A Buddhist Response

Abstract

and scholars have a great deal in common when it comes to discussing dialogue and scholarship. Both seem to agree that there is no nonnormative approach to the study of religion. Rather than attempting to defend our methodology, we must simply do our work well. In my response to these fine discussions of the respectability of interreligious dialogue, I will do things. First, I will comment briefly on each of the papers, and then I will add a few comments of my own on the topic of whether and how dialogue is academically respectable. What strikes me about these three papers and my own response is that none of us has anything decidedly Buddhist or Christian to say that puts us in different camps from each other. Rather, we have a lot in common as academically trained scholars of religion who regard religion as a currently relevant resource rather than a relic from some other time and place. One of the things that occurs over and over in dialogue is the experience of mutual exploration of troublesome topics in an engaged rather than an apathetic mode. Sometimes dialogue is about exploring differences and similarities between us, but usually it is in the service of better illuminating some issue about which no one of us has a conceptual fix. We dialogue because, in working on such issues, two heads are better than one, not, as our critics charge, because we are indifferent to standards of rigor. It occurs to me that complaints against the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies that we are not sufficiently academic may have more to do with our existential engagement with issues than with interreligious dialogue itself. Such complaints may be more about our willingness to engage in normative, constructive discourse than our doing so in the context of dialogue across religious boundaries. All three papers address this possibility. Sharon Burch is very explicit in her statements that dialogue is about losing the old theological order and discovering that we are left with one another to explore human experience as a locus of theological investigations. She is very clear and, I think, . See, for example, Curators f the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism under ColoThis content downloaded from 207.46.13.156 on Sat, 10 Sep 2016 05:39:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms