Liberation-Hermeneutics in the Asian Church

The continent of Asia, well known as the source of the sacred scriptures of all existing world religions, is not yet recognized as the repository of so many exegetical traditions, some of which go back to pre-Christians times. These have not yet been properly assessed and judiciously employed for the benefit of Christians and non-Christians both in Asia and elsewhere. In recent times, however, the exercise of "cross-scripture reading" has opened up avenues for a cross-fertilization of various hermeneutical traditions.

I myself have made some attempts at generating an inter-textual encounter between the Hebrew-Christian Bible and the Pali Buddhist Tripitaka with due regard paid to their original linguistic and cultural idioms as well as to their different social contexts. I have fruitfully employed one of these studies—on the Buddha's and the Christ's convergent teachings on beatitudinal spirituality of evangelical poverty demanding justice to the poor—during a seminar organized by the Methodist Church which invited some socio-politically active Sinhala Buddhist monks to dialogue with representatives of Hinduism, Christianity and Islam (among whom were also Tamil participants) with the intention of engaging them in a common struggle for peace in our ethnically torn, economically impoverished and politically polarized country. It was by employing Asia's traditional exegetical methods that I discovered how both Buddhist and Christian Scriptures can come alive as a voice that speaks to the representatives of all religions in the here-and-now of our history.

Leaving aside the West Asian hermeneutical traditions of Judaism and Islam, which bear an affinity to Christianity, I focus now on a South and South East Asian contribution which offers us a startlingly new approach, namely, the Pali commentarial literature (aṭṭhakathā) which has adopted a different methodology. Two monumental Buddhist treatises on hermeneutics, the Nettippakaraṇa and the Peṭokapadesa, had been compiled about ten or twelve centuries before modern biblical exegesis was even thought of in Europe! My own doctoral thesis as well as thirty years of post-doctoral research, published and unpublished, have revolved around this Buddhist exegetical lore. I grant that the Pali exegetes were an elite class of literati who practiced and promoted a soteriology that culminated in the family-renouncer's spirituality. Yet, unlike the corresponding bhāṣya literature of the Hindus, the Buddhist commentaries (specially of the Theravada School) show a remarkable "sense of history," supplying a wealth of information about contemporary people, customs and events in the course of commenting on the sacred text, thus tacitly acknowledging that what the sacred texts reveal and what the secular history has recorded are not to be dissociated from each other.

From the Garden

© MA Andrew

In the limited space allotted to me I can do no more than merely whet the appetite of Asian theologians who long to see their Christian scriptures speak intelligibly to Asians. Dr. Sam Mathews, the New Testament Professor of the Gurukul Theological Seminary in Chennai, who visited our Centre to be initiated into the art of cross-scripture reading and had watched me handling the biblical texts for young Jesuits during their Sunday liturgy, urged me to make this method available in writing and not to restrict it to oral transmission. This essay is the first timid step towards that bold enterprise; for what I illustrate here is just one hermeneutical principle among many which I have used with immense success in day-to-day reading of Scriptures as well as in explaining the biblical texts during the liturgy of the Word.

This ancient formula runs in Sanskrit as follows: Mumukṣave vyācikhyāsito granthaḥ. Using the desiderative form of the verb "to liberate" (muc-) and of the verb "to interpret" (vi+ā+khyā-), the sages declare that the sacred text (granthaḥ) by its very nature is "longing, yearning and pining to be interpreted" (vyacikhyāsitaḥ) solely "for the sake of the person who is longing, yearning and pining to be liberated" (mumukṣuḥ). The criterion of a good exegesis, in other words, is that it responds...