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Summation and Critique
By Kusumita P. Pedersen

THE THREE ESSAYS offered in this Symposium share a single aim: to interpret material from religious traditions other than Christianity to gain insight enriching Christian understanding. All three authors are Christians, though only Paul Griffiths volunteers a specific self-identification ("one of the ethnic and theological species Anglican") within his essay. All three are accomplished not only in theological reflection but also in historical scholarship. They differ significantly in their choice of material and in their statements, and therefore in the use that can be made of each of the articles. The approach adopted here, of specialized study informed by theological judgment, demonstrates by the very success of its execution the need to contextualize such studies in the larger picture of contemporary interreligious dialogue.

I

I turn first to the essay by David Burrell for several reasons. It deals with the Western religions of historical revelation-Islam, Christianity, and Judaism-and so can be assumed to be on more familiar ground for readers of this journal than the two pieces on Hinduism and Buddhism, "pagan" traditions of Asia. Burrell's piece is the only one of the three which is broadly comparative, seeking to delineate an overarching theme essential to all three traditions: the unknowability of God, who yet is "known" because he is, and must be, named. It engages normative issues cross-traditionally with balance and nuance, and so may serve as a helpful model for a much-needed kind of interreligious inquiry, ambitious in scope but based in primary research. Burrell lucidly displays the intrinsic connections between the philosophical question of the divine names, the nature of revelation, and the practical life of contemplation. He so effectively demonstrates, in brief compass, the centrality of this question in the patterns of religious meaning of the three traditions that one cannot help thinking how productive it would be if the comparison were expanded beyond the religions of the West.

The analysis is precise, but Burrell does not hesitate to state in large perspective what the traditions hold in common: "Jew, Christian, and Muslim … concur in three related assertions from within their respective communities: (1) that God is unknowable, (2) God is the creator of all that is (and is not God), (3) God reveals God's own self." It is after acknowledging such well-founded judgments on questions of

Kusumita P. Pedersen teaches Asian Religions at New York University and also serves as Joint Secretary for Religious Affairs of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival which sponsored the January 1990 Global Forum on Environment and Development in Moscow.

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basic similarity that theologians attempting comparison, and also practitioners of dialogue, may perhaps most successfully proceed to consider questions of difference.

I make this suggestion without forgetting that Burrell himself might disagree, since he concludes by saying, "The experience of complementarity may prove a more reliable guide than a quest for commonality." The substance of his essay belies this; perhaps a grasp of complementarity as well as difference calls for an initial discernment of common ground.

Burrell remarks that "The thinkers we shall focus on shared overlapping intellectual climates, however much their religious conviction may have been perceived to be mutually exclusive," and notes the influence of the earlier on the later. His introduction dramatizes the fraternal relationship of the three religions, which share not only cultural interconnections, but also a lineage of prophets and a concept of revelation. The perception of what is "exclusive" is intrinsically linked to this very concept of revelation and its supersessionist structure. Thus what is in common, and what is different, together paradoxically yield the interdependent but tragic history of the three communities. Here lie interreligious issues of extreme difficulty, sensitivity, and pain; this makes efforts such as Burrell's, which irenically chart a path for discussion of mutual theological concerns, all the more welcome.

II

While Burrell has focused primarily on how we may speak about God (though keeping in view the continuity of theology with prayer) Francis Clooney wishes to draw us into the heart of the Hindu poet Nammalvar, as he speaks to God. Clooney records his conviction that we must read first and then theologize, allowing the text to act on us before we interpret it. He leads the reader through this process by first simply presenting his translation of the text. He then explains its origin and sense. He reserves for the final section his comments on its possible significance for Christians, as well as his statement of his own inclusivist position on the relation of Christianity to other religions. Perhaps because he wishes to bring key points into higher relief, Clooney brackets certain questions and omits information closely related to his subject. While the essay is a vivid introduction to a certain school of Hindu devotion, the total effect is perplexing and heavily laden with ambivalence. One is left with the overall impression, as well as Clooney's explicit admission, that "fear of the other" is indeed real; one does not feel that the reading actually moves "beyond" this fear, only that it indicates an avenue for doing so.

As the song is introduced, we learn from a pronoun that Nammalvar is a man, but see from his poem that be has adopted the voice and attitude of a woman. We learn also that the poet is a "saint" in his Tamil tradition, so venerated by succeeding generations that his words have revelatory status. We would know more. Who was Nammalvar? What,

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in concrete terms, was his religious practice? What was his personal narrative of relationship with Krishna, and of his outer life in his social community? Was he married, or a renunciant, or both in succession? It is the poem itself which brings to mind all these questions by its own personal immediacy. What does Nammalvar disclose of himself in all the rest of the Tiruvayamoli? What is distinctive about his works, among those of his contemporaries, or any other Hindus? For the Christian, the non-specialist, even the non-Tamil Hindu, answers to these questions would be illumining.

