Sunyata and Kenosis.Qxd

Šðnyat„ and Kenõsis JAMES W. HEISIG According to the author of the Acts of the Apostles, what prevented Christian- ity from spreading to the East in the early years of its mission was a dream. In the course of his second missionary journey, Paul’s plans to return west to Ephesus from Iconium were thwarted, and he was drawn instead to the verge of the East. The scripture speaks of the inner inspiration urging him from place to place as a Spirit pushing from behind like a driving wind. Then one night a Macedonian ³gure appeared to him in a vision and begged him to return to help the Christian community there. At once Paul and his troop pulled up stakes and headed back to the Mediterranean basin (Acts 16: 9–10). The hindsight of history, as Jacques Ellul points out, makes the turn East seem the logical thing. There Paul would have been free “to proclaim a spiritual religion in the homeland of spiritual religions.”1 Instead the ³rst Christian mission kept to the path of the Jewish diaspora, where it was to establish itself as Church and sink the cultural roots that nourish it to this day. In time, of course, Christianity in various forms and under a variety of inspira- tions was to encounter the spirituality of the East. But it was never able to face it with the youthful detachment from institutional structures and openness to doctrinal formation that characterized those early years. Despite the universality of its claims and its perennial hope of winning all the cultures of the earth to its faith, Christianity has been shaped by a radical historicity that has been at once its greatest strength and its greatest peril. In the eagerness to look back with profound regret at the stain of triumphalism and cultural provincialism that marked the Christian Missionary efforts to the Orient initiated in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are those who seem to forget that it was after all a stain and not an evil spirit. The openness to the East that is now becoming the pride of increasing numbers in the ranks of Christendom hardly points to a recent acquisition of mag- nanimity previously lacking in Christian tradition. Nor is it simply the lapse into unbelief and slackness of conviction that its opponents claim. It is fundamentally 1 2 HEISIG the very same Spirit that drove St. Paul, every bit as alive and every bit as pushy in the twentieth century as it was in the ³rst. What makes contemporary Christian fascination with the East so easy for Christians to misunderstand is the mistaken notion that it is something that can be explained in terms of rational decision, be it the decision of certain Christian believers to make amends for past excesses or the decision of certain Eastern religious traditions to take advantage of the pluralism and tolerance of Western religious philosophy to embrace the Christian world as their new missionary frontier. It is time we realized that we are being swept up into something much greater than a mere philosophical deduction-a Zeitgeist that we have every cause to call Holy. If this Spirit is not understood, the full force of the scandal of doctrinal differences will give way to a cosmetic spirit of conciliation that can only lash back a genera- tion later into a spirit of confrontation, of reason pitted against reason. It is in this light that I would have my following remarks read. The Scandal of The Cross Whenever I see a cruci³ed ³gure of Christ, I cannot help thinking of the gap that lies deep between Christianity and Buddhism. This gap is symbolic of the psy- chological division separating the East from the West. Christ hangs helpless, full of sadness on the vertically erected cross. To the Oriental mind, the sight is almost unbearable.… The cruci³ed Christ is a terrible sight and I cannot help associating it with the sadistic impulse of a physically affected brain.… Could not the idea of oneness [with Christ] be realized in some other way, that is, more peacefully, more rationally, more humanly, less militantly, and less violently?2 There could hardly be a more striking statement of the scandal of the cruci³ed Christ than those words published by D. T. Suzuki in English in 1957 when he was eighty-seven years old. We read them not as Westerners eavesdropping, through the good graces of a translator, on Buddhists consoling one another over the supe- riority of their native religion to the foreign imports of Christian missionaries, but as the words of a Buddhist missionary aimed directly and primarily at the Christ- ian West?3 What is surprising is not that Suzuki should resist the cruci³x for its violence and inhumaneness, but that he should reproach it for its lack of rationality. Surely Buddhist thought in general—and Zen Buddhism in particular—is no stranger to paradox and the overturning of everyday