Buddhist Inclusivism

Attitudes Towards Religious Others

Kristin Beise Kiblinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138275645
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351954280
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Although Christians have well-developed responses to other religions, the counterpart scholarship from Buddhists has thus far lagged behind. Breaking new ground, Buddhist Inclusivism analyzes the currently favored position towards religious others, inclusivism, in Buddhist traditions. Kristin Beise Kiblinger presents examples of inclusivism from a wide range of Buddhist contexts and periods, from Pali texts to the Dalai Lama's recent works. After constructing and defending a preferred, alternative form of Buddhist inclusivism, she evaluates the thought of particular contemporary Buddhists such as Thich Nhat Hanh and Masao Abe in light of her ideal position. This book offers a more systematic treatment of Buddhist inclusivism than has yet been provided either by scholars or by Buddhist leaders.

Chapter 1

Why Buddhist Inclusivism?

Here in the West, the Dalai Lama’s books are constantly on the New York Times bestseller lists, and you can take meditation classes in even the most out of the way places. The market for all types of Buddhist materials beyond Asia is thriving, indicating that members of non-Buddhist religions, whether casually or seriously, are hungry to learn about and from Buddhism. Indeed, many Christians make no bones about their eagerness to incorporate aspects of Buddhist thought and practice into their own religious cultures.

In the Academy, scholars who ponder such matters on a theoretical level continue to produce much-discussed literature on Christian inclusivism towards Buddhism and other religions. But in our excitement to search Buddhism for treasures to import, and amidst Christian theologians’ efforts to formulate justifications for inclusive stances, have we forgotten something obvious? Clearly, many want to include Buddhists, but do Buddhists want to be included? Reciprocally, do they want to do any including themselves, absorbing Christian and other non-Buddhist beliefs or practices? What are the prevailing Buddhist attitudes towards and methods of inclusivism, and might not studying them help Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike?

Each religious community that is aware of the existence of other, different religious communities must reckon with the fact that its religious tradition is but one of many such forms of life. Each religious community must face and decide how best to respond to the situation of religious plurality. Common terms designating three options for responding to others include exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.

What is meant by “inclusivism”? How does it compare to related terms? As I will show, the category of inclusivism has been used variously, but nevertheless there is a common thread. Simply put, the name “inclusivism” comes from the idea of including, so an inclusivistic approach towards others has to do with willingness to include the other or something of the other’s. One might, for example, accept as true or good a doctrine or practice (or many doctrines/practices) from a foreign religious system. Or, one might believe that a religious other could attain ultimate fulfillment or salvation as conceived by the home tradition, despite (or even through) membership in an alien tradition. An inclusivist is open to the presence of truth and value in other traditions, feeling that there is overlap between the foreign and the home faith and/or that there is something distinct that the other can contribute and teach to the home community. In this general usage, the term covers, of course, many possible methods and justifications for such an attitude. It allows that the other tradition might be accepted as a whole or only in part, so that one may be inclusivistic with respect to one thing, such as the truth of doctrinal claims, but not with respect to something else, such as the possibility of salvation. In fact, one may be inclusivistic in my sense while still rejecting numerous or even central aspects of alien religious systems. Thus, different degrees and kinds of inclusivism will need to be specified.

Inclusivism is normally used in contrast to exclusivism, which has to do with excluding the other or something from the other. An exclusivist thinks that the home community is in sole possession of all important truths and that it is only through membership in the home community that one can attain salvation or ultimate fulfillment. Exclusivism in the strict sense with respect to truth must be rare, for it commits the home group to the problematic claim that no other community teaches or practices anything that the home group does.

A third option that often accompanies discussion of these two is pluralism, which picks out the practice of accepting several traditions as equals. Therein lies a key difference between pluralism and inclusivism: an inclusivist privileges one tradition, keeping it primary, and absorbs something foreign into that tradition. Pluralism, in contrast, is more of a “separate but equal” or “different strokes for different folks” position. Pluralists with respect to salvation “think that all religions are equally effective in bringing salvation about.”¹

