Two Truths, Part 2...

finally....

Well… I got derailed by life, but here I am again with a renewed commitment to post more regularly. In the midst of being Acting Senior Vice President of this and President of that and Coordinator of the other and Director of the thing and Professor of the stuff, I gotta get moving toward the book I hope will sharpen up and unfold from these reflections.

You’ll remember in my last post that I started to get a little into the weeds of one Buddhist idea of nonduality. I unpacked in a very basic way the “doctrine of two truths” that lives in the teaching and practice of Buddhism in its Mahayana schools, especially drawn from the Madhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna.

Don’t try to read Nagarjuna. He’ll make your head hurt.

You might want to go back and read Part 1 of my “Two Truths,” since I took so long to get to this Part 2….

Or, pick it up here, a little more into the weeds, and then off to Emmaus. So:

According to this doctrine:

there is not one reality where differences and distinctions appear to be real (conventional or relative) but are actually illusory (some schools of Hindu Advaita in positive form, nihilist in negative western form);

nor are there two realities, one where the unity of existents is true (ultimate) and another where their identities and distinctions illusory (conventional or relative);

nor two realities where existents and their distinctions are real now but temporary (conventional or relative) eventually dissolving into the other forever (ultimate).

There is rather just one reality, characterized by these two truths:

there is the world that exists in all its relative truth – existents exist, distinctions are there – AND all existents are empty of their own substantial being separate from others but arise and fall in their relationship with all the other conditions that lead to them, contextualize them, or follow out from them.

The way to say this, to be precise – since speaking of one reality is, by definition, distinct from and opposite to either no reality or multiple realities, thus collapsing into another dualism – we acknowledge that our “one” reality is, in fact, not-two.

Or as we saw in the Lankavatara sutra: “Things are not as they seem… nor are they otherwise.” They are not how they appear. And they are not not how they appear.

This nondualist metaphysics is the foundation of the view of practice – prayer, liturgy, contemplation, works of mercy and justice, and so on – that I explored in even earlier posts: that spiritual practice is “absolutely essential and completely unnecessary.”

Here is that view again:

Without spiritual practice, we are adrift. We are, if you will, off center, out of sorts.(Buddhist dukkha.) We are alienated, unreconciled, missing the aim of life (Christian sin.) We need ascesis, disciplined practice, a structured approach to growth and change and development, because we live in a world in which all is not one (conventional reality), in which one thing is not another, in which distinctions exist (like healthy and unhealthy, present and absent, alive and dead, good and bad) and in which we need to become better, deeper, stronger, kinder, more capable of flourishing.

And…

the flourishing we grow into, however haltingly, arises in the discovery, through practice, that there was nowhere to go to begin with, that we are already what we are made to be (ultimate reality). All is already given. In this discovery and through its acceptance, we flourish. In just this very life, with its heartbreak and its joy, we are ALIVE.

We can now put together that view of practice with the two-truths view: we practice (in the realm of relative truth) what already is (at the level of ultimate truth).

As Dogen teaches of zazen (sitting meditation) in his Bendowa:

Sitting upright, practicing Zen, is the authentic gate to free yourself in the unconfined realm of this samadhi [concentrated awakening, more or less].

Although this inconceivable dharma is abundant in each person, it is not actualized without practice, and it is not experienced without realization. When you release it, it fills your hand—how could it be limited to one or many?

Notice Dōgen’s playing with opposites to push us, not to nonsense (that’s a misconception about Buddhist teaching), but to a recognition of the not-two reality we inhabit.

Look at Dōgen’s language.

One frees oneself… in a realm that is already unconfined.

It is abundantly in us already… but it must be realized.

You release it and… it stays right where it is.

Remember Merton on Christian prayer, from an earlier post?

In prayer we start from what we already have. You start from where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize you are already there…. Everything has been given us in Christ. All we need is to experience what we already possess.

Not identical teachings. We have yet to explore Christian and Buddhist claims about God and Dharmakaya, the Christ and the Buddha, and much more, and to fathom what they bring to bear on all this. But ascetically and soteriologically speaking, Dōgen and Merton sure do rhyme.

