The
Buddha's 'Undetermined Questions' and the Religions
(pdf available here)
In
considering the 'conflicting truth claims' of the different
religions we need not only a theory of religious knowledge but
also a theory of religious ignorance. And we have a very good
start to this in the Buddha's doctrine of the avaykata, the
undetermined, or unanswered, questions.
The
ten undetermined questions
There
are two main texts in the Pali scriptures, Suttas 63 and 72
of the Majjhima Nikaya, each with the same list of ten propositions
or 'views' (ditthi):
1.
The world is eternal.
2. The world is not eternal.
3. The world is (spatially) infinite.
4. The world is not (spatially) infinite.
5. The soul (jiva) is identical with the body.
6. The soul is not identical with the body.
7. The Tathagata (a perfectly enlightened being) exists after
death.
8. The Tathagata does not exist after death.
9. The Tathagata both exists and does not exist after death.
10. The Tathagata neither exists nor does not exist after death.
The issues dealt with by these ten propositions fall into two
categories, which I shall call respectively unanswered questions
and unanswerable questions. (Whether this distinction was in
the mind of Gautama, or in the minds of the editors
of the Pali canon, I do not profess to know.) The Buddha refused
to give any teaching about these issues, although the monk Malunkyaputta
challenged him, 'If the Lord knows that the world is eternal,
let the Lord explain to me that the world is eternal. If the
Lord knows that the world is not eternal, let the Lord explain
to me that the world is not eternal. If the Lord does not know
whether the world is eternal or whether the world is not eternal,
then, not knowing, not seeing, this would be honest, namely
to say, 'I do not know, I do not see'. And likewise with the
other questions (Majjhima Nikaya, 63:427). But the Buddha's
fundamental point - which was always for him the soteriological
point - was that to know the answers to these questions is not
necessary for liberation and that to treat them as though they
were will only hinder our advance toward liberation. To make
his point he told the parable of the man pierced by a poisoned
arrow. If he insists, before receiving medical treatment, on
knowing who shot the arrow, and of what clan he is, what kind
of bow he was using, what the bow string and the shaft of the
arrow were made of, from what kind of bird the feathers on the
arrow came, and so on, he will die before his thirst for knowledge
is satisfied. Likewise, if we distract ourselves from the path
to enlightenment by trying to settle these disputed cosmological
and metaphysical issues we may well fail to be healed from birth,
ageing, dying, grief, sorrow, suffering, lamentation and despair.
And so these matters are set aside by the Buddha because such
knowledge 'is not connected with the goal, is not fundamental
to the Brahma-faring, and does not conduce to turning away from,
nor to dispassion, stopping, calming, super-knowledge, awakening
nor to nibbana' (Ibid., 63:431).
Unanswered
and unanswerable questions
This
applies to both of the two kinds of issues. The difference between
them is, however, of considerable interest. The first, consisting
of what I am calling the unanswered questions, are questions
to which there is a true answer although we do not in fact know
what it is. On the face of it Malunkyaputta's protest is reasonable.
The world must be either eternal or not eternal, etc. He reckons
that if the Buddha has attained insight into all things he will
know which. And indeed it may be that the Buddha does know;
this is not clear from the Pali scriptures. But whether or not
he knows, he insists that the answer is not necessary for liberation
and that to treat it as soteriologically important would only
distract Malunkyputta from a single-minded striving to attain
nirvana.
The second kind of issue is illustrated by the question, asked
by the monk Vaccagotta, about the state of the Tathagata after
death. A Tathagata is a fully enlightened being, a Buddha, and
the question concerns the ultimate conclusion of the process
of finite human existence. This is not the question of the fate
after death of ordinary unenlightened individuals; the Buddha's
answer to that was the doctrine of rebirth. In response to Vaccagotta's
question he rejects as inapplicable the entire range of possible
answers in terms of which the question was posed - namely, by
specifying in what sphere the Tathagata arises after death:
'Arise',
Vaccha, does not apply.
Well, then, good Gotama, does he not arise?
'Does not arise', Vaccha, does not apply.
Well then, good Gotama, does he both arise and not arise?
