John D’Arcy May

Ernst Steinkellner (Vienna) opened the conference proper with an account of Buddhist critiques of Hindu doctrines of creation. The absolute Bráhman was not a creator, but in the course of doctrinal evolution (the masculine Brahmán becoming the post-Vedic Brahmâ) the world came to be seen as the work of a kind of demi-urge, leaving open the question ‘why?’. Buddhism, restricting itself to the realm of the finite, mocked Brahmin ideas of the cause of the world, but still had to account for the existence and nature of the world. By the time the Madhyamaka had developed theories of momentary creation, these had become part of the common logic of Buddhists and Hindus.

This was followed by a presentation on contemporary Buddhist critiques of creation and creator doctrines by José Cabezon (Santa Barbara), who pointed out certain affinities between modern theories of many universes without beginning or end and traditional Buddhist ideas. Buddhism, he maintained, has an aversion to cosmological uniqueness, whether spatial, temporal, causal or personal, but it does regard the causal law of karman as ineluctable. Despite the critiques of Buddhist thinkers like Gunapala Dharmasiri of Sri Lanka, who are under the misapprehension that Buddhism is on a par with science whereas Christianity is merely religion, this lays the basis for a metaphysics. The site of both suffering and liberation is the co-creativity of all beings. Buddhism is concerned, not with being, but with consciousness.

Eva Neumaier (Calgary) suggested that in fact Buddhism does have conceptions of creation, but in narrative form, represented in the cosmological structure of the world as the product of the Buddha’s meditation rather than as a cosmogony. Creation is not ex nihilo, because nature pre-dates any act of creation, yet the ‘emptiness’ of shûnyatâ is also the ‘swollenness’ of fulfilled potential. The Buddha has been represented as the all-creating sovereign, and pure mind has been interpreted as the gender-neutral mother-father of all Buddhas, the ‘primordial basis’. The ‘original enlightenment’ objected to by Critical Buddhism enabled Buddhists to adapt pre-Buddhist ideas such as the Tao, even to the extent of tolerating animistic polytheism.

If this presentation surprised some participants, it provided the perfect counterpart to the paper on Christian ideas of creation by John Keenan (Middlebury College). The Jewish and Christian conceptions of creation arise out of events in history, the exodus from Egypt being the originating metaphor. For Christians, liberation from the bondage of sin was the legacy of Israel’s tribal warrior God. The Genesis accounts of creation are essentially liturgical, not cosmogonic. Creation is simply assumed as the evidence of divine transcendence; God is not a benevolent parent. The pagan critics who mocked the Jewish and Christian creation stories were just as misguided as the Buddhists who ridiculed the Vedic myths. God was eventually conceived as ipsum esse, the ‘to be’ of things, a non-substantialist account that does not purport to answer the question ‘why?’. According to the logic of Buddhism, the complete enlightenment of all would mean the final extinction of karman and with it the disappearance of the world, including the Buddhas! Such dependent co-arising is human history.

What, then, of evil? Armin Kreiner (Mainz) had the unenviable task of tackling the problem of theodicy in the Buddhist-Christian context thus established. He gave a closely argued version of the traditional Christian account derived from original sin, saying that it has now lost credibility. God causes or permits everything in the world, yet nothing in the world makes it inevitable that it was caused by a transcendent being. There is genuine evil which should not be, but values cannot be realised without suffering and the risk of evil. That we could have acted otherwise is the mark of personhood, just as it is only through facing challenges and dangers that ‘soul-making’ can succeed. The unanswerable question ‘why evil?’ can be asked in any logically possible world.

A possible alternative view is provided by process theology, and Aasulv Lande (Lund) gave an account of this as a possible way of mediating between Buddhist and Christian views of creation. It has been suggested that Buddhism lacks the capacity for modernisation precisely because it lacks a doctrine of creation, but Christians themselves are now searching for alternatives to an authoritarian creator-God. Scandinavian creation theology (Grundvig, Løgstrup) sees humans as co-creators, while the process theologians assert not only that God creates the world, but that the world creates God, the ‘fellow-sufferer who understands’.

In an attempt to tie up the various threads of the conference in the context of Buddhist and Christian approaches to ecology, John D’Arcy May (Dublin) sketched out a basis for correlating the ‘deep structures’ of the Buddhist and Christian ‘universe stories’, showing that, even though they do not directly address what modern science understands by ‘nature’, they contextualise the natural world by using powerful symbols of transcendence such as creation and dependent co-arising. Canonical texts, while markedly different in emphasis, can still make practical agreement possible, because each tradition has ethical implications despite their different scenarios for the drama of history and liberation.

Considerable space was given to presentations by graduate students of their research projects, which added considerably to the interest and variety of the conference. This will be continued at the next conference, which as been scheduled for 10-13 June 2005 at the Benedictine Archabbey of St Ottilien near Munich on the theme of Conversion and Religious Identity.

John D’Arcy May is Associate Professor of Interfaith Dialogue, Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

Next article: "No one religion better than the other" : Pluralist Summit 

Back to list of contents