Of these three main options for responding to others (i.e., exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism), inclusivism is currently enjoying widespread popularity. Many religious people want to justify inclusivistic attitudes and behaviors using the resources of their respective traditions. However, although a few articles and books can be found on such topics as “Buddhism and dialogue” or “Buddhism and toleration,” unfortunately rigorous philosophical work utilizing the categories of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism from a Buddhist perspective is extremely rare. Comparative studies on particular topics are available, as are historical studies of the relations between Buddhism and other faiths, but theoretical work analogous to Christian philosophical and theological arguments for certain approaches to religious others is not. Unlike their Christian counterparts, Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism have not yet analyzed what the term inclusivism might mean in Buddhist contexts. They have not collected for reflection evidence of Buddhist expressions and behaviors that might reasonably be labeled inclusivistic, nor have they asked whether inclusivism is philosophically and doctrinally justifiable according to Buddhist resources. As the late German Indologist Paul Hacker wrote regarding inclusivism in the Indian context, Indians (or, better, thinkers whose religious roots stem from India) seem to have no term for inclusivism, they have not reflected on it very much, and they tend not to justify their inclusivistic moves.² I aim, therefore, to begin to remedy this situation by exploring inclusivism in Buddhist contexts, in order to encourage Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism to develop more theoretical work on Buddhist responses to religious diversity.

Ironically, despite the lack of scholarship on the subject, there is a romanticized perception of Buddhism as an exceptionally tolerant and inclusivistic religion. Although my work helps to complicate this stereotype, this reputation has attracted many to the faith and thus underscores the importance of the project at hand. On the other side, scholars within the Critical Buddhism movement, among others, have berated Buddhists for being too accommodating in their approach to others, at the risk of diluting their traditions. Hakamaya Noriaki has argued that “Buddhists should not give in to a compromising and mushy ‘tolerance’ that uncritically accepts all things…” Similarly, Hans Küng has proposed the “problem of an easy, cheap tolerance in Buddhism.” “There is a danger,” he says in agreement with Hakamaya, “of uncritical assimilation, of an opportunistic attitude of compromise, of a dangerous lack of discrimination and insufficient resistance to some highly dubious Western ‘achievements’.”³ M. Monier-Williams said that primitive Buddhism was too “tolerant, liberal, and eclectic” to survive intact, and Sir Charles Eliot found that Buddhists are prone to corrupt their faith. He wrote that “their courteous acquiescence in other creeds enfeebles…their own,” and that Buddhism is “dangerously tolerant.”⁴ This criticism also supports my work here, for the underlying assumption motivating this book is that Buddhists and scholars have yet to articulate, develop, and defend their inclusivistic positions adequately, lagging behind the Christian scholarship.

One matter to address initially is how Buddhists have, in fact, demonstrated inclusivism. Thus in one section of this work I gather examples of inclusive Buddhist behaviors and attitudes, categorizing the patterns identified. But I stress that, although I purposefully offer cases from a wide range of time periods, schools, and regions, I do not aspire to comprehensiveness. Nor do I mean in any way to suggest that Buddhists as a whole have been or mostly are inclusivists. There is, of course, no singular Buddhism. The complexities and varieties of Buddhism, like those of Christianity, make it possible to support a range of positions towards religious others, all in the name of “Buddhism”. In any case, at bottom, my principal interests are not historical but rather critical. The provided instances of inclusivistic argumentation serve mostly as a jumping off point for constructive analysis, for critique and comment.

My work here, therefore, is modeled not on descriptive studies of the intermingling of Buddhism with Hinduism, Christianity, and so forth, and not on historical narratives of Buddhism’s gradual assimilation in the lands to which it has spread. I provide only minimal historical contextualization and idealize types, but that is because I am concerned with the question of whether a certain stance in response to other religions is philosophically and doctrinally justifiable, not with historical questions and explanations of Buddhist behavior. I write having been heavily influenced by the work of certain Christian thinkers who, though referencing historical examples, focus their efforts mostly on supporting theologically a particular approach towards non-Christians. I am trying to jumpstart the parallel work in Buddhist thought. My goal is to provide a more systematic treatment of the possibility of a tenable Buddhist inclusivist position than has yet been provided either by scholars or by contemporary Buddhists.

In the Christian literature, scholars have recently argued that some forms of inclusivism are not as nice or as friendly as they appear but rather mask polemicism or disrespect for the other, and thus are disingenuous. Also, there are methods of inclusivism that so massively reinterpret what is supposedly included that one may question whether anything other has really been accepted or absorbed, whether anything has been understood in its distinctiveness, on the other’s own terms, before being gobbled up by the including tradition. Such methods do violence to others’ teachings and practices by distorting them for the benefit of the home community. Having distinguished various methods of going about inclusivism, Christian scholars have convincingly argued that some inclusivist strategies have more integrity in these matters than others.