'Both arises and does not arise', Vaccha, does not apply.
Well then, good Gotama, does he neither arise nor not arise?
'Neither arises nor does not arise', Vaccha, does not apply
(Ibid., 72: 486).
Vaccha
then expresses his bewilderment and disappointment, and the
Buddha responds, 'You ought to be at a loss, Vaccha, you ought
to be bewildered. For Vaccha, this dhamma is deep, difficult
to see, difficult to understand, peaceful, excellent, beyond
dialectics, subtle, intelligible to the wise . . ' (Ibid., 487)
- referring all the time to the mystery of parinirvana, nirvana
beyond this life. It is misleading to say that after death the
Tathagata - that is, the fully enlightened individual that we
know in this life - exists, or does not exist, or both exists
and does not exist, or neither exists nor non-exists beyond
this life. The Buddha then illustrates the idea of a question
which is so put that it has no answer by speaking of a flame
that has been quenched. In which direction has the flame gone
- east, west, north or south? None of the permitted answers
applies. Likewise what happens after the bodily death of a Tathagata
cannot be expressed in our available categories of thought.
For the analogy of the quenched flame is not intended to indicate
one particular answer, namely nonexistence. For 'Freed from
denotation by consciousness', Gautama says, 'is the Tathagata,
Vaccha, he is deep, immeasurable, unfathomable as is the great
ocean' (Ibid., 488).
The difference, then, between the two kinds of avaykata is this.
The unanswered questions are legitimate questions to which there
are true answers, but to which we do not in fact know the answers.
It is not excluded, in logic, that human beings might some day
come to know the truth of these matters. But it would still
be the case that salvation/liberation neither depends upon not
is assisted by such knowledge, and that the search for it as
a religious end is not conducive to salvation/liberation. In
distinction from these, the unanswerable questions are about
realities transcending the systems of categories available in
our human thought and language. They are matters which, in St
Paul's words, 'No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart
of man conceived' (I Corinthians 2:9). It seems appropriate
to refer to the subject matter of these unanswerable questions
as mysteries, matters that are beyond human comprehension and
expression. But once again we do not, according to the Buddha,
need to be able to penetrate these mysteries in order to attain
to liberation; and to feel that we must hold a view concerning
them is soteriologically counterproductive.
The sciences, then, are left to do their own legitimate work
of finding out what the physical universe is composed of, and
how it works, without it's conclusions affecting either way
the dharma, the saving religious truth. The Buddha would not,
then, have endorsed the contemporary attempts to use the Big
Bang or the anthropic principle or the concept of emergence,
or any other aspect of physics or of scientific cosmology, as
a new form of natural theology leading 'from science to God'.
Nor, on the other hand, would he have supported the labours
of theologians over the centuries, using Christian examples,
who have developed complex systems of doctrine about the attributes
of God, and whether or not God has 'middle knowledge' (knowledge
of what all humans would freely do in all possible circumstances),
and how one person (Jesus) could have two natures, one human
and the other divine, and whether or not the members of the
Trinity are three distinct centres of consciousness, etc., etc.
All such matters would come, for him, under the heading of speculative
views, the pursuit of which is not relevant to salvation.
Living
in a 'need to know' universe
Those
of us who are not Buddhists should nevertheless be open to benefiting
from the Buddha's very challenging insights. It could be that
the universe operates on a 'need to know' basis and that what,
religiously, we need to know is soteriological rather than metaphysical.
If so, the doctrinal differences between the religious traditions,
responding in their distinctively different ways to the various
unanswered and unanswerable (because wrongly posed) questions,
will not affect the all-important matter of salvation/liberation.
This is the possibility that I now want to explore.
The 'conflicting truth claims' of the different religions are
of three kinds: in ascending order of importance, first, historical
issues; second, what I shall call (for want of a better name)
trans-historical issues; and third, conceptions of the ultimate
reality to which the religions are, on a religious interpretation
of them, different responses. I want to suggest that these three
sets of issues all concern either unanswered or unanswerable
questions, which naturally evoke theories and guesses but concerning
which knowledge is not necessary for salvation/liberation.
