Donald W. Mitchell

Spirituality and emptiness : the dynamics of spiritual life in Buddhism and Christianity

The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity, Donald W. Mitchell. Juxtaposes the views of Japanese Buddhists of the Kyoto School with those of traditional Christian spirituality by focusing on the Buddhist concept of Emptiness and the key theological issue of Kenosis, the process of self-emptying.

The Making of a Joint Buddhist-Catholic Statement

Buddhist-Catholic relations were strained by the end of 1994 and early into 1995 by two events. First was the publication of Pope John Paul IIs Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Knopf, 1994), which contained a controversial chapter on Buddhism. The second event was the boycott of the Popes visit to Sri Lanka by the Buddhist leadership of that country precisely because of what was said about Buddhism in that chapter of the Popes book. In view of these two events, both Buddhist and Catholic leaders around the world expressed the desire to hold a dialogue, at the highest international level of encounter, between their two religious traditions. Responding to this desire, the Vatican organized its very first encounter with the Buddhist world at the highest level of the church. In the spring of 1995, Cardinal Francis Arinze, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue (PCID), invited ten Buddhist representatives from around the world to meet with him, three other members of the Vaticans PCID, and ten Catholic scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States. The Buddhist, participants both monastic and lay scholars, represented Buddhist traditions in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Taiwan, Tibet, Japan, and the United States.

The Trinity and Buddhist Cosmology

The Trinity, the quintessential Christian concept of com- munion, is the signature of the Transcendent intimate to created phe- nomena. The inner life of the Triune God is reflected in the inter- communion of all created things. This finds resonance in the Hua-yen interdependence and interrelatedness of all put-together phenomena that essentially intimates or reflects presence to the transcendent Cosmic Buddha. In this kenosis and emptiness are significant moments of consciousness and cosmology.

The Gethsemani Encounter on the Spiritual Life

From July 22 to 27, 1996, there was a meeting of fifty Buddhist and Christian monastics at the Abbey of Gethsemani, home of Thomas Merton. This encounter was called for by His Holiness the Dalai Lama at the 1993 Parliament of the World Religions. At the Parliament, there was a dialogue between Buddhist and Christian monastics on the topics of emptiness and kenosis. That dialogue had been the fruit of over twenty years of intermonastic exchanges and dialogues between Buddhism and Christianity organized by the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID). At the parliament, His Holiness felt that the intermonastic encounter had come to the point that an in-depth dialogue on the spiritual life would be possible. He asked that it be held for a full week with just twenty-five Buddhist and twenty-five Christian monastics at the home of his spiritual friend, Thomas Merton. Shortly after the Parliament, Fr. James Wiseman, OCSO, chair of MID; Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, OSB, executive director of MID; and Prof. Donald W. Mitchell, MID advisor, began organizing the Gethsemani Encounter with the guidance of the MID Board. Twenty-five Christian monastics were selected for their expertise as well as their involvement in the BuddhistChristian dialogue. Twenty-five Buddhist monastics were also selected to represent the different types of Buddhism that have been active in the intermonastic encounter. Also invited were some laypersons from both traditions who are experts in spirituality and dialogue. As time went on, among the persons who asked to be present to observe the dialogue were other monastics involved in the intermonastic exchange. So the MID Board decided to invite these and some other persons-including the press-as observers. In the end, there were the fifty dialogue participants, one hundred observers, and the monks of Gethsemani Abbey. The observers met at a special time each day with Patrick Henry and Robert Thurman to discuss the dialogue among themselves. Their reflections were also presented to the dialogue participants, and they were able to share their thoughts directly with the whole assembly on the final day. The encounter began on the evening of the twenty-second with the planting of a blue spruce tree at the entrance to the monastery in honor of

The Church in the World: Dialogical, Ethical, and Spiritual Implications

In his book Christianity and the World Religions, Hans Kiing compares Gautama Buddha to Jesus Christ., One of the comparative points that he makes, which caught my eye while preparing to write this paper, is that the Buddhas life has a sense of completion about it while that of Jesus does not. The Buddha taught the Dharma and established a large Sangha for nearly fifty years after his enlightenment before peacefully entering Parinirvana. On the other hand, Jesus lived only a few years of public life, a life that was ended by crucifixion. While the life of the Buddha has a sense of wholeness about it, the life ofJesus seems fragmentary, somehow incomplete. I think that this sense of incompleteness about the life of Jesus is important to understanding the Christian mode of being-in-the-world. This is the thesis that I would like to explore. I will do so by first looking at how this sense of incompleteness draws Christians to seek a more communal mode of being-in-the-world as the Church. Then I will go on to examine the dialogical, ethical, and spiritual implications of this communal life in the world today. Because of my own interest in Christian spirituality, I will especially emphasize that particular dimension of the Churchs being-in-the-world.