Reassessing Buddhist and Christian Comparisons in Light of Early Buddhism: The East Asian Ontological Requisite

Why does Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially East Asian traditions, dominate the comparative theological field of study with Christianity in the West? What aspects of Mahāyāna Buddhism resonate with Christianity or Western modes of thought thereby making comparison a seemingly feasible project for many scholars and enthusiasts? By employing an Early Buddhist hermeneutic, these questions are addressed in two sections: The first section explores these questions by first briefly examining some influential comparative works, including those by Masao Abe, John B. Cobb, and Paul Knitter, in order to extract some reoccurring themes that ground their respective comparisons between Buddhism and Christianity. The extracted Buddhist themes from this brief survey demonstrate a conceptual meeting point through the broad ontological nature of the discourse. In section two, I discuss the Buddhist hermeneutic known as Early Buddhism, which critically studies the "historical theology" or development of Buddhisms in order to ascertain proliferations or additions to Buddhist thought as it traversed space and time. Early Buddhist scholars and practitioners, such as William Chu, Choong Mun-Keat, and Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, critically argue against latter proliferations of the Buddhist Dharma whereby explaining its unique perspective upon the extracted themes derived from section one. One of the cornerstones of this hermeneutic is the utter rejection of any ontological claim. However, I utilize Early Buddhism's critiques as a tool of investigation and not as representing Buddhist orthodoxy. The primary goal of this examination is to add greater justification to the comparative theological field by showing that East Asian Buddhism and Christianity rightly meet one another on an ontological substratum, and additionally, but to a lesser extent, argue for a greater contextualization of Buddhism within Western theological discourse.