Historical
issues
Consider
first conflicts of historical truth-claims. (I mean 'historical'
here in the sense of referring to alleged past events in world
history which, if they occurred, would have been able, had the
necessary technology been available, to be recorded with camera
and/or microphone.) There are in fact very few conflicts of
this kind between the different traditions. In general the historical
affirmations of the religions refer to different and non-overlapping
strands of history, and the doctrines of tradition A have nothing
to say, either positively or negatively, about the distinctive
historical beliefs of tradition B. For example, Judaism tells
the story of the conflict between Elijah and the priests of
Baal, whilst the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist scriptures
are not concerned to confirm or deny this - it belongs to a
quite different universe of discourse from their own. Indeed
the only instances I have been able to identify of direct inter-traditional
conflict of historical beliefs are the Christian belief that
Jesus died on the cross versus the Muslim belief that he only
appeared to die (Qur'an, 4: 157), and the Jewish belief that
it was Isaac, versus the Muslim belief that it was his brother,
Ishmael, who was nearly sacrificed on Mount Moriah. What are
much more common are historical disagreements within a tradition,
producing splits between rival subtraditions - for example,
the Mahayana-Theravada debate as to whether the latter preserves
the original teaching of the Buddha; the Catholic-Protestant
dispute as to whether Jesus appointed Peter as head of his church
and whether the popes are Peter's successors in this office;
and the Sunni-Shia dispute as to whether Muhammad appointed
his nephew 'Ali as his successor in the leadership of the Muslim
Ummah.
Such historical issues - both inter- and intra-traditional -
can only properly be settled by historical evidence. In practice,
however, they are not usually today definitively settleable
because adequate historical evidence is no longer available.
The historian, qua historian, has to be content to live with
uncertainty. These, then, are examples of unanswered questions
- questions to which there are true answers although we do not,
and indeed may perhaps sometimes never, know with certainty
what those answers are.
However, it is possible to hold that even though we lack conclusive
evidence, such beliefs are nevertheless so integral to a whole
religious system that it is necessary for salvation/liberation
to hold certain views as a matter of faith. Thus many Christians
would hold that if Jesus did not die on the cross, then (a)
the New Testament records are unreliable, (b) Jesus' did not
die to atone for the sins of the world, and (c) his subsequent
resurrection cannot have occurred, and that these implications
would be fatal to the system of Christian doctrine. If it is
then added that it is necessary for salvation to accept the
traditional system of Christian doctrine, it will follow that
only those who believe by faith that Jesus died on the cross
are able to be saved.
This particular question of Jesus' death raises well some of
the issues that we have to look at. As a strictly historical
question it is fairly nonthreatening to Christian faith. For
the historical evidence is distinctly onesided. Although the
Gospel accounts come from two generations after the event, they
all concur in affirming a death, as do the letters of St Paul,
earlier than the Gospels, and there is also an independent reference
in Josephus' Antiquities to Jesus being crucified (though there
has been much discussion about the authenticity of this passage);
and the only basis on which his death is denied within Islam
is the theological inference that God would not allow so holy
a prophet to be killed. But this inference does not constitute
historical counter-evidence. Any strictly historical question
mark is a very slight and shadowy one arising merely from the
general fact that we cannot attain one hundred per cent certainty
about any historical details of the remote past. So there is
(in my view at least) no serious purely historical dispute here.
There is however a theological dispute. Here I can only express
my own view. On the one hand, I have no doubts as to the historicity
of Jesus' death on the cross. But on the other hand I think
that the ideas that his death was an atonement for human sin,
and that his disciples' experience of his presence after his
death was a physical experience, are later creations of the
church and are optional Christian beliefs.
Those fundamentalist Christians who do affirm that it is essential
for salvation to believe the church's doctrines occupy the exclusivist
position, mirroring exclusivism within the other traditions,
a stance which has always been used to validate ethnic and political
hatreds and wars. For my part, I find the idea that God has
ordained a scheme under which the large majority of the human
race, who were not born into a Christian society, are condemned
to perdition, so morally repulsive that it would negate the
Godness, or worship-worthiness, of a being who was said to be
God. It would thus be, to me, a religiously self-refuting view.
