Joseph O'Leary's book Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox demonstrates how richly a comparative theological study can inform fundamental understandings of one religious tradition in light of another.
O'Leary quotes many passages from the Vimalakīrti Sūtra that express various, related Mahāyāna Buddhist meanings of “nonduality” (advayatvam): the nonduality of phenomena and their emptiness, of conventional and ultimate truth, of samsāra and nirvāṇa; and nonduality as the negation of dualistic thought. He draws on these Buddhist understandings to illuminate ways nonduality of God and creation or God and humanity are asserted at the core of Christian theological understanding in Scripture and commentary. As O'Leary explains in his introduction,
The elements of nonduality that we attempt to discern in the Christian vision of the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery concern a union of God and humanity or an indwelling of God in creation [and in persons] which goes beyond the mystical and has affinities with the Mahāyāna [Buddhist] discovery of nirvāṇa in saṃsāra. They also imply negations of dualistic thinking, through the conjunction of love of God and love of neighbor, of dying with Christ and being raised from the dead, through the joyous exchange wherein Christ assumes our sin and mantles us with his righteousness, and through the bond that makes us all one in the body of Christ. (6–7)
Because O'Leary handles the Buddhist side of these comparisons with such care and alacrity, and because he discerns such rich areas of comparison with Christian concepts, he succeeds in reintroducing the reader to fundamental aspects of Christian thought while pointing scholarly readers to areas for further research, to explore additional implications of nonduality for Christian thought that are highlighted by interreligious comparison.
In this review, I want to suggest one other theme of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, related to the theme of nonduality, as a further point of fruitful comparison of Buddhism and Christianity, but which O'Leary did not explore in his book. In the opening dialogue of the sūtra, the bodhisattva Ratnākara offers extensive praise to the BuddhaFootnote 11 and then poses a question to him that sets the stage for the scripture as a whole: “Please, Lord, explain … the bodhisattvas’ purification of the Buddha field.” A buddha field (buddha-kṣetra) is a field of enlightened influence. A bodhisattva is a person who is advanced on the path to the fullest form of enlightenment, buddhahood. An enlightened being, whether a buddha or bodhisattva, exerts a strong positive force on the beings who reside in his or her field of influence, empowering those who are receptive to the dharma to cultivate, realize, and embody capacities of enlightenment like that of the bodhisattva.
Responding to that opening question, the Buddha explains how the meaning of enlightenment for bodhisattvas is thus intrinsically relational and communal. Bodhisattvas gradually attain enlightenment, he explains, by purifying their buddha fields, that is, by teaching other beings how to cultivate the same virtues and powers of enlightenment that the bodhisattva embodies in the very act of teaching them: love, compassion, joy in others' happiness, equanimity, the resolve to awaken fully for all (bodhicitta), generosity, moral conduct, patience, perseverance, all the meditative attainments with their associated powers, wisdom, skillful means to communicate the truths of the dharma, and so on.
By entering beings into the same kinds of cultivation and discipline that they are practicing, bodhisattvas thereby bring many others onto their same path, who in turn will enter others into the same types of cultivation, purifying their hearts, minds, perceptions, and actions. The progressive result of such a path is thereby the “purification” of one's whole field of influence, one's “buddha field,”Footnote 12 which ultimately results in the bodhisattva's attainment of buddhahood (buddhatvam). And this final attainment is embodied in the activity of a cosmic buddha (tathātagata), such as Aksobhya, Amitābha, or one of the other tathāgatas named in the Vimalakīrti Sūtra. From these cosmic buddha figures, the liberating powers and truths of enlightenment are shared in widening circles, as a vast power for communal awakening. Final enlightenment thus manifests not just as an individual attainment of personal freedom (not just svārtha, dharmakāya) but also as a field of influence that coalesces vast communities of awakening and liberation (parārtha, rupakāya).
The Buddha's reply to the opening question of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, then, points out the communal nature of enlightenment as the foundational understanding that informs all the other teachings of the sūtra. O'Leary does make reference to the sūtra's opening question, “How are bodhisattvas to purify their buddha fields?” and the Buddha's response, but mainly just to note that the “vaulting Indian imagination” of enlightened cosmology is “skillfully set at the service of bedrock teachings of down-to-earth virtues and attainments” (61–62). This is true, but O'Leary is not noticing there how the text's focus on buddha fields expresses a fundamental Mahāyāna shift in the definition of enlightenment. Pre-Mahāyāna abhidharma Buddhist traditions had raised up the arhat path, the path of individual liberation from samsara, as the primary normative model of enlightenment. The Vimalakīrti Sūtra, like other early Mahāyāna texts, wants to redefine the normative model of enlightenment as the bodhisattva path to buddhahood, which is intrinsically communal, thereby downgrading the arhat path and its individualistic orientation to a much lower status. It is likely for this very reason that the sūtra's opening dialogue begins with the question about buddha fields.
