One of the most important philosophical challenges for Christian theology lies in its engagement with Indian philosophies of non-duality, and one of the most daring and creative theologians confronting this challenge is Joseph O’Leary. For the past two to three decades, O’Leary has pushed the Christian theological agenda to open it up to insights from Buddhist Mahayana thought, which he has consistently argued exercise a chastening and purifying effect on the Christian understanding of doctrine.

Reality Itself brings together many of O’Leary original insights on the topic of Mahayana Buddhism in general and its importance for rethinking Christian faith. O’Leary refers to his own work as a type of “interreligious theology,” that goes beyond the particularities of Buddhist or Christian or any denominational thought and moves in a “more self-consciously philosophical direction” that represents a “contribution to the rich disinterested play of the human mind” (10). Still, O’Leary remains a Christian theologian and the volume moves back and forth between a search for a “pre-denominational faith” and a critical and constructive engagement with specifically Christian sources.

One of the most important challenges for Christian faith in subjecting it to a Mahayana interpretation lies in its unmooring of the traditional Christian understanding of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. This is also clear in Reality Itself. The classical conception of the unique redemptive role of Jesus Christ is based on a Hebraic and Hellenistic worldview that acknowledges the irreversible salvific importance of singular historical events and that moves toward a more dualistic conception of the relationship between the divine and the human. The Mahayana conception of reality, on the other hand, is based on the notion of radical emptiness, dissolving any substantialist idea of God and self, and of once-and-for-all transformative historical events. The ultimate goal is awakening to the emptiness of reality, which may be realized through different paths, but which in the end is attained through self-effort. Though Mahayana Buddhism has developed various types of mediators of salvation or liberation (heavenly Buddhas and bodhisattvas), these are generally understood as imaginary figures that may support the realization of the emptiness of reality and of the self, rather than ontologically real human or divine saviors. There is thus in the Mahayana cosmology no place for a vicarious salvific event or for a unique historical savior. O’Leary also acknowledges that there is “a deep tension between the Indian wisdom that grasps ultimate reality in impersonal terms and regards the idea of a creator (Isvara) or any personlizations of the ultimate as at best provisional skillful means (upaya) for those who need them, and the Christian conviction that ultimate reality is most fully and concretely known when it gives itself the voice and face of a personal God” (53). However, he does not regard this tension as insurmountable, but on the contrary views it as an opportunity to rethink Christianity and to bring it back to what he believes is its original meaning and intention:

Study of Buddhism throws new light on Christianity by showing it to be a religion of awakening to reality. It focuses the attention of Christians on what is most essential in their faith and yields a new way of affirming Christian identity, such that this no longer means obsessing over church claims or lifestyles, but rather a return to the basics of the outlook on reality taught and lived by Jesus Christ. (30)

One of O’Leary’s favorite categories in Mahayana Buddhist thought is upaya, skillful means, which serves to de-absolutize religious teachings without discounting their value and importance in religious faith and practice. Rather than cling to religious doctrines and practices as absolute and ultimately true, it allows believers to remain faithful to particular teachings without rejecting the possible truth and validity of other teachings and traditions. The notion of upaya still leaves room for a hierarchy of truths, or for more or less skillful means. It thus provides a framework for affirming the reality of religious plurality without falling into the trap of radical relativism. Among the many teachings that form part of the Christian doctrinal tradition, O’Leary lifts up certain central orientations of the gospel that he regards as “coterminous with reality itself”:

the primacy of love, the superiority of the life-giving Spirit to the letter that kills, the abundance of grace and of divine mercy, justification by faith in Christ, the assured triumph of the eschatological Kingdom. (31, 88)

It is not entirely clear whether or not these central orientations are also to be regarded as skillful means, or not. His attempt to develop a pre-denominational faith would suggest that he is searching for a truth beyond or before the particular doctrines that constitute the skillful means of the various traditions. But he does not discuss the status of these particular insights and conclusions.

It is the mention here of “justification by faith in Christ” that is particularly intriguing. O’Leary is sharply aware of the fact that his reinterpretation of Christianity in Mahayana terms leaves little room for the traditional understanding of the uniqueness of Christ. The notion of the ultimate emptiness of reality “demands a less substantialist ontology of the Incarnation” and “puts a question mark against definitive eschatological events” (75). He puts it more bluntly when he states that

credibility is strained by the startling particularity of the Christian claim that the salvation of the entire world, including all of humanity stretching back to its ancient evolutionary origins, has been decided by an event that happened on an afternoon in Jerusalem in 30 CE. (31)

For O’Leary, much of what constitutes traditional Christian soteriology and eschatology belongs to the realm of mythology, which is indebted to particular cultural and historical remnants and which obscures, rather than reveals, the original meaning of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Rather than jettison the meaningfulness of the Christian belief in the incarnation, he thus calls for a process of demythologization which would uncover its true and universal meaning.

O’Leary’s understanding of the universality of the truth of different religions deserves attention. He does not suggest that all religions ultimately teach the same or that they arise from and are oriented to the same experience. He does, however, believe that the deepest truth of each religion is universally valid, and that there is a need to demythologize religions in order to bring them back to “a bedrock simplicity where they all meet in their truth” (179). He is thus intent on discovering the universal elements in particular religious beliefs and events. “What best survives of classical religious claims” he states, “is their universal dimension, that which emerges when one reduces their message to an account of reality itself” (186). This is what he has in mind with his pursuit of a “pre-denominational faith” that may serve “as criterion for discerning truth of the manifestation of ultimate reality” (25).

In dealing with the Christian understanding of the unique salvific role of Jesus Christ, O’Leary distinguishes Jesus’ own experience of the saving presence of God from the ways in which it has been expressed, which are “a matter of adroit convention or skillful means, constantly adjusted to new situations of communication” (175). He goes back and forth between minimalizing the uniqueness of Jesus and tentatively affirming it. On the one hand, he states that “the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is a concern of orthodox theology, but one that need not weigh heavily on the philosophical mind, which takes from theological tradition only what meets its own specific concerns” (81). In Mahayana terms, he understands Jesus as “a man empty of own-being, and therefore manifesting in his dependently originative existence the ultimate reality of divine emptiness” and believes that this is “a vision that chimes well with many aspects of the Gospel” (83).

O’Leary certainly recognizes that this reinterpretation of Christ from a Mahayana perspective “carries the great risk of losing its integral content” (83). He thus seeks to reinstate an understanding of the uniqueness of Christ in a way that does not deny the presence of saving grace in other religions. With regard to the divine nature of Jesus, he proposes that “phenomenologically, the claim that Jesus is savior and divine is grounded in the way that in the story of Jesus divine and human historical struggle click together in a cogent and potent way, unknown elsewhere” (83). The last clause thus sets Jesus apart from saviors in other religions. And with regard to the unique salvific work of Jesus Christ, he offers a few tentative proposals:

Perhaps the concrete completion of historical eschatological salvation is what is meant, the idea that Christ brings to fulfillment and leads to its ultimate destiny the universal creative-salvific process that is always going on in all religions and in all life. (86)

Perhaps we could say that in the Christ-event humanity passes a new threshold of God-consciousness, opening up to the nearness of the divine in an integral way. (182)

The striking use of the qualifier “perhaps” illustrates O’Leary’s uncertain attempt to hold on to some notion of the unique salvific role of Jesus Christ within an overall Mahayana framework in which it would seem incongruous. The conception of ultimate reality as emptiness would not seem to allow for a distinction between experiences of emptiness or God consciousness. Is the experience of Christ different from that of the Buddha, or from any other experience of realization either within or outside of Christianity? It is not entirely clear on which grounds that could be argued.