I shall therefore pass on to the next type of conflict of belief.
Trans-historical
issues
This
consists of matters of what I am calling, for want of a better
name, trans-historical fact. These are matters of fact which
are not settleable by historical evidence. Whether or not the
universe had a beginning is such a question. But the Buddha's
point was that it is not necessary for, or conducive to, liberation
to know whether the universe is infinite in time and/or infinite
in space. I would go further and say that no scientific knowledge
can in itself be religiously significant except in so far as
the religions unwisely adopt dogmatic views, as they have often
done, on questions in astronomy, geology, biology, neurophysiology,
astrophysics or any other of the special sciences. (They have
usually done so because they accepted the science of the time
when their scriptures were written as divinely revealed and
so have lagged behind advancing scientific knowledge). Religiously,
the physical universe is ambiguous, in the sense that everything
we know or can conceive of knowing about its physical structure
and workings is capable of being construed both religiously
and naturalistically. Thus if the postulated big bang of some
13-15 billion years ago was unique, it does not necessarily
follow that there is a God who created it; and on the other
hand if the universe is going through an infinite succession
of expansions and contractions, it does not necessarily follow
that it is not a divine creation. Nor is there any objective
sense of probability in which scientific discoveries can render
the existence of God either more or less probable. The only
way to pull a divine rabbit out of the scientific hat would
be to reduce the concept of God to that of an aspect of the
physical universe - such as energy, or life, or order, or creativity
or complexification. Certainly, if we choose to call any of
these God, then science can indeed lead us to God. But the move
will inevitably be unacceptably reductionistic from the point
of view of belief in a transcendent divine reality.
The doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth is another response
to an unanswered trans-historical question. Of course, the Buddha
himself did not classify it in this way. It seemed obvious to
all within his religio-cultural world that human life is part
of a vast karmic process involving repeated rebirths in this
and other worlds. Further, during the hours of his progressive
enlightenment under the Bo tree at Bodhgaya the Buddha remembered
all his previous lives, as recounted in several places (e.g.,
Majjhima Nikaya 36: 247-8), as also did disciples who had attained
to enlightenment (Ibid.,73:496). But so far as the West is concerned
the idea of reincarnation conflicts both with traditional Jewish,
Christian and Muslim beliefs and with contemporary western naturalism.
Thus looked at on the world scale, we have to categorise reincarnation
as one of the avyakata or undetermined issues. And if we accept
the Buddha's basic soteriological insight, we shall conclude
that it is neither necessary for salvation/liberation to know
whether reincarnation occurs, nor conducive to salvation/liberation
to devote one's energies to establishing such knowledge.
Unanswerable
questions
Let
us turn now to an instance, not of an unanswered, but of an
unanswerable question. Here the Buddha's example was the state
of a Tathagata - that is, a perfected human being - after death.
This is the question of the ultimate state to which the projectory
of human spiritual growth finally leads. And the Buddha said
that this cannot be described in our present set of human concepts.
None of the options of which we can conceive is applicable.
The notion of what we mean by a self either existing or not
existing does not apply. What lies beyond what we now think
of as the self cannot be expressed in our present conceptual
system or pictured with our present imaginative resources: 'Freed
from denotation by consciousness is the Tathagata, Vaccha.'
And once again the Buddha's point was not only that we cannot
at present know what the ultimate state is but also that we
do not now need to know, and that it is not be conducive to
salvation/liberation to speculate about it - and still less
(I think we may add) to insist that everyone must accept our
own speculation.
