Liberating Truth:

 Buddhism, Whitehead, and a "Religio-diagnostic" Approach to Religious Pluralism

Christopher Ives

Stonehill College

With his ecumenical commitments and magnanimous approach to religious pluralism, John Hick deserves praise.  All of us who reflect on religious pluralism are indebted to his sustained efforts to formulate a thesis whose "practical upshot…is that people of the different religious traditions are free to see one another as friends rather than as enemies or rivals."[1]  Yet I wonder whether his identist pluralism passes the test of adequacy to Buddhism.  Relative to Buddhist epistemologies, truth claims, and soteriological schemes, Whitehead's process thought, especially in the hands of John Cobb, offers a more adequate framework for articulating a Buddhistically "genuine" approach to religious pluralism.  For several decades Whiteheadean and Buddhist  thinkers have found much to discuss, and their exchange has illuminated complementary truths, highlighted differences, and, as John Cobb would have it, mutually transformed the participants.  

As a scholar of Buddhism who in recent years has been mainly sitting on the sidelines of interfaith dialogue and debates about pluralism, and whose understanding of Whitehead is limited at best, I will attempt in this paper, after offering a short critique of Hick's approach, to set forth a heuristic angle on Buddhism and pluralism with an eye toward promoting collaborative efforts to formulate a "genuine" approach to religious pluralism.  Specifically, given the preponderance of Japanese Mahayanist representations of Buddhism in formal interfaith dialogue, I think it expedient to bring the perspectives of early and Theravadan Buddhism more into the discussion; Theravadan concerns suggest an approach to pluralism that focuses less on metaphysical ultimates and more on views of our basic religious problem(s).  Specifically, the soteriological bent of Buddhism, especially its focus on diagnosing human religious "suffering" (in Pali, dukkha; Skt. duhkha), points to what I will call (awkwardly) a "religio-diagnostic" approach to religious pluralism.  In viewing all religions as offering valuable and complementary insights into existential suffering, this approach can complement more metaphysical approaches and, when expanded to cover other types of suffering, may help Buddhism learn further from Whiteheadean thought, the "soteria" approach of Paul Knitter, and other resources for addressing "suffering" in its various forms.  In addition to being more adequate to Buddhism, this approach may, at this point in time, be more mutually transformative—and politically relevant—than our continuing to compare Emptiness and God or Nothingness and Being.

As a means of charting the plurality of religious traditions, Hick's ontologically and soteriologically identist pluralism founders in Buddhist waters.  Hick orients his paradigm around the "basic conviction, common to all the great traditions, that religious experience is not simply human projection but is at the same time a cognitive response to a transcendent reality."[2] Hick construes that transcendent reality, what he terms the Eternal One, or the Real, as "pressing in upon the human spirit"[3]; and with his revamped Kantian epistemology, he argues that the Eternal One is "being perceived within human cultures under different forms."[4]  

While perhaps applicable to facets of Pure Land and Tibetan Buddhism, this conception of the Eternal One as the singular object of religious experience does not necessarily hold for other types of Buddhism.  For example, Zen thinkers have represented their religious "experience"[5] not as a perception of a special object of experience but as a shift in their mode of experience (from a subject-object mode to a "non-dual" mode), through which the discriminating, self-conscious experiencer "drops off," leaving no sense of being a subject over against the experienced object.  If, for the sake of Hick's argument, one were to specify the object of Zen "experience," it is ordinary reality, including, as traditional Zen accounts would have it, the sound of a pebble hitting bamboo or the feeling of being hit by a staff.   The key thing "experienced" here is not the Eternal One, or even the "plunk" of the pebble, but the sense of existing profoundly connected to—or as—everything else.  

Though one might criticize this portrayal of Zen experience as hairsplitting and argue that in a certain non-objective sense "satori" or "awakening" is what Zen practioners experience, the tradition is consistent in arguing that "satori," as that mode of experiencing, cannot be objectified in any way. Hence the metaphors about how a sword cannot cut itself or a mirror cannot reflect itself—the key is to do (or "be") the cutting and reflecting.  What one might objectify, reflect on, or talk about later is the traces of the experience, a lingering "felt sense" of what the experience was like.