The classical Christian understanding of the salvific role of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ has no place in O’Leary’s approach. Rather than as a particularly Christian symbol of suffering and redemption, he proposes a “non-confessional philosophy of the Cross, as a key to putting human nature back in touch with itself” (84). He believes that the “Christian story of sin and redemption can seem a mythical rigmarole falling short of the dignity of being” (85). Consequently, traditional views of the cross as a symbol of atonement for the sins of the world become meaningless and are dismissed as a magical or “behind the scenes process.” O’Leary is sympathetic toward Rene Girard’s anthropological interpretation of the cross as an expression of the universality of sacrifice and victimization (177) and as means of exposing and “dismantling of human mimetic rivalry and its murderous outcome” (83). But his main understanding of the Cross is as a symbol of deconstruction “dissolving the barriers set by human arrogance and fixation against the liberating space of divine ultimacy” (84). O’Leary’s interpretation of the Cross as symbol and power of deconstruction resonates with the work of another great Christian philosopher and friend of O’Leary, Stanislas Breton. In his work Unicité et Monothéisme, he also emphasizes the critical function of the cross as a sign of contradiction and the contestation of all idols, including its own pretentions to uniqueness:

The empty space in which the Cross traces the sign of contradiction, and the spirit in its germination of non-being prescribe the conditions which simultaneously make possible the universalization of the Christic function and the contestation of its uniqueness.” (Unicité et Monothéisme, 109)

The reinterpretation of salvific function of the Cross in the approaches of O’Leary and Breton is intended not to bring about its dissolution but rather to bring out its universal meaning and function. However, with this, the particularity of Christianity and its understanding of the reality of sin and the promise of forgiveness and redemption is also sacrificed.

In general, O’Leary approaches the Christian understanding of the uniqueness of Jesus Christ not as absolutely or ultimately true, but rather as skillful means:

Even if a believer is utterly convinced that Christ is the one Savior and divine the meaning of these expressions is elusive: they are monuments of religious thought that mark a place of depth, but they need to be used skillfully if they are to continue to mark that place. (159)

The appeal of the notion of upaya or skillful means is that it “allows one to cherish the richness of the religious fabric while not investing too heavily in doctrinal fixations” (159). In his own work, O’Leary however focuses more on deconstructing the traditional meaning and status of the claim to uniqueness rather than on affirming its skillfulness, or its salutary effect in the lives of believers, both past and present. If the ultimate goal of religious faith and practice lies in overcoming human arrogance and self-centeredness, a focus on the person of Jesus Christ as the only one to have fully attained this state provides a powerful model and antidote against spiritual pride and self-aggrandizement. The belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ may thus be seen as skillful means for preserving spiritual humility, which may be regarded as the highest goal of religious life. This is only one of many possible functions of the belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.

The interpretation of Christianity from a Mahayana philosophical perspective opens up new and very promising horizons for understanding and living Christian faith. For O’Leary, however, Mahayana philosophy represents not merely one among many possible frameworks of interpretation, but rather reality itself, as the title of the book indicates. What is more, he claims that his interpretation of the person and teaching of Jesus coincides with Jesus own self-understanding and intention, or that it represents a “return to the basics of the outlook on reality taught and lived by Jesus Christ” (30). These claims to attain to reality itself and to the mind of Christ seem like an unnecessary and unfounded leap to objectivity in a work that otherwise overflows with rich and inspiring hermeneutical insight.

Joseph O’Leary’s book is admirably rich, learned, ambitious and provocative.1 Of course any lengthy philosophical discussion of religious matters will deal more or less explicitly with the essentially interrelated concepts, e.g., in metaphysics and ethics. In this book numerous rich concepts are more or less explicitly taken up and returned to in discussions in various contexts which weave them back and forth. In what follows I’m afraid I will also pursue a path of such interweaving and repetition.

The core perspective is that of an advocate, apologist, and proponent of Mahayana Buddhism who is steeped in Christian philosophical theology as well as contemporary continental philosophy. My own background is similar to that of O’Leary, but in Buddhist studies I am not even an amateur. However, through probably a misinterpretation, I have always been positively disposed to some core themes, especially of the traditions of Mahayana Buddhism because I have found some kinship with my home base in especially transcendental phenomenology.

A tension that runs through O’Leary’s work is the one initiated by Nagarjuna, i.e., whether the core Buddhist teaching of “emptiness” does or does not make impossible an ultimate philosophical or theological truth, e.g., of the ultimacy of Emptiness, the Buddha, Essential Mind. (Perhaps the most important discussion is ch. 9, “The Two Truths.”) O’Leary repeatedly returns to the question of whether foundational doctrines, e.g., that of emptiness and dependent co-arising of causes, may be applied to the foundational doctrine itself. I want to briefly pursue this tension in relation to some of the basic issues as they emerge out of my own present theoretical interests and inclinations. What follows will be a sketch of a transcendental phenomenological position that is laced with more or less explicit interpretations of not only Buddhism but Prof. O’Leary’s version of it. Given my illiteracy in Buddhist matters I cannot engage Prof. O’Leary on his deep far-ranging turf but on my own. Thus this somewhat selfish undertaking is minimally in the service of the truth about whether or not I have got close to understanding Buddhism and Prof. O’Leary, or whether I fail in regard to both. In any case I am grateful to both Professors O’Leary and Rivera for the challenge and stimulus to move at least a little “outside my comfort zone.”

Consciousness, Selfhood, and Ethics without Persons

I take it to be true that for transcendental phenomenology and Mahayana Buddhism, the ultimate relation of “Being” and “Mind,” obviously terms laden with historical and conceptual schemes, is the core metaphysical theme upon which everything else is founded. This is not the relation ultimately of two essences or entities but a non-twoness in which everything is encompassed and included.2 We are confronted by an apparent two in “the natural attitude” where a sense of “Being” unmindful of mind goes in advance, indeed this sense of “Being” itself raises the issue of whether it is able to have any prior antecedent or anterior consideration.3 But a familiar sense of mind surfaces later when the mind is not absorbed in “Being,” i.e., in its life with beings in the world but, for whatever reason, it is turned toward itself as distinct from Being as in the sense of the world absorbing it. This may happen for a variety of reasons, not least of which might be a mistake or an error in interpretation. Here mind as a medium of the presence of the being of the world surfaces, and it might initially and falsely appear as an intervening entity needing to be overcome. But once it becomes evident that being is evident or manifest only through the mind’s agency of manifestation, then we have reason to hold that being and its manifestation are coaeval.

Indeed, because the notion of Being is limitless in its extension, and yet never present without the agency of manifestation, Husserl proposed that we speak of consciousness as “Being” in a uniquely radical sense, i.e., as “absolute being,” or the “root of ‘Being’” or even as non-Being, but here non-Being is by no means a nihil negativum.4 Both the possibilities of the root of being and non-being are tied to the consideration that consciousness’s manifesting manifestness was the source of the manifestation of all of that which is or can be called “Being” in the sense of something able to be made present, and especially what is in the space and time of the horizon phenomenonology names “world.” This, of course, includes the beings of dreams, numbers, selves, dreamings, rememberings, questions, doubts, square roots, irrational numbers, etc. Thus if we (mistakenly) take “beings” to be that which is individual by being individuated and having identifiable distinguishing properties, and having duration both in terms of its own changing and not changing, then mind as consciousness is not a being. And thus it is not in time or space. Indeed it bears all (being) that is manifest, i.e., it is the phenomenological (not efficient-causal) bearer of all manifest meaning and value, der Geltungsträger der Welt.5

It is not as if the meanings or kinds or suchnesses, the various ways world is fleshed out as . . ., are not inherent in the displayed world, but they require the agency of manifestation for this to be brought to light that it might be so manifest (cf. eidos). With this inherent excellence manifested by the agency of manifestation (mind or consciousness) itself is enriched by participating in the excellence intentionally.