I shall come presently to the third level of disagreement, which
concerns conceptions of the ultimate. But let us pause here
to draw some interim conclusions. The belief systems of the
great world faiths consist very largely of assertions regarding
what I have called matters of trans-historical fact. I shall
consider some Christian examples, though each of the other world
faiths deals in the same or similar issues. The traditional
Christian dogmas include: that the universe began through an
act of divine creation; that the first human beings fell from
grace, so that all of us since have inherited their original
sin; that we can be forgiven by God only as a result of his
Son dying on the cross; that Jesus had a virginal conception,
a bodily resurrection and a bodily ascension into the sky; that
after death ,we go either to heaven or to hell (or to heaven
via purgatory); that the Bible is the divinely inspired and
therefore authoritative Word of God to humanity; that there
is no other way in which humans can be saved except by faith
in Christ. These are dogmas which nearly all Christians from
about the end of the second to about the end of the eighteenth
century confidently believed. However, during the last 200 or
so years thoughtful Christians have been treating this belief
system as more open to development in the light of new knowledge
and new thinking than was possible during the ages of dogmatic
faith. When the traditional way of construing a basic concept
leads to mounting difficulties, it is now regarded as possible
to explore other construals of it. The cumulative result has
been gradually to disentangle the Christian life from commitment
to particular dogmatic answers to both the unanswered and the
unanswerable questions. This is the direction in which Christian
theology has been going for more than a century, and in which
it seems likely to continue. Accordingly, forms of Christian
theology which leave open the unanswered questions, and which
respond with what are accepted as mythic stories to the unanswerable
questions, are at present being experimentally developed. It
will, however, be a long time before any new consensus develops,
and when it does, it may well prove to be not another monolithic
consensus at all but rather a pluralistic range of differing
theoretical frameworks for the same soteriological process.
Further, there will probably always be some, indeed probably
many, who need a simple, unproblematic belief-system such as
the older tradition provided. Indeed in the early 21st century
we are seeing a reversion towards fundamentalism all round the
world, within Islam and Hinduism as well as Christianity.
Application
to Buddhism
Let
us now consider how the Buddha's doctrine of the unanswered
and the unanswerable questions might apply to the developments
in Buddhist thought after his time. I would suggest that any
doctrine that generalises dogmatically beyond the scope of experience,
including crucially the experience of enlightenment, will be
affected by it.
Thus, first, to say that we find ourselves to be part of a vast
continuous process of interdependent change (pratitya samutpada),
in which there is no aseity, or self-existence, but everything
is mutually co-constituted by everything else, is to affirm
a doctrine based upon experience and the analysis of experience.
But to go beyond this to assert that this continuum of pratitya
samutpada is uncreated, and not structured towards any end or
fulfilment, is to go beyond the witness of experience. The existence
of a creator is not dogmatically denied, according least to
some well-known scholars of Buddhism. Thus Edward Conze, who
was himself a Buddhist, wrote that ' Buddhist tradition does
not exactly deny the existence of a creator, but it is not really
interested to know who created the universe. The purpose of
Buddhist doctrine is to release beings from suffering, and speculations
concerning the origin of the universe are held to be immaterial
to that task' (Buddhism, Its Essence and Development, Harper
Torchbooks, 1975, p. 39). I suggest that dogmatic insistence
upon the nonexistence (as also of the existence) of a creator,
and a dogmatic insistence that the universe does not have a
teleological structure moving towards what we can refer to,
in Buddhist language, as universal nirvana, would be to go beyond
what is known within Buddhist experience. In practice, not many
Buddhists doubt that there is such a soteriological structure;
but to insist that such views are essential in order to find
liberation would be soteriologically counterproductive.
But further, consider the doctrine that the ultimate reality
indicated by the Mahayana term sunyata ('emptiness') is identical
with pratitya samutpada, the world process. Is this a truth
necessary for liberation, or an optional speculative view? One
possible Buddhist position, I suggest, is that the ultimate
reality, sunyata, is manifested within Buddhist experience as
pratitya samutpada, but is not exhausted by or limited to the
world process. Rather, it is itself beyond all concepts, including
the concept of pratitya samutpada, being empty of everything
that human thought can attribute to it. Thus Masao Abe in his
important paper 'A Dynamic Unity in Religious Pluralism: a Proposal
from the Buddhist Point of View' (in The Experience of Religious
Diversity, ed. John Hick and Hasan Askari, Gower 1985), suggests
that sunyata, which is ultimate reality, the Real, is manifested
as the various personal Gods, and presumably also (though he
does not say this) the nonpersonal Absolutes, of the different
world religions. It is the ground of these different experienced
manifestations within human consciousness. If he were to add
that the absolute of distinctively Buddhist experience, namely
pratitya samutpada, is also a manifestation of sunyata, we would
then have what would in principle be a field theory of religion.
