Cobb, John B., Jr.  Review: Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, ed. Steven Heine. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1995. 245 pages.

Over many years Masao Abe has written fine essays and given splendid lectures representing Buddhism, specifically Zen, in many contexts but especially in interfaith dialogue. He has been widely recognized as the leading teacher of Buddhism in the United States, inheriting the mantle of D.T. Suzuki. Much of the gain in accuracy in the understanding of Zen Buddhism in the United States is due to his careful and patient explanations.

Suzuki published numerous books that had wide appeal beyond the scholarly community. Abe has expressed himself in more academic ways, with greater precision and less mass appeal. For many years his thought was not available in book form.

Since 1985 he has been keenly interested in gaining a larger audience and has worked closely with a series of editors to make his writings more available. William LaFleur edited a volume of his essays, Zen and Western Thought, which was published in 1985 and has been increasingly recognized as a major contribution to our understanding of Zen and of its contributions to all of us. The present book is described as "Part one of a two-volume sequel to Zen and Western Thought ," the second part being Zen and Comparative Studies. Other essays by Abe are being collected by James Fredericks in an additional volume to be called A Study of the Philosophy of the Kyoto School. Collectively these books will embody the important legacy of a major religious thinker in accessible form.

In addition to collecting his essays into books Abe has been busy capturing the results of his dialogical endeavors. In 1984 he gave a lecture, Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata, which he subsequently developed into a substantial essay summarizing much of what he wanted to say. During the next ten years he systematically sought responses from Christian and Jewish thinkers. Three volumes of such responses, together with his replies, have been published.

Understandably the publication of this sequel to Zen and Western Thought does not have quite the importance of the original book. The ideas presented inevitably overlap with what had been put forward earlier, particularly in Part II, which was entitled Zen, Buddhism, and Western Thought. Nevertheless, despite commonalities each essay makes distinctive points in distinctive ways and adds to our understanding both of Abe and of his topics. For example, whereas no one of the four papers on Paul Tillich, constituting Part Two of the present book, quite equals Tillich from a Buddhist Point of View, published in the earlier volume, each adds new dimensions.

Abe has long emphasized the contribution of Buddhism to the whole religious community. This is found most fundamentally in its notion of emptiness or, better still, the unlimited emptying that is also boundless openness to what is as it is. This provides, he insists, the ground for the appreciation and letting be of all religious communities and beliefs in their specific richness, while overcoming the reification of beliefs and the clinging to ideas and practices that occurs in all of them. In this way it opens each to the others.

Abe's solution to interreligious understanding is clearly expounded in Chapter 2, A Dynamic Unity in Religious Pluralism: A Proposal from the Buddhist Point of View. Here he uses the Buddhist trinity to explain three levels of religious reality. The Nirmana-kaya, or manifestation of deity, is the one regarded as Lord. In Buddhism this is Guatama, in Christianity, Jesus. The Sambhoga-kaya is deity experienced in personal form. In Buddhism this can be Amida; in Christianity, God. At the third and deepest level, the Dharma-kaya, Abe locates only "the formless and boundless reality of Emptiness."

He has been disappointed, it seems, that representatives of other religious traditions see this as a Buddhist approach which is to be respected but which is one response alongside of others rather than the solution to the overall problem of interreligious understanding. Abe replies to Christian critics that the movement of emptying is found in the Christian scriptures, especially in the Philippians passage that speaks of Christ's emptying himself. In his exegesis this entails that God is engaged in self-emptying and is, indeed, finally to be understood in terms of emptying. Abe urges that this be recognized as the direction in which Christian spirituality now leads.

Whether Christian discussants agree with Abe's exegesis of Christian scriptures or with his interpretation of the tradition, they must take his proposals seriously. Few non-Christians have ever understood Christianity so deeply or dared, so responsibly, to indicate directions theologians might move to solve their problems.

Even if Christian conversation partners are not persuaded that emptying constitutes the common ground for all authentic spiritualities, many of them have been led to recognize its value. Many are attracted to a Buddhist nondualism based on an emptying of the subject of all prejudgment and conceptualizing, resulting in radical openness to otherness, while overcoming the dualism of subject and object. They see in this a way of overcoming the dualism that infects so much Christian thinking without succumbing to monism.

Abe has also called on Buddhists to recognize that they have something to learn from Christians. In this book he points to the need to develop a realization of personal existence in the context of the impersonal understanding of the ultimate. He wants to gain a way to appropriate for non-theistic Buddhists the I-thou relationship developed in the theistic context. He wants to develop a historical consciousness that he finds lacking in Buddhism. Finally, while critical of the judgmental and conflictive way in which the interest in justice functions in the biblical faiths, he wants to appropriate such portions of the understanding of justice as would arouse Buddhists to seek to overcome social evils.

Whether it is possible for Buddhism to move in these directions while maintaining its fundamental grounding in emptiness remains to be seen. Abe himself does not display in these essays how it is to be done. On the other hand, one of his students, Christopher Ives, has shown how some of this can be accomplished in the context of Zen, and another, John Yokota, in the context of Pure Land.

Although Abe often discusses Christianity in general, he knows that there are many different Christian theologies. In his discussion with individual theologians, as with Christianity in general, Abe works hard, and with remarkable success, to deal with their intentions fairly and perceptively. In this book he engages at least ten of them, beginning with Paul Tillich. With Tillich the central question is that of Being. Abe recognizes that Tillich's Being has much in common with the Absolute Nothingness of his own form of Buddhism. Both include both Being and non-Being. But Abe argues that it is significant, but not finally justified, that Tillich includes non-Being within Being. It is better, he insists, to recognize that what included both is not either but instead the negation of both.

The book concludes with Abe's engagement with Paul Knitter. Knitter suggests that a deep difference between Buddhism and the liberation theology to which he is personally committed is that Buddhism gives priority to contemplation, wisdom, and enlightenment over action in society, whereas this is reversed in Christianity. Abe replies that such priority must not be understood in temporal terms. Action in society can be the occasion for enlightenment, but it cannot be the source; whereas in Knitter's formulation it appears to be the source of knowledge of God. Clearly, if strengthening Buddhist social ethics entailed identifying the insights gained in working in solidarity with the oppressed with the wisdom Buddhists seek, Abe would eschew such strengthening.

At this stage of intellectual history, many doubt that real communication is possible between persons who stand in different religio-cultural traditions. The regnant orthodoxy suggests that each is bound to a linguistic system whose meanings cannot reach beyond the respective systems. The whole enterprise of interfaith dialogue is so suspect that it is largely excluded from the academy. Abe did not write these essays to refute this position, but all the more they constitute such a refutation. He moves back and forth between the two systems, effectively relating them to one another. What so many declare impossible is clearly happening here. That does not mean that it is easy or that Abe's achievement is flawless. He does not rise above finitude. But hežas well as many Christians with whom he has been in dialoguežknows that real communication does occur, that Buddhists grasp Christian meanings, and that Christians grasp Buddhist ones. They know also that this can be, and sometimes has been, deeply transforming.