Given the bramble of claims about satori and the methodological problems in talking or writing about something that many claim is "ineffable" or is "lost" the instant one starts talking about it, we might be advised to focus on nirvana.  Hick construes "Nirvana" as "the nonpersonal awareness of the Eternal One," equivalent to the "Brahman of advaitic Hinduism…and the Sunyata of Mahayana Buddhism"[6][7]  Rather, as indicated by its etymology, nirvana is the "extinguishment" of the fire of clinging.  It is the cessation of suffering that emerges when one has eradicated basic clinging or entanglement in the form of such defilements (P. kilesa) as the Three Poisons of ignorance, greed, and hatred, and by virtue of this eradication no longer clings to impermanent things or conditions and hence does not cause further dukkha.  Accordingly, what "nirvana" connotes is less a metaphysical presence than a psychological absence.  As Rupert Gethin observes, from the perspective of such early Buddhist schools as the Sautrāntikas, "one should not say more than nirvāna is the absence of the defilements."[8][9]  And resisting the urge to conceive of an "object" of experience in that event, scholars like Peter Harvey prefer to construe nirvana as an "objectless consciousness"[10] (whatever that might entail).

In short, most Buddhists regard satori and nirvana not as experiential objects with a special and elusive ontological status like the Eternal One, but as modes of experience or, so to speak, psychological states (of course with huge soteriological import and purportedly accompanied by such feelings as joy and tranquility).   And as I will argue below, śūnyatā ("emptiness" or, better yet, empyting), while having more of a metaphysical connotation than either satori or nirvana, eludes the grasp of Hick's paradigm as well, despite the reification of the construct by Hick and even certain Buddhists.[11]  As John Cobb astutely points out, "Emptiness is not an object of worship for Buddhists" and "it is not illuminating to insist that Emptiness and God are two names for the same noumenal reality."[12]  

 Hick's paradigm, especially in its earlier expressions, also falters in its representation of indigenous religions.  In God Has Many Names (1980) Hick argues that "Primitive religion seems to have been a sense of an inscrutable environing power to be feared, or of unpredictable and often ruthless beings to be placated...";[13] and in "primitive," "natural religion, or religion without revelation,[14] lasting from the beginnings of human history down to the spiritual dawn which occurred about three millennia ago,"[15] people had, relative to the "spiritual masters"[16] who founded or developed world religions, "a dim and crude sense of the Eternal One, an awareness which took what are, from our point of view as Jews or as Christians, at best childish and at worst appallingly brutal and bloodthirsty forms, but which nevertheless constituted the womb out of which the higher religions were to be born."[17]  Hick also notes that in his theory of pluralism he is "speaking of what we commonly call the great world faiths, not of primitive religion, not of religious movements that have perished," and he claims, "There is a law of the spiritually fittest that simplifies the religious scene."[18]  

In response to Hick, one might argue that some of those "primitive religions" have not "perished," but rather are still around, and quite fit, as the Ooldea in Western Australia and Navaho in Arizona would heartily agree.  (Where are their voices in our conferences on religious pluralism?  Do we have monotheistic or monistic biases in our approaches that preclude sustained dialogue with polytheistic or animistic others?)  Insofar as some "primitive" religions are not very fit, one might wonder whether the survival of the religiously fittest, or the perishing of the least fit, is determined less by religious factors (such as "dim and crude" senses of the absolute) than by historical factors, such as the imperialism and cultural conquest pursued by countries that historically have professed Hick's "higher" religions.  And rather than "our" Jewish or Christian points of view, the worldview of "primitive" religions, focused on natural forces and patterns, seems from certain Buddhist perspectives to offer a truer picture of the way things are than does the doctrine of a transcendent, eternal God advanced by "spiritual masters" and their "higher" religions.

To his credit, by 1995 Hick had shifted his position on "primitive religions."  In A Christian Theology of Religions he switches his wording from "primitive religion" to "primal religion," and he writes that primal religions, while not being "salvific in the sense of seeking a radical human transformation, …are communal rather than individual responses to the Real."[19]  And though Hick proceeds to echo a common stereotype in asserting that "in so far as they [primal religions] are effective, individual ego-transcendence is not called for because in traditional societies the autonomous ego has not become detached from the unity of the social organism,"[20] he ends his exposition by stating that "there are immensely valuable aspects of primal religion that we in the individualistic industrialized world must try to recover—the sense of unity with nature, the awareness of the other animals as our cousins, a sense of responsibility towards the earth as the mother of all life."[21]  From 1980 to 1995 Hick has thus tempered his scheme of religious evolution, though the problems with the fit between his identist pluralism and Buddhism remain.