We would be saying that the ultimate reality, in itself inexperienceable
and beyond the scope of human conceptualization, is experienced
in a range of different ways made possible by the different
spiritual disciplines and systems of religious thought. There
are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other theistic experiences
of sunyata as a personal deity. There is the advaitic Hindu
experience of sunyata as Brahman. And there is the Mahayana
Buddhist experience of sunyata as the world-process, pratitya
samutpada. Here the ultimate is experienced as wholly immanent
within the immediately experienced. But the kind of theory I
am now suggesting would not claim that this is the only authentic
mode of experience of the ultimate. Rather, there is a range
of different but, so far as we can tell, equally valid modes.
Application
to Christianity
So
what l am suggesting in relation to questions of trans-historical
fact is that it would be a mark of wisdom and maturity frankly
to acknowledge our ignorance. We should recognise that there
is a range of possibilities, and should not try to insist that
everyone - neither all Christians nor (still less) all human
beings - must affirm the position which appeals most to ourselves.
Rather, we should realise that it is not necessary for salvation/liberation
to know whether, for example, the universe had a beginning and
will have an end (as western thought has generally supposed),
or whether on the contrary it goes in a beginningless and endless
series of cycles (as eastern thought has generally supposed).
Further, we should take very seriously the Buddha's insight
that to regard such questions as soteriologically vital can
only hinder the salvific process. And concerning the unanswerable
questions - unanswerable because posed in human terms about
realities which transcend our human conceptualities - it would
again be a mark of wisdom and maturity to accept our ignorance.
We do not know, for example, the nature of the ultimate eschatological
state - whether it is a state of what we now call ourselves,
whether it is in what we now know as space or in what we now
know as time, and so on. The questions that we pose about it
may be so wide of the mark that any answers to them are worse
than useless. If a caterpillar could ask, concerning its own
future post-chrysalis state, how many legs it will then have,
how fast it will be able to walk, and what kind of leaves it
will be able to eat, the Buddha would say, 'Number of legs,
speed of walking, eating of leaves, Vaccha, do not apply. Freed
from denotation by caterpillar consciousness is the butterfly.'
The suggestion, then, that we derive from the Buddha's words
is that we should sit very lightly to our inherited Christian
dogmas concerning creation, fall, eschatology and method of
salvation. In this last item I would emphasise the word 'method'.
The fact of salvation/liberation, in the concrete sense of the
progressive transformation of human existence from self-centredness
to Reality-centredness, or (in Christian terms) to God-centredness,
is not in question. It is an observable fact - observable indirectly
in its fruits in human life. But the dogma that this is made
possible only by the death of Christ is a distinctively Christian
theory; and it is to this and to all such theories that we should
sit lightly, realising that each has been developed in the context
of a particular tradition and has its use only within that context.
The reality of salvation/liberation is limitlessly more important
than particular theories about it; and to try to insist that
all Christians, or all human beings, must accept the traditional
Christian theory, or family of theories, would be - and has
I think in fact been - soteriologically counterproductive.
Parallel considerations apply, of course, to the dogmas of the
other great world faiths, though I do not have space to develop
these here. But the outcome, so far as interfaith relations
is concerned, is that the kinds of doctrinal differences that
we have been considering should be matters of keen speculative
interest rather than matters of ultimate concern in which our
religious existence is felt to be at stake.
