enthusiasm has to be reckoned among the most pathological forces in Christian faith
today. In my experience the initiative to dialogue is less a continuation of ‘orientalism’
than its critique. What is more, the sources of the inspiration are far more diverse
than changes going on in the missionary ideal of Christianity. One has only to think
of the many Christian scholars who have found a sure footing for their dialogue in
Buddhist philosophies like that of the Kyoto school thinkers Nishida, Tanabe, and
Nishitani, a body of thought that has prompted as many Japanese Buddhists to take
the initiative in the encounter with Christianity. And there are other examples from
the Buddhist world that come to mind when the focus of the dialogue shifts from
doctrine to religious experience and social ethics.
Even so, this is only part of the picture. In the end, the most decisive spiritual force
behind the search of Buddhist and Christian scholars for a common forum to discuss
questions of religion and to reassess their self-understanding may belong to the general
spiritual atmosphere of our age in which people feel less affinity for traditional religion
than for the kind of thinking that Jung represented. Yet why should so timely,
cross-cultural, and open-minded a venture as this have reduced the psychology of
religion in general, and Jungian psychology in particular, to so incidental a role?
In asking the question and then dismissing the obvious answers, my aim is not to
clear the air for a better diagnosis and then suggest a forum for Buddhist-Christian
dialogue grounded on Jung’s thought. I want rather to shift the question in order to
suggest another way of bringing Jung into the dialogue.
A Jung-Buddhist-Christian dialogueThe intellectual dialogue between Buddhists and Christians today—excluding
encounters limited to a mere exchange of information—has concentrated itself in
two models which we may call the comparative and the ethical.
The comparative model of dialogue consists of a common, more or less neutral,
forum into which each side can enter to discuss selected ideas from their respective
traditions. In addition to the general rules of rational discussion, such a forum
typically structures itself around a specific set of ideas that provide a common focus
and language. In principle this superstructure can range from the generalized
concepts, more or less explicit, that define a particular discipline (such as philosophy,
anthropology, hermeneutics, comparative religions, psychology, or sociology) to the
more specific concerns of particular currents or schools of thought (such as
phenomenology, structuralism, Marxism, or psychoanalysis), and even to particular
thinkers (such as Tillich, Radhakrishnan, Eliade, Whitehead, or the philosophers of
the Kyoto school). The range of possibilities, only a few of them explored in practice,
is as wide as the study of religion itself. As long as comparative dialogue preserves this
protean character, it protects itself from expropriation by the new breed of ‘specialists’
nipping at its heels like sheep-dogs trying to drive the flock into its own corrals.
The aim of the comparative dialogue is insight: an increased awareness of the variety
of religious world views and values, a reawakening to things neglected or forgotten
in one’s own tradition, and eventually a reform of self-understanding in the light of
46 JAMES W.HEISIG