Griffin and Cobb's Whiteheadean approach to religious pluralism, their "pluralistic" and "complementary" pluralism, is significantly more adequate to Buddhism.  Griffin writes, "Pluralistic pluralism, by contrast [with Hick's identist pluralism], says that religions promote different ends—different salvations—perhaps by virtue of being oriented toward different religious objects (perhaps thought of as different ultimate realities)."[22] Further, "It belongs to complementary pluralism to assume that every great tradition is based on some deep insight into, some revelation about (whichever language one prefers), the nature of things,"[23] and that religions offer "insights arising from profound thought and experience that are diverse modes of apprehending diverse aspects of the totality of reality."[24]  

While Cobb and Griffin's approach moves beyond Hick's identification of nirvana with the Real, it still advances what one might call an "objectist" pluralism,[25] insofar as the concern is to discern the special "objects" or ultimate(s) apprehended by the plurality of religions.  As indicated earlier, many Buddhists would question whether their religious experience—satori and nirvana—is ever of some ultimate "religious object," whether through sense perception, prehension, cognition, or some sort of "mystical" consciousness.   Perhaps in the above statements Griffin does not mean to imply that "religious object" refers to a special reality with distinct ontological status apart from the person, though I do find John Cobb's wording preferable when he notes that the Buddha opened "a different path to a different goal, a different name of a different aspect of reality, a different language through which something quite different from communion [with the ultimate] is sought."[26] (Granted, the difference between "religious object" and "aspect of reality" may be negligible.)

Nevertheless, "pluralistic" and "complementary" pluralism, especially as grounded by Cobb and Griffin in Whitehead's distinction between two ultimates, God and creativity, is preferable to Hick's approach.  As many have noted, Whitehead's notion of two ultimates has constructed a much-traversed bridge between Christianity and Buddhism.  Building on Whitehead, Cobb offers an even more adequate formulation with his notion of three ultimates: God, creativity, and the cosmos or universe, "the totality of [finite] things."[27] Griffin summarizes Cobb's Whiteheadean presentation of these ultimates: "What exists necessarily is not simply God, as in traditional Christian theism, and not simply the world as understood as the totality of finite things, as in atheistic naturalism, but God-and-a-world, with both God and worldly actualities being embodiments of creativity."[28]  I concur with Griffin's assessment that Cobb's formulation "gives us a basis for understanding a wide variety of religious experiences as genuine responses to something that is really there to be experienced."[29]  

Insofar as Buddhism engages in metaphysical inquiry, its primary focus, especially in the Theravada tradition, is on Cobb's third ultimate, the cosmos as characterized by conditioned arising (pratīitya-samutpāda) or emptying (śūnyatā).[30]  This "cosmos" on which Buddhism focuses diverges from the cosmos in most  "cosmic religions" (to use John Hutchison's typology), for the Buddhist "cosmos" is not necessarily some sacred realm of nature, a polytheistic universe, an animistic world accessed by shamans, or the natural cycles with which a "nature mystic" accords.  Rather, the cosmos here is simply the realm of psychological, physical, socio-cultural, and natural events, what we experience through the five sense organs and certain non-sensory experiences.

In viewing conditioned arising and emptying in this way, I resist Hick and Cobb's equations of "Emptiness" with Nirguna Brahaman, Being Itself, or the Godhead.[31] Indeed, not all Buddhists would agree thatśūnyatā is "the formless ultimate reality,"[32] or some formless ultimate that "is subject to taking on any form."[33]  Rather, as indicated by the locus classicus in the Heart Sutra (the line, "Form is none other than emptiness; emptiness in none other than form"), śūnyatā is the mode of the arising and ceasing of all "forms" (events), not some reality that is separate from those "forms," despite Masao Abe's talk of the "bottomless depth of Sunyata."[34] Nor is it something that has agency or can do certain things, despite Abe's frequent statements about "emptiness emptying itself"[35][36] Though Nargajuna advanced śūnyatā primarily as another way of expressing conditioned arising (pratītya-samutpāda), most Theravadan Buddhists would have a hard time recognizing the early Buddhist construct of conditioned arising in Abe's statement, "Sunyata remaining with itself, without turning itself into a vow, is not true Sunyata. …[I]n and through self-emptying, Sunyata always ceaselessly turns itself into vow and into act, and then dynamically centers itself in a focal point of this dynamism."[37]

In short, for most Buddhists, śūnyatā or pratītya-samutpāda is not some mysterious ultimate like the Godhead behind God but the mode of reality in front of God (or, if you will, the principle that characterizes reality "down here").  With this view of śūnyatā, and lacking Abe's desire to delineate the ultimate of ultimates that lies deeper than anything else,[38] I feel less inclined to ask the question, "How can Sunyata, as agentless spontaneity in its boundless openness, incorporate a personal deity as the ultimate criterion of value judgment?"[39] If I were to answer this question, though, I would say that "Sunyata" doesn't incorporate any deities, at least not eternal ones with unchanging essences, and it may be presumptuous of Buddhists to assume that it does.

