The Music of Purity
Dionysian hymning and the Nembutsu
This is the text of a paper delivered at the First International Symposium on Buddhism & Neoplatonism, held at Musashino University 4-6 October 2024. A full version of the paper will be published as part of the proceedings of the conference in due course.
One may nowadays observe three broad tendencies in Christian approaches to other religions. I do not mean the by now traditional threefold 1990s typology of Alan Race into “exclusivist,” “inclusivist” and “pluralist” strands, which, though not without certain taxonomic merits, has proven too blunt a tool to address the complexities of inter-religious relationships. Not least, it tends to erode the distinction between claims of truth and soteriology, not allowing that there might be exclusivists in terms of truth claims who are universalist in their soteriology (Barth is one such), or for that matter, truth-claim pluralists who are, in David Bentley-Hart’s polemical phrase, “infernalist” in soteriology. Though I am not aware of any extant examples of the latter, the scorn certain pluralists harbour toward exclusivists suggests that they might at least wish it so. The threefold typology also faces the problem identified by Gavin D’Costa, to whit, all three paradigms ultimately collapse into some kind of exclusivism: there is no pluralist position which does not, by necessity, exclude those who regrettably continue to insist on the rectitude of their given religion’s historic orthodoxy.
The three tendencies I would now identify are somewhat different, though not without correspondence to the earlier model. Under the influence of postmodernity, whether or not consciously imbibed, religionists now face the question not so much of whether their truth claims are commensurable with those of other religions, or whether there is even any common ground of reason on which such truth-claims may be disputed.
First, the exclusivist position thus metamorphosizes into one which, rather than claiming its own truth-claims falsify those which are incommensurable with it, asserts instead that each religion is so particular that conflicting truth-claims cannot be assessed. There is no overarching universal of “religion” or “salvation” by which a potentially infinite panoply of different phenomena can be justly categorized. Each religion is sui generis and hermetically sealed. This is an essentially nominalist position which leads to radical skepticism. We might therefore have grounds to suspect that this kind of religiosity is in fact a mask of the Enlightenment.
The inclusivist paradigm cannot bear the weight of such skepticism. If all religions are radically incommensurable, then how can one claim that others in any way participate in the truth of one’s own? The rubrics of postmodernity decry such presumption as colonialist hubris, a manifestation of the intellectual occupier’s power-hungry will to conform all foreign thought to his own. Claims of conceptual overlap with other religions therefore become more muted and cautious. Perhaps rightly so.
Henri de Lubac’s work on Buddhism expresses such cautious ambivalence. An admirer of Honen and Shinran, he wrote an entire monograph declaring their religion, despite cosmetic similarities to Christianity, to be just one more outworking of “orthodox Buddhism” (as he defined it), contrasting Buddhism as an atheistic path of “enlightenment” with the Christian way to “salvation.” And yet, despite insisting that “rien n'est fallacieux comme [la] transposition de termes d'une religion à une autre” (Lubac 1955, 256), he concludes with the startling and apparently incongruous remark that he cannot simply resign himself to “condemning [Honen and Shinran] as atheists” (Lubac 1955:307). He is unwilling to transpose, still yet to impose a Christian theistic concept on these Buddhists, yet at the same time restrains himself from claiming that they are utterly lacking faith in the same God as he worships. The weight of de Lubac’s approach towards Buddhism is skeptical, but a breeze of optimistic sympathy pushes him closer to the centre of the Christan-Buddhist seesaw.
The second recent paradigm takes over from de Lubac and shifts further towards the middle of the seesaw, attempting to straddle it and there find a point of balance. De Lubac’s approach to Buddhism, rather than attempting to address it tout court as though it were a single system, was to single out Honen and Shinran as particular interlocutors in a dialogue with him, speaking for his own Catholic position. His is an approach which recognises the specificity and particularity of religious doctrine, without assuming a priori that they are entirely incomparable.
Those who follow him and build on his method go further. Just as de Lubac himself could not represent the entirety of Catholic thought, himself being one not uncontroversial voice among many throughout the ages, let alone represent “Christianity” in any monolithic sense, modern comparative theologians recognise the specificity of their own position, even within their own religion; and rather than engage in broad-brush comparisons between “Buddhism” and “Christianity” as a whole, they bring particular voices and writings and limit the scope of their comparisons to that level. The methodology of Francis Xavier Clooney SJ, which he dubs Comparative Theology, is exemplary in this regard. It calls on the theologian to work towards bilingualism, literal and conceptual, in two religious traditions, bringing together specific texts into close comparison. This methodology makes no attempt at reading exclusivist, inclusivist or pluralist claims into historic texts. As de Lubac did when he subjected the Church Fathers to his ressourcement methodology, it hears particular voices as far as possible in their own right.
