Theology Today - Vol 47, No. 1 - April 1990 - ARTICLE - Encountering Buddha Theologically

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Encountering Buddha Theologically
By Paul J. Griffiths

IN THIS ARTICLE, let us attempt to convey something of what it means, theologically, for a faithful Christian (in this case one of the ethnic and theological species "Anglican," born and acculturated in England but latterly transplanted to the United States) to encounter Buddha.1 More exactly, I want to speak theologically of an encounter with Buddhist discourse about Buddha, discourse preserved and available in texts.

The attempt is based, among other things, upon the following assumptions: that it is possible for such an encounter to be theologically meaningful; and that it is better to withhold judgment as to what theological meaning the encounter might have until after a serious attempt has been made to understand what is being encountered upon its own terms (though in fact the process of understanding can never be completely separated from that of judgment). To put this more directly: encountering Buddha theologically requires that those doing the encountering know what their theological commitments and convictions are, and that they be willing, simultaneously, to employ them as instruments in furthering the encounter and to allow the possibility that they may be radically reshaped by it.

A proper theological encounter with Buddha cannot occur if it has already been decided, on an a priori basis, what will issue from the encounter. If I already know that my Buddhist interlocutors are anonymous Christians;2 or that their faithful appropriation of their tradition relates them to the same transcendent reality as does my appropriation of mine;3 or that they are part of the massa perditionis,

Paul J. Griffiths is Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of On Being Mindless: Buddhist Meditation and the Mind-Body Problem (1986), Japanese Buddhism (1987), and numerous articles in journals on Christianity and Buddhism.

1 The omission of a definite or indefinite article to modify "Buddha" is deliberate; the reasons for it will become apparent as we proceed.
2 This theory is associated with Karl Rahner. See the following essays: "Anonymous Christians," in Rahner, Theological Investigations (Baltimore: Helicon, 1969), vol. 6, pp 390-98; "Anonymous Christianity and the Missionary Task of the Church," in Rahner, Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1974), vol. 12, pp. 161-78; Rahner, "Observations on the Problem of the 'Anonymous Christian,'" in Rahner, Theological Investigations (New York: Seabury, 1976), vol. 14, pp. 280-94.
3 For two different expressions of this view, see Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), and John Hick, An Interpretation Of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

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outside the elect group of the saved-if I know any of these things before I begin, I will neither be able to hear clearly nor respond theologically to what my interlocutors are saying. Christian theologizing about nonChristians has for too long been focussed upon the abstract a priori to the detriment of theological thinking about concrete examples of non-Christian religious phenomena. This article, together with the Symposium of which it is a part, attempts to remedy this state of affairs by providing an example of other ways to go about things.

The kind of encounter I have in mind is primarily an intellectual one. It operates almost entirely on the level of the analytical, the rational, and will thus be concerned scarcely at all with the sharing of religious sentiment or spiritual technique. Since these latter-rather than doctrine-are the focus of most contemporary interreligious dialogue, the approach taken here has at least the virtue of rarity; it is also forced upon me by the fact that my interlocutors are texts, not people, texts whose authors have been dead for a millennium and a half. In so far as I have encountered Buddha, I have done so mostly through the medium of texts, and so largely through the operations of the analytical intellect. I do not mean to suggest that this kind of encounter is better (or worse) than what happens when a Christian and a Buddhist pray or meditate together, or when they engage in some other kind of shared praxis; I want to stress only that it is different from these.

Buddhist intellectuals and poets, soon after the death of that historical individual to whom the honorific title "Buddha" ("Awakened One") was first given,4 began to engage in an intellectual discipline broadly similar in its structure and goals (though quite different in its content) to what Christian intellectuals have long called "Christology." Buddhists began, that is to say, to think both systematically and poetically about about what kind of entity is referred to by the honorific "Buddha." They began to think about what properties each possessor of that title must have (for it was quickly established that the historical possessor of that title, the individual Gautama Sakyamuni who may have lived five hundred years or so before Christ, was not the only Buddha), about what differentiates one Buddha from another, what all share, what the proper functions of Buddhas are, and so forth. Eventually, the more systematically inclined among those engaged in this enterprise developed a complex and systematic view as to what Buddha must be, a view that, among many other things, reduced the apparent manifoldness of Buddhas to one single maximally great metaphysical fact-the buddhadharmakaya or the body of "dharma" which is Buddha.