Again, many forms of Buddhism, especially early and Theravada Buddhism, are forms of cosmic religion, not what Hutchison terms "acosmic" religion, especially insofar as the "aspect of reality" on which their metaphysical speculations focus is śūnyatā, the conditioned arising of things, or, more specifically, the fact that all things are impermanent, "empty" of any unchanging essence or soul (atman).  The fact that an insight into conditioned arising can eradicate the clinging that causes suffering is for many Buddhists the crucial "universally valid salvific truth."[40]  This is the Buddhist insight that fits into Cobb's stance that, in Griffin's words, "different religions can each be seen as proclaiming universally valid insights, which can be synthesized."[41] Concerning this Buddhist insight, Cobb recognizes that "to be enlightened is to realize the fundamental nature of reality."[42]  Indeed, the "valid insight" of Buddhism is into the "aspect of reality" termed conditioned arising or emptying.

In the spirit of complementary pluralism I might add that while it may not necessarily be the case that "to be enlightened is to realize the fundamental nature of reality," at a minimum it may be true that "to be enlightened is to realize a fundamental facet of reality."  That is to say,  Buddhists cultivate an insight into how people usually experience, and cling to, parts of that ever-changing process of conditioned arising called the cosmos, and through Buddhist practice they can achieve liberation from the suffering that derives from that clinging.  At the same time people in other religions may be cultivating insights into other "aspects of reality," including permanent ones, that transcend (at least partly) the cosmos, and on the basis of those insights and religious practices (or faith) they, too, achieve liberation from "suffering" as they understand it—whether sin, disobedience, idolatry, or something else.  Simply put, just as religions attend to multiple "facets of reality," they also focus on multiple religious problems and pursue multiple paths to multiple solutions.  In terms of traditional Buddhism and Christianity, both premortem psychological release into impermanence "right here" and postmortem ontological release from impermanence "down here" to permanent existence "up there" may be "salvific" and based on complementary and equally valid insights into two key "aspects of reality."  

One might question here whether this way of affirming Cobb's complementary and pluralistic pluralism squares with "genuine" Buddhism.  My heuristic argument—that Buddhism is a cosmic religion offering a soteriological scheme that is not incommensurable with those of other religions, even religions with a transcendent, eternal God—may  appear to be Buddhistically illegitimate.  In principle, a zealous member of the sangha, faithful to the doctrine of impermanence, could take a hardline Buddhist approach to pluralism and reject truth claims about a permanent God (or eternal consequent nature of God) as delusive, as dangerous "wrong views" that reflect ignorance of the fact of impermanence and hence conduce to clinging and suffering.  But logically such a rejection would constitute unjustifiable overreaching, for it could be the case (and may very well be the case) that there are several ultimates—or simply several "aspects of reality"—on which religions focus and in congruence with which they offer "salvific" schemes, and not all of these ultimates are characterized by impermanence, emptying, and conditioned arising.  These Buddhist doctrines, while offering a fairly accurate representation of the cosmos in and around us, may not apply to all facets of reality.  

