Lenses and Insight: Paradigm Changes and Different Kinds of Religious Consciousness

Abstract

Crisis and opportunity are two notions that have been used to describe the impact of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue. Participants have sensed that they are in personal and communal crises requiring redefinition of human capacity and responsibility, new self-images, and new social-political structures. However, not only are these redefinitions and changes in self-images and social structures required to keep up with newly acquired information, expanded communication with other people, and a growing network of political interdependence; many people have the experience that transiency of ideas, social relationships, and ways of doing things is a way of life. The sense of crisis is an expression of the awareness that change, interrelatedness, and continual shifting of one's position are a necessity; this is in the nature of contemporary life whether one likes it or not. The sense of opportunity, on the other hand, reflects an affirmation that the conditions of modern living permit a freedom, an exploration, and an engagement with life within a dynamic horizon of human experience. The focus on paradigm changes at this conference can help to clarify the dynamism and interrelatedness which are characteristic of the contemporary experience. Such a focus also provides new vistas on past human life. It calls attention to the fact that religious traditions, the age-old quest for truth, and personal expression of authentic existence constitute a process, or better, a matrix of processes. I would like to address our theme by giving a brief analysis of the variety of paradigm shifts in the present Buddhist-Christian dialogue. What can we learn by engaging each other at the deepest levels of awareness? Can we learn something by examining diverse approaches to ultimate truth? Can we discover something about ourselves, about the historical-social matrix of religious traditions, and about the dynamics of our own religious lives when we engage each other in the last quarter of the twentieth century? I believe we can.