The third paradigm and heir to last century’s pluralist endeavours remains the closest of the three to its forebear, either by positing a single, universal truth claim – such as, that “all religions are pathways to God” – or by diving into such clouds of apophaticism as to be barely distinguishable from nihilism. Either way demands a certain suspension of belief in any particular tradition by effectively positing a new super-tradition to subsume them all. One need not go so far as to investigate the child-sacrificing cults of Dagon or Molech or consider the potential of applying this argument to Scientology or Aum Shinrikyo to see its inconsistency. Without so much nuancing as to make the word “God” meaningless, it cannot be given blanket application to non-theistic religions, and requires substantial qualification even to cover the theistic ones. Consent to such a position demands that all religionists abandon the historic orthodoxy of their respective traditions and adopt what is essentially a new dogma based, generally, in some subjective apprehension of a supposedly universal “mystical experience.” This position has repeatedly been demonstrated as incompatible with Christian revelation in Scripture and the tradition of Holy Church, including Nostra Aetate, of which it is a strained, contestable, and contested interpretation.
Serious consideration of other religions, it seems to me, demands proper attention to the particularity and specificity of various inter- and intra-religious perspectives rather than making broad-brush claims about “religion” as a whole. The postmodern critique cannot be ignored or bulldozed. Clooney’s Comparative Theology method takes such particularity seriously and limits its claims to the specific encounters it embarks on. However, it too faces the problem that the “exclusivist” postmodernist identifies, namely the question of what grounds make any dialogue between different intellectual traditions, theological and philosophical, possible. In short, Comparative Theology faces the problem of nominalism.
The philosophical doctrine of nominalism popularised in 14th century Europe by William of Ockham, though of older providence reaching back at least to Peter Abelard, has for some decades now been a bête noire in Christian theological circles and adjacent scholarly opinion critical of the Enlightenment and its subsequent developments. The early twenty-first century Radical Orthodoxy movement spearheaded by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, Alistair MacIntyre’s contemporaneous call for a return to Thomistic virtue ethics and Charles Taylor’s magisterial A Secular Age all, with certain variations, posit nominalism as one of the cardinal sins of Western thought. This train of thought has more recently spilt out into more popular theological presentations, such as those of Bishop Barron’s online Word on Fire project and Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. What these voices, mostly Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican, articulate in common is opposition to nominalism and a desire to return to a broadly Platonic realism, mediated through Christianity. The Anglican priest Hans Boersma’s notion of “sacramental ontology” typifies this view. There are exceptions to the Christian rule: the Sufi scholar Hasan Spiker proffers Platonically influenced Muslim sages such as Ibn ‘Al-Arabi as a realist retort against nominalism from within Islam. The True Pure Land cleric John Paraskevopoulos is a rare Buddhist exemplar. There are also what one might call “pure” Platonists, who see Platonism itself, regardless of any religious mediation, as a sufficient philosophical response to the problems which, they concur, nominalism continues to cause. Lloyd Gerson, for instance, practically defines Platonism as anti-nominalism, and by extension anti-materialism, utilitarianism, relativism and scepticism, problems germane to our day.
I wish to suggest by means of Comparative Theology how Buddhist-Christian dialogue might confront nominalism. Since Platonism is the West’s predominant school of philosophical realism, I take its Christian representative who wrote under the patronage and name of St Dionysius the Areopagite as my Christian interlocutor. On the Buddhist side, I will follow de Lubac’s lead and call on Shinran Shōnin, whose intimation of trust in the other-power of Amida Buddha suggest something like a Buddhist realism. Note from the outset, however, that both Dionysius’ and Shinran’s articulation of what is truly real go beyond what is commonly, and only partially correctly, seen as a Platonic “dualism” between the truly real and the merely apparent.
What is in a name?