That being said, one might still wonder what might be the most genuine Buddhist approach to religious pluralism, that is, the approach that is most faithful to the tradition.  But which Buddhist tradition?  The earliest suttas (ostensibly the standpoint of the historical Buddha), Theravadan approaches, Tibetan teachings, Pure Land Buddhism, the Nichiren tradition, or Zen?  Despite frequent representations of a singular "Buddhism" with śūnyatā as its purported essence, the religion is, not surprisingly, anything but monolithic.  Different strands of Buddhism take different stances on religious pluralism, even if those stances are not explicitly articulated.  For example, despite Masao Abe's claim that Buddhism displays compassion and tolerance in contrast with what he regards as a judgmental and intolerant tendency in biblical traditions, especially in their concepts of justice,[43] the Buddhist tradition has exhibited its fair share of intolerance, too.  Nichiren (1222-82) infamously declared, "Those who practice invocation to Amitābha are due to suffer continuous punishment in Hell; the Zen sect is the devil; the Shingon sect is the ruiner of the country; the Ritsu sect is the enemy of the county."[44]  And one does not need to go all the way back to the 13th century to encounter this sort of Buddhist approach to pluralism.  In the late 19th century, nationalist Buddhist leaders assailed Christianity as a foreign, subversive creed, as reflected by the title True Pure Land thinker Inoue Enryō  (1858-1919) crafted for one of his anti-Christian works: Haja shinron,  "a new refutation of the evil religion."[45]  Cognizant of claims that Buddhism, in contrast with biblical traditions, is tolerant and presumably more ecumenical, Zen social critic Ichikawa Hakugen (1902-1986) writes in his assessment of wartime Buddhist collaboration with the militarist government, "Of what has Japanese Buddhism been tolerant?  Of those with whom it harmonizes. Of its own responsibility for the war."[46]  

Yet even if we limit our gaze to the more magnanimous approaches of recent representatives of the Dharma, not all Buddhists would sign on to their approaches.  Those of a more Theravadan persuasion, heretofore less represented in conferences on pluralism and interfaith dialogue, might question the main focus to date: comparative metaphysics.  Much of the Buddhist-Whiteheadean, Buddhist-Christian, and Buddhist Jewish dialogue has privileged discussions of metaphysical ultimates, whether God, Amida, creativity, śūnyatā, the cosmos, or suchness.  And most of this dialogue has been with East Asian Mahayana Buddhists and their theistic formulations of Amida and "kenotic" representations of śūnyatā, in some cases with a substantialist nuance foreign to most Theravadan Buddhists.[47]  This metaphysical orientation can be ascribed to any number of factors, whether the central project of Whitehead to replace substantialist metaphysics with a process perspective, or Abe's quest to elucidate the "foundation" beneath all religions.  This orientation is deepened to the extent that consideration of the relationship between religion and science enters the dialogue.  

Granted, most Buddhist thinkers do consider the nature of reality, whether in terms of pratītya-samutpāda, dharma theory in Abhidharma treatises, or śūnyatā.  But while these constructs may refer to how things really or ultimately are, they are not necessarily denoting an "ultimate reality" or the Ultimate; andthe "conditioned arising" or "emptying" on which they focus does play any not soteriological role (as an impinger (Hick), revealer (Gilkey), or inspirer (Smith)).[48]  But more importantly, are these metaphysical "facts" the central concern of most Buddhists?  What might ordinary Buddhists—not Buddhist thinkers ("Buddhalogians") or scholars of Buddhism—regard as crucial to a genuine Buddhist angle on religious pluralism?

Avoiding questions that "do not edify," many Buddhists, as I stated above, would take less of a metaphysical orientation.  Members of the Theravadan sangha are more likely to direct their energies to mental cultivation (P. bhāvanā) in conjunction with giving (dāna) and ethical precepts (śīla).  Their ultimate concern is stopping dukkha.[49]  And early Mahayana thinkers like Nagarjuna regard even the doctrines and techniques deployed in Buddhist practice as conventional, not ultimate, truth, as upāya, skillful means of eradicating the causes of suffering.  Even śūnyatā is seen as a corrective solvent, a "upayic" technique, for dissolving views that promote clinging.  In short, soteriology, not metaphysics, is the central concern.

Buddhists faithful to their tradition would agree with Griffin that "The question of the truth of a given worldview must be settled by appeal to the normal rational-empirical criteria of self-consistency and adequacy to the facts…."[50] In the worldview of early and Theravadan Buddhists the key facts are that nothing is permanent and that a clear recognition of impermanence is liberating.  In formulating their worldview, zeroing in on notions of what the key facts might be, and cultivating insight into those facts, Buddhists are not simply trying to pin down the exact nature of reality. Like most religious thinkers, their metaphysical ruminations serve soteriological aims, and for them the crucial "test of adequacy" is what works to liberate, not merely what worldview is most adequate to the "facts," to the Ultimate or ultimates.  That is to say, building on his recognition of the "fact" of impermanence, the historical Buddha set forth the Four Noble Truths, and these four "truths" are, to use Griffin's expression, "universally valid salvific truth."[51] Importantly, most Buddhist thinkers regard this "truth" pragmatically, as instrumentalist "conventional truth," as a skillful means effective in the same way that dirt is when used to remove dirt.   Buddhism thus privileges a pragmatic notion of truth as opposed to a correspondence theory of truth.  