While Christian writers have already distinguished and separately evaluated various methods of inclusivism with these concerns in mind, the time is at hand for Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism to consider these sorts of arguments. We must mine Buddhist cases for the light that they shed on inclusivism in general, and reflect with more rigor and precision on the desirability of specific inclusivistic moves for Buddhists. In this project, I get the ball rolling by recommending one particular form of inclusivism that I judge to minimize the problems just mentioned. I argue for this type and against other forms using both tradition-neutral and specifically Buddhist resources.

Before I can begin, however, I must clarify further the concept inclusivism that is in play here. A look at some sample usages of the term inclusivism may help in getting a sense of this category and in defending the reasonableness of my own broad definition. S. Mark Heim, for example, has referred to a “widely accepted typology” that is often discussed in Christian contexts but has been applied as well in a parallel fashion to other faiths:

Exclusivists believe the Christian tradition is in sole possession of effective religious truth and offers the only path to salvation. Inclusivists affirm that salvation is available through other traditions because the God most decisively acting and most fully revealed in Christ is also redemptively available within or through those traditions. Pluralists maintain that various religious traditions are independently valid paths to salvation.⁵

Commonly, then, the category of inclusivism is used to refer only to inclusivism with respect to salvation. This counts as inclusivism with my terminology, too, but it is not the only (nor a necessary) way for a stance towards others to qualify as inclusivist.

Similarly, in the passage that follows J. A. Dinoia also focuses solely on inclusivism with respect to salvation with his use of the term, although he goes further to specify particular moves that inclusivists typically use in order to explain how others might be saved. He writes,

Generally speaking, inclusivists are those who espouse some version of the view that all religious communities implicitly aim at the salvation that the Christian community most adequately commends, or at least that salvation is a present possibility for the members of non-Christian communities…Theories about the universality of the experience of grace, the possibility of implicit faith, the structure of general revelation, the sources of moral uprightness, and the ubiquity of broadly christological and soteriological motifs figure prominently in the articulation of most inclusivist positions.⁶

Again, such techniques qualify as inclusivism for me, too, but they do not exhaust all possible inclusivistic maneuvers.

Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christian” model is a famous example of inclusivism that fits in here. Rahner judges that salvation is necessarily available universally and that all humans are always related to God. But since he feels that salvation is achieved only through Christ, and not everyone has exposure to Christian teachings, it must be possible to be saved by living implicit or “anonymous”—even if not explicit—Christianity. Insofar as salvation is possible in non-Christian communities, it comes only through Christ, even if the religious others are unaware of this. The salvation described by other communities is not genuine salvation, which is properly understood only as Christians know it.

For Rahner, insofar as other religious forms of life help and do not obstruct Christian teaching, they can help their adherents attain salvation and be included, but insofar as they contradict Christian teachings, they are not salvific and cannot be incorporated. In this way, inclusivism may mean selective acceptance of aspects of other traditions, so that it is not an all-or-nothing acceptance of others. And while Rahner discusses inclusivism with respect to salvation, he acknowledges inclusivism with respect to truth, too. This is clear especially in his writing on Vatican II, documents from which he interprets to say that Catholics ought to acknowledge and learn from the truths present in non-Christian communities and engage in dialogue with them.⁷

Other scholars have used inclusivism, as I do, to cover a wider range of moves. For example, “Inklusivismus in Neuen Religiösen Bewegungen (Inclusivism in New Religious Movements)” by Johann Figl distinguishes three types of inclusivism. One he calls the “essentialist-mystical” type, which interprets a central thrust from the foreign religion to be identical with something central in the home religion. Figl adds that sometimes inclusivists of this stripe justify their assertions of commonality among religions by asserting that there was an original Urreligion from which differing forms of religion have all derived.

Another type of inclusivism Figl describes as “historical-revelatory.” This kind asserts that the home tradition is the last and most ultimate of a series of historical revelations, so that other religions are judged as good but provisional and surpassed by the superior home religion. With respect to this type, he cites Islam as a classic example because Islam presents Mohammed as the last a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Buddhist Inclusivism?
• 2 Issues Regarding Inclusivism Generally
• 3 Selected Examples of Inclusivism in Buddhist Contexts
• 4 Towards a Tenable Form of Buddhist Inclusivism
• 5 Case Studies of Two Prominent Buddhist Inclusivists
• 6 The Contrast Case of Exclusivist Gunapala Dharmasiri
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index