This intellectual discipline goes beyond theorizing about (what Christians would call) the redemptive acts of Buddha; it is concerned also with the metaphysic which makes such acts possible, and so is like Christian systematic or philosophical theology in that its practitioners

4 This is not strictly accurate since adherents of Jainism almost certainly used the term before Buddhists; but the details of this historical issue are not important here.

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are concerned to predicate of Buddha-just as Christians are of God-all the properties that the tradition takes to contribute to greatness, and to predicate them to the maximal degree possible consonant with coherence and the historically determined constraints of the tradition.5

Since Buddhists have had longer to work on the enterprise of delineating the properties proper to Buddha than Christians have had to work on their analogous discipline of Christology, and since Buddhists have carried out this work in many different cultural and linguistic contexts, it is scarcely surprising that the theories they developed are every bit as complex and subtle as those of Christian systematic theologians. To attempt a summary of even the main features of such theories in an essay of this kind would be absurd. Instead, I shall offer a concrete example of Buddhist discourse on the subject, together with a theological response. In what follows I shall translate some selected verses from an Indian Buddhist text which may have been composed in the fourth century C.E.6 The verses deal with the nature of Buddha, and especially with the nature of Buddha's salvific action (which is, of course, what makes Buddha religiously significant for Buddhists). I shall first translate them, then explain them as they are understood by Buddhists, and then conclude by offering some Christian-theological responses to them.

First consider two verses on Buddha as "refuge" (sarana), a term of fundamental importance for the tradition. This term has been used by Buddhists from the earliest times in the formula of the triple refuge: "I go to the Buddha for refuge; I go to his doctrine for refuge; I go to his monastic community for refuge." The verses on Buddha as refuge:

Buddhahood is a constant protection, from all
the hosts of defiling passion/
From all evil action, and even from old age
and death. [7]
It is a constant protection from all
infirmities, from unpleasant rebirths and
improper methods/

5 For terminology of this kind, see Thomas V. Morris, "Perfect Being Theology," Nous 21 (1987), pp. 19-30. For a more detailed analysis of this way of thinking about Buddha, see my paper "Buddha and God: A Contrastive Study in Ideas About Maximal Greatness," The Journal of Religion (October 1989).
6 The text is the Mahayanasutralannkara, the "Ornament of the Sacred Texts of the Great Vehicle," a work whose authorship and date remain uncertain. I translate selected verses from the ninth chapter, "On Awakening." There is no complete English version, though there is a translation into French accompanied by an edition of the Sanskrit text: Sylvain Levi, Mahayana-Sutralamkara: Expose de la doctrine du grand vehicule selon le systeme Yogacara (2 vols.; Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honore Champion, 1907 and 1911). My translation is made directly from the Sanskrit text, with consultation also of the Tibetan version. See also Sitansusekhar Bagchi,Mahayanasutralannkara of Asanga (Darbhanga: Mithila Institute, 1970). My understanding of this text has been shaped by the extensive commentarial literature produced in India. It should be emphasized that this text has its own peculiar view of what Buddha is; not everything said in it would be assented to by all Indian Buddhist intellectuals, much less by all Buddhists. Technically, the text belongs to the Yogacara school, though there are influences also from tathagatagarbha thought.

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From the illusion of individuality, and from
the lesser vehicle. It is therefore the
supreme refuge. [8]

It is worthy of note that an abstract noun, "Buddhahood," is used at the beginning of the verses: that to which one goes for refuge and protection is of neuter gender and is, grammatically at least, not a person. Hence my choice, evident from the beginning of this reflection, to speak of "Buddha" without either definite or indefinite article and to refer to it with the gender-neutral demonstrative pronoun "it." Buddhahood, then, functions as a protection from all the ills to which human persons are, on a Buddhist reading, necessarily heir. It protects, the verses tell us, from those defiling passions that attach us inappropriately to the transient and finally insignificant things of the world; it protects us from the "evil actions" to which such passions lead; and it protects finally from the ultimate evils of old age and death. There is a passing and summary reference here to the standard Buddhist causal analysis of the cyclical nature of human existence, an analysis that provides a chain of cause and effect beginning with ignorance and leading finally to old age and death.7 The reference to this causal analysis would be evident to every Buddhist hearer or reader of these verses.