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“Things are not as they seem … nor are they otherwise.”

Does this insight from the Lankavatara Sutra offer a fresh way to look at some of the puzzling stories of Christian Scripture?

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. (Gospel of Luke)

This, of course, comes from the Lukan account of two disciples walking along the road to Emmaus, deeply dejected and afraid, following their Lord’s crucifixion. He meets them, and walks along with them, and opens the Scriptures to them, though they do not recognize them. As they approach Emmaus, they urge him to remain with them at the inn. No doubt this reflects the hospitality code of the time, but one wonders if they are also struck by his interpretation of Scripture and want this stranger’s company to continue. When he breaks bread with them at the table, they know it to be Jesus, and he is suddenly … no longer there.

Biblical commentaries take a range of approaches to the story. Some explain Jesus’ sudden departure, now that these disciples recognize him in the bread-breaking, by the need to go and appear to others. Some read it primarily as a covert Eucharistic story, because later eyes would see in it a Word-Sacrament structure. There is nothing wrong with coming to understand it that way, though this story is too early to be an account of Eucharistic presence as it comes to preoccupy theologians much later. Some interpreters go other ways.

From the point of view of sacramental theology, a number of moderns have noted that in Emmaus we see how Jesus is present under the sign of absence. That may be epistemologically true (in the way we know it initially). But maybe, ontologically (in the way things are) that is too binary. Thinking about this story in the light of the two-truths doctrine, could it be, in his vanishing, that Jesus has not been there and then left, present then absent… but that he is present to the disciples in both the relative and ultimate frames – that is, distinct and recognizable in body, and also indistinguishable from bread he so often broke with his disciples?

Or … at the ultimate level of things, where all being is interdependently arisen: was he not present with these disciples at Emmaus on the road, and in the broken bread? Is he not present with us within all the permeable boundaries of all that exists, present in our neighbor, present in the stranger, present in the Word, present in nature, present in bread broken and wine poured out and water washing, present in suffering and present in joy, and also transcending all these existents even while permeating it all? Is that not precisely what the creation-incarnation nexus is about? Is that what Emmaus was showing the disciples, showing us?

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I don’t have that formulation quite like I want it yet. It is not too distant to what some Christian theologians have called panentheism, without the help of Buddhist philosophy. But not quite.

I will keep working on it and come back to it in a later post. Because I also want to hold other Christian Scriptures more attentively in the light of this two-truths doctrine and see what it enables us to see, or see afresh. Transfiguration… the bush that burns but does not burn up… Jacob’s wrestling with the angel and his vision of the angels ascending and descending… the Johannine Jesus appearing in a body beyond a locked door…. There are more.

The question is whether this comparative theological method, passing over to another tradition and then returning to our own, helps us in some way to see our own differently or even better.

What about, beyond Scripture, in doctrine? Can two-truths nondualism help us, for example, in bearing witness to the mystery named by the council of Chalcedon - that Jesus is completely divine and completely human, without mixture and without separation? Talk about a binary! Greek philosophy had its categories really stretched for that one. Maybe the Buddhists can help us…

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In the next post, before moving into more of these ventures in doing comparative theology, I will, with the help of my colleague Catherine Cornille (Boston College), briefly outline several different outcomes that this comparative theology might yield, so that you have more of why I am attempting this enterprise. And maybe so I myself know why I am attempting this enterprise, motivated by that first encounter with my grandmother as I told earlier.

Then we will try doing comparative theology again with a few of those other Scriptures I mentioned.

John Keenan, an Episcopal theologian now retired from Middlebury, asks us to consider: if early Christians could use Greek philosophy to articulate our faith, and Thomas Aquinas, with his Jewish and Muslim interlocutors, could use the philosophy of Aristotle to articulate our faith – why can’t Madhyamaka philosophy help us to articulate our faith in another equally compelling way? Theology, “giving reason for the hope that is in us….”

We’ll test Keenan’s challenge in coming posts. And of course, we will return to how this theology relates to practice. I don’t want to get too far from practice, from how lex credendi connects to lex orandi and lex vivendi. And so we will return to Dōgen, and Merton. For me, they are never far away.

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