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James L., Fredericks

T H E  E A S T E R N  B U D D H I S T  1 ,  1162
Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox: A Christian Commentary on !e Teaching of 
Vimalak%rti (Vimalak%rtinirde&a). By Joseph O’Leary. Leeuven: Peeters Publishers, 
2018. 313 pages. Paperback: ISBN-10: 90-429-3421-2.
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In its elegant prose, its command of multiple texts, and the author’s expertise in both 
Christian and Buddhist traditions, this is a commentary that re>ects the maturity of 
the dialogue among Christians and Buddhists. Although it is a Christian commentary 
on a decidedly Buddhist text, O’Leary’s interest cannot be described as an exercise in 
comparative religion. Instead, he is asking a Christian theological question: “How can 
Indian nonduality correct and enrich Christian theology, and are there insurmountable 
tensions between the two?” (p. 26). !is should not suggest, however, that O’Leary’s 
commentary will be of little interest to Buddhists. “My task is to draw on the theologi-
cal imagination so as to bring out the religious themes of the [Vimalak%rti Sutra] and 
to encounter the sutra as a living scripture that can still speak to us under the changed 
conditions of the contemporary world” (p. 3). Buddhists interested in returning to a 
familiar text in the hope of discovering it anew will not be disappointed.
Along the way, we are treated to O’Leary’s enormous erudition. In addition to 
Buddhist scholars (Etienne Lamotte and Takahashi Hisao 高橋尚夫, of course, but 
also Paul Demiéville, Jan Nattier, Malcolm Eckel, and Michael Pye), O’Leary brings 
into the conversation Christian theologians (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Barth, 
among others), the masters of Christian spirituality (Eckhart, John of the Cross, 
Fénelon, Pascal, and Newman), and philosophical thinkers (Feuerbach, Fichte, Hegel, 
Levinas, Derrida, and Marion). Best of all, in my view, O’Leary places Vimalak%rti 
in dialogue with European literati (Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Rabelais, 
Moliere, Hopkins, Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett). Even Wagner, Elgar, and Pope 
Francis, alongside N@g@rjuna (ca. 150–ca. 250) and Sh#toku Taishi 聖徳太子 (574–
622), are given a say.
!e basic thrust of his argument is that paradoxical Buddhist discourses on non-
duality can elucidate Pauline and Johannine Christianity, both of which are saturated 
with paradoxical discourses of their own. !ese discourses have to do with the rela-
tionship of Jesus to God, the justi=cation of the sinner by grace, and the paradox of 
death and resurrection. O’Leary combines these discourses under the broad heading 
of “the Pascal Mystery,” which he understands as the ultimate reality of all. He does 
this in the hope of making the truth of Christian faith more accessible and credible 
and to resist those who would dilute it, whether it be ancient Arians or those in more 
recent centuries who would reduce the historical Jesus to the status of a teacher of 
morality without remainder (pp. 17–19).
B O O K  R E V I E W S 163
O’Leary has much to say about the literary character of the sutra. He looks on it as 
an unresolved narrative. It is a text that uses the power of narrative to come to closure 
without concern for a full resolution of the issues raised along the way. !e sutra leaves 
us with dichotomies, without synthesis being attained in a higher, metaphysical level as 
with a Hegelian Aufhebung. !erefore, a text such as this invites comparison with the 
Pauline and Johannine literature in the New Testament. !e Gospel according to John, 
for example, is also an unresolved narrative in which the dichotomies of life and death, 
sin and eternal life, the Son and the Father, remain perpetually suspended nondualities 
without ever succumbing to harmonious reconciliation. !e commentary succeeds in 
showing us that there is a rhetoric of paradox at work in both Christian and Buddhist 
texts (pp. 15, 23, 82–92). Vimalak%rti, like Paul and John, manifests ultimate reality 
through the skillful use of language (pp. 72–81).
I want to o;er comments on two issues that require re>ection. !e =rst issue has 
to do with what O’Leary says about the tension between wisdom and compassion 
in Buddhism. !is may cause some controversy among Buddhists, all the more so, 
perhaps, because his understanding of wisdom and compassion serves as a basic her-
meneutical starting point in his treatment of the sutra. Some background will be help-