The second of the two verses cited, verse 8, uses slightly more technical language in its presentation of what Buddhahood protects from. By saying that the Buddhist is protected from the "illusion of individuality," the text is indicating that Buddhahood can also provide a refuge from what, for a Buddhist, is the most fundamental cognitive or intellectual error that it is possible to make, namely, assent to the view that one is a being with an identity that persists through time in a substantive way, the view that one's personal proper name has an enduring referent. This intellectual error has emotional or affective results. From it springs improper attachment to one's "self," a "self" that finally has no existence; and from this improper attachment comes every other variety of improper attachment and passion. Asmimana, the conceit 'I am' "-employing both the literary and attitudinal senses of conceit"-is one of the more important Buddhist terms for this error.

III

How then can Buddhahood act as a refuge from all these things? How can Buddha be a proper protector, be salvifically effective, for those who go to it for refuge? In answering this, our text becomes metaphysical. It explains what properties Buddha must possess in order to do what Buddha does. It tells us that Buddha is omnipresent, spontaneous, and

7 I refer to the twelvefold chain of "dependent coorigination" (pratityasamulpada), which in its most common form runs like this: "From ignorance come karmically-conditioned volitions; from these comes consciousness; from this comes mind-and-body; from this come the six sense-organs; from these comes contact; from this comes sensation; from this comes craving; from this comes grasping; from this comes becoming; from this comes birth; and from this come old age and death."

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endless:

Just as space is always omnipresent, so
Buddhahood is always omnipresent/
Just as space is omnipresent among the
multitudes of physical objects, so Buddha
is omnipresent among the multitudes of
living beings. [15]
Just as the moon's reflection cannot be seen
in a broken waterpot/
So Buddha's reflection cannot be seen among
wicked living beings. [16]
Just as a fire burns in one place and goes out
in another/
So should the appearance and disappearance of
Buddhas be understood. [17]
Just as sound comes from gongs which have not
been struck/
So Buddha spontaneously teaches. [18]
Just as a jewel effortlessly shows forth its
radiance/
So Buddhas effortlessly show forth their
action. [19]

Verse 15 explains that Buddhahood is omnipresent among living beings in just the same way that space is omnipresent in the interstices between physical objects. The question then naturally arises: if Buddha is omnipresent in this way, and if Buddha's salvific efficacy is a result of its omnipresence, why is Buddha's presence not immediately evident to all living beings and its salvific work not immediately completed? The analogy in verse 16 provides the beginnings of an answer.

The moon's light, on a cloudless night, is omnipresent; it is reflected by all bodies of water, and so by each and every waterpot. When a waterpot is broken, the water runs out and the moon's reflection is no longer visible-though its radiance is no less present. The fault, and the change, lies in the broken waterpot, not in the changelessly shining moon. The waterpots represent living beings in the analogy; the moon represents Buddha, or, perhaps better, Buddha's compassion. The central point is that Buddha's salvific presence is not present with differing intensity or differing effect in different places. Such differences as there are can be only apparent; they are constituted solely by differences in the receptive capacities and conditions of human persons.

The analogy in verse 17, while perhaps not so immediately clear, makes a similar point.8 The nature of fire is to burn wherever fuel and the other ancillary conditions for its presence are to be found, and to cease its burning when such conditions are jointly or severally absent. The same is true for Buddha's salvific presence among human persons; that it appears to us to be present at some times and in some places and absent in others-as, for example, Buddha, apparently embodied in one

8 I draw in the remarks that follow upon what the Indic commentaries to theMahayanasutra lankara have to say, especially upon that attributed to the Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu.