modes of rationality; but that can hardly be the level at which Suzuki, of all people, directs his remark. That the cruci³xion is a “sign of contradiction” could hardly chafe his logical sensitivites. The point is rather that because the cross is not open to appropriation, because it cannot be ŠÐNYATÃ AND KENOSIS 3 “realized” as belonging to the self on the way to enlightenment, it does not meet the Buddhist understanding of what it is to be rational. The following statement of Takeuchi Yoshinori puts it well Strictly speaking, Buddhism has nothing like what Saint Paul refers to as the “folly of the cross”… The religious experience of the “folly of the cross” sets philosophy and religion in opposition to each other in the West, establishing the autonomy of reason to criticize religion from the outside; but at the same time this basic opposition led to a new, albeit secondary, relationship between philosophy and theology, a mutuality grounded in a common concern with meta- physics… Philosophy in Buddhism is not a speculation or metaphysical con- templation but rather a metanoia of thinking, a conversion within reµective thought.4 Surely Takeuchi ³nds the Christian attraction to the cruci³x every bit as great a petra scandali to his Oriental sense of propriety as Suzuki did. His point here is that insofar as the cross opens a gap between the logic of religion and the “folly” of faith, its scandal reaches out to embrace even the theological tradition that sustains Christian doctrine in culture. Rather than draw a limit to the engagement of rational reflection in faith, and thereby call upon revelation to ³ll up what is want- ing, the Buddhist tendency, on Takeuchi’s account, is to transform and broaden the very nature of rational reflection as such, to make philosophy itself a meta- noetics. The paradox that Paul glori³ed because of its illogicality to the world of Greek logic belongs to the very structure of Buddhist epistemology and underlies its logic.5 The image of the cruci³ed that Paul found to be a “stumbling block to the Jews and a folly to the pagans” turns out to be no less a scandal to the contemporary Buddhist, even one who made considerable efforts to seek common ground between Christianity and Zen. Had Paul’s voyages taken him eastwards in the ³rst century, things would hardly have been different. Just what kind of cultural upheaval it would have caused, or indeed whether it would have succeeded at all, we cannot say. Even to imagine the possibility of the Christian evangel circulating for centuries throughout the vast cultural diversity of Asia, whether in oral form or in a scripture adjusted to Asian languages and modes of thought, can be no more than wild conjecture. At any rate, the scandal remains. For all the stress Buddhist tradition puts on up„ya or skill-in-means, and for all the remarkable adjustments in its doctrine and practice this has allowed, there simply has been no way for it to incorporate within its ideals the image of a God who became human and died the painful and shameful death of a criminal. For the Christian, the shock to human sensibilities that Suzuki describes and the rupture of faith from philosophy that Takeuchi points to are far from circum- 4 HEISIG scribing the full “scandal” of the cross. These reactions, as genuine as they are, are only initial symptoms of a deeper problem: the radical otherness of the hierophany of God in Jesus. They do not answer the challenge of Christianity to Buddhism; they merely acknowledge the breadth of its reach. An adequate Buddhist response, whatever it be, cannot stop short at the scandal, since that would be equivalent to refusing a response.6 Nor can it stop short at a mere attempt to appreciate why the Christian believer can ³nd religious inspiration in the image of the cruci³ed. The challenge is not even met by simple conversion to Christian faith itself. The response that Christianity today asks of Buddhism goes beyond questions of per- sonal assent to or rejection of the Christian faith. It is primarily a demand to be taken seriously at the very point that Christianity takes itself most seriously, but to be taken seriously in a wholly Buddhist way. It is no less than the invitation of one religious way to face squarely and with the full weight of its tradition the contradiction presented to it by another religious way. Obviously, such a challenge presumes a standpoint of respect that allows one to seek the truth in another’s doctrine, not necesarily one’s own received truth but a truth that allows “heart to speak to heart.” The standpoint is expressed well by Nishitani Keiji, who speaks squarely from the midst of his own Buddhist faith I do not feel satis³ed with any religion as it stands, and I feel the limitations of philosophy also.

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