Buddhist Emptiness and the Christian God

It is often assumed that since the ultimate is understood by Buddhists to be Emptiness and by Christians to be God, Emptiness and God must be competing interpretations or designations of the same reality. There may, instead, be diverse ultimates. The quest for the ultimate in India first led to Brahman; in the West, to Being. Buddhism dissolved Brahman into Emptiness. In this century Being has been dissolved into the being of beings or what Whitehead calls creativity. There are other traditions, especially Judaism and Confucianism which have sought the ultimate as the ground or principle of rightness. Unlike Judaism and Confucianism, Christianity stresses that true rightness can be attained only as a gift, but Christianity does not thereby turn away from the principle of rightness. On the contrary, this principle is the giver. In both the Judeo-Christian and Confucian traditions, there have been efforts to assimilate the metaphysical ultimate to the ultimate of rightness, but the resultant syntheses have proved unstable. Nevertheless, in Christianity the idea of God was long associated with such a synthesis. With the dissolution of the metaphysical Being into the being of beings and with the collapse of the synthesis between Being or being and the principle of rightness, the idea of God has become problematic. It is best to reaffirm its identification with the principle of rightness; for worship is directed to this. The metaphysical ultimate is realized rather than properly worshipped. God can then be recognized as categorically distinct from being or creativity or Emptiness. The question now is how faith in God is related to the realization of Emptiness. God can be conceived as the supreme and everlasting Empty One in distinction from Emptiness as such, thus as the one cosmic Buddha. The realization of Emptiness is the realization of oneself as an instance of dependent co-origination or the concrescence of all things. This is often held to be beyond the distinction of good and evil, right and wrong. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the concern for rightness, the realization of Emptiness appears as a fulfilment of this principle. This can be explained if we assume that God as the principle of rightness participates in every instance of John B. Cobb, Jr., is Ingraham Professor of Theology in the School of Theology at Claremont and Avery Professor of Religion in the Claremont Graduate School. He is director of the Center for Process Studies. Prof. Cobb wrote this paper while a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. This content downloaded from 40.77.167.48 on Thu, 09 Jun 2016 06:56:07 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 12 John B. Cobb, Jr. dependent co-origination, that to be empty is to be open to each element in the concrescence playing its own proper role, and that God's proper role is to guide the concrescence. In this case, the realization of Emptiness is at the same time conformation to the principle of rightness. It may be that faith in God as conformation to the principle of rightness can also lead to the realization of Emptiness. M topic is quite ambitious: it is the ultimate. In Buddhism the ultimate is often designated as Emptiness. In Christendom, at least traditionally, the ultimate has been declared to be God. One view of this situation is that Emptiness and God are but two names of the same reality, such that understanding between East and West is a matter of clarifying terminology. Another view is that these two names express opposing views of what the one ultimate reality is. In that case we can either engage in disputation or seek some sort of dialectical reconciliation. My own view is that Emptiness and God name two quite different ultimates to which we are related in two quite different ways. Indeed, there may be still other ultimates, such as the Whole or Cosmos, in relation to which segments of humanity have taken their bearings. If so, the question is whether human beings can develop their relations to this multiplicity of ultimates in ways that are not mutually exclusive. In this paper this question will be pressed only in terms of the Buddhist and Christian ultimate. I propose to develop my position as follows. First, I will consider briefly the quest for the ultimate as it has led to Being in the West and to Brahman in the East. I will note how in Buddhism and in twentieth century philosophy Brahman or Being has been dissolved into Emptiness. Second, I will discuss the sense of rightness as pointing to another ultimate that has come most clearly to expression in Confucianism and Judaism. I will evaluate the efforts that have been made by the heirs of these traditions to assimilate the metaphysical ultimate to this ultimate principle of rightness. Third, I will consider the status of the idea of God in light of the dissolution of the ultimate into two ultimates, urging its renewal as a designation of the principle of rightness. Fourth, I will consider whether the realization of Emptiness and faith in God are mutually exclusive states, or whether they can be achieved in