This collection of papers focuses on Philosophy as Metanoetics, the seminal work of the celebrated Japanese philosopher Tanabe Hajime (1885-1962).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Contrasting Images of the BuddhaTaitetsu UnnoAll the Christian writers express a deep and sympathetic appreciation for the historical Sakyamuni Buddha, demonstrating some of the positive fruits of interreligious dialogue. But—speaking as a practicing Buddhist—their views appear to be focused on the human face of the Buddha and scant attention is paid to what might be called the numinous. It is this dimension of his enlightenment experience that constitutes his (...) very being and the reason for his appeal far beyond the borders of India. This sense of the sacred, the transhistorical, inspired the great civilizations of Asia and today attracts worldwide attention to the Buddhist path of liberation and freedom.Terry Muck makes an ironic allusion to the respective lives of the Buddha and of the Christ. He states that “Official Christian dogma teaches that Jesus was divine, a part of the Trinity, three gods in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Buddhist teachings dogmatize a different understanding of the Buddha—that he was human through and through,” but a reversal occurs in later history: “The popular Buddhist [End Page 133] approach to the Buddha tends to produce a ‘godlike’ Buddha in a religious tradition that insists on his humanity, and the popular Christian approach to Jesus tends to produce a very human Jesus in a religious tradition that insists on Jesus’ divinity. It is almost as if the populace has decided to emphasize what the buddhologians and theologians have decreed secondary. The evidence for this reversal is everywhere” (Muck, p. 107).This may be a valid observation, but the truth of the matter might not be so simple. That is, both religious figures may combine the practical and the spiritual in different, complex ways and, depending on the historical lens, a person may see one aspect and not the other. At any rate, in this paper I wish to note that Sakyamuni Buddha is more than simply “human, through and through.”Rudolph Otto was the first to use “numinous” as a religious category to describe Christian and Hindu experience, but it also can be applied to the Buddhist case. This is so if we subscribe to one of its basic characteristics: the quality of the inexpressible—“in the sense that it completely eludes apprehension in terms of concepts.” 1 In Buddhist literature we have an abundance of words suggesting this fact: the unconditioned, formless, ineffable, inconceivable, unthinkable, unattainable, indefinable, immeasurable, and so on.In order to understand the numinous fully, Otto writes that a person “must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reaches the point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness.” 2 He continues: “The arising of the numinous from beyond discursive consciousness is central to the Buddha’s enlightenment experience. This point has been overlooked and has caused misunderstanding, as noted by John Ross Carter: ‘One is told repeatedly that one has to work out one’s own salvation—this is treated as a corollary to there being no savior or savior god. This has been pounded into the English-reading audience to such an extent that one has failed to discern what Theravada Buddhism has long known—one does not work out one’s own salvation or liberation or release.’” 3In the Theravada classic, Visudhimagga, the ultimate awakening does not result from human calculation. According to Mahinda Palihawadana, it comes from the “arising of magga.” Magga is the “path” in the eightfold scheme (ariya attahangika magga), but it has a further connotation: “the moment of spiritual change as well as the event and the content of the mind at the moment.” 4 He sums up this process by enumerating the fourfold goal of Theravada life. The first three are well known—sila, samadhi, and lokiya panna. There is also the fourth, which is crucial but often overlooked: supramundane or lokuttara panna. The first three are preliminaries to the fourth realization: “Personal effort is only the ‘setting’ for the realization of the highest religious truth, that the highest realization can take place only when effort ceases to be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 93-99 [Access article in PDF] Jesus Prayer and the Nembutsu Taitetsu Unno Smith College As a Shin Buddhist of the Pure Land tradition, I find the practice of Jesus Prayer in Eastern Orthodox Christianity fascinating, because so much of it resonates with my own experience in the saying of Nembutsu or the Name—namu-amida-butsu. 1 One calls on the Name of Jesus, and the other on (...) the Name of Amida, the Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life. Both may be called the "Way of the Name." 2 Some appreciation of the Jesus Prayer may help us understand the depth of Nembutsu experience, for the similarities are striking, but there are also fundamental differences.We begin with four definitions of prayer as given by the Orthodox scholar Kallistos Ware. 3 The first may be called external prayer, which includes some form of verbally addressing God, including petitions for favors to be granted. Second is prayer understood simply as standing before God. Here there is only silence, negating all discursive activities. In both of these cases the focus is on the human and not on the divine.In Buddhist terms these two forms of prayer are dualistic, the subject standing apart from the object and the act centered on the human subject. In Pure Land language both are acts of self-power. In the case of Nembutsu it may also begin as a self-generated act, but it must be superseded. True prayer, as we shall see, is nondualistic with the initiative coming from the side of the divine. In Pure Land terms it is the manifestation of the working of Other Power.Buddhist meditative practice may also begin in a dualistic mode with personal benefits as the goal, but ultimately it becomes a nondualistic experience, whereby conceptual distinctions of subject and object disappear, so that a deeper reality is realized. The Soto Zen teacher Kosho Uchiyama sums up this awareness: 4 In our zazen, it is precisely at the point where our small, foolish self remains unsatisfied, or