In these respects, for many Buddhists the most genuine Buddhist approach to pluralism (and dialogue) would focus on soteriology.  It would regard soteriological teloi and the various religious practices leading to those goals as complementary.  And perhaps the most fruitful and genuinely Buddhist approach here would be to look less at the different goals and paths and more at different formulations of our "basic problem(s)" or "human condition(s)."  The central focus here would be on the plurality of diagnoses of our problem (and its causes), on such issues as suffering (dukkha), ignorance, disobedience, sin, original sin, delusion, unrighteousness, a break in our communion with others, idolatry, impurity, or disharmony with cosmic forces.  

As a genuine Buddhist angle on religious pluralism, the approach that I'm advancing here would complement more metaphysical approaches with their investigation of differing views of ultimate reality (whether the Eternal One à la Hick, or several ultimates, such as God, creativity, and the cosmos, à la Cobb). Complementing Cobb's "pluralistic metaphysics"[52] and its focus on "diverse modes of apprehending diverse aspects of the totality of reality,"[53] this approach would constitute, for lack of a better expression, a "pluralistic religio-diagnostics," or, to put it even more awkwardly, a "dukkhic" approach to pluralism, that would, to borrow Cobb's wording, focus on "diverse modes of apprehending diverse aspects of the totality of existential anguish."  Granted, this approach has not been completely overlooked in past dialogue or treatments of pluralism, but pursuing it further could provide another avenue for the mutual transformation that Cobb champions.  In fact, Cobb takes such an approach in a remark about Christians and Vedantist Hindus: "…through dialogue Hindus may come to appreciate the importance of sin in human life and the urgency of finding forgiveness.… And Christians may in turn realize how deeply we are all mired in illusions, how they distort all our thinking, and how valid and valuable it is to realize that they are just that, illusions."[54]

This approach could also broaden participation in interfaith dialogue and reflection on pluralism, for it might prove more interesting to the majority of religious people, who, unlike those of us who are professorial elites, might not have the time, resources, or inclination to reflect on metaphysical issues; to grapple with the doctrines of śūnyatā, Nothingness, God, the Godhead, or the two or three Whiteheadean ulitmates; to explore connections to science; to search for a possible "empty" ground of all religions; or to attend academic conferences.  This approach might also bring more non-religious people into the discussion of religious pluralism, including those who raise issues of verification.[55]  

It is not without ulterior motive that I advocate this religio-diagnostic approach to pluralism, for it can transform Buddhism by nudging Buddhists to look at how Gutierrez, Knitter, Cone, Ruether, and other liberationist theologians have gone beyond spiritualized soteriologies and outlined the socio-political dimensions of "sin" and "salvation," especially in terms of justice (in a much broader sense than Abe's limited construal of justice as judgment and punishment).  Specifically, this approach to pluralism can help Buddhists develop their diagnostics and ethics into a systemic analysis that links dukkha with "mundane" socio-political suffering.[56]   Some Buddhists might argue here that the dukkha with which Buddhism has traditionally concerned itself exists in a "vertical" religious dimension, not on the horizontal plane of "mundane suffering," and that nirvana goes far deeper than, for example, Paul Knitter's soteria. Regardless of how we might respond to that argument,[57] I would argue that even though Buddhists might have much to teach about the psychology of dukkha, sin, and other existential issues, they have the most to learn about the socio-political facets of dukkha.  And Buddhists need to learn from thinkers like Knitter, whose "soteriocentric" model focuses on "the welfare of humanity and this earth, the promotion of life and the removal of that which promotes death"[58] and lifts up "the 'salvation' or 'well-being' of humans and Earth as the starting point and common ground for our efforts to share and understand our religious experiences and notions of the Ultimately Important."[59]  In Cobb's parlance, dialogue with Knitter and other liberation theologians (as well as Cobb and his recent writings on "economism," globalization, and sustainability) might be the most transformative dialogue for Buddhists at present. To some extent this dialogue has begun, with "engaged Buddhists" like Sulak Sivaraksa, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama frequently discussing socio-political suffering with thinkers from other religious and non-religious systems of thought.