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of its many "bodies of magical transformation" (nirmanakaya), is only sometimes with us, the last one having walked the earth about 2500 years ago-is due not to any changes in Buddha or to any genuine alterations in its presence. It is due only to alterations in the needs and conditions of living beings. As one of the commentaries to our text puts it: "Buddhas appear � when there are living beings who need religious training. They disappear when those beings have been trained and have passed into final Nirvana."9

Verses 15-17 emphasize the omnipresence of Buddha. Verses 18 and 19 emphasize its spontaneity. The teaching that Buddha gives, as well as all of its salvific activity, occurs without any cause other than the changeless facts of its own nature. Magical gongs that sound without the external cause of being struck, and jewels shining without the help of anything other than their own radiant nature, are the analogies used here. Buddha, then, acts spontaneously, without deliberation and without dependence upon external causes. The analogies used also clearly suggest that Buddha's salvific action does not change as external circumstances change. For if it were to do so, it would be dependent upon causes other than itself and so would not be spontaneous in the proper sense. Jewels, after all, never do anything other than manifest their essential properties-hardness, radiance, and so forth-whatever the external conditions may be.

There are more verses that emphasize the spontaneity, unity, and changelessness of Buddha's action and awareness:

Just as illimitable rays of light blend in the
single orb of the sun/
Always performing the single function of giving
radiance to the world [29]
So also is the illimitability of Buddhas in the
uncontaminated realm/
They have a single function mixed with all their
actions: the emission of the radiance of
awareness. [30]
Just as when a single ray of light is emitted from
the sun, every ray of light is emitted/
So should be understood the emission of awareness
belonging to Buddhas. [31]
Just as there is no egocentric functioning among
the sun's rays/
So there is no egocentric functioning among the
awarenesses of Buddhas. [32]
Just as the world is illuminated by rays of light
whose radiance is emitted from the sun once/
So it should be understood that everything is
illuminated at once by the awarenesses of
Buddhas. [33]

The analogy between the sun and Buddha in verses 29-31 is fairly clear. The sun possesses immeasurable, uncountable ("illimitable") rays

9 This is part of Vasubandhu's comment upon verse 17.

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of light, but they all have one function and one only: the giving of light to the world. Further, this function is performed changelessly and perhaps even-though this reading goes beyond what the text says-timelessly. It is fully and completely present in each single ray of light and does not change over time.

Precisely the same is true of Buddha's "awareness." This is a technical term, translating the Sanskrit jnana which spans in meaning the English words "knowledge" and "awareness." Sometimes it means something close to what anglophone philosophers mean by propositional knowledge: knowledge that such-and-such is the case. And sometimes it means something much closer to direct awareness of some state of affairs. For Buddha the latter range of meaning is generally closer to what the texts intend, though the former is never entirely absent. This is clear enough even in the few verses translated here. The analogies for Buddha's awareness are visual ones-light, radiance, illumination, and so forth-and not intellectual or judgemental ones. Other texts make this still clearer. Buddha's knowledge/awareness is universal in extent and consists always and changelessly in direct awareness of all the states of affairs that can be objects of awareness.10

Verses 32-33 continue the analogy between the sun's radiance and Buddha's awareness by pointing to the absence of "egocentric functioning" in both. To function egocentrically, in the sense intended by our text, is to function with a volitional awareness of what one is doing, to have consciously made a decision to do something and to be aware that one is doing it. Obviously, the sun's rays do not do this-as one of the commentaries puts it, "the sun's rays function without egocentricity because they function spontaneously and without conceptualization. Even though the sun's rays perform the actions of burning and withering, they do so without thinking 'I shall burn and wither.'"11 This is also how Buddha's radiant awareness functions: without volition, effort, concept-formation, or intention; with spontaneity and changelessness.

Here is a concluding catena of verses to drive home these points. The topic here is Buddha's capacity to bring living beings to "maturity," an explicitly religious term. To be "mature" in this sense is to have realized one's capacity for awakening and, ultimately, to have entered Nirvana. The imagery is derived from a verbal root (pac-) that means literally "to cook" or "to ripen," and is throughout agricultural. One "ripens one's good roots" and so eventually jettisons one's tendencies toward cognitive error and emotional defilement. The verses need, I think, little comment:

10 I explore this in detail in "Omniscience in the Mahayanasutralankara and its Commentaries," The Indo-Iranian Journal (April 1990).
11 This comment is found in AsvabhAva's commentary upon verse 32.