Further a fundamental feature of being mind is that not only is it agency of manifestation but that it is self-manifest, self-aware without being aware of itself, and in its pre-reflective self-awareness as well as in its explicit self-awareness, is indicated with the first-person singular pronoun, whereby one refers to oneself as oneself. This reference is non-ascriptive (no property assignment) to what itself is essentially non-sortal, i.e., without properties. Referring to oneself as oneself is not referring to one’s identifiable person as intersubjectively in the world with others.

We need to make a distinction between the use of “I” in the natural attitude and the use of “I” in the transcendental attitude. Both refer non-ascriptively to what is non-sortal and unique. But the “I” achievement in the natural attitude spontaneously thinks of itself as itself something in the world, whereas with the “transcendental I” one refers to oneself as the transcendental ultimate agent of manifestation, to whom everything appears through its acts of display, and this included the display of oneself as this person in the world. For the transcendental I as such there can be no identity-crisis or proclivity to clinging to delusional fabrications of its identity. This is because its transcendental self-presence is non-sortally and non-ascriptively and non-reflectively intact and the basis for the awareness of such crises. The transcendental I recognizes its referent in the natural attitude “as oneself.” “As oneself” is not identically the same as recognizing, e.g., “JGH.” That is, the reference of “I” is free of any identifying, recognizing, predicating activity. This same reference happens in the natural attitude where “I” refers non-ascriptively to what is made presence apart from any identifying of the familiar properties. (This is what is meant by the referent being “non-sortal.” But it is in a philosophical reflection, e.g., the transcendental attitude, that there emerges the transcendental identity of the person as standing in contrast with the public intersubjective identity. Consider how when one responds to “who is there?” I answer, “I,” and the questioner then asks: And how am I to identify who “I” refers to, I will say my name or identify me as the neighbor, or a census taker, etc. Here there is a clear sense in which although one answers to “who are you ?” with “I” but at the same time there is another sense given to “me” with, e.g., “JGH,” or “the neighbor,” a sense than with “I.” Even if I answered with “a stranger” I would have identified myself differently than with “I.” Indeed there is a clear sense that with “I” I don’t identify myself. And, to say that “I” refers to “this speaker now” or by using some other identifier or indexical, as “this one here and now across from you” what “I” refers to is not captured. To make a long story short: the thought experiment of an “ontological” clone in the very restricted sense of a doubling of JGH down to every detail, would still not mean that the “JGH One” with “I” would refer to “JGH Two”; the first one (as well as the second, assuming the experiment) would each say: “Whoever you are in the world you are, you not me and I am not you.” In this sense, the inclination to name certain identifying properties as identical with oneself, or saying I cannot be me unless I am “trans-” or even I cannot be me if I am not Catholic or Buddhist, etc., is metaphysically “delusional” even if demanding a loving understanding.

Nevertheless we may not therefore underplay the ontological necessity of the transcendental non-sortal I to be “sorted out,” to personalize itself in its being in the world with others. This is not an option but personifying me as the one I should be is the most important task, i.e., it is the absolute ought to be one’s ideal self; it is a calling to an adventure of discovery and self-formation. But as such it is never a finished accomplishment, and the truth of one’s ideal self is never given to us in apodictic evidence.

All forms and habits of presencing and self-presencing and identification depend on the unique non-sortal referent of “I” as an agent of manifestation and, in the course of one’s being in the world with others, are “personifications” of this. That is, they are synthetic cumulative acts forming habituations and identifiable features as a result of one’s living out what may be taken as an original unique pervasive “ought” or “calling” to concretize the unique non-sortal essence that is the referent of “I.”

There is obviously no transcendental person in the world without these embodied self-identifications, whether they are delusional or not. (For example, I must believe that I have a father, and further believe that X the famous athlete was my father, and that belief has pervaded much of my life and life-choices, but it might well turn out that X was not my father and neither was he a famous athlete, etc.; but this person, JGH, with his constellations of properties is not the proper referent of either the first-person reference nor of the transcendental I of JGH that comes to light in transcendental-phenomenological reflections. Nevertheless, even though there is an identity when I, JGH, the metaphysically mistaken person, say “I,” and when I, JGH, engage in transcendental phenomenology and gain a theoretical detachment from JGH.)6

Now let us (finally) switch to Prof. O’Leary’s book. He presents a novel and nuanced analysis of religious concepts and language and how the ineluctable discriminations emergent out of our perceptual life in the world can only provide a superficial framework unless these are emptied of ultimate significance in favor of their moorings in another deeper transcendent, perhaps even transcendental, dimension to which we do not have the same ready access (see 103 and ch. 9). Inseparable from these considerations is his proposal for the advancement of social justice, peace, compassion, forgiveness and reconciliation, in the light of a Buddhist theory of no-self, anatman.7 I confess to a basic difficulty of not knowing whether this theory that holds that there is no such legitimate thing as “self-ness” or “I-ness” is a theory denying the fundamental philosophical status of mind as intellectual consciousness as such, or whether it is a theory that holds that an I-less, self-less theory of consciousness is more basic than one claiming that consciousness necessarily “selved” or “egoic.” This difficulty will reassert itself in the course of what follows.

I appreciate that violence and conflict have much to do with one’s being attached to our moral and psychological self-identifying baggage and vices (not least of which is the propensity to demonize). Thus I appreciate also the importance of the exhortation that protagonists “empty” themselves of this baggage, and especially important is each’s emptying herself of hate, frequently the source of the legitimation of demonization (cf. 105).

Although I appreciate the basic important claim that conflict is tied very, if not most, often to our erroneous self-identifications, I find it to be an unrealizable thought-experiment to retain traditional moral concepts and moral language, to say nothing of exercising forgiveness, compassion, and reconciliation, in the face of a self-less person or Humean self. For me it is similar to requiring one to behave toward ethically toward robots or zombies (assuming I am correct in my metaphysical assessment of these beings). All the virtues practiced by members of a peaceable society presuppose the ontological respectful presencing of others as self-experiencing agents of manifestation whose presence of each to each is not exhaustively grasped as something in the world. This transcendence is an “empathic” experience of what the I refer to with “you,” refers to, i.e., to what the Other refers to when saying “I.” The one who is before me and identified as this embodied experiencing person in space and time and who is an identifiable person in the world in endless ways of gender, race, appearance, etc., is not what “you” refers to, but rather the one who “has” this embodiment, i.e., the transcendent self-aware agent of manifestation and world-transformation. As transcendental subjects the persons do not have their being exhausted by a third-personal thingly description proper to worldly objective beings. Thus they are never able to be reduced to the causal considerations which may be involved in their being bodies here and now and in their experiencing here and now what they do experience. As Kant said, persons are never just things in the world, but are incommensurate with things and thus are never worldly means but always ends in themselves. In short, they have a unique dignity which is not commensurate with the values proper to objective things in the world.

