Grounding Ethics Nondualistically: Fruit from a Synthetic Reading of John Wesley and Masao Abe

Abstract

abstract: "[T]rue Christianity cannot exist without both the inward experience and outward practice of justice, mercy, and truth," writes John Wesley, the eighteenth-century founder of Methodism. For him, belief and behavior, motivation and praxis, collapse dialectically into one. The Kyoto-formed dialogist Masao Abe identifies one strength and one weakness each in the poles of Western and Zen thought. For him, the West understands the importance of ethical behavior but cannot understand the oneness of all things. Conversely, Zen Buddhism is deficient in its conception of ethics but more actualized in understanding the interdependence of all things ( pratītyasamutpāda ). While his Western interlocutors include a disproportionate number of heirs to the Wesleyan tradition, Abe himself never deals directly with Wesley. This is presumably because of the latter's European Modernist philosophical and theological commitments. Still, putting these diverse worldviews in creative dialogue with each other might do more to resolve Abe's twofold tension than does his conversation with more "likely" interlocutors. If Abe is correct that "the practical problem par excellence" in Buddhism is integrating the "oneness of practice and enlightenment and that the West tends to bifurcate existence to its own detriment," Wesley can be invited into the conversation to stand in the gap between these challenges. For the Methodist patriarch, understanding and ethics are two sides of one coin in his emphases on "practical divinity" and "social holiness."