Peter FELDMEIER. Experiments in Buddhist-Christian Encounter: From Buddha-Nature to the Divine Nature. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2019. pp. ix+261. $40.00 pb. ISBN 9781626983069. Reviewed by Christopher DENNY, St. John’s University, Queens, NY 11439.

Veteran Roman Catholic theologian Feldmeier follows up on his 2011 book Encounters in Faith: Christianity in Interreligious Dialogue with this current text, comparing Buddhist and Catholic spiritual texts on themes ranging from metaphysics to interior illumination.  Influenced by Francis Clooney’s comparative theological method, Feldmeier guides readers through a variety of classic themes spanning two millennia. 

Feldmeier’s opening chapter places his project within the shift from modernity to postmodern epistemology.  He criticizes the philosophies of John Hick and Wilfred Cantwell Smith for positing a common core within different religions.  In keeping with the book’s “experimental” project, Feldmeier cautions: “This book is not about a theology of religions, nor does it take a stand on the values and problems found in inclusivism and pluralism” (6).  From this starting point chapter two summarizes Buddhist teaching on the “selfless self,” attending to the famous anecdote in the Majjhima Nikaya, in which Buddha uses the example of a man shot with a poisoned arrow to relativize metaphysical claims in light of human suffering.  Buddha does not equate Nirvana with extinction or with an eternal essence. 

Succeeding chapters compare Buddhist and Christian traditions on a range of topics, mostly centering upon apophatic experience.  Unlike other Christian theological interpreters of Buddhism who confidently distill Buddhism down to an essence (one often mirroring Christian theological assumptions), Feldmeier attends to the historical context of canonical Buddhist texts and respects contrasting doctrines in Theravada and Mahayana schools.  In an extended comparison between Buddhaghosa and John of the Cross, Feldmeier finds their conceptual understandings and doctrines incommensurable yet Feldmeier discovers similarity in praxis: “[W]e are instructed to see all our experience as not the self” (57).  Feldmeier stakes out a position between the “one goal/many paths” paradigm of Hick and the radical plurality of religious ends expounded by Mark Heim.  Employing a transcendentalist interpretation of Nagarjuna’s philosophy in a deconstructive comparison with the writings of Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Denys, and Aquinas, Feldmeier asserts: “Christians can talk about God’s transcendence and the divine mystery, but all conceptualization even of these terms are laden with a human perspective” (86).  A comparison between Mahayana Buddhism and Meister Eckhart yields Feldmeier’s contrarian claim that Mahayana represents a non-conceptual theism.  These chapters on Indian Buddhism conclude with a comparison of Ignatius of Loyola and Shantideva. 

Moving from classical traditions of India to those of China and Japan, Feldmeier criticizes D. T. Suzuki’s claim that Zen Buddhism achieves pure unmediated experience.  From this point Feldmeier makes a provocative move.  In agreement with Sandra Schneiders’s critical analysis of select historical tendencies in Christian spirituality, Feldmeier argues cultural and educational backgrounds shape the spiritualities of the Zen masters in an analogous manner.  He also asserts that historical deference accorded to Zen masters enabled secretive and abusive sexual relationships, publicized in the media, between contemporary roshi and their students in a manner similar to the way certain Catholic ecclesiologies (e.g. Ignatius’s “Rules for Thinking with the Church”) have abetted a cult-like view of Catholicism.  The eighth chapter uses a series of oxherding paintings attributed to the fifteenth-century Rinzai Zen master Tensho Shubun to articulate a paradigm of spiritual development in comparison with Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle.  Feldmeier’s chapter on Pure Land Buddhism faults John Paul II’s opposition between Buddhist and Christian soteriologies, responding that faith and grace are realities found in both traditions.  “Christianity,” Feldmeier writes, “has a both/and understanding of union with God.  On the one hand, we find a personal God who is a divine Thou. . . . And on the other hand we find a blurring of identities in the divine” (210).  A final chapter on the Heart Sutra characterizes shunyata as non-duality rather than emptiness, illustrating the possibility of a Christian experience of shunyata by probing ways in which classical trinitarian and christological doctrines problematize stable definitions of personhood and identity. 

Feldmeier has produced a very good book of comparative theology encapsulating wide reading and astute philosophical analysis.  This volume represents a via media in theological hermeneutics: Feldmeier takes religious doctrines seriously enough to identify irreconcilable differences but also recognizes that religious experience always serves as a backdrop for historical and cultural processes shaping doctrinal appropriation.  Here is a work of Catholic theological inclusivism attempting to create space within Christian theology for a Buddhist-inspired “apophatic anthropology” destabilizing reified notions of self and other.  Feldmeier introduces his own relevant personal experiences judiciously in ways that nicely illustrate theological points.  Scholars of Buddhism could challenge the book’s claim that Mahayana is theist, for debates about theism and atheism continue to be adjudicated within Buddhist-Christian studies.  Feldmeier’s concluding “Christian Heart Sutra” contains insights worth pondering: “Your self is selfless and your truth is outside of truth” (231).  I recommend the work for those interested in comparative theology, comparative mysticism, and the relationship between Buddhism and Christianity.