On the one hand, Hume was right about not being able to find himself given to himself among what is given, certainly among things in the world, but even among the things in his stream of consciousness. But, on the other hand, as Chisholm observed, because it is not possible so to find himself, it is impossible that he would not know that it was he himself seeking the self and/or himself. It is not possible that he not know that the very one, the one that is searching, stumbling and perplexed in not finding the self among the incessant flow of different perceptions, to be himself. And if he is correct in saying he finds himself to be stumbling how can he say he doesn’t find himself?8

(Of course, the Buddhist [as well as commonsensical and materialist] response is that the self-aware Humean self that is seeking his objective self, as well as Chisholm’s, and the searching self of JGH, are manifestly ephemeral, i.e., dead or soon to be. Yet [if I’ve got it right], in some sense the Buddha Nature/self of Hume and Chisholm are not ephemeral. John P. Keenan, for example, says that “after the dawning of an awareness of no-self, the awakened subject “searches for appropriate words and images skillfully to lead other subject so share in the direct experience of wisdom.” He also says the “awareness of an ‘I’ leads to no affirmation of “therefore I am.” But he also says the awareness of there being no I or no-self involves the awakened subject to want to help others.9 Thus we have a non-self that is continuously aware and awakened to the importance of helping others. Having overcome one’s collapse into one’s delusional self, one now lives awakened to a life of compassion. But putting it this way presupposes what the O’Learyan Buddhist denies. One may interpret James Joyce as making a Buddhist case, but will the claim for a stream of consciousness without a subject of this consciousness, i.e., without a dative of awareness, withstand reflection? Key would be to distinguish intentional consciousness and the non-reflective foundation which is ineliminable for any personal and therefore ethical agency. Otherwise we are left with something like the sheerest “behaviorism,” cybernetics or robotry, where no one is there but rather there is a screen displaying “events” without viewers.

For transcendental phenomenology there is no evidence available that would enable any propositions about the eternity of the self. Yet it does raise questions about how to understand its undeniable ephemerality. For example: Whether the transcendental I’s ineluctable engagement with the primal temporal flow, its “internal time-awareness,” does not mean that this awareness itself cannot be totally immersed in the flow; there are also important questions about the senses of its mortality as these are evident in the experienced world. For example, i.e., everyone experiences herself surrounded by death and that death is the lot of everybody, and typically makes the solid presumption that one too will die—in spite of the impossibility of experiencing one’s death. (The verb “to die” does not know a first-person past conjugation.) We will return to this.

Furthermore, we all recognize, and both Hindu and Buddhist thought are especially rich in pointing this out, that “one’s life” has numerous discrete interruptions and transformations like sleep and illness. Of course also life is laced with “surprises” and the occasional experience of the contradiction to what one has “every reason” to expect. Similarly, one has the familiar experience of looking back on one’s life in amazement: Did I do that? Did I write that? The framing habits of our perceptions of ourselves and the world undergo enormous changes. But the evidence seems clear that even though by definition recalling the past is recalling what is removed from the actual Now and what is at a personal-psychological-social distance, and thus it is not a perception, which, of course, has its own form of obscurity. Rather memory or recollection necessarily has to do with what, in contrast to perception, is something no longer present and available for clarification and interaction. But nevertheless, granted these difficulties, it is undeniable that I am not looking for my past in someone else’s memory. And if I can recall the past events I recall them as what were as experienced by me, not someone else, even though I may sense the sameness at a distance between the one who experienced that former event and the one recalling it. And even if, e.g., a friend may tell me that even though I have no recollection of an event and my behaving in a certain way, and, in contrast he knows that it is so, still I cannot experience it as my past until the right cues evoke it as indeed my former life.

Obviously there is some support for the no-self theory in our familiar experiences with the discontinuities in our lives, but is the discontinuity absolute? It seems hyperbolic to take such incidents and offer them as arguments for a no-self view. Not only does the observation of the discontinuity require continuity, but it is always a matter of my past. And in cases of not-remembering often enough there are techniques and therapies for overcoming the barriers and occasioning the right recollection.

The transcendental I-awareness is a flow of its conscious engagement of the life in the world as a personal I. This is an awareness of a series of processes or a series of a series of processes. The event of taking a sip of coffee in an Irish cafe, is a rich complex event of a lived synthesis of multiple identity syntheses. The simple movement of picking up the cup of coffee is an experience of an identity of temporal-spatial identities: there is the identity of the experience of the surfacing of the desire to taste the coffee, which involves the protention of the extension of one’s hand, with the execution of this extending of the arm there is the identity of the retention of the just past experience of the initiating desire, with the extended hand fulfilling in the present the protention of the extended hand, the motion of the hand seizing the cup, thereby fulfilling that protention, and moving it back to one’s lips, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction with how it tastes in relation to the original desire, etc.—all these moments are a flow of temporal different identity syntheses within the one large one of “taking a cup of coffee.” And the event of, e.g., one’s “trip to Ireland,” which upon one’s return might be rendered in a narrative which necessarily prescinds from the concrete richness of the ongoing variety of identity syntheses, building on the awareness of inner time, is a complex identity synthesis of identity syntheses, of which the sipping the cup of coffee in the Irish cafe might be not only negligible but hardly memorable. But this ongoing now-awareness of these is not itself a process in time any more than the now-consciousness of the flowing present itself is now. And this is just one more reason supporting Husserl’s own claim for an equivocal sense of “I” as it is used in transcendental phenomenology.10

Again, doubtless, most would benefit from a therapeutic deconstruction of their personal and cultural habitualities and inheritances, providing the therapy culminated in an appreciation of the epistemic achievement of respect as the necessary epistemic precondition for presencing persons as persons, i.e., not only is it a matter recognizing persons as not things or bundles or constellations of more or less blind efficient causes, but this very recognition as a cognitive act is inseparably an affective-moral act whereby the inviolable unmerited dignity of the other is manifest.11 Without this forgiveness, compassion, and reconciliation make no sense. Indeed, this therapy of respect needs to be extended also to the agents of violence themselves, and may be shown to at least imply a disrespect themselves in so far as the violence indicates their distorted sense of themselves. This is a view surely of Gandhi.

Joseph O’Leary’s latest book eloquently uses Buddhist philosophy to highlight what he understands to be the core of any lived Christianity, which it would share with Buddhism as with any other religion, namely an opening up to reality itself: “Study of Buddhism,” he explains, “throws new light on Christianity by showing it to be a religion of awakening to reality” (30). On O’Leary’s account, the ground for their reciprocally elucidating capacity is what we might call their shared kenotic structure, namely the “logic of the Incarnation” in Christianity as it corresponds to “the truth of emptiness” in Buddhism (190). If Christianity is characterized by a historical person in which God has emptied himself of his own divinity (Phil 2:7), in which God manifests himself by withdrawing from himself and assuming the finite condition of humanity, then the Buddhist development of emptiness might help us think this gesture:

Phenomenologically, the claim that Jesus is savior and divine is grounded in the way that in the story of Jesus divine ultimacy and human historical struggle click together in a cogent and potent way, unknown elsewhere. Unless Christological discourse acquires some such concrete and graspable profile it withers away in abstraction. Buddhist philosophy contributes to this regrounding. To see Jesus as a man empty of own-being, and therefore manifesting in his dependently originating existence the ultimate reality of divine emptiness, is a vision that chimes well with many aspects of the Gospel. (83)

According to O’Leary, this is what puts religions in touch with reality itself. After all, if the divine is “a reality that cannot be securely pinned down, and that reveals itself in its withdrawal, as what forever eludes our grasp” (62), religion is better equipped than any other human activity to think reality itself: “Reality plays hard to get; it is known only in its withdrawal” (412). Within theology, then, this “implies a reconversion of all religious terms into indications of concrete life-orientations” (23). The exercises this book thus rightly engages in are “reductions of dogma to what is phenomenologically accessible” (90), namely the elusive experience of reality itself that escapes the clutches of metaphysical reason.