ful. !ere is a danger of oversimpli=cation inherent in applying Mahayana Buddhist 
metaphysics to Christian theological problems. Christianity, we are sometimes asked 
to assume, has a problem with dualism and that a ready-made Buddhist metaphysics 
of nondualism is waiting in the wings to supply a solution. !is tendency can be seen 
in Japanese Buddhist intellectuals, like Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治F (1900–1990), Hisa-
matsu Shin’ichi 久松真一 (1889–1980), Abe Masao 阿部正雄 (1915–2006), and other 
=gures associated with the Kyoto school. O’Leary, to be clear, is certainly convinced of 
the virtues of nondualism as a “therapy” for Christianity’s “painful dualisms for which 
it seeks healing” (p. 19). In such discussions, seldom do either Buddhists or Christians 
recognize that Buddhism has a sizable problem with monism, let alone that Christian 
theism and spirituality might have insights useful to Buddhists in remedying this situ-
ation. Abe, at least, came close to acknowledging the problem of monism in Mahayana 
Buddhist thought when he recognized the tendency of Buddhist nondualism to 
undermine the basis for ethical discernment.1 From my perspective within Christian 
theology, the appeal to Buddhist nondualism as an ancilla theologiae runs the risk of 
privileging the mystical side of Christian tradition at the expense of its prophetic side. 
In encounters like this, Christianity is reduced to a kind of Gnosticism. !is must be 
resisted. !e God of Christian faith, precisely in the intimacy of the Incarnation of the 
Word, remains a transcendent Other who commands love and the pursuit of justice. 
1 James L. Fredericks, “Masao Abe and Karl Rahner: On Traces of Monism and Dualism,” in 
Masao Abe: A Zen Life of Dialogue, edited by Donald W. Mitchell, pp. 242–47 (Boston: Tuttle, 1998).
T H E  E A S T E R N  B U D D H I S T  1 ,  1164
!is Otherness cannot be reduced to the true suchness of all (Skt. tathat&; Jp. shinnyo 
真如) or the original naturalness of things (Jp. jinen 自然) based on the principle of 
emptiness or the logic of the prajñ&p&ramit&.
O’Leary is quite aware of this monistic tendency in Buddhism. Modern Japanese 
philosophy (O’Leary names Inoue Enry# 井上円了 [1858–1919] and the Kyoto 
school), promotes “the identity of phenomenon and reality” ( gensh# soku jitsuzai 現象
即実在). !us, writes O’Leary, in modern Japanese philosophy, “a Buddhist monism 
was put forward as ‘the religion of the future,’ more scienti=c than Christianity and 
free of the dualisms that plague Christianity” (p. 25). With all this as background, 
O’Leary is genuinely intriguing when he argues that wisdom and compassion are 
actually at odds with one another in Mahayana Buddhism (p. 11). !ere is no easy-
going harmony between the two in his untypical reading of the tradition. Wisdom 
and compassion are two forces within Mahayana that struggle for dominance. !ey 
do not imply one another in any automatic or natural way. Compassion does not 
arise naturally out of wisdom. In fact, compassion confers on self and other a related-
ness that wisdom seeks to refute. I can imagine any number of Buddhists objecting 
to this reading of the tradition. Yet, I also suspect O’Leary is on to something of 
genuine importance with the potential to enrich Buddhists in their practice of the 
Dharma. 
O’Leary, however, has much more to say about this matter. He sees in the bodhi-
sattva ideal an audacious attempt to reconcile wisdom and compassion through praxis 
(pp. 11–12). !e bodhisattva =nds inspiration and motivation in the unresolved 
antinomy of the two. Moreover, we must resist the temptation to resolve this tension 
between wisdom and compassion with a metaphysics of emptiness. Like contempla-
tion and action in Christian spirituality, the tension between wisdom and compas-
sion can only be maintained by means of practice. !erefore, according to O’Leary, 
Buddhist nonduality, correctly envisioned, is not some “placid luxury,” but rather a 
“creative living” in which opposing realities are kept in tension by skillful means (p. 
12). Buddhism must look to ascetics, not metaphysics, in practicing the Dharma. To 
this, I would add, not only ascetics, but ethics, and most especially, social ethics, which 
remains woefully underdeveloped in contemporary Buddhism. 
A second issue deserving attention has to do with the nature of a commentary as a 
literary genre and as a theological enterprise. Re>ecting on this book, I have come to 
think of commentary as a literary performance of tradition. By “tradition,” I mean a 
negotiated tension between continuity and innovation. By “performance,” I mean an 