Different
conceptions of ultimate reality
Finally,
let us turn to the most fundamental differences of belief between
the great traditions, namely, their different conceptions of
the ultimate reality to which the religions constitute our human
responses. In speaking of the ultimate focus of religious thought
and experience, I propose to use the term 'the Real'. Is the
Real, then, personal or nonpersonal? If personal, is it the
Adonai of rabbinic Judaism, or the Holy Trinity of Christianity,
or the Allah of Islam, or the Shiva or Vishnu of theistic Hinduism,
or the wah guru of Sikhism? If nonpersonal, is it the Brahman
of advaitic Hinduism, or the Tao of Chinese religion, or the
Dharmakaya or Sunyata or Nirvana of Buddhism? The hypothesis
that I should like to consider is that the nature of the Real
in itself, independently of human awareness of it, is the ultimate
unanswerable question. Our human concepts, drawn as they are
from our earthly experience, including personality and impersonality,
do not apply to the Real in itself, but only to the Real as
humanly thought, experienced and responded to within the different
traditions. 'Thou art formless', says the Hindu Yogava'sistha,
'Thine only form is our knowledge of Thee' (I: 28). In Buddhist
terms we could say: The Real is sunyata, empty, formless, but
takes different forms within human experience. And in theistic
terms: the Godhead in itself is unknowable, but in relation
to human consciousness it becomes the range of divine personae
worshipped within the different theistic traditions. Such manifestations
are formed at the interface between the Real and the various
streams of human life. They consist both in the personae of
the Real - Adonai, the Holy Trinity, Allah, Vishnu and so on
- and its impersonae, Brahman, the Dharmakaya, the Tao and the
rest. And our concepts - such as personality, consciousness,
goodness, love, justice, power, unity, plurality, substantiality
- apply literally, in either the univocal or the analogical
mode, to these manifestations. But in speaking literally in
these ways about a manifestation of the Real we are at the same
times speaking mythologically about the Real in itself. Thus,
that the Real is love is literally true of its manifestation
as the heavenly Father of the New Testament or as the Krishna
of the Bhagavad Gita, and mythologically true of the Real in
itself; and that the Real is rahman rahim (gracious and merciful)
is literally true of its manifestation as the Allah of the Qur'an,
and mythologically true of the Real in itself; and that the
Real is being-consciousness-bliss (satchitananda) is literally
true of its experienced manifestation as Brahman and mythologically
true of the Real in itself. By 'mythologically true' I mean
tending to evoke in the human hearer an appropriate dispositional
response. For in so far as the personae and impersonae of the
Real are authentic manifestations of it, they are in soteriological
alignment with the Real, so that a right response to one of
these manifestations constitutes a right response - not the
only right response but a right response - to the Real. Thus
in responding to the heavenly Father as love by loving our neighbour,
or in responding to the Dharma by seeking to attain unselfcentred
existence, we are responding rightly to the Real.
If this is so, the different conceptions of the Real, in terms
of which the different forms of religious experience and response
are structured, are not literally true or false descriptions
of the Real but are mythologically true in so far as they are
soteriologically effective. And there is no evident reason why
a variety of such mythological conceptions of the Real should
not prove to be equally soteriologically effective and hence
equally mythologically true. To what extent this is in fact
the case cannot be decided a priori, but only by observing the
fruits of salvation/liberation in human life, individual and
communal, within the contexts of the different traditions. Such
a comparative assessment is extremely difficult, except as a
very rough impression. I would only say that we have at this
point no adequate reason to think that any of the great world
traditions is soteriologically superior to any other.
Conclusion
To
conclude, then, I have suggested that the doctrinal differences
between the great world faiths consist in different responses,
formed within different cultural histories, to a range of unanswered
and unanswerable questions. These questions are either good
questions to which we do not at present know the answer, but
in relation to which a variety of hypotheses and guesses are
permissible, or questions to which there can be no non-misleading
answer because the terms in which they are posed are not applicable
to the realities to which they refer. Although dogmas concerning
these realities are therefore not appropriate, myth-making is
not only appropriate but needed, and religious myths are true
in so far as the dispositional response which they tend to evoke
makes for the transformation of human existence from self-centredness
to Reality-centeredness.
(This
is a revised version of an article first published in Hermeneutics,
Religious Pluralism, and Truth, Wake Forest University Press,
1989, edited by Gregory D. Pritchard, and reprinted with permission
in John Hick, Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy
of Religion, London: Macmillan and New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993, now reproduced here, with permission, in a much
revised form).
©
John Hick, 2004.