The intellectual and spiritual world of Europe in the earlier Middle Ages was dominated by Platonic realism, according to which abstract ideas something like Plato’s Forms are more fundamental to reality than their concrete instantiations. Difficulties emerged with this philosophy in the new European universities of the 12th-14th centuries when a tranche of Greek wisdom hitherto lost to the West was recovered through the reconquest of Islamic Spain. Much of this passed under the name of Aristotle, but included the wrongly ascribed writings of so-called Neoplatonists, notably Proclus, often interwoven with anonymous and unattributed Muslim scholarly interpretation. Averroes’ hyper-Aristotelian emphasis on the particular, which enjoyed far longer currency in Christendom than in the Islamic world, was taken up by the Franciscan friar John Duns Scotus (1264-1308). St Thomas Aquinas had argued that the existence of beings is only analogous to God, who is the Act of Being but Himself transcends “being” in any creaturely sense. But if the word “being” or “existence” means something of creatures and something completely other of God, Duns Scotus countered, it becomes unintelligible. Scotus was not himself a nominalist, but his thought on the univocity of being propelled his junior contemporary, William of Ockham, a member of his same Franciscan order, to go beyond Aristotle and completely to reject the doctrine of Forms, insisting that only the particular can be said to exist. God, no longer the source of existence Himself beyond existence, was now one existent among many, as separable and separate as any one thing is from another; the notion of participation, inherence, and any more than apparent commonality between such particulars was a useless appendix, ripe for excision by Ockham’s notorious razor. What exists is the particular: universals are mental constructs. There are no extra-mental intellectual realities. Rather, the correspondence that minds make between different things is a matter of “naming” them: universals are not independent Forms but mere nomina, the names minds map onto objects of perception.
Ockham’s nominalism transformed the mediaeval view of God and the relationship of the cosmos to Him. The old school of realism understood the cosmos as an unfolding of the divine nature which participates in God, analogous to a tree from a seed, and yet preserved His simultaneous transcendence as the One beyond-being. Now, the cosmos was seen as the result of God’s sovereign and free will, entirely separate from Him and bearing no necessary relation to Him. The relationship of humans to God consequently changed from that of participants in and vehicles of cosmic reunion with the Good beyond being, to subjects, obedient or otherwise to the will of the Supreme Being. Critics trace the trajectory of this move through the Calvin’s emphasis on the Sovereign Will of God, through to Enlightenment scepticism of God, and today’s ultimately materialistic, utilitarian understanding of the natural world. This is, saliently, the kind of God to which Buddhists typically object.
Neither Dionysius nor Shinran share this modern Western understanding of names as arbitrary mental impositions on particulars. The Dionysian Corpus and the Kyogyoshinsho portray reality in terms of illumination emanating from a source which is nameable never as a means of definition but always as a means of reorientation towards truth in trust and praise. The names of that source are revealed in all things but not limited to or comprehended by them: the source essentially exceeds all nomenclature. Rather, in each case, all things participate in the source’s own vocalisation of its Name. Both interlocutors describe this in terms of music, an artform which transcends words.
We begin with a text on Dionysius’ concept of hymning.
Dionysius: Hymning the Name
“We pray that we might approach this super-luminous darkness, and that through unseeing we may see that which is beyond vision, and through unknowing know that which is beyond knowing, by the very act of not seeing and not knowing respectively — for this is actual seeing and knowing — and that we may hymn in a way beyond being that which is Beyond Being, through the abstraction of all beings, just as those who make animated statues carve away everything that has been put in the way of pure sight of the hidden, and only by abstraction reveal the beauty hidden within it. So I think one has to hymn these abstractions in the opposite way to the affirmations. That is, we have put the affirmations in order beginning from the highest instances, through the middle, and descending to the last. Conversely, we abstract everything by making ascents from the last to the absolutely primary. That way, we can know unveiled the Unknowing, which is shrouded beneath all the objects of knowledge among all beings, and can see that darkness beyond being which is hidden beneath all the light among beings.” (MT II, my translation)
Κατὰ τοῦτον ἡμεῖς γενέσθαι τὸν ὑπέρφωτον εὐχόμεθα γνόφον καὶ δι' ἀβλεψίας καὶ ἀγνωσίας ἰδεῖν καὶ γνῶναιτὸν ὑπὲρ θέαν καὶ γνῶσιν αὐτῷ τῷ μὴ ἰδεῖν μηδὲ γνῶναι–τοῦτο γάρ ἐστι τὸ ὄντως ἰδεῖν καὶ γνῶναι –καὶ τὸνὑπερούσιον ὑπερουσίως ὑμνῆσαι διὰ τῆς πάντων τῶν ὄντων ἀφαιρέσεως, ὥσπερ οἱ αὐτοφυὲς ἄγαλμαποιοῦντες ἐξαιροῦντες πάντα τὰ ἐπιπροσθοῦντα τῇ καθαρᾷ τοῦ κρυφίου θέᾳ κωλύματα καὶ αὐτὸ ἐφ' ἑαυτοῦ τῇἀφαιρέσει μόνῃ τὸ ἀποκεκρυμμένον ἀναφαίνοντες κάλλος. Χρὴ δέ, ὡς οἶμαι, τὰς ἀφαιρέσεις ἐναντίως ταῖςθέσεσιν ὑμνῆσαι· καὶ γὰρ ἐκείνας μὲν ἀπὸ τῶν πρωτίστων ἀρχόμενοι καὶ διὰ μέσων ἐπὶ τὰ ἔσχατα κατιόντεςἐτίθεμεν· ἐνταῦθα δὲ ἀπὸ τῶν ἐσχάτων ἐπὶ τὰ ἀρχικώτατα τὰς γνῶμεν ἐκείνην τὴν ἀγνωσίαν τὴν ὑπὸ πάντων τῶν γνωστῶν ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς οὖσι περικεκαλυμμένην καὶ τὸν ὑπερούσιον ἐκεῖνον ἴδωμεν γνόφον τὸν ὑπὸ παντὸςτοῦ ἐν τοῖς οὖσι φωτὸς ἀποκρυπτόμενον.
As the first verb of this passage indicates, Dionysius’ aim is not to make dry philosophical statements about God, but to “pray.” He prefaces the Mystical Theology with a prayer to the Holy Trinity and this prayerful approach frames the whole treatise. Dionysius is adamant that we cannot properly speak of God, but only to God. This is what “hymning” conveys. The end of the Christian spiritual life is not to define God, but to see and so know Him in a way which transcends what we consider knowledge or vision. Hence, that spiritual aim is better compared to entering darkness than to light. We can imagine light all too easily. The divine light exceeds our imagination to such a degree that it is equally valid to describe it as a kind of darkness, as revealed in the cloud into which Moses climbs to meet God on Mount Sinai.
To clarify this point Dionysius employs the motif of a sculptor derived from Plotinus. When we praise God in positive terms, we start with the highest Names we can imagine – God’s Oneness, Goodness, Wisdom and so on – and work our way down through similes and metaphors which derive from these highest affirmations. Such might be the method of a pictorial artist who begins with a blank canvas or board and adds images to it. The sculptor, however, does the opposite. She takes material, the lowest of things, say a block of marble or wood, and rather than adding to or imposing anything on it, she “abstracts,” that is, cuts away to reveal the image within (a method not alien to Buddhist sculptors). This is the way of privation or abstraction (aphairesis), which Dionysius regards as a necessary complement to the way of affirmation. Dionysius is often spoken of as a progenitor or “negative theology,” but this is only half of the truth. For him, the negative and positive are equally necessary. He insists on the need both to affirm all the images of God revealed in Scripture and, at the same time, to deny them, recognising the inability to comprehend God through reason alone.
Dionysius employs the musical term of “hymning,” to describe our approach to God. Music is capable of expressing what words and pictures cannot. As Nietzsche noted in his Birth of Tragedy, poetry is the closest verbal form of communication to that of music. Although poetry is incapable of music’s immediacy of expression, the gaps between the words, or their dissonance and apparent meaninglessness in formal logical terms can express what reason alone cannot. It can use images to lift us beyond images and express the inexpressible. This is like St Paul’s experience of the Holy Spirit praying through us by its wordless groans when our words are not enough. Dionysius, going further, says that our words are never enough: but they are necessary, nonetheless. Through the prayer of hymning, Dionysius dares not define but instead addresses God, using the words of praise and images that God has revealed in creation and in Scripture, yet all the while growing in awareness that none of them, not even all of them, nor the absence of all them, can encompass God. Orientation in worship towards God ultimately yields knowledge of Him in a way that exceeds words, and sight of Him in a way that exceeds vision.
Unknowing knowledge and unseeing vision constitute the aim of Dionysius’ Christian life, which is the realization of union with God. This is not, however, a spiritual exercise to be undertaken alone. Dionysius regards “hymning” as part of the worship of the entire Church on earth and in heaven, the Body of Christ into which God yearns to incorporate the entire cosmos, “that all things may be all in Christ.” Hymning is the most proper “theology,” or verbal approach to God, but it is ultimately consummated in theurgy (EH 3.14), the work of God, effected historically in Christ’s Incarnation and latterly through the Sacraments of the Church, in communal celebration. Material things brought into the ritual act of naming, which Rowan Williams calls “transignification,” reveal their spiritual antecedents and ends. Thus the cosmos is gathered back into harmony with the one who sings it into being, and Himself is the Song.
Shinran: Amida, the Music of Purity
On the subject of hymns, Shinran wrote them prolifically. His Shōshinge 正信偈, sung at daily prayers in the True Pure Land Buddhist tradition since at least the days of Rennyō, praises the Name and virtues of Amida Buddha. It begins:
I take refuge in the Tathāgata of Eternal Life.
I take refuge in the Buddha of Inconceivable Light.帰命無量寿如来
南無不可思議光
Eternal Life is a name of Buddha. Muryōju 無量寿, is a translation of the Sanskrit Amitāyus; Shinran also uses the name Muryōkō 無量光, which renders Amitābha. Both become Amida in Japanese. In both words, Amitacomprises a initial privative a, represented in Chinese and Japanese by 無, governing mita, limited: hence Infinite Life is the first rendition of Amida, Infinite Light the second. We might note that Shinran, like Dionysius, hymns the Name he adores by negation, or “abstraction.” The compound muryō 無量 bears semantic likeness to Dionysius’s constant refrain of hyper, beyond, a likeness more apparent yet in the name which appears in the second line: Fukashigikō不可思議光, Inconceivable Light, where “inconceivable” is literally “impossible to think,” or incomprehensible.
Amida Buddha’s dual names of Infinite Life and Light refer to the twelfth and thirteenth of his Vows revealed in the Larger Sutra of Eternal Life, namely that the Buddha himself should not attain Supreme Enlightenment unless his light spread throughout all reality and his life be unending. These share a paradoxical structure common to all the vows, and particularly the Primal Vow (hongan 本願) central to Shin Buddhist practice, wherein the Buddha vows that unless all sentient beings achieve Buddhahood, he himself should not be Buddha. The paradoxical structure of the Vow lies at the heart of the Pure Land intuition that Amida is simultaneously other than all things, so that sentient beings must rely on his Other-power (tariki) as cardinally opposed to their Self-power (jiriki), and yet that he is entirely one with them as their latent Buddha-nature (busshō).
Amida’s Vow reveals two truths: first, the Tathāgata, or “one who is as things truly are,” is who or what he is only by merit of the participation of all sentient beings in his Buddha nature; and secondly, that “things as they truly are” are motivated by a compassionate desire, something we might perceive even as a will, for the enlightenment of all sentient beings. In another passage relating to the Name of Amida as Inconceivable Light, he presents the outworking of this compassion in terms of that Inconceivable Light emerging from a yet more inconceivable and formless depth:
“From this treasure ocean of oneness form was manifested, taking the name of Bodhisattva Dharmākara, who, through establishing the unhindered Vow as the cause, became Amida Buddha… This Tathāgata is also known as Namu-fukashigikō-butsu and is the ‘dharma body of compassionate means’ (hōben hosshin). ‘Compassionate means’ refers to manifesting form, revealing a name, and making himself known to sentient beings. It refers to Amida Buddha. This Tathāgata is light. Light is none other than wisdom; wisdom is the form taken by light. Wisdom is, in addition, formless; hence this Tathāgata is the Buddha of inconceivable light.” (Shinran, Notes on One-Calling and Many-Calling, trans. Sato 2021:34)
この一如宝海よりかたちをあらわして、法蔵菩薩となのりたまいて、無碍のちかいをおこしたまうをたねとして、阿弥陀仏と、なりたまうがゆえに、報身如来ともうすなり。これを尽十方無碍光仏となづけたてまつれるなり。この如来を、南無不可思議光仏とももうすなり。この如来を方便法身とはもうすなり。方便ともうすは、かたちをあらわし、御なをしめして衆生にしらしめたまうをもうすなり。すなわち、阿弥陀仏なり。この如来は、光明なり。光明は智慧なり。智慧はひかりのかたちなり。智慧またかたちなければ、不可思議光仏ともうすなり。この如来、十方微塵世界にみちみちたまえるがゆえに、無辺光仏ともうす。
Shinran here adopts the distinction made by Tan Lu’an between the Buddha’s unmanifested and manifested Dharmakāyas. The former is characterized by formlessness, oneness and unnameability, the latter by revelation and illumination. Noting the parallels of transcendence, immanence, and compassionate self-manifestation under a Name, this is surely not beyond fruitful comparison with a passage from Dionysius’ Divine Names:
“Hence, the Beyond-God has come even unto nature by his love for humanity (philanthrōpia), has truly been rendered existent, and taken the name of a man — may these things beyond thought and reason which we are hymning, by which the beyond-nature and beyond-being subsists, be gracious! — and this is so, not just because he has come into communion (kekoinōke) with us while he remains unmixed and unconfused (nor is it the case that his superplenitude was affected by his unutterable kenōsis), but because although he is the most utterly primal of all primaries, he was beyond-nature even amid our natural realm, and was the Beyond-being among things of the order of being, transcending everything that belongs to us, everything that comes from us, everything that is beyond us.”[1] (DN 2:10)
Ὅθεν ἐπειδὴ καὶ ἕως φύσεως ὑπὲρ φιλανθρωπίας ἐλήλυθε καὶ ἀληθῶς οὐσιώθη καὶ ἀνὴρ ὁ ὑπέρθεος ἐχρημάτισεν, ἵλεω δὲ εἴη πρὸς ἡμῶν τὰ ὑπὲρ νοῦν καὶ λόγον ὑμνούμενα, κἀν τούτοις ἔχει τὸ ὑπερφυὲς καὶ ὑπερούσιον, οὐ μόνον ᾗἀναλλοιώτως ἡμῖν καὶ ἀσυγχύτως κεκοινώκε μηδὲν πεπονθὼς εἰς τὸ ὑπερπλῆρες αὐτοῦ πρὸς τῆς ἀφθέγκτου κενώσεως, ἀλλ`ὅτι καὶ τὸ πάντων καινῶν καινότατον ἑν τοῖς φυσικοῖς ἡμῶν ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς ὑπερέχων.
Shinran was noted for his humility, proclaiming like Socrates his own ignorance, even to the extent of naming himself the “stubble-headed fool,” Gutoku. One sees such humility too in Dionysius, not least in his adoption of a pseudonym so that he, as Luther put it, “whoever he was,” might unlike his critic not be remembered by posterity. But note too the humility in his reluctance to try to comprehend God: hymning is as far as Dionysius is willing to allow language to stretch in its reach towards that which is beyond all things and, as he at one point echoes Proclus, is “no thing at all.” Shinran’s humility finds its doctrinal outworking in the Nembutsu, the “practice of no-practice” of taking refuge in Amida Buddha, not so much by reciting the Name, but by letting the Name recite itself through the (non-)practitioner. There is conceptual overlap here with Dionysius’ mode of hymning, whereby all creation joins in the choir of angels with a silent and nonverbal vocalisation of Who God is. With this in mind, we might treasure Shinran’s evocative description of the Pure Land:
The delicate, wondrous sounds of jewel-trees in the jewel-forests
Are a naturally pure and harmonious music,
Unexcelled in subtlety and elegance,
So take refuge in Amida, the music of purity.(Shinran, Hymn 39 on Gathas in Praise of Amida Buddha)
Names, then, for both Shinran and Dionysius are not arbitrary impositions of meaning, whether by God or man, but constitute rather a luminous music in which beings are called to participate so as to return to the depths of reality, which so exceed light and song that they seem to us silence and darkness.
Conclusion
Platonism, so called, is a broad school, enough to accommodate Cartesian dualism and the modified Proclean, theurgic non-dualism which Dionysius embraces. It is broad enough to provide a platform on which mutually comprehensible dialogue with Shin Buddhists might be held. Though I have tried to mitigate the risk of “transposing terms of one religion with those of another,” I leave it to you to decide to what extent this brief reading of both Christian and Buddhist text in Platonic terms is legitimate and successful. What I hope I have demonstrated is that the interplay of these specific Christian and Buddhist traditions opens possibilities for a realist response to nominalism, wherein true reality is not merely subject to the definition of the most powerful “being,” whether god or man, but radiates and reveals itself from an unfathomable cloud or ocean of oneness beyond number, division, discrimination or comprehension; that Dionysius and Shinran recognise in this reality, in a way which counters majority Platonic and Buddhist opinion, something of a philanthropic or compassionate desire to restore all things to itself; and that it sings a Name which exercises a gravitational compunction on those who hear it to join the song.
