Abe's Buddhist Realization of God

Abstract

Our greatest modern Western thinkers from Spinoza through Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Whitehead have continually posed the problem as to whether pure thinking is possible apart from the primal presence and realization of God, and this problem is magnified all the more if Eastern thinkers, in absorbing Western thinking, inevitably thereby absorb the category, if not the name, of God. Masao Abe would appear to be such a thinker, and perhaps most so in his very understanding of Buddhism, for, if that understanding here occurs in the perspective of Western thinking, it thereby occurs under the shadow of God. Abe knows full well that the deepest manifest difference between Buddhism and Christianity occurs within the arena of time and history, but, in attempting to give witness to a Buddhist understanding of time within that context, he would appear to be giving indirect witness to a specifically and uniquely Western apprehension of God. So it is that, in speaking of that aspect of wisdom in which time is overcome, Abe can declare: Through the off and the opening up one goes down or transdescends into the bottomless depth of the and realizes eternity right 'below' the present (The Emptying God[Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Press, 1990], p. 191). Now, even if here eternity is rather than above, it is nevertheless clearly a transcendent eternity and an eternity transcending time itself; hence, its realization makes possible the overcoming of time. This, I would suggest, is a Western rather than an Eastern understanding of time and one that is alien to the Buddhist tradition that Abe would embody. Abe calls for a process of living-dying concentrated into this moment, but this moment apparently has a depth that is below it, and that depth is clearly a transcendent depth, even if Abe attempts to understand it in wholly immanent terms. Accordingly, Abe can resist my suggestion that Buddhism divests time of all positive identity by insisting that Buddhism is grounded in the trans-temporal depth of eternity, a ground making possible a cutting through the temporal dimension (p. 194). While it may be possible that this language has a nontheistic meaning in an Eastern context, it certainly does not in a Western context, and that is the context that Abe is here addressing. Nor can Abe escape the forward and backward grounds of a Western understanding and vision of