My knowledge of Buddhism is too embarrassingly superficial to comment on the details of these various exercises—which on their own constitute an impressive venture in (comparative) philosophy of religion—, but I do wish to raise a question regarding the overarching argument of the book: in saying that “the whole point of religions” is to put us in touch with “reality itself, in its deepest and most universal sense” (11), does O’Leary not declare reality itself to be religious, as opposed to merely pointing out the reality of religion, namely the fact that “religions are false and valueless when they are not in accord with reality itself” (10)? Throughout the book, he depicts religion as the primordial access to reality itself, superior to philosophy, science, and art. Whilst these other human activities are indeed also concerned with reality itself, “religions maintain that concern in a more ultimate sense, since they live by the conviction (and experience) of reality as numinous and graced” (30).

This critique of philosophy as unable to think (or to experience) the withdrawing (of) experience is not new; it sits arguably at the heart of philosophical projects of both Heidegger and Derrida, and I therefore wonder whether O’Leary is not being overly hasty in seeking this experience outside of philosophy. More importantly, however, the idea that the real is inherently religious has a potentially dangerous implication, namely that contact with reality becomes a feature of a particular religious practice and thus the privilege of people of faith. That religion in no way accords with the real, that it is entirely illusionary, a question of childish self-indulgence or at best a useful evolutionary fiction, is indeed a position we can hardly take seriously. However, establishing the religious structure of reality itself nevertheless strikes me as an enterprise that is both impossible from the point of view of philosophy (i.e., given the necessity of sticking to the horizon of finitude) and undesirable on its own terms (i.e., the book’s admirable ambition of contributing to an interreligious dialogue where the transformative encounter with the other gives rise to a better understanding of oneself). Indeed, there seems to be an unresolved tension within the book: though O’Leary urges us to “recognize the blessings of conventionalism and relativism” (190) in dealing with the differences between the religions, he seems reluctant to apply this to the category of religion as such. However, if specific “religious terms” indicate certain “concrete life-orientations” (23), why would religion itself not also be one of many equally valid ways of approaching reality itself?

Of course, at no point does O’Leary claim that religion is the only means of accessing reality itself; however, religion is said to deliver a “richer and deeper” (13) or “fuller and deeper” (14) grasp of it. I cannot help but be suspicious of this language of depth. What does it mean to say that something is more fully real when it is deeper? Indeed, the abyss is truly deep, but more than that cannot be said about it either. Depth might in some instances belie an uninteresting superficiality: by plunging into the abyss we also step outside of our life in the world, which was supposed to be the matter at issue. Here, we would do well to bear in mind Nietzsche’s warning that even “those Greeks were superficial—out of profundity!” 1

On O’Leary’s account, an appreciation of the depth of reality itself is available only to the religious perspective, only religion puts us in touch with what “blank secularity” (15) would find itself “unable to articulate convincingly” (14) or “attain on its own” (94). This results from the method he borrows from Heidegger, which consists in setting up what the latter calls a “loving struggle” between Christianity and Buddhism: “All refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish,” Heidegger says, and in that spirit O’Leary does not see Christianity and Buddhism as competing claims to truth; rather, the differences between them are sketched as “a ‘loving struggle’ concerning the matter itself,” which “assists them mutually toward a simple belonging to the Same,”2 namely an awakening to reality itself. It is Jaspers, however, who has developed this notion in more detail as a confrontation that is not oriented towards victory and domination over the other, but rather towards an understanding of oneself through the other:

The [loving] struggle (…) is unlike the struggle for existence in which all weapons are brought into play and trickery and fraud become inevitable, in which my fellow man is treated as an enemy (…). The [loving] struggle (…) has to do (…) with utter candor, with the elimination of all kinds of power and superiority (…). It is a struggle in which both combatants dare to show themselves without reserve and to allow themselves to be thrown into question. (…) It never aims at superiority and victory; if these are gained, they will be felt as disturbing (…). Mutual transparency is sought not only in the matters at issue, but in the means of questioning and of contention. Each combatant penetrates himself along with the other. 3

Emmanuel Falque, in his The Loving Struggle, has aptly described this kind of confrontation as a “quasi-athletic tussle,” where “the partners are adversaries only in order to measure themselves against one another and thereby to surpass themselves.”4

Indeed, though he might be reluctant to admit it, O’Leary’s use of this metaphor of a loving struggle puts him very close to Falque’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and theology in terms of the transformation of one by the other: like when Christianity comes into its own in its encounter with Buddhism; when philosophy encounters the religious, when thinking happens within the context of religion, what follows is a “glorious apprehension of the real” (94) that neither human activity could attain on its own. I am aware that O’Leary has elsewhere described Falque’s position, along with the rest of contemporary French phenomenology, in a wonderfully stinging way as presenting “philosophy as a pouting servant girl, the ancilla theologiae who would like to climb into her master’s bed.”5 By nevertheless drawing the comparison here, I do not mean to suggest that O’Leary similarly theologizes philosophy, like so many French phenomenologists do at their peril and as he (correctly) remarks here again (e.g., 87); but rather that he fails to recognize the sophistication of Falque’s position and the radical break with the generation of phenomenologists of religion that came before him it represents: for Falque, it is very much the case that phenomenology and theology make two.

The key difference between Falque and O’Leary, however, is that the former has far more time for “atheism” or “secularism,” whilst the latter insists that “with any religion one steps into a realm of thought and feeling that goes beyond common secular perception” (14) and where “faith feels itself to be in contact with an inward truth that secular rejection cannot crush” (13). The loving struggle O’Leary thus sets up—a struggle about reality itself unfolding between different perspectives on it—is thus exclusively between religions, and in this case between Christianity and Buddhism in particular. The secular or atheist perspective does not get involved, for it would not have the same level of access to reality itself. The struggle between religion and atheism, unlike that between Buddhism and Christianity, does not “take place at the same level” since there is no “mutual recognition, and in the questioning, mutual affirmation,”6 as Jaspers puts it: it is not a loving struggle over the matter itself, but a fight to the death. However, why not extend this loving struggle to atheism? Do atheists not also experience the real in a valid way? O’Leary’s struggle about reality itself involves only “the religious other” (16), but not the other of religion, which is dismissed as superficial.

The problem here is O’Leary’s understanding of atheism. By engaging in Christian-Buddhist dialogue, he wants to illustrate how “we are living through a change in the nature and function of theism,” away from doctrinal truth and towards life orientation, which has as its result that “atheism ceases to have a clear target” (18). If God no longer is a transcendent being that would exist ‘out there’, there no longer is anything for atheism to deny the existence of. However, is this really the atheism we see around us today? Are so many of our contemporaries really that naive? If the experience offered by the confrontation with another religion “is more puzzling than the challenges of a blank secularity,” for O’Leary, this is because “it advances under the guise not of scepticism but of a conviction every bit as firmly held as one’s own” (15). Yet, this ignores the fact that there are plenty of people who genuinely claim to be atheists, with this conviction being every bit as firmly held as other people do their faith. Moreover, this atheism—precisely as firmly and sincerely held conviction—is not simply an exercise in intellectual scepticism, and it therefore does not need a target: most people who would call themselves atheists, unlike Richard Dawkins, do not spend their time trying to disprove what they think theism to be (why would they bother?). Today, most atheists are not militantly against anything, let alone God; rather, the religious or spiritual dimension has simply ceased to mean anything to them, they do not see the point of God, they are indifferent. Today, atheism designates not the rejection but rather the disappearance of any supposed depth-dimension, or precisely its appearance only as something profoundly unreal. To understand atheism as being against something, as having or needing a target, is only atheism “as seen by the theologian,”7 to reprise the insightful phrase the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty directs against the theologian Henri de Lubac. When O’Leary then elevates religion as the primordial access to reality itself, he does so—despite his protestations—from a theological position: if not speaking from any particular “confessional investment,” it is still not the “more disinterested” (76) speaking of philosophy he aims at, but instead a speaking from a position that has “already succumbed to the attraction” (15) of religion, for only from that position could one ever declare its superiority, could one declare reality to be structured in a religious way. However, since this implies that atheists would be living in unreality, condemned to an inauthentic existence, I feel this should be resisted on philosophical grounds.8  Indeed, atheism is anything but easy, superficial, or invalid, when it comes to approaching reality itself. For someone like Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, ‘atheism’ consists precisely in the attempt to think the world as it is, namely on its own terms and therefore without transcendent referent or depth.9 For him, the deepest and most difficult thing to think is also the most ‘superficial’ or mundane: the world as it worlds, without seeking anything behind this worlding that might ground it.