enactment or realization of this tension mediated by a text. 
Commentaries create this tension of innovation and continuity by contributing to 
what Julia Kristeva called “intertextuality.” No text stands alone. Every text appears to 
us in relation to other texts, either explicitly or, more commonly, implicitly. Lurking 
B O O K  R E V I E W S 165
about within the vicinity of the Divina Commedia, for example, are Aquinas’s Summa 
!eologiae and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. How can we read Eliot’s Wasteland without 
reaching for Dante and therefore, implicitly, for Aquinas and Ovid? All these texts 
are linked by a web of intertextuality. A similar argument could be made about the 
Prajñ@p@ramit@ literature. !e Heart Sutra does not stand alone. Its textuality is an 
intertextuality.
Kristeva’s principle becomes especially vivid in the writing of a commentary. In a 
commentary, the text receiving comment is not present in some pristine originality. It 
is presented to us in terms of another text, namely, the commentary itself. !is phe-
nomenon is considerably magni=ed in a tradition like Buddhism where there is often 
a lineage of commentaries on commentaries, sometimes even to the extent that it is no 
longer possible to speak simply of an urtext. Shinran’s great work, the Ky#gy#shinsh# 
教行信証, exempli=es this phenomenon by collecting passages from the three Pure 
Land sutras and assembling them into a choir with passages from Pure Land patri-
archs like N@g@rjuna, Shandao 善導 (613–681), and Genshin 源信 (942–1017). !e 
Ky#gy#shinsh# is a commentary, in a purely technical sense, because Shinran comments 
on the texts he has selected for inclusion in it. !e Ky#gy#shinsh# is a commentary, in 
a less obvious way, in that by assembling texts, Shinran is manifesting their intertex-
tuality. !e real text, in this case, is the intertextuality of the many texts, which are, in 
e;ect, commenting on one another. My point is that a commentary, including Shin-
ran’s famous Ky#gy#shinsh#, o;ers a peculiar linguistic instantiation of tradition, under-
stood as a nexus of continuity and innovation. 
What happens when we are presented with a Christian commentary on a Buddhist 
text? O’Leary has linked the Vimalak%rti Sutra, which inevitably presents itself to us 
with its own intertextuality, to numerous Christian texts, each of which brings with it 
its own web of texts. In doing this, I would argue that O’Leary’s commentary takes on 
the character of what Deluze and Guattari once called a multiplicité : a complex and 
not completely integrated literary structure that does not reveal any de=nitive unity or 
starting point. As a commentary, O’Leary’s book is not a branching out from an origi-
nal meaning. Rather, O’Leary’s commentary is a conversation with multiple voices, 
some Buddhist and some Christian—a conversation that did not begin with his com-
mentary and does not conclude with it. If O’Leary is using Paul and John to comment 
on the Vimalak%rti Sutra, the sutra is also commenting on Paul and John. 
Toward the end of his book, O’Leary quotes Pope Gregory the Great (540–604) to 
the e;ect that, with attentive reading, the Bible “grows on its readers” (p. 272). !e 
same can be said, he assures us, of the Buddhist scriptures. His commentary can be 
read as proof of this. !e Vimalak%rti Sutra, read with care and reverence, can “grow on 
a reader,” even a Christian reader. For this to happen, however, the reader, and espe-
cially a Christian reader of a Buddhist text, must go around the hermeneutical circle 
T H E  E A S T E R N  B U D D H I S T  1 ,  1166
many times. !is commentary is by no means O’Leary’s =rst pass around the herme-
neutical circle. Best of all, this contribution to Buddhist-Christian dialogue should be 
welcomed as an invitation to us all to enter the circle and pass around it many times.


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BOOK REVIEWS Joseph O’Leary. Buddhist Nonduality, Paschal Paradox: A Christian Commentary on The Teaching of Vimalakīrti (Vimalakīrtinirdeśa)

The Buddha's Motivations for Teaching and Their Historical Background

The Mahāyāna Scriptures as Views of Śākyamuni:Reading the Buddha's Words from the Perspective of His Being

表紙、扉、目次、奥付、Contents

スタッフ取り組み紹介図書館員のための読書倶楽部

The Development of Mahayana Buddhism Through Shinran's Eyes: Nāgārjuna (Part 1)

ARTICLES Religion and Philosophy: Miki Kiyoshi’s Philosophy of Religion

“I Have Accorded with the Buddha's Teaching”: The Sutra of Immeasurable Life and Upadeśa

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