Abe was the third of six children born to a physician
and his wife in Osaka, Japan. Although the whole family belonged to the True
Pure Land ( JÉdo-Shin) sect, a cheerful, world-accepting branch of Mahayana
Buddhism founded by Shinran Shonin in the thirteenth century to emphasize the
gratuitous nature of Amida’s salvific influence, only the mother was a devout
practitioner.
During Abe’s high school
years, however, a feeling of anxiety about the way he was unconsciously hurting
others prompted him to take seriously what he was reading in a collection of
talks by Shinran about human sinfulness and the need for faith in Amida’s
loving mercy. He wanted to take up the study of philosophy, and did in fact
continue his study of Buddhism at Osaka Commercial University where his family
had sent him to pursue a degree in economics. He was especially troubled at the
time by the question about how his religious faith could be reconciled with
reason.
Upon graduation, he
started working for a company in Kobe, but a growing sense of emptiness soon
inclined him to leave the business world. At the age of twenty-six, four months
after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, he enrolled, much to the chagrin of
his supposedly more patriotic family and friends, at Kyoto University to study
Western philosophy. His goal was to push his rationality beyond the breaking
point into a reaffirmation of his Pure Land faith. But a protracted debate with
Professor Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, who like another of his Kyoto professors (Keiji
Nishitani) had been a student of the great Zen master Kitaro Nishida, eventually
convinced him that his Pure Land beliefs were illusory, or as Nietzsche had put
it, “holy lies.”
After flirting briefly
with Nietzsche’s own “positive nihilism,” Abe struggled for some time to
understand the total negation of the self-implied by Hisamatsu’s Zen notion of
“Absolute Nothingness,” before finally experiencing an awakening to the
“formless, unobjectifiable True Self” or “Buddha nature.” Inspired by his
subsequent association at Columbia University with the then preeminent Zen
scholar, D.T. Suzuki, and with Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr at neighboring
Union Theological Seminary, Abe went on to become, at least since the death of
Suzuki in 1966, the leading interpreter and exponent of Zen Buddhism for the
Western world. Publication of articles he has written and the multiple lectures
he has delivered at universities around the world on the dynamic nature of
Sunyata (Nothingness) and other Buddhist doctrines have stimulated, as he had
hoped they would for the sake of world unity, an intense interfaith dialogue.
Particular religions have
been subject to criticism since ancient times. But hardly anyone throughout
human history, not even during the Age of Enlightenment when religion’s
worldview and understanding of nature were questioned, ever doubted the
fundamental significance or the necessity of religion itself for the human
soul.
In the past few
centuries, however, not only have many people become indifferent to religion or
sought substitutes for religion in art and literature, but also there have
arisen on a more theoretical level at least four different ideologies that deny
in principle religion itself, namely: mechanistic/materialistic scientism,
Marxism, traditional Freudian psychoanalysis, and Nietzschean nihilism.
While the first three
attack religion from without, dismissing it as being unscientific, and
therefore false and illusory, the last attacks it from within, rendering it
useless as an antidote to fears of meaninglessness by going “beyond” the
experience of a living God, declaring the latter’s “death,” and depreciating
all traditional religious values for the sake of reappropriating the human
“will to power.”
Superseding any attempts at interfaith dialogue is the most crucial task of all religions in modern times to respond to these anti-religious forces. Nontheistic Buddhism, for example, must exploit its emphasis upon “dependent co-origination,” “suchness,” and “Emptiness” in such wise as not only to find a “new, non-teleological, non-mechanical teleology” that will reconcile religion with modern science, but also to cultivate a Self-awakening that will recapture a qualitative conception of mankind as a single, living, self-aware entity (its “Buddha-nature”), negate the sovereignty of nation-states, and help bridge the traditional gap between East and West by affording itself a genuinely qualitative sense of being a world religion.
With an interpretation of its doctrine of the divine kenosis as a “total self-negation of God,” might the Abrahamic faiths be in a similar position to respond?
Sources
Abe,
Masao. “Kenotic God and Dynamic Sunyata.” In The Emptying God: A
Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation. Edited by John B. Cobb Jr. and
Christopher Ives. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990. 3–65. (Ives’s
“Introduction” on pp. xiii–xix is an excellent biographical source.). _____. A
Study of DÉgen: His Philosophy and Religion. Edited by Steven Heine. Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1992. _____. Zen and Western Thought.
Edited by William R. LaFleur. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1989.
Cha,
John Y. “Abe, Masao.” In World Philosophers and Their Works. Vol. 1. Edited by
John K. Roth. Pasadena, CA, and Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press, Inc., 2000. 1–7.
Mitchell,
Donald, ed. Masao Abe: A Zen Life of Dialogue. Boston, Rutland, Vermont, and
Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., 1998. See esp. Abe’s “Response,” 371–409.
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