Editors' Introduction

Abstract

Editors' Introduction Thomas Cattoi and Kristin Johnston Largen There are as many paths of interreligious dialogue as there are individuals who walk them, but not all ways are equally constructive—or even respectful. Many interreligious engagements struggle to navigate between two tensions. On the one hand, it is important to present the spiritual experiences of the members of another religion as real and valid, and not incomplete, partial, or inferior. On the other hand, however, it is tempting to try to fit those experiences into hermeneutic categories that ultimately are alien to them, arranging them according to a hierarchical model that practitioners of these traditions would most likely view as fundamentally patronizing. Rather than helping increase interreligious understanding, this approach may actually fail to do justice to the lived spiritual experiences of members of non-Christian traditions (for example), with their attendant particularity and uniqueness. In fact, the temptation to impose a totalizing metanarrative is in no way something characterizing Christianity alone; even the well-known Buddhist teaching of skillful means (upayakauśalya), while an extraordinarily useful resource to ease the dharma's introduction into new cultures, can easily foster a utilitarian view of other religious beliefs and practices as mere stepping stones for the spread of Buddhist teaching. A different way to foster interreligious understanding is to attend to the specificities of the religious experiences of practitioners of other traditions without necessarily seeking to interpret them through the categories of our own. This mode of encountering the other can underscore points of contact between different modes of practice without disregarding the tensions or the irreducible differences that exist between them—and indeed, without immediately classifying such differences as flaws necessitating correctives that are imported from another tradition. This appreciation of particularity allows us to home in on the worldview of individual authors and bring them into conversation with the analogous claims of representatives of a different religion. A scholar taking this approach will not pass judgment on the reality of another's experience, but will map the claims of practitioners of different religions against each other, in the belief that an acknowledgement of differences will not impede, but actually foster mutual interreligious understanding. In line with these considerations, the first two sections of this issue see a number of Buddhist and Christian authors engage in conversation with texts and practices of the [End Page vii] tradition different from their own, without seeking to impose an all-explanatory hermeneutic framework but pausing to reflect on the way the claims of the other tradition illumine and clarify their own beliefs as well as their own spiritual practice. The first three articles build on the ongoing academic dialogue between Christianity and Zen in all its different cultural and speculative forms, discussing how distinct modes of Christian contemplation come to resemble Zen meditation, albeit with a number of important provisos. Nicholas Worssam, SSF, tackles the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1217–1274), drawing on his own Franciscan tradition to explore Korean Buddhist practices of mental purification and cultivation. Perry Schmidt-Leukel compares the Lord's prayer with different aspects of Shin Buddhism in the writings of Shinran (1173–1263), reflecting on the way a dualist and a non-dualist construal of ultimate reality help us understand the problem of evil and the dialectic of freedom and grace. Finally, Joseph Nguyen, SJ, compares sudden experiences of consolation in the spiritual exercises of Ignatius and in the pursuit of satori in Japanese schools of Zen. Nguyen claims that these two practices share a belief in the existence of a dimension of knowledge born out of direct experiential contact with ultimate reality—something that bypasses logic or pure reasoning and leads us to an unmediated encounter with transcendence. The second section similarly explores a number of aspects of meditative practice across different Buddhist traditions, considering also the broader anthropological and cosmological implications of distinct notions of liberation. Stephanie Cloete brings into conversation the Kephalaia Gnostika by Evagrios of Pontus (345–399) and the story told by the Buddha in the Aggañña Sutta about the nature and origin of evil. Cloete explores the echoes and parallelisms between the reconfiguration of interiority that characterizes...