The Challenge of an Authentic Buddhist-Christian Dialogue: A Response to Young Woon Ko

I am grateful for the opportunity to be here today as the respondent to Professor Young Woon Ko’s paper on “Wŏnhyo’s Theory of Hwajaeng and Buddhist-Christian Dialogue.” I feel a bit like a fool rushing in, since I have never been involved in a Buddhist-Christian dialogue panel before, so I hope you will all bear with me if I bring a thick Buddhist lens to my discussion today.

Professor Ko’s task in this paper is quite daunting: to apply Wŏnhyo’s (617–686) hermeneutical principle of “reconciling” or “harmonizing doctrinal disputes” (hwajaeng 和諍) to this broader issue of Buddhist-Christian dialogue. This is a courageous paper, and one that few would be able to undertake, as it requires both a mastery of Wŏnhyo’s thought as well as careful consideration as to how this principle might be applied in a Christian context.

What I found especially helpful in this paper were Professor Ko’s attempts to examine the broader issue of truth claims in religion and the importance of understanding the context within which those claims are made. Certainly in Buddhism it is absolutely correct that, even going as far back as some of the earliest stratum of materials in the Atṭṭhakavagga (the “Section on the Eights”) from the Suttanipata, there are extremely detailed discussions of the danger of truth claims—what are technically called “views” (dṛṣṭi in Sanskrit, or diṭṭhi in Pali)—and how views can create some of the most virulent types of attachment, leading in turn to some of the worst sorts of religious and ideological conflict. Professor Ko’s discussion of the way that hwajaeng thought might be deployed to reconcile some of these divergences of views promises to offer an important new perspective on this issue of the dangers associated with a religion’s asserting exclusivist truth claims.

But one thing that was perhaps missing from the paper was the acknowledgment that many times these “reconciliations” of doctrinal controversy often have a quite polemical purpose behind them, a purpose to which even Wŏnhyo was not totally immune. Wŏnhyo also created doctrinal taxonomies (pan’gyo 判敎) in his own treatments of Buddhist doctrine, taxonomies that were typically polemical in intent. Widely cited in Chinese Buddhist literature is Wŏnhyo’s four-level classification schema, which ranked Buddhist teachings into four categories, which culminated in the “consummate teachings of the one vehicle” (ilsŭng wŏn’gyo 一乘圓敎), teachings that were exemplified in the 華嚴經 Hwaŏm kyŏng ([Buddha]Avataṃsakasūtra). Thus, the fact that Wŏnhyo employed hwajaeng analysis does not mean he was reluctant to deploy hierarchical rankings of Buddhist teachings that suggested the superiority of some Buddhist teachings over others.

Wŏnhyo, obviously, did not bring Christianity into these taxonomies. But we do see such polemical discussions appearing in the writings of later Korean Buddhist thinkers, such as Yongsŏng Chinjong 龍城震鍾 (1864–1940) during the Japanese colonial period, who does try to explore Christianity’s place in this broader religious marketplace that was developing in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. In his Kwiwŏn chŏngjong 歸源正宗 (The Correct Doctrine that Returns to the Source), Yongsŏng includes a rather detailed comparison of Buddhism to Confucianism, Daoism, and Christianity, the first time that a Korean Buddhist tried to incorporate Christianity into this traditional three-teachings type of religious comparison. His analysis is a modern twist on this old comparative model that goes back to medieval East Asian philosophy. The Kwiwŏn chŏngjong was one of the first attempts by Buddhists to respond to Christianity and the challenges it was creating for traditional religions in modern Korea.

Yongsŏng’s treatment is explicitly polemical, as these taxonomies often are. For example, in discussing Confucianism, he suggests that Confucianism presents a complete moral doctrine but one that is utterly deficient in the transcendent teachings that characterize Buddhism. Daoism was deficient in moral teachings but half understood the transcendent teachings. Christianity, he says, is...