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3 1 On Understanding Religious Men and Women We are entering an exciting period in the history of our global religious self-consciousness. It is no longer a period in which persons study others and offer their findings to audiences back home, to a few hundred participants in one’s academic discipline. It is a time that enables one to live alongside friends, to learn about them and with them, their vision for and struggles with life, and to learn from them about how to live life well. The inquiry invites us to look and listen, and not to frame a picture. WHAT IS BEING ATTEMPTED When I first shared the words that follow in this chapter, some years ago, I began by saying, “I am honored to be here to speak to you today,” indicating both the context—a speaker addressing an audience—and an attitude on the part of the speaker, now the writer. The invitation to speak at Otani University, Kyoto, Japan, took the form, “Speak to us about what you are doing.”1 What am I doing? It seems to me that this is one of the great questions. When asked, “Who are you?” most of us begin to define ourselves by our names and occupations, our jobs, mode of employment. When asked “What are you?” our tendency has been, in the last half-century or so, to turn the search for an answer over to our university colleagues in the natural sciences or social sciences . We sometimes seek, surprisingly, an empirical or, disappointingly, an impersonal reply to this question: I am made of water, bone, flesh, and so forth, or I am a species or a social animal, a Caucasian male or female, an Afro-American, Asian American, a minority, and so forth. Nevertheless, in the development of the Western religious heritage, one question has loomed large: “What am I?”—providing a personal orientation to the issue raised more indirectly by our questions, “Who are you?” and “What 4 I n t he C om p a ny of Fr ie nd s are you?” “What am I?” is the kind of question that gives one pause to begin the search for fundamental criteria, foundational orientations, in light of which one shapes one’s identity. “What am I?” is one of those great questions, and the Western heritage has had a great deal to say in response to it. Among the answers that have been given to the question, “What am I?” one finds, “I am a Jew,” or “I am a Muslim,” or “I am a sinner saved by the grace of God,” or “I am a child of God.” Another response, representing also a major strand in the Western heritage, is, “I am a rational being.” Perhaps we have weathered the faddish reply of saying, in response to this question, only “I am an individual .” It appears that we in the West are moving into (back to?) a more engaging formulation of “I am a person” in response to the question, “What am I?” We are learning (again?) that one moves from being an individual into becoming a person as one moves from isolation into meaningful relationships. The assignment put to me, to talk about what I am doing, gave me pause, made me ask, “What am I doing?” That, I suggest, is a question that will repay reflection. As is the case with most engaging questions, there can be levels in one’s reply. One can reply to the question by noting a particular concurrent action, for example, that one is speaking at a Japanese university to a group of scholars who are Buddhists. But this is hardly the full extent to which one could reply to the question “What am I doing?” Sensing the levels in the responses one might make to this question could well indicate, for example, the development of a child through adolescence into the maturity of adulthood as those responses move from being simple, to becoming complex, more subtle, perhaps to move again to a profound simplicity. There also might be a dimension in responses to this question that could indicate the sensitivity one might have in attempting to live one’s life religiously. There is a story passed around among persons who have chosen to aspire to live life Buddhistically through the Zen medium. You readily recall how a child will play outside, or in his or her room, for hours, playing intently, moving buses, houses...

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