To their credit, these Buddhists have recognized the significance of Buddhism's encounter with non-religious systems of analysis.  In the past Buddhists have often deemed those systems not as a resource but as a challenge if not a threat.  Abe has agreed with Whitehead that religions in modernity have had to face the challenge of "the rise of the third tradition, which is science,"[60] and he has construed Marxism, too, as a challenge, as one part of a major crisis for religion: "the problem of religion versus irreligion."[61]  Abe writes, "Scientism, Marxism, traditional Freudian psychoanalytic thought, and nihilism in the Nietzschean sense all deny the raison d'être of religion, not merely on emotional grounds but on various rational or theoretical grounds.  Not stopping with criticism of particular religions, these ideologies negate the very being of religion itself.  The most crucial task of any religion in our time is to respond to these anti-religious forces by elucidating the authentic meaning of religious faith"[62][63]  It is ironic that Abe sees Marxism as a crisis, a problem Buddhism must confront and somehow overcome, for despite his professed interest in developing Buddhist social ethics through dialogue, he overlooks the fact that in the early-Shōwa period (1926-1945) Marxist intellectuals were virtually the only people who criticized Japanese Buddhist leaders for their collaboration with Japanese militarists, with the architects of the imperial ideology that was central to State Shinto, and with the propagandists in the Home and Education Ministries.[64]  Buddhists with ethical concerns about the political stances of their tradition in Japanese history might find that Marxist modes of analysis are not so much a problem for Japanese Buddhism as a welcome resource for grappling with the issue of traditional Buddhist symbiosis with the Japanese state and economically powerful interests.  Dialogue with the range of liberationist thinkers could help Buddhists not only address their past—especially the nationalist skeletons in their historical closet—but also confront the numerous and usually ignored issues of class and gender in their religion at present.

A politically expanded religio-diagnostic approach to pluralism could also promote intra-religious dialogue among Buddhists insofar as it could prod them to reflect critically on past formulations of Buddhist ideals and social ethics that were influenced by other traditions.  Whitehead is unaware of these influences when he writes about Christianity and Buddhism, "The self-sufficient pedantry of learning and the confidence of ignorant zealots have combined to shut up each religion in its own forms of thought.  Instead of looking to each other for deeper meanings, they have remained self-satisfied and unfertilized."[65] While Buddhism and Christianity may not have looked to each other for "deeper meanings," and Christianity may have "remained self-satisfied and unfertilized" through the centuries (a claim I doubt), fertilization characterizes much of Buddhist history. That is to say, Buddhism did not become "shut up…in its own forms of thought" and languish in a vacuum as it spread across Asia, for it retained the "flexibility of adaptation" that Whitehead inaccurately denies historical Buddhism when he claims that "neither of them had retained the requisite flexibility of adaptation."[66]  Since it was introduced into East Asian nearly 2000 years ago, Buddhism has been engaged in relationships of mutual transformation with Confucianism, Daoism, and Shinto.  It has been fertilized by all of these traditions, and fertilized them in return.[67] And in some cases this "fertilization" of Buddhism has germinated weeds, at least relative to certain early Buddhist teachings and Mahayana ideals.  For example, one can argue that the Zen assimilation of Confucian ethical and political constructs in certain respects contravened the Mahayana bodhisattva ideal.  

I am not sure how the religio-diagnostic approach I have been sketching here would accord with Whitehead's thought. As he wrote at the beginning of Process and Reality, Whitehead's concern was Speculative Philosophy, "the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted."[68]  In this endeavor Whitehead did consider broadly soteriological issues, and in their analysis of dukkha Buddhists can learn from his discussions of enjoyment, Peace, the Harmony of Harmonies, perpetual perishing, the divine aim, and God's responsive love.  Yet from my limited study of Whitehead's writings, Whitehead's explicit treatment of soteriology may be limited, a least insofar as being prehended by God and achieving objective immortality in God's consequent nature does not strike me as offering that much solace to those who are wrestling with death as the ultimate problem of interpretability.[69]

And in expanding their treatment of suffering beyond dukkha to socio-political pain and injustice, Buddhists can certainly learn much from Whitehead and process thought.  Whitehead's ideas about creativity, prehension, novelty, complexity, and beauty provide a rich resource, especially insofar as Buddhists might draw from them to clarify how, for example, conditioned arising allows for novelty, teleology, or simply the envisioning of possibilities beyond the collective ignorance and suffering that characterizes much of the world in these first few years of the new millennium.