In conclusion, if O’Leary’s admirable book establishes that religions are undeniably real, in that they consist in a lived approach to reality itself as opposed to idle speculation; I wonder whether it does not overshoot its mark somewhat by implying that reality itself is religious. Likewise, if the loving struggle between Christianity and Buddhism he stages to make his point delivers valuable results for Christian theology; I wonder if the question it raises for the philosophy of religion is not whether another loving struggle must be staged: not between Christianity and Buddhism, but between religion and atheism, for they too struggle over reality itself yet are not in competition, existing instead in an “incomparable solidarity,”10 as Jaspers puts it, that is documented by swathes of recent work in continental philosophy. The goal of this loving struggle, as Falque puts it, would be “to come to an understanding of ‘man without God,’ in the double sense of entering such a person’s thought processes and feeling empathy for one who holds such a view,” which “entails incessantly taking up the challenge (…) not to destroy atheism but to learn from it, avoiding (…) seeing it only through Christian eyes, and thus condemning it de facto.”11 After all, if from the loving struggle about reality itself between Buddhism and Christianity it becomes evident that the nature of theism itself has changed; then it is from a similar struggle between religion and atheism that we likewise discover “a new mode of being of atheism (the surpassing and the relinquishing of God, rather than a combat with God),” from which follows the need for Christian theology “to appropriate it before we condemn it,” and even more importantly the “need to see it not simply from the point of view of the certitudes of faith.”12 When it comes to the awakening to reality itself, which is perhaps not so much a characteristic of religion as it is of human existence in general, the Christian then has as much to gain from a loving struggle with the Buddhist as they do from a similar struggle with the atheist. After all, as Husserl already suggested in a famous phrase from the Crisis that has lost none of its relevance today, the “struggle between the philosophies” is a “struggle for the meaning of man.”13

The following is a look back at the presentation of Critical Buddhism in Pruning the Bodhi Tree, criticizing that book and trying to sketch Critical Buddhism within its own Sōtō Zen context.

Pruning the Pruners

If Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism had begun with Hakamaya’s essay “Thoughts on the Ideological Background of Social Discrimination” and Matsumoto’s “The Lotus Sutra and Japanese Culture,” the genesis of Critical Buddhism would be much clearer. It all began within the Joint Conference of the Special Section of the Sōtō Doctrinal Advisory Committee established in 1985 within the Sōtō school, established by Komazawa University, to update the Shushōgi handbook, used by the Sōtō priest in local temples throughout Japan from its composition in Meiji times. As the Sōtō Zen tradition began to flourish in Kamakura, Japan, its priests performed funeral rites that guaranteed a blissful afterlife for the departed.1 As Ken Williams writes, the more rituals performed, the more certain the blissful fate of one loved family dead: the more rituals performed, the more funds flowed into the local temples.2 But the committee’s task of updating the handbook became difficult indeed, because, after finding practices of discrimination inscribed in sermons that relied on the Shushōgi handbook, they turned attention to why and how their own doctrinal teaching about a really real Buddha nature had encouraged that discrimination. “The apparent equality that obtains on the absolute level serves at once to justify, obscure, and confirm the discrimination that appears on the phenomenal level.”3 The committee looked back to the Shushōgi and to Dōgen, the founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen, and his classic Shōbōgenzō, which they found largely innocent of discriminatory practice, a major focus of the committee’s reform efforts. The central thing to remember is that Critical Buddhism began and remained focused on Sōtō Zen issues within the Buddhism faculty of the Sōtō Zen Komazawa University. Unsurprisingly, two years before O’Leary’s essay, William Bodiford noted that “while calls for a new Critical Buddhism have prompted much interest among American scholars of East Asian Buddhism, little attention has been paid to the particular Sōtō context of social discrimination and current reform campaigns from which they arose. Like most aspects of Japanese religious life there is “more (and less) to Critical Buddhism than is readily apparent on the surface.”4 Bodiford continues “to correct this imbalance” by placing Critical Buddhism in its Sōtō context, concluding that Critical Buddhism “represents for the first time that Japanese Buddhist scholars have applied the same philological rigor normally reserved for Indian and Tibetan Buddhism to their own Japanese Buddhist traditions,” because “investigations of the validity of the teachings of Japanese Buddhism have been taboo, something not suitable for polite academic discussion.”5 He ends by saying that undoubtedly “the truly critical study of Japanese Buddhism by Japanese (and Western) scholars is sorely needed.”6

The confusion apparent in Pruning the Bodhi Tree and thus in O’Leary’s chapter entitled “Critical Buddhism and the Hermeneutics of Religion” is understandable because in its Sōtō context the committee branched out to consider the doctrinal trajectories that led to the discriminatory practices they wanted to counter (293–320). Yet the criticisms in Pruning the Bodhi Tree appeared to be very disorganized and helter-skelter. Still, if one attends to Hakamaya’s essay on “Ideology,” the scattered targets of Critical Buddhism come into unified focus. Additionally, by subtitling the volume “the Storm over Critical Buddhism,” the volume itself seems to have engendered the storm: what Western scholar of Chinese Buddhism could not have felt challenged. “Whereas the label of “Critical Buddhism” has been widely used among Buddhist scholars in the United States, this is not the case in Japan.”7 Although often highly critical, it should be clear that Hakamaya and Matsumoto were not doing detached Buddhological studies at all, but doing Sōtō “theology” on the background of the sins of their own tradition—apparent when one attends to Hakamaya’s essay on “Scholarship as Criticism,” and its rejection of the usual genre of Buddhist scholarship.8 In arguing for the twelve-fascicle version of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, Hakamaya contended that toward the end of his life, Dōgen, after he returned from the disappointments in Edo, himself had a renewal of his thinking, now firmly rejecting all notions of original enlightenment previously expressed in the larger versions. Even here Hakamaya was not doing the expected detached study of traditions, but tracing the predecessors that had in his view led to the sad state of Sōtō Zen practice.