The exegesis of the song focuses on its emotional development and exposes its dependence on Shrivaisnava teaching's about the devotee's path to God. Taking this as a point of departure, Clooney offers a series of moving and fruitful suggestions for Christian meditation on the text. By confining his considerations to the song's interior and subjective dimensions (though making clear that these are moral as they concern the love of God and self-love), he effectively finds a way for a Christian to utilize the song within his or her own religious framework-but without taking up the potentially disturbing questions of the "truth" of the song or of Hindu beliefs. All of this is valuable and important. Yet at least two more questions, in addition to those about Nammalvar himself, remain insufficiently answered. It is in this area that the ambivalence in Clooney's approach is felt more strongly.

First, there is the question of genre. This is not merely a technical question, since many Christians (maybe Protestants especially) may feel distaste or even disapprove the use of the imagery of erotic love for spiritual experience. And Clooney stresses the erotic in his reading, rather than the also prominent language of grief, tears, loneliness, death-in-life, and the distortion of time, or the clear references to worship ("place your lotus hands on this slave girl's head" or "grasp your lovely feet"). We do learn that the conventions of secular love poetry are used here, but not why they are used. The poem refers to a particular period in the life of Krishna. Yes, but why has this imagery taken hold and endured for centuries with such power, not just among the Tamils but throughout Hindu India? Why have "saints" and devotees, in a land known for its ascetics, stuck with this world of discourse? Why the instruction to male devotees that they should assume a woman's attitude toward her lover when approaching God? Is it true, then, that Nammalvar is "concealing himself behind the words of the young woman''? Or is there, for a Hindu, a reason that her voice might be the most directly expressive of his inner life-or that he wishes to "assimilate" (to use Burrell's word) himself to her experience? The Western reader may be impeded in appreciation of the song without a bit of added religious and literary elucidation, or even justification.

This leads us to the second and crucial question: Who is Krishna, the subject of the poem? It is a safe guess that in the classroom, this would be the first question students would ask if they had no prior knowledge of Hinduism. It is likely, too, that this might be the first question of an

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educated lay person, if he or she had little background. Clooney begins the paragraph by introducing Krishna with a trivializing locution recently found also in The New York Times, "the god Krishna," with a small g. The same paragraph ends, as it apparently enters the gopi's point of view, "only now the lover is God." From then on, it is taken that whatever is said of Krishna, is also said of "God" (large G). A note tells us that "Visnu is the most generally applicable name of the God [sic] who was thought to have appeared in many forms, including that of Krsna." To the reader who, once more, knows little of Hinduism, this could be unclear or even misleading, since no intimation is given of the central (though not exclusive) position Krsna occupies in Hindu religious reality.

The reader may not know of the doctrine of avatara or "descent of Godhead into human form" as John Hawley.1 has put it: avatara (English "avatar") is often rendered as "incarnation" and compared with the Christian doctrine to which it bears both similarities and differences.2 The reader needs to be told that the beautiful cowherd to whom the poem is spoken is not for the believing Hindu merely "the god Krsna," but a full manifestation of the God who, as for Christians, is the one source of all that is. The non-Hindu reader also needs to know that there is much more to the life of Krishna than his dalliance with the gopis: that he is a principal figure of the Mahabharata epic and the attributed author of the Bhagavad Gita. All Hindus know this, and it resonates in any image of Krishna or mention of him. While the attitude of the gopis may be paradigmatic for devotion, Krishna's total and complex significance should be conveyed at least in a few words to avoid trivialization, even if unintended.

To expand the point, stories about Krishna are not "myths" for Hindus. This is a question requiring more extended treatment than is possible here; suffice it to say that the use of the word "myth" seems to deliberately introduce ambiguity about the kind of reality Krishna has for Hindus. Though enfolded in legend and story which are indeed mythic (as is Jesus), Krishna is held by Hindus to be a figure historical as well as divine. Many thousands make pilgrimages each year to places associated with his life, and especially to Vrindavan, the very spot of his love-play with the cowherding women. For all the spiritual fecundity of their imagery for Hindus, Christians or any others, the loves of Krishna are believed to have taken place once on earth, as they take place eternally in heaven. Krishna is mythic, surely, but not merely "myth": I doubt that Nammalvar understood the life of Krishna as Joseph Campbell would understand it. And for the woman with whom he spends the night, Krishna is no myth. She does not "know the myths." She knows simply life: Krishna's and her own.

1 John Stratton Hawley, At Play With Krishna. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 198 1, p. 59. and see pages 59ff.
2 See Geoffrey Parrinder, Avatar and Incarnation. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970.

