Feldmeier's book is a work in comparative theology in the vein of James Fredericks’ Buddhists and Christians: Through Comparative Theology to Solidarity (Orbis Books, 2004), Paul Knitter's Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian (Oneworld Publications, 2009), and Kristin Largen's What Christians Can Learn from Buddhism (Fortress Press, 2009). Like Fredericks, Feldmeier begins by locating his project with respect to theologies of religion since Vatican II, taking us through models of exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism, before roughly espousing the position of Mark Heim, that religions like Buddhism and Christianity may have entirely different ends, but can nevertheless inform and benefit each other. Largen's Gadamerian explanation of this process of mutual information is highly recommended.
Unlike Fredericks, whose comparison focuses primarily on Nagarjuna and Aquinas, or Knitter, who focuses mostly on a deconstruction of traditional Christology, Feldmeier's “encounters” are much further ranging, his cast of interlocutors including Ashvagosha, Buddhaghosa, Nagarjuna, Shantideva, and Kuo'an Shiyuan, in dialogue with thinkers spanning the history of Christian spirituality (St. John of the Cross, Gregory of Nyssa, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, and Thomas Merton).
Given such a range, a reader new to many of these writers could easily become lost or overwhelmed, but Feldmeier excels in providing careful exposition and context, and the work performs an effective and profitable cartography to these figures and the terrain they tread in common. The labor of dialogue does in fact mostly occur in long periods of alternating exposition, while the punctuating moments of encounter consist more of suggestion and association rather than argument. Certain themes do come to the fore—the crucial significance of shunyata or “emptiness” in Buddhism, for example, which corresponds in many ways to the Christian emphasis on the limits of language and conception in theology (the via negativa)—but while Fredericks, in addressing the same comparison, argued specifically that Nagarjuna's fourfold negation as a whole is incommensurate with the via negativa or even eminentia (chapter 4), Feldmeier is content to draw the analogy without further analysis.
Feldmeier does acknowledge the need for such analysis. On page 192, for example, he indicates some “extraordinary claims” often made in the context of similar comparative projects, that Christianity is essentially nondualistic, for instance, or that Buddhist nonself is the same as dying to Christ: these claims “require a detailed argument,” he intones, and “a case would have to be made metaphysically.” But the present book does not seem to be the occasion for this type of analysis. The most distinctive claim Feldmeier himself makes, in a number of places, is that Mahayana Buddhism may be considered theistic in its concern for an absolute reality (tathata/suchness) and the Buddha nature in all things. This would be an “impersonal” rather than “personal” theism, he suggests, but further analysis, including the relevance of theistic creation and the goodness of created things, is left to the reader's own discernment.
To an extent, a project such as this, doing the work of contextualization of doctrine rather than moving too quickly into processing, is precisely what is needed in comparative theology, and this is perhaps Feldmeier's explicit aim—he does say at one point (11) that “this book seeks to help the reader enlarge her own soul” (i.e., rather than do it for her). For a Christian audience, embedding foreign doctrines more thoroughly in their original contexts of signification helps guard against a commodifying appropriation of those doctrines, in which they lose their ability precisely to enlarge our souls. Readers of Feldmeier should bear this in mind when he elsewhere speaks of “creative appropriation” and suggests that non-Christian traditions “have religious goods the church does not have and could use” (5).
