Christianity and Buddhism; Ontology; Nothingness; God (comparative religion); God; Confucianism
摘要
It is often assumed that since the ultimate is understood by Buddhists to be Emptiness and by Christians to be God, Emptiness and God must be competing interpretations or designations of the same reality. There may, instead, be diverse ultimates. The quest for the ultimate in India first led to Brahman; in the West, to Being. Buddhism dissolved Brahman into Emptiness In this century Being has been dissolved into the being of beings or what Whitehead calls creativity. There are other traditions, especially Judaism and Confucianism which have sought the ultimate as the ground or principle of rightness. Unlike Judaism and Confucianism, Christianity stresses that true rightness can be attained only as a gift, but Christianity does not thereby turn away from the principle of rightness. On the contrary, this principle is the giver. In both the Judeo-Christian and Confucian traditions, there have been efforts to assimilate the metaphysical ultimate to the ultimate of rightness, but the resultant syntheses have proved unstable. Nevertheless, in Christianity the idea of God was long associated with such a synthesis. With the dissolution of the metaphysical Being into the being of beings and with the collapse of the synthesis between Being or being and the principle of rightness, the idea of God has become problematic. It is best to reaffirm its identification with the principle of rightness; for worship is directed to this. The metaphysical ultimate is realized rather than properly worshipped God can then be recognized as categorically distinct from being or creativity or Emptiness. The question now is how faith in God is related to the realization of Emptiness. God can be conceived as the supreme and everlasting Empty One in distinction from Emptiness as such, thus as the one cosmic Buddha. The realization of Emptiness is the realization of oneself as an instance of dependent co-origination or the concrescence of all things. This is often held to be beyond the distinction of good and evil, right and wrong. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the concern for rightness, the realization of Emptiness appears as a fulfilment of this principle. This can be explained if we assume that God as the principle of rightness participates in every instance of dependent co-origination, that to be empty is to be open to each element in the concrescence playing its own proper role, and that God's proper role is to guide the concrescence. In this case, the realization of Emptiness is at the same time conformation to the principle of rightness. It may be that faith in God as conformation to the principle of rightness can also lead to the realization of Emptiness.