The first problem that faces an interpreter of Buddhist doctrinal history is that no generally recognized authority has ever developed a Buddhist canon of normative writings, unlike Western Jewish and Christian traditions, both of which did adopt a canonical list of authorative scripture. The Chinese Taisho “Canon” contains over five thousand volumes and is in no sense a determination of any official list of authentic writings. No Buddhist tradition (Shugaku) can appeal to a commonly agreed canon of orthodox writings, simply because there is no normative collection of Buddhist writings. Each school had then to develop its own canon, grading other schools and their preferred scriptures as they approached their desired orthodoxy. For Hakamaya and Matsumoto, as for the Prasaṅgika tradition they champion, Mahāyāna was foundational and it taught emptiness as the expeller of all views that relied in any stable being anywhere. As they began to examine their own teachings and practices, this is where they began. But Sōtō did not fit that pattern because it developed in Japan with the common acceptance of Buddha nature.9 Which is why these critical Buddhists argued both for the smaller version of the Shōbōgenzō that champions Dōgen’s rejection of Buddha Nature and from the earliest Mahāyāna texts that present the content of the Dharma as dependent arising, specifically the twelvefold dependent arising found in the early Pāli texts. They highlighted the differences that had sidelined Mādhyamika teaching as it passed through China. Their approach was organic and not helter-skelter, focusing on Sōtō teachings and their background influences. Faced by the onslaught of writings by Hakamaya and Matsumoto, Paul Swanson felt the need to divide their criticisms into three distinct areas: Buddhological, sectarian (i.e., Sōtō), and social, with a fourth target added by Lin Chen-kuo as “philosophical.”10 By contrast, I read their efforts to be an organic whole from start to finish: how to identify the shortcomings that became obvious when they saw the discrimination practices within their tradition and traced its origins back into the Buddhist doctrinal traditions before and in Dōgen.

I do not come to write about Critical Buddhism from any objective distance. The questions were basic: How should I think of Buddha? An awakened teacher? How are we? What does doctrine mean? We were never attracted to Buddha nature or to Original Enlightenment. It would have been wonderful if we could have calmed our minds and let the waves settle, so that the pure mind would eliminate the rough waves of discrimination like removing the dust from our pure minds. The appearance of Critical Buddhism in the years immediately following our seminar and our Dos banditos discussions was thrust into the world of Western Buddhologists by Pruning the Bodhi Tree. What was been a peculiarly Japanese affair among Japanese Buddhists of the Sōtō tradition vis-à-vis other Japanese Buddhist within the Sōtō tradition became a Buddhological storm among Western Buddhist scholars.

As I now reexamine Critical Buddhism in light of Joseph O’Leary’s essay in Reality Itself,11 I begin to notice what I had missed, that I want to defend the project in its proper Japanese context, and further that I want to suggest Christians may employ such Dhātuvāda criticism vis-à-vis their own scriptures and traditions. Although things became stormy when Western scholars learned what was afoot, the single target of the movement was always focused on Sōtō practice and teaching. Which is why the initial object of criticism was the Shushōgi Handbook in its embrace of Buddha Nature. Hakamaya and Matsumoto then traced its origins in Chinese and Indian versions of what Matsumoto skillfully describes as Dhātuvāda paradigm: a really existent, not-empty dhātu (ground/place), whether the womb of a Buddha, the pure mind of Paramārtha, or the original enlightenment teachings that have characterized most all Japanese Buddhist traditions.

Sōtō scholars by denominational necessity have to deal with Dōgen since he is the patriarchal founder of Sōtō Zen. Which is why Hakamaya argued that the smaller twelve-fascicle version of the Shōbōgenzō ought to be normative because therein Dōgen criticized the “heresy of Śrenika” about original enlightenment. Heine wondered if he had been critical enough because he sheltered Dōgen from criticism, enabling the Sōtō elders to draw on that part of his work.12 Carl Bielefeldt, agreeing with Bodiford, noted an account he heard that the Sōtō elders co-opted Hakamaya’s defense of Dōgen which perhaps led to Hakamaya’s decision to leave the Zen priesthood.13 By contrast, Matsumoto Shirō holds that, even in his later years, Dōgen was not free from Tathāgatagarbha thought.14 Still, the background for all these arguments was internal: the efforts within Sōtō to deal with the then exposed discrimination practiced within that tradition.

Pruning O’Leary

O’Leary argued that Critical Buddhism lacks methodological clarity, which is justified when compared to Western theologians who adopt O’Leary’s nuanced phenomenological readings.15 Indeed, I am in harmony with his theological approach.16 Yet, despite the raging arguments of method and theory in Western literary and biblical studies, the task of the joint committee within the Sōtō Zen Komazawa University was more focused: how to enliven Sōtō practice and update the Shushōgi handbook, express its teachings, and avoid the many acts of discrimination often embraced in Sōtō history, which is why the critical reformers focused on the impact of the Shushōgi on the Japanese society it in some measure helped to create. All the three targets of criticism divided in Pruning the Bodhi Tree (Buddhological, sectarian (i.e., Sōtō Zen), and social) flow organically from this task. No one doubts that Japanese society is discriminatory, for the examples are too numerous to go unseen, foreign workers from the Philippines and Thailand, burakumin, Ainu, etc.17 Finding the Shushōgi silent on discrimination, yet the Sōtō practices that relied on it were indeed entangled in furthering discrimination. Which is why Hakamaya wrote: “I have come to a point where we must question the very meaning of our religion, and, thereby perhaps for the first time, clarify the nature of the religious issues involved.”18 As they studied the background of their tradition these critics traced it to the notions of the innate garbha, the Buddha nature we all have, and the common idea of original enlightenment, all of which they saw as cloaks for locking people into their lot in life since we all are buddhas anyway. Hakamaya and Matsumoto, together with some of their cohorts from the joint committee, recognized that the culture of a pretend harmony (和) allowed free reign for discrimination within Japan.19 Their task then was to challenge their own Japanese tradition and its surfacing throughout Japanese society and culture. Discrimination and racism are clearly not peculiar to Japan and no doctrine necessarily enjoins discrimination. But many serve as accommodative allowances that fail to challenge such delusion. So the target of Critical Buddhism grew from these Japanese concerns and, even when sketching the ideological background, remained related to such issues.

Given the negative slant of Pruning the Bodhi Tree, it is hardly surprising that O’Leary had such a critical evaluation, for he regards the book as providing “a clear picture” of the argumentation (295). Still, even the cover photo suggests the criticism offered by Hakamaya and Matsumoto has left the Bodhi Tree near death’s door, the trunk severed with only two branches left, each of which struggles to produce but a single leaf. The impression of intellectual reductionism is nurtured by translations that are too accurate to be to reflect the sense of Critical Buddhism.20 The problem lies not with the accuracy of these translations, but with the consequent failure to “carry over” the Japanese Sōtō context within which the criticisms were launched, leaving Western scholars the impression that Critical Buddhism is a reductive, rationalistic rejection of Buddhism itself, a point Matsumoto rejects in the introduction.21 Hakamaya in particular does employ hard-hitting and polemic language,22 such that would hardly be accepted in Japanese Buddhological studies, sounding more like our Dos Banditos argumentative discussions of years ago. Which is why, I surmise, O’Leary charges Hakamaya with “textual fetishism,” and being “adolescent” in his attacks.23 Yet in context, the critique was directed to the unquestioned paradigm and unquestionable social ethos Hakamaya and Matsumoto saw embraced by Sōtō practice. The example of Luther, which O’Leary brings up in his essay, should be more closely attended to, for Luther also used scatological language to make his point, calling the Vatican the whore of Babylon.24 Critical Buddhism is found to be so exiguous because Pruning the Bodhi Tree failed to contextualize its presentation,25 but presented its critiques unvarnished to Buddhologists in Europe and the United States who did not have to deal with a “hierarchical” structure that smothers every thought. The essays and their arrangement in Pruning were presented as if they were a helter-skelter criticism of most everything possible, which is why Paul Swanson brought order by dividing them into discrete targets as if they did not form an organic whole in their own context. The same mistake is reflected in O’Leary’s essay.