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Buddhas do not say, "I have brought this one to
maturity," or, "this living being needs to be
brought to maturity," or, "I am now bringing
this one to maturity."/
Instead, living beings advance to maturity without
conditions through their virtuous actions,
always, everywhere, and completely, by way of
the three entrances. [52]
Just as the sun, everywhere and completely,
effortlessly ripens the harvests by its
emitted rays, extended and pure/
So also the sun of doctrine ripens harvests,
everywhere and completely, by its emitted rays
of doctrine which bring peace. [53]
Just as from a single flame there comes a great
mass of flames, illimitable and incalculable,
while that first flame is not exhausted/
So also from a single Buddha there comes a great
mass of maturation, illimitable and incalculable,
while that first Buddha does not
become exhausted. [54]
Just as the great ocean does not become saturated
with water, nor increase because of the great
amount of water that pours into it,/
So the Buddhas' realm is neither saturated nor
increased by the constant and continuous
entrance of pure things; this is a great
marvel! [55]

Let us summarize the vision of Buddha present in the verses quoted and extrapolate somewhat from it. Buddha is the sole salvific reality for Buddhists, the changeless salvific fact. It offers protection from the beginningless cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and redeath, a cycle fuelled and made possible by a combination of cognitive error and improper passionate attachment, because it is changelessly compassionate. Buddha does not desire the liberation of human persons because it desires nothing; neither does it act volitionally and deliberatively, with effort and choice, to bring this liberation about. Its compassion simply shines forth, always the same, as a refuge for those who choose to avail themselves of it. It is always there, to use one of the images used by our text, for those waterpots that are whole enough to reflect it. Buddha, in so far as it can be said to act, does only one thing, and that changelessly. Its knowledge, correspondingly, does not change and is best characterized as non propositional direct awareness that is universal in scope.

What, then, are the theological meanings of an intellectual encounter of this sort with Buddha, all too briefly sketched here? On this, I must be still briefer; each reader with the necessary inclinations and equipment will be able in any case to constitute these meanings directly-and will, necessarily, constitute them differently.

First, then, certain (Christian) theological judgments are among the

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conditions for the encounter's possibility. I made some of these explicit in the prolegomena. It must be possible for me to recognize the discourse encountered as similar to something in the tradition that has shaped me. If, per impossibile, it had no such points of contact and similarities, encounter could not occur. My tentative and preliminary judgments as to what sort of thing this discourse is make possible the development of understanding; they also carry with them the danger of inappropriately weighting and warping my understanding. Because I judge, to advert to the example before us, that Buddhist discourse about the person and work of Buddha is structurally and functionally analogous to the intellectual enterprise that Christians call "Christology," I mayinevitably will-miss things in it that Buddhists see and see things that for them are not present. Buddhists, also, may object to my categorization of their discourse in this way. Such objections are to be learned from and welcomed.

I do not feel crippled by the objections mentioned in the preceding paragraph. At their weakest, they say no more than that my understanding of Buddhist discourse is not Buddhist. And since this is necessary and inevitable, it is not a serious objection. At their strongest, they say that I may have radically misconstrued the Buddhist discourse I am studying. If that should turn out to be the case, no genuine encounter has occurred; but it remains to be shown that such a misconstrual has occurred. And since some such preliminary and tentative theological judgments as those I have made are necessary conditions for genuine encounter, the only demand that can properly be made upon committed religious individuals studying the discourse of equally committed religious persons from another tradition is that they should be open about the content of their preliminary substantive and methodological theological judgments. This condition I have tried to meet.

