The Dialogue of Spiritual Experience in Buddhist-Christian Encounter

Summary

Buddhist practices of emptiness can enhance Christian understanding of being a creature. Three forms of introspective practice are identified: analytical awareness of consciousness's emptiness, real-time application of antidotes to false self-projections, and nondual awareness leading to enlightenment. Each form offers insights for Christians, particularly in understanding the nature of sin and the therapeutic aspect of emptiness, as well as a complex connection to divine communion.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Can one learn more about one’s own religion through the practices of another? My positive answer to this question is illustrated in this paper by reflection on aspects of the Buddhist practice of emptiness, in specific connection with Christian under-standing of our lives as creatures. The Buddhist meditative practices I have in mind have several things in common. They are introspective (activated in one person’s inner consciousness) and premised on the Buddhist understanding of emptiness (specifically “no self ” teachings). Buddhist introspective practice takes at least three broad forms. One of these is a meditative analytical awareness of the contents of consciousness that finds it empty of essences. Second, there is a related but distinct introspective experience of the application in real time of antidotes to the arising or projection of reified things within awareness. Third, there is a nondual awareness of emptiness whose fullest form is unconditional awareness without a subject, nirvanic realization or enlightenment. Buddhist practice deepens and informs my Christian understanding of what it isto be a creature. There is Christian learning to be had in each of the three types of introspective practice. The first type of learning relates to meditative realization of analytical or diagnostic emptiness, rooted in an agreement on the lack of essential being in both creatures (in Christian perspective) and selves (in Buddhist perspective). The second learning has to do with a convergence in Christian understanding of the nature of the sinful creature and Buddhist understanding of the reified self, the falsely projected self. This may be the most extensive field of spiritual learning about creatureliness for Christians: the application of therapeutic emptiness in practical terms. The third learning is more complicated and relates to what we might call redemptive emptiness. For Buddhists this has to do with nondual emptiness as nirvanic bliss, the very nature of enlightenment. For Christians, such emptiness must be related to an apophatic or kenotic openness to divine indwelling or communion. This is less a convergence than a resonance, and one we cannot pursue very extensively in this discussion

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