Phrased another way, how do the central Mahāyāna teachings of interdependence and emptiness, by connoting a basic nonduality between the bodhisattva and other sentient beings, define the starting point, practice, and result of the bodhisattva path, which is now understood as the normative Buddhist ideal? In the Mahāyāna context, an individual seeking liberation from samsara can no longer be viewed as separate from other beings that are not yet liberated from samsara. To seek fullest liberation, in a Mahāyāna vision of interdependence and emptiness, is necessarily to seek liberation for all, by cultivating liberating capacities for and with all, for the enlightenment of all.
The communal nature of practice (bodhisattva path) and of its fruit (buddhahood as a field of enlightened influence and activity) is reiterated throughout the sūtra in many passages that affirm the unity of compassionate activity and wisdom of emptiness, which together connote that a bodhisattva's liberation is indivisible from that of others. O'Leary has skillfully discussed these nondualities in ways that shed light on corresponding Christian themes of nonduality between God, Christ, and creation. What I am raising here are communal implications of nonduality in the Vimalakīrti that would also point to Christian ecclesiology for comparative study. As the Vimalakīrti scripture repeatedly declares, bodhisattvas realize the emptiness of all things (sarvadharmaṡūnyatā), an unmediated awareness of the inmost nature of things, which is also an intimate awareness of beings that understands how they fall into suffering by grasping at things as nonempty, as if things were substantially existent. Since emptiness is the nature of all things, the bodhisattvas' nondual realization of emptiness pervades all things like space, supporting an equally pervasive compassion that encompasses all beings who suffer for not yet realizing their emptiness. This raises up an ecclesiological dimension of Buddhism prominent in the Vimalakīrti as in many other Mahāyāna Sūtra.
The Dominican ecclesiologist J. M. R. Tillard has written: “To be ‘in Christ’ is to find oneself under the power of the Spirit of God that … knits into the unity of one body those who receive the gospel of God.… Whoever is ‘in Christ’ and ‘in the Spirit’ is never in a relation of one to one with God.”Footnote 13 Human participation in God, in this view, is intrinsically communal, ecclesiological. The individual is incorporated into the Body of Christ that reaches out to all in the building of God's kingdom. One's relationship to God can never be isolated from one's relation to others in God, which is ultimately one's relation to all of God's creation.
Analogously, in the context of the Vimalakīrti and other Mahāyāna sūtra, one's relationship to the buddhas cannot be isolated from one's relationship to all other beings, from whom the buddhas are undivided in emptiness and compassion. So, for example, in the seventh chapter of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, a striking juxtaposition is made between the bodhisattvas' devotional intimacy with the buddhas, whom they know to be undivided from themselves in emptiness, and the bodhisattvas' compassion for beings in their emptiness: “Though [bodhisattvas] worship buddhas by the millions with every conceivable offering, they never dwell upon the least difference between the buddhas and themselves. They journey through all buddha-fields in order to bring benefit to living beings, yet they see those fields as like empty space, free of any conceptual notions of ‘living beings.’”Footnote 14 The last sentence connotes that bodhisattvas have unified their compassion for beings with their awareness of their emptiness. Beings who have not realized emptiness remain caught in habits of reification and grasping that cause them suffering. To know beings in their emptiness is to recognize how they have been caught in suffering for not realizing emptiness, and thus to take compassionate action to free them.
Unlike Tillard's Christian understanding, the bodhisattva path and its fruition in buddhahood are intrinsically communal not because bodhisattvas are “knit into one body” by a supernatural Spirit, but because their practices awaken them in wisdom and compassion to the nondual nature of all beings and enlightenment, undivided in their nature of emptiness.
In sum, if the communal nature of enlightenment were recognized as a foundational aspect of the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, it would provide a rich basis for comparative reflection in Christian theology that focuses on ecclesiology.
In this regard, I wonder if O'Leary may, to some degree, have been drawn away from ecclesiological dimensions of the Vimalakīrti text by his focus on what he described as the “here-and-now character of Buddhist salvation” that he noticed in some parts of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, which, as he put it, are “not distracted by a supernatural ‘beyond.’” On page 72, O'Leary references a Japanese Marxist whose comments on the Vimalakīrti Sūtra downplay its transcendental aspects (including perhaps the notion of buddha fields?) to focus on “practical here-and-now salvation” as a hermeneutic key, which resonates with a this-worldly kind of Zen focus, and with the reductive materialism of modernist cultures that now encounter this text. But I wonder if this direction of thought may partially prevent O'Leary from noticing how the opening question of the sūtra on buddha fields provides a kind of ecclesiological organizing theme of the sūtra that goes hand in hand with the theme of nonduality: the understanding that one's awakening to nondual liberation cannot be separated from the awakening of multitudes of other beings, and that this reality must be worked out relationally in countless concrete actions of compassionate responsiveness and confrontation, which are then depicted in numerous dialogues and encounters in the rest of the sūtra.