My preliminary theological judgment that Buddhist discourse about the person and work of Buddha is structurally and functionally analogous to the intellectual enterprise that Christians call "Christology," and that in it one can see Buddhists trying to limn what they consider to be maximally great, of maximal salvific significance, is itself of considerable theological interest for Christians. It points, perhaps, to the necessity of human beings thinking in this way if they are to make sense of the religious experience given to them and prepared for them by their tradition. Perhaps it is necessary to ask what must, metaphysically, be the case if the grace (I use Christian terms now, explicitly and self-consciously) I receive is what it seems. And perhaps, also, such thinking must include an attempt to sketch maximal greatness and maximal salvific efficacy as both Christian and Buddhist intellectuals appear to have done. We have here, then, at least the beginnings of an outline of what will belong to systematic thinking undertaken by intellectuals self-consciously operating within the constraints of any religious tradition whatever.

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This is important enough. But far more important, for Christians, is the realization that the intuitions we have about how such thinking should be done, about which properties count toward maximal greatness and maximal salvific efficacy and which do not, need not be shared by others engaged in what is, structurally and functionally, the same kind of thinking. When we discover, as we already have through the brief descriptive analysis given in the second part of this essay, that Buddhist intuitions about such matters differ in almost every significant particular from (most) Christian ones, we are, or should be, given pause. Is it obvious that our intuitions are more appropriate than those of our Buddhist counterparts? Can the systematic intellectual enterprise that some Christians feel themselves called to undertake be reshaped by what has been learned through the encounter? Or must the disagreements that go deep simply be left as such? Must we acknowledge that some dimensions of the Buddhist intellectual enterprise cannot be appropriated by Christians and must, indeed, be judged profoundly mistaken? Let me, in conclusion, offer some suggestions about these impossibly difficult but utterly necessary questions by commenting on the disagreement in intuitions about what counts toward maximal greatness and maximal salvific efficacy which appears to me to go deepest. It is, in brief, the disagreement about the significance of free agency and the possibility and desirability of special providence.12

Suppose we understand the concept of free agency to include the idea that there is something other than the agent to be acted upon; that actions are located in space and time; and that in the case of any particular action of a given free agent, the action could have been other than it was. Then, for the purposes of this study, the main point is the following: if the idea of agency outlined above is accepted as a great-making property proper to God, as it is by many Christians, we have a splendid example of a property which is clearly great-making for one tradition and equally clearly not great-making for another, since it is explicitly rejected, and for good metaphysical reasons (good, that is, within the canons and constraints of scholastic Buddhism) by Buddhists.

There are, of course, other and more recherche' concepts of agency used by Christian theologians in thinking about God's actions, especially by those for whom atemporality and immutability are great-making properties. But even where agency in the sense defined in the preceding paragraph is rejected or modified by Christians, perhaps through attempts to combine it with doctrines of immutability and atemporality, and with distinctions between God's essential and accidental properties (as would perhaps be done by many Thomistic thinkers), this seems always to be done in a way that preserves both God's transcendence (the

12 In what follows, I again draw upon discussions present in my paper "Buddha and God: A Contrastive Study in Ideas About Maximal Greatness," The Journal of Religion (October 1989).

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idea that God is not just one more existent in the world and that there are existents which God transcends), and God's genuine salvific interactions with temporally-bound existents in a historical process that has independent reality. Here, of course, the doctrine of the incarnation is paradigmatic, but it is not the only constraint on Christian thought in this area. So even if the concept of agency is modified by combining it with doctrines of atemporality and immutability, certain key contrasts with the Buddhist view of maximal greatness are still preserved. For a Buddhist theorist, if Buddha's agency were conceived in either the strong sense (in accord with my definition thereof in the preceding paragraph) or in a modified sense (in accord with an atemporalist view of God), Buddha could not be Buddha. Agency, in either sense, is simply not a great-making property for the tradition.

This difference in intuitions concerning the status of the properties of agency, freedom, and temporality is based upon and grows naturally out of fundamental metaphysical differences between Buddhists and Christians. It is surely just because Christian metaphysicians tend to conceive of human beings as imago dei and to think of them as independent and real agents, possessors of-indeed defined by-an eternal essence, a soul which exists independently of all other existents except its creator, and just because Christian metaphysicians have, as a general rule, not seriously called into question the reality of the historical process and of the (temporally located) creative event which began it, that they naturally, intuitively, regard as great-making those properties which exemplify and magnify to the greatest possible extent (within the bounds of coherence) the values of agency-in-time, of creation, and of loving concern for the inherently valuable other.