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III

Paul Griffiths' meticulous account of his selected text unfolds deliberately, and then without fanfare meets head-on the most critical issues it has adumbrated. He says: "These two sets of intuitions about what contributes to maximal greatness are not obviously reconciliable. This is precisely because they are intimately, symbiotically linked with radically different metaphysical systems." One might go even further, and say that the metaphysical systems or ontological understandings are not merely "symbiotically linked" with religious intuitions, but are constitutive of them and of the systems of belief in which they are embedded as vital parts. Christianity may be unintelligible without a certain understanding of "person," and Buddhism without "no-self" or "emptiness." In the linguistic and conceptual terms of their own texts, Buddhism and Christianity may seem radically incommensurable. Griffiths, thus, is doing exactly the opposite of what Burrell does: he tries to show what, at base, the traditions he compares do not hold in common. He locates the incompatibility in the value of "agency," associated with personhood, for Christians, and the value of its absence, in his construal, for Buddhists. On the one hand, God, incarnating himself in the world, has acted as agent: that is, he has done this in time, and it could have been otherwise. On the other hand, the compassion intrinsic to Buddhahood is perfect because it is perfectly spontaneous, it is eternal, and it cannot be otherwise. The opposition seems clear.

There may, nevertheless, be another way to take up the question of this proposed incommensurability. Buddhists do not speak of a personal God who creates the world, though a kind of functional and structural equivalence may be found between God and Buddha as dharmakaya The comparison between Buddhahood and God as creator or as person, then, could be a dead end. The matter of grace, love, and compassion manifested in "salvific activity" may, however, prove a more useful subject. Without attention to narrative, moral sturctures in any religious world cannot be adequately grasped, so one might suppose that material on the Bodhisattva path, the core of Mahayana Buddhist practice, would be germane here. But I think that Griffiths' analysis is so sound that this would not actually alter his argument in any essential respect.

IV

I would like to bring to this inquiry an episode in the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha of our world and our era. The story of his life may be taken as the root story for Buddhist faith and practice, since it has been through him that the Buddha-dharma has been disclosed to us. Even though according to Buddhist belief other worlds and other ages have known other Buddhas, their stories have been archetypalized so that the points of this instance may be relevant to all; from the modern historian's point of view, the nature of Buddhism in other worlds does not arise in an article of this particular kind.

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It is told in what are reported as the Buddha's own words in the Majjhima-Nikaya3 that after attaining full enlightenment, he deliberated whether he would teach what he had realized, or would not. The doctrine, he knew, was profound and subtle, while human beings were bound by their attachments. "If I were to teach the Doctrine, others would fail to understand me, and my vexation and trouble would be great … my mind was disinclined to action." The god Brahma saw from his heaven the mind of the Buddha, and saying "The world is lost, ruined!" appeared before him to persuade him to proclaim his teaching. The narrative continues, "Then 1, 0 priests, perceiving the desire of Brahma, and having compassion on living beings, gazed over the world with the eye of a Buddha, And as I gazed over the world with the eye of a Buddha, I saw people of every variety," and at every stage of spiritual maturity. He assented to Brahma's affimation that some, at least, would understand the doctrine, and he determined to begin his mission. As accounts of a turning point in the biography of the founder, one which proves to be of cosmic significance, versions of this incident would be as well known to Mahayana Buddhists as the ideas found in the scholastic poetry of the Mahayanasutralamkara.

The Buddha's decision to teach, as described here, clearly fits all three of the criteria defined by Griffiths for "free agency": there is something other than the agent to be acted upon, the action is located in space and time, and the action could have been other than it was. Griffiths refers to a commentary to the Mahayanasutralamkara which says that the rays of the sun (a metaphor for the awareness of Buddhas) do not think, "I shall burn and wither." In the case of the Buddha's decision, the awareness is clearly not of this un-self-conscious kind, but is volitional-though one must suppose in an exceptional or even "analogical" way, since it is not "egocentric" in the ordinary, unenlightened sense. The account also makes clear that not only does the Buddha deliberate on the alternatives of teaching or not teaching, but that he has a specific intention toward those beings who, he has seen, are receptive. It could be argued that he is aware of individual persons whom he will teach; in fact, the passage continues with his question, "To whom had I best teach the Doctrine first?" and his choice of the first hearers of the doctrine.

Even this brief consideration may show that the evidence of this passage, as well as that of the biography of Siddhartha Gautama more generally, is of great importance for the interpretation of Buddhist ethics, Buddhist understanding of personhood, and Buddhahood, the subject of Griffiths' essay. The content and implications of the passage provide a necessary counterweight to those of the text analyzed by Griffiths. The theological question which must follow is, what is the relative weight of the texts and their perspectives for Buddhist understanding? Is one more normative than the other? If in tension, how can

3 Henry Clarke Warren's translation of Sutta 26 of the Majjhima-Nikaya, found in his Buddhism In Translations, New York: Athenuem, 1962. (Orginial 1896, Harvard University Press).

