Enterprising students might mistake the subtitle of Harold Netland and Keith Yandell’s Buddhism: A Christian Exploration and Appraisal as immediately suggestive of those popular works in whose company the incessant ring of platitudes and expansive generalizations quickly becomes tiresome and an effective excuse for a good break from reading. ‘Exploration,’ after all, does call to mind the beginning of some intellectual adventure, a turnoff for those already somewhat acquainted with basic ideas of that behemoth called Buddhism. It would be unfortunate, though, were this book to be put aside in favor of some other on that basis.
It is true that it covers standard fare for an introductory text. Chapters one through three follow Buddhism’s historical development, from its birth in India to its ongoing transformation as it spread into China, Japan, and then the West. Historically, the authors begin with the Hindu religious context against which Buddhism, with its rejection of the authority of the Vedas and Upanishads and of the existence of enduring souls, is thrown into greater relief. Chapter one covers basic teachings of Gautama the Buddha and distinctives of Theravada Buddhism, which is contrasted with the doctrinal development of Mahayana tradition in the second chapter. The same chapter situates the evolution and enlargement of Mahayana Buddhism and the emergence of the Pure Land, Zen, Tibetan, and Vajrayana traditions within Buddhism’s geographical expansion in the East.
As for the West, the 1898 World Parliament of Religions marked a turning point before which the impact of Buddhism of any sort was modest at best, its most notable impressions being felt mainly by Transcendentalists and a few European intellectuals. But the general impression one gets in moving through chapter 3 is that the move from relative absence in the West to a popularity beyond the scope of the actual number of its adherents has not been accompanied by a loss of ignorance. The mix of mass media, the popularizations of such figures as D. T. Suzuki and Masao Abe, and the oversimplifications of Orientalism and Occidentalism, Buddhism’s affinity for adaptation to local beliefs and adoption of parochial practices, and the common man’s conflation of a particular strand of Zen Buddhism with Buddhism in total has reduced Buddhism in popular Western consciousness to the sort of unenlightening eponym that the word postmodern has in popular apologetics circles.
This hodgepodge of influences understandably strands the common Westerner in a fog of terms and concepts, for which even the basic question – what is Buddhism? - is a stumper. The question is doubly worse for the Christian, who not even needs to know what Buddhism is, but how she ought to think of it. For her, introductory texts such as this toss about such unhelpful generalizations that engaging with a Buddhist about his beliefs still leaves her with the fearful premonition of being tongue-tied in ignorance. Of course, generalizations are ineluctably woven into the nature of introductions, but the reason for this is that beginners need a sort of conceptual and historical taxonomy to organize a barrage of new terms into a coherent whole. This, to the average Western Christian, is especially true for the disorienting jumble of ideas, names, and concepts that are supposed to cohere in some apparently unified philosophy called Buddhism. The temptation of introductions is to go beyond this, packing in technical explanations and historical minutiae that inevitably lose the reader and force him to give up on his new enterprise.
“I knew it,” he might say, “it’s all too complicated. I’ll tackle something manageable and leave this to the experts.” That is the best evidence that an introduction has failed. When it does succeed, the beginner set the down book in a truculent display of satisfaction, feeling both that he understands Buddhism, but only a fraction of it. The difference is that the author has so described it that the beginner knows where his ignorance fits into a broader picture that he does understand, and so is not troubled by it. This, I expect, would be the satisfaction of the readers of Netland and Yandell’s book, whose liberal footnoting brackets many of the smaller issues and fosters the vague impression that the authors have far more to say than this easy-to-road book has room for, an impression justified by Netland’s extensive work in the history of religions and Yandell’s in their comparative analysis.
This comparative background of Yandell, masterfully demonstrated in his previous work on Hume and on epistemology, shows itself especially in the other purpose of the book, which is classed not only as an introduction, but also as an appraisal. Its self-designation as a work of interreligious polemics is unfortunate, especially if one’s standard of apologetic is as vitriolic as one might find in the work of the New Atheists or the conversion stories of former evangelicals who have seen the light, books whose rhetoric is so grating and argument so slim that one finds them valuable chiefly in their example of how not to go about the task of inter-religious polemics. In contrast, the language and tone of the work is self-consciously guarded and fair, so much so that a Buddhist reading it would probably come away with the same feeling an American gets in alighting upon a fellow citizen in a land of utterly foreign tongue, the homely urge to sit down over coffee and chatter about the country he knows, or in the Buddhist’s case, the religion he believes. That is the measure of a good work of inter-religious polemics, one too often ignored by popular religious diatribes in their search to make the top-seller lists, and one found regularly among the finer apologists in Christendom.
Guarded and fair language, though, does not substitute for honest analysis, and here the book is at its best. The careful doctrinal exposition coupled with rigorous, though not too technical, philosophical examination provide just the necessary background a Christian needs for evangelistic dialogue and the skeptic for informed assessment of Buddhism. But there is a surprise in strategy. Buddhism’s philosophical tender points are presented through the historical infighting of one Buddhist school against another, thus shattering monolithic notions about the religion and appeals to it as a paradigm of creedal tolerance while allowing the authors to probe philosophical issues through historical narrative. The irony of the approach is that one does not need a Christian to attack Buddhism; Buddhism has attacked itself. Through this repeated but judicious quoting of scholars and central historical figures, the authors also avoid a brand of sustained invective at odds with Christian charity. The last chapter’s topical contrast of Buddhism and Christianity succeeds in clearing away the fashionable falsehoods that gloss over the marked disparity between the two religions. Its elucidation, for example, of the differences between Jesus and Buddha leaves no place for a feel-good harmonization that makes Jesus a Buddha or the two religious figures a congruous part of some broader religious framework. It is either Jesus or Buddha, not both.
Due more to the size of Buddhism than the failure of the authors, the amount of material may at times seem overwhelming for memory and for the brisk pace of the book, and later on a reader might wish she had clearly marked terms along the way when the repeated appearance of one down the road bests her recall. That is the fault of the genre. The work as a whole is excellently planned and written, worth the price, with good binding, and sure to please the interested reader for whom Buddhism has flown around far too long as some distant dragon unconquered by her understanding.
Endnotes:
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