completely bewildered, that immeasurable natural life beyond the thought of the self functions. It is precisely at the point where we become completely lost that life operates and the power of Buddha is realized. The third and fourth definitions of prayer, based on Saint Gregory of Sinai, highlight the core experience in Jesus Prayer. The third sense of prayer, according to Ware, is [End Page 93] an inner act. In his words, "True inner prayer is to stop talking and to listen to the wordless voice of God within our heart; it is to cease doing things on our own, and to enter into the action of God." 5 Here, silence is not mere silence but the openness to hear the wordless voice of God. The initiative comes from the divine: "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20) and "He must become greater, I must become less" (John 3:30).Fourth is prayer as "the manifestation of Baptism," not baptism as a ritual act but as the embodying of the divine. This is the state of grace that is brought "to the point of full spiritual perception and conscious awareness when we experience and feel the activity of the Spirit directly and immediately." 6These two connotations of prayer may be helpful in understanding the writings of Shinran, the founder of Shin Buddhism, who lived in thirteenth-century Japan. 7 The English translations of his works, coming from an entirely different cultural tradition and written in an alien language, sometimes defy easy comprehension. To take one important example, Shinran states at the beginning of the Chapter of Practice in his major opus, translated as "True Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way," as follows: 8 The great practice is to say the Name of the Tathagata of unhindered light. This practice, embodying all good acts and possessing all roots of virtue, is perfect and most rapid in bringing them to fullness. It is the treasure ocean of virtues that is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 214-217 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism: Creating a Shin Buddhist Theology in a Religiously Plural World Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhism: Creating a Shin Buddhist Theology in a Religiously Plural World. Edited by Dennis Hirota. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 257 pp. One of the lessons I learned from Martin (...) Luther is about "vocation." Basically, one's "vocation" is to express love and compassion toward all through engagement with the structures of existence that hinder justice through whatever social or occupational role (one's "calling") one occupies. In Luther's theology, there is no privileged ecclesiastical institution, no privileged theological class, and in his better moments, no privileged doctrinal system that mediates God's grace—meaning God's love and compassion. Instead, grace meets us where we are in the midst of whatever our "calling" might be; our "vocation" is to serve others in community through our callings: teacher, pastor, parent, physician, farmer, clerk, politician, or any other honest occupations by which persons make their way in the world. Luther's ideas of vocation—part of his doctrine of the "priesthood of all believers"—functioned as part of his critique of received medieval Christian tradition; it remains a defining theological principle of Protestant thought that Paul Tillich called the "Protestant principle."Being critical of Christian tradition is still widely practiced in mainline Protestant circles, even though Protestantism since Luther has produced absolutized forms of Luther's original critique of Christian tradition. My own Lutheran tradition is as guilty of this sort of idolatry as other Christian traditions. But the best of Protestant thought and practice has always generated critical attitudes in many theologians. So each generation of mainline Protestant theological reflection since Luther rejects, even as it builds upon, the work of previous generations, sometimes even retrieving elements of earlier tradition that their predecessors had rejected—as Luther retrieved Pauline-Augustinian notions of grace as a means of critiquing the sale of indulgences and the entire sacramental system of medieval Catholicism. [End Page 214]So as a Lutheran who believes that the process of personal and corporate self-criticism is an expression of faith, and that every attempt to absolutize any given form of tradition or religious practice is idolatry and constitutes nonfaith, I am always interested in learning how other religious traditions encourage personal and corporate self-criticism. As a Lutheran who happens to be a historian of religions engaged in interreligious dialogue, especially with Buddhists, and who has also thought and written about Pure Land Buddhism, I am especially intrigued when I encounter self-criticism similar to the Protestant principle at work in a form of Buddhism I deeply admire.Toward a Contemporary Understanding of Pure Land Buddhismis a collection of essays that evolved from a 1989 symposium planned by Dennis Hirota and sponsored by the Institute for Buddhist Studies that was held in Berkeley on campuses affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union. The focus of the conference—and of this volume—was constructive criticism of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist tradition. The essayists—three Buddhists and two Christians—share the conference's two convictions: (1) Pure Land Buddhism has a significant contribution to make to life in the contemporary world, and (2) Pure Land teachings and practices in the forms in which they are commonly communicated appear alien to contemporary persons both East and West. The structure of this collection flows from these convictions: first, three Pure Land authors (Dennis Hirota, John S. Yokota, and Musashi Tachikawa) offer three distinct proposals for deconstructing and reconstructing Pure Land Buddhism so that practitioners can more adequately reflect on contemporary intellectual and social circumstances as the context for faithful practice in a global context of religious and secularism pluralism, followed by critical comments on the Pure Land Buddhist proposals by two Christian theologians (Gordon D. Kaufman and John B. Cobb Jr.), and concluding with reconsiderations of their original proposals by the three Pure Land... (shrink)