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they be reconciled? The distinction made in the passage between enlightenment and the salvific activity of proclaiming the Dharma is relevant to a number of theological or "Buddhalogical" motifs, especially in Mahayana Buddhism, All this in turn raises a historical question even when one limits the questions to Mahayana: if a text is normative, then for whom? What community accepts its authority? The search for judgment must set forth into a territory much vaster than that circumscribed in this precisely focused study, seeking to locate both the texts and assess their relative importance in the overall tradition. The investigation should not be limited to the testimony of scholastic philosophy, but should also embrace other classes of Buddhist literature along with popular devotion, liturgy, and contemplative practice.

V

The three essays fulfill the aim of the Symposium as each concludes with an insight offered specifically to the Christian reader: Burrell finds that the practical spirituality of Ghazali may augment the treatment Aquinas gives to the question of the divine names. Clooney finds that the song by Nammalvar, when it has been "'read into' the Christian context … becomes a permanent part of it, neither to be later excised, nor to be confined to a single, controlled set of possible meanings." The text acts upon the Christian reader in unforeseen ways to open new aspects of his or her own experience. Griffiths finds that "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."

These three contributions are discrete, and not in conversation with one another at this stage. The disparity is even greater when one examines the attitudes of the three authors to their subjects. In Burrell's essay, we begin with a shared understanding of who and what God is, and then engage the ways in which we do not know God although we speak of him. There is a clear though implicit assumption that what all three philosophers have to say is already "ours," available to us for appropriation. This appropriation is not seen as a challenge. It is able to yield enhancement of our own religious faith without disturbance because one keeps in view the fact that a single concept of the divine and a single theological problematic have been delivered to "us"-Burrell very often uses the first person plural. Divisive questions are not addressed, and "the other" gives us no anxiety.

Clooney, by contrast, also seeks enhancement but through a personal risk imposed by "fear of the other" and struggle with this sense of the alien and the untrue. A single understanding of God has not been delivered to both Christians and Hindus, as far as he tells us here, yet an implied comparison is made by juxtaposition of the text with the reader's own convictions. The question of how or why Krishna might be seen as God is intimated but hovers unanswered over the essay. Who or what is "God" for a Hindu? We have had a glimpse of one Hindu's experience,

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but somewhat decontextualized. For reasons I have tried to indicate, we are not sure what it is we have seen, nor do we know whether "the other" is or could be ourselves.

Griffiths is at an even greater remove from his subject. He is sure that no understanding of "God" is common to Buddhists and Christians, who hold radically different metaphysical views. At this great distance, there is little fear in the encounter. The task is indeed to determine whether "we" are close enough to Buddhism for an encounter to take place, to find what grounds whatever there may be for comparison, and then to seek the insights a Christian may appropriate. It is likely that it is this very distance which makes Buddhist-Christian dialogue in the academic context so compelling for those who pursue it.

VI

It is a maxim of interfaith work that dialogue does not take place between religions but between people. What of this enterprise, then, in which "the interlocutors are texts" as Griffiths says? In dialogue with a living person, the interlocutor will answer back: to concur, to correct, to enlarge, to object. A text, opened on the scholar's desk, does not do this. This commonsense observation may seem unnecessary, but it is worth making because the difference can affect the approach of the interpreter. When one is free from the possibility of rebuttal by one's subject, one may feel that one is given permission to say things one would not feel as free to say to a living conversation partner. But in my view, this difference is partly illusory. Texts are created by persons, and those persons (be they long deceased or close to us in history) are as deserving of respect and accurate understanding as those "others" we meet face to face in our neighborhoods, in our world of work, and in conferences designed to provide interfaith encounters. And the dead authors of our texts are not in any case gone from our midst; they live now in the faith, study, stories, and practice of contemporary religious communities. In my comments, I have attempted, however sketchily, to point out the ways in which the authors of our texts might be linked to contemporary religious life through their concern with central normative questions.

The followers of any religion can, and often do, misdescribe their traditions, their beliefs, and themselves, as well as having different views on religious issues. The scholarly theological exercise and academic debate is therefore anything but irrelevant to the dialogue of living persons; it is indispensable. Yet the academic needs to be checked, broadened, and refocused by "live" dialogue with other people of faith, exposing and testing his or her presuppositions. Those engaged in dialogue on any intellectual level need to draw on the resources of those who have encountered the "other" in texts: for clarification, knowledge of the tradition which forms them, and fresh ways to gain critical purchase on interreligious questions. The work of both, and ongoing interchange between them, is needed in the enormous undertaking of building understanding and cooperation between religions.