1. Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian. By Paul F. Knitter. One World Publications, 2009. 240 pages. $22.95. 2. Robert Magliola, National Taiwan University and Assumption University of Thailand.
摘要
“If you meet a swordsman in the street, give him a sword” (Wumenguan XXXIII, the Verse). Paul Knitter's recent book can be that sword, seeking to penetrate the heart. Author of pioneering books on religious pluralism, Knitter is well-known as a theologian. With this new book, however, he crosses over into the genre of Catholic life-writing. Over the last ten years, only two other full-length Catholic “personal histories” assimilate from Buddhism and seem comparable: Elaine MacInnes's Zen Contemplation for Christians (2003), and Luciano Mazzocchi's Delle Onde e del mare (2006). Knitter recounts how his religion has developed from the Stoff of his life and how Buddhism has transformed his Christianity: he is now a double-belonger (215), but remains, he says, a “practicing Catholic” (Interview, National Catholic Reporter, 23 June 2010).
Each of Knitter's seven chapters unfolds dialectically: an account of his discomfit with the pertaining Catholic teaching, a “passing-over” to the corrective Buddhist teaching, and a “passing-back” to his Christian (usually synthetic) solution. The root-cause of Catholicism's problems is said to be dualism, a dualism largely fabricated by the Church's magisterium and the latter's dependence on Greek metaphysics (22, 92–93).
The first three chapters treat God the Other as Transcendent, Personal, and Mysterious. Catholicism anthropomorphizes God as “up there” (3); Buddhism, on the other hand, is about “connections” (8) and the non-duality of Samsara and Nirvana (14): Christians should affirm a God who is the “Connecting Spirit” (20) of “Interbeing” (22).
Catholicism addresses God as a “Super-you” (26) said, unconvincingly, to “allow” free will and thus permit “evil”; Buddhism, on the other hand, identifies the Other Power of the Buddha as the self-power of the individual, so immorality is the result of wrong choices and can always be remedied sooner or …