Likewise, it is just because Buddhist metaphysicians have always regarded agency as a particular species of event rather than as a property of persons, have always judged that persons, conceived as independent entities have only imaginary status, and have always judged that the processes of concept- formation, analysis, and categorization are inherently productive of error and necessarily inferior to direct unmediated awareness, that they naturally, intuitively, regard as great-making those properties which exemplify and magnify to the greatest possible extent (within the bounds of coherence) the values of agentless spontaneity, universal and concept-free direct awareness.

These two sets of intuitions about what contributes to maximal greatness are not obviously reconcilable. This is precisely because they are intimately, symbiotically, linked with radically different metaphysical Systems.13 My preliminary theological judgment as to this aspect of Buddhist discourse about Buddha is that it is simply incapable of appropriation by Christians, and that key elements of it must be (tentatively) judged by them to lead to false beliefs about the nature of

13 I leave out of account here entirely the problem of what methods are appropriate in resolving such deep-going metaphysical disagreements. For some thoughts on this, see my "An Apology for Apologetics," Faith and Philosophy, 5/4 (1988), pp. 399-420.

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what is ultimately salvifically significant. Some Christians may feel called upon to show why this aspect of Buddhist discourse is unacceptable to them, and even to try to show Buddhists why it should be unacceptable in a broader sense. This would be to engage in apologetics. Engagement in such an enterprise can be of enormous philosophical and theological benefit to Christians; even the realization that it is a possibility is an advance over the current theological orthodoxies on these matters.

There are, though, other dimensions of the Buddhist discourse under discussion which may be very fruitful for Christian theologians. Most obvious is the attempt, merely mentioned here but developed in detail elsewhere in the Buddhist tradition, to present the knowledge possessed by the maximally great and maximally salvifically efficacious as being not a species of propositional knowledge but rather a species of direct awareness of states of affairs. This is central to the Buddhist tradition. Although it has also been of great importance in the Christian tradition, it has been obscured in the last century or so-at least among English-speaking philosophers-by the dominance of a propositional model of knowledge. According to this model, knowledge is a species of belief and has propositions, atemporal translinguistic entities, as its objects. God's knowledge has also been construed according to this model, so commonly, in fact, that recent anglophone philosophical work on divine omniscience tends to assume such a model without argument. Exposure to a religious tradition such as the Buddhist may act as a catalyst for the reappropriation and rediscovery of the more traditional model of God's knowledge already present in the Christian tradition. And in this case, I think, this would be an unmixed good since conceiving God's knowledge as Buddhists conceive Buddha's-as direct awareness of states of affairs-has significant advantages over the propositional model for Christians.14

The upshot is that the kind of theological encounter with Buddha here described can only be enormously theologically nourishing for Christians. This is true even where they cannot appropriate what Buddhists have said about Buddha; it is even more true where they can. And I have tried to show that both responses may be appropriate for Christians considering different aspects of the Buddhist discourse I have described. The prerequisites are a critical awareness of one's own tradition and of the range of one's theological and philosophical commitments that come from it; a genuine desire to know and understand the other; and a lack of fear of making critical judgments where these seem called for. An a priori pluralism, just as much as an a priori exclusivism, makes genuine encounter of this sort on the intellectual level effectively impossible.

There is then a perfectly proper sense in which Buddha, encountered theologically by Christians, can become an element in Christian

14 See on this question William P. Alston, "Does God Have Beliefs?" Religious Studies 22 (1986), pp. 287-306, and a rejoinder by William Hasker, "Yes, God Has Beliefs!" Religious Studies 24 (1988), pp. 385-94.

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theological discourse, a proper contributor to Christian theological thinking. There is also, correspondingly, a sense in which Christ, encountered Buddhologically by Buddhists, can become an element in Buddhist systematic discourse, a proper contributor to Buddhist systematic thinking. But it is for Buddhists to speak to that.