Relationship and Solitude in Hinduism and Christianity

Abstract

IN AN EARLIER PAPER in this Journal* I argued that the meeting of Eastern and Western ideas should not in itself be taken as an enrichment but as a task for philosophico-theological speculation. I am in no position to attempt to accomplish this task, but I would like in the present paper to draw attention to a number of problems that could be solved more satisfactorily than has hitherto been the case by a cross-fertilization between the Christian intuition that redemption consists in absolute and incommensurable love and the Hindu intuition that redemption consists in spiritual realization. Using the argument of my earlier paper about these two intuitions as a premise, I propose now to sketch the task ahead, at least in outline. If anything new is to emerge from the meeting of East and West, the meeting must be conceived primarily as a borrowing from one tradition in order to solve problems in the other. Only in this way can the meeting become a genuine dialogue. For simplicity's sake, and basing my arguments upon the theory put forward in my first paper, I propose to use the two categories of relationship and solitude in order to characterize the Judeo-Christian insight into the redemptive power of love and the Buddhist-Hindu insight into redemptive power of spiritual realization, respectively. The argument will be divided into five parts. 1. An examination of the equivocal treatment of relationship in Hinduism. 2. An examination of the equivocal treatment of solitude in Christianity. 3 & 4. An attempt to show how some Christian difficulties can be eased with the help of the notion of solitude; and how some Hindu difficulties can be eased with the help of the notion of relationship. 5. A brief reflection upon the roles played by relationship and solitude in the two traditions of thought.