O’Leary complained that Critical Buddhism was adolescent because of its lack of nuanced methodology. But I think he missed the point. Hakamaya and Matsumoto do have their own hermeneutic, the traditional endeavors of each Buddhist tradition to being order into their embrace of the vast number of Buddhist texts available by grading traditions and their scriptural bases. It is difficult for Jews and Christians to imagine a scene where everything written by Jews or Christians had a potentially equal claim to be normative.26 But that was the normative task Hakamaya and Matsumoto assumed. By the force of their questioning their own Sōtō tradition and its writings, they were constrained to trace back the Indian and Chinese background of the Sōtō teachings they saw entailed in social injustice. Steven Heine’s apt understanding is that Hakamaya’s hermeneutic is a “foundationalism,” seeking to determine authentic teaching from pretenders. They were engaging in the grading system as they choose the foundational Mahāyāna texts as their own normative canon for their own Zen tradition. As a Sōtō Buddhist, Hakamaya apparently saw no option other than to bring Dōgen in line with Nāgārjuna and so graded normative teaching by the craft of emptiness. He then was able to criticize positions and viewpoints as they did or did not correspond to Nāgārjuna’s emptiness, excluding any notion of an innately pure mind or any version of original enlightenment. Hakamaya was not being “adolescent” or frivolous and his critique was not less trenchant than was Nāgārjuna’s in the face of the scholastic surety he encountered. In light of their own essays in Pruning, both Hakamaya and Matsumoto write as confessional Buddhists,27 immersed in studying their tradition, attentive to its practices, and aware of the starkly different Mahāyāna writings they studied. Hakamaya wants to criticize detached scholarship, just as Stephen Moore wants to criticize the critical-historical method.28 The reception history of a text begins from the moment its ink dries on the parchment because no cherished scriptures ever stand alone, innocently insulated from its after-effects on the communities they serve.29 Moreover, O’Leary is not clear about what hermeneutics he thinks Critical Buddhism should embrace. No doubt it would resemble the phenomenological and interfaith methods he employs in his much-to-be-admired trilogy, especially on his understanding of Fundamental Theology.30

It is hardly true that Critical Buddhism has “petered out” after the first wave.31 I doubt if there ever was a first wave, apart from internal Sōtō concerns. Still, their critiques have been often used in evaluating Buddhist doctrinal development.32 They are taken up by other scholars, such as James Shields and Duncan Williams,33 and appear frequently on the internet. The Buddhist practitioner David Brazier not only has written a book in which he includes two chapters on Critical Buddhism,34 and has also founded a community of practice to encourages criticism and questioning. In addition, contrary to O’Leary’s assertion that the canon of Critical Buddhism consists in only a “few” texts that pass muster, the list O’Leary provides (297) as acceptable to the project of Critical Buddhism includes much of the Pāli canon, the Lotus as interpreted as a Three Vehicle text, together with its voluminous commentaries,35 plus Nāgārjuna and the entire Prasaṅgika tradition from Candrakīrti down to Tsong Khapa (an entire tradition of hundreds of writings), Zhiyi’s half dozen works, and selections from Hōnen, Shinran, and Nichiren. Plus the twelve-fascicle Shōbōgenzō. Critical Buddhism has restricted its canon, but still it does contain some thousand texts.

It should come as no surprise that Critical Buddhists target the Kyoto School of Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani Keiji, for they embrace the pure experience already celebrated in many classical Zen writings.36 Critical Buddhism undermined the very foundations of the Kyoto School. Among the Western commentators, Ruben Habito focused on the social critique, aware of the initial issue that bothered the critics. Sallie King wrote a book on Buddha Nature and saw it as a skillful means (upāya) to encourage people to realize their potential; she also was one of the first to champion a socially Engaged Buddhism. If Buddha Nature is simply an upāya and does not challenge Mādhyamika emptying, then King’s argument is persuasive.37 But that is the central issue. How does upayic discourse correspond with conventional discourse: the former usually has no criteria for its truth value, while the latter clearly has.38 Peter Gregory approached the entire issue from the critical-historical norms that made teaching “religion” acceptable in the academy, yet, if my reading is accurate, the critics resituated their ideas within the assumed normativity of their own Buddhological context. Dan Lusthaus, by contrast, was not at all surprised: both he and I have long been attuned to the battles between Xuanzong and Paramārtha over the very issue at stake. Nevertheless, by adopting a sic et non format, Pruning left the impression that the issues raised were unfocused and now mostly passé. It would have been much better to present Critical Buddhism in its own Japanese context and note that even now we do not know much about these developments. We know nothing about how the Sōtō authorities received the work of the joint committee appointed by their own Komazawa University. We can imagine that they must have been upset about how it turned out; two of their most illustrious scholars were at the forefront of such harsh criticism. After these two decades, we still do not know what happened within the Sōtō tradition or within its Komazawa University. What we do know is that, when carried over to Western Buddhist scholars, it caused a dark and stormy academic night. But then, academic storms are usually academic.

Critical Buddhism is not “obstructed by methodological inadequacies” (294). From when first I began to study Buddhism at Temple University in 1965, the constant focus was on method and hermeneutics, earnestly seeking guidance in just how to proceed. Still, one tires of endless hermeneutical designs and close arguments. But Hakamaya and Matsumoto appealed to an ancient and well-trodden hermeneutic design, which had to choose from the vast number of texts those that will serve as foundational, since no Buddhist tradition can embrace writings that so clearly contradict one another. In Sōtō, the prime text is Dōgen Shōbōgenzō, which is why Hakamaya opted for the 12-fascicle version, for which Heine’s essay is both accurate, balanced, and explicative. The other texts they chose as foundational excluded Tathāgatagarbha and Buddha Nature writings, but included the Mādhyamika writings that defined the Mahāyāna. Hakamaya’s concern for choosing normative scripture is hardly “fetishism” (310). With O’Leary I too shy away from claims deemed absolutist (307), but Matsumoto uses the term “absolutizing” mainly in regard to the nativist folk-Buddhism he is attacking.39 Perhaps a better term could have been used by asking Matsumoto if normative might have been his meaning. I do not know when “absolute” became a term for religious or philosophical doctrine, but in Japan likely with the Kyoto School.

Still, since Critical Buddhism does not lack “a comprehensive hermeneutic framework” (308), Matsumoto hardly practices a “textual fetishism,” a surely gratuitous swipe. I do not think that Critical Buddhism reduces “Buddhism to a lean critical regime, an incessant dismantling of temptations to dhātuvāda,” because there is hardly anything lean about all the sources Hakamaya and Matsumoto accept and because I have long shared their view: Mādhyamika empties all realms that might serve as ontological surety. Many scholars of Japanese Buddhism began critically to question the immediacy of enlightenment when Bernard Faure wrote his The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism and when Robert Sharf critiqued the idealization of enlightenment.40 It is simply not true that Critical Buddhism “disauthorizes most texts of the Buddhist tradition” for the simple fact that the Taishō Shinshu Daizokyō has five thousand texts, only a small number of which any preacher, or scholars has read. One can simply not overlook the absence of a canon of Mahāyāna writings.

I do not think it true to speak of “Critical Buddhism’s obsession with pure origins,” because the normative writings accepted span from the earliest accounts of the Buddha’s awakening (itself a subject amenable to criticism) throughout Buddhist history to medieval (Lotus, Dōgen) to modern Tibetan Buddhism. Throughout the constant object of critique has been Sōtō teaching and practice, compared first to the founder’s Shōbōgenzō, then to the Nikāya account of dependent arising and to classical Mahāyāna teaching some six hundred years after Buddha, and turn to the Indian Tathāgatagarbha writings, through Chinese teachings on Buddha Nature, and to the common paradigm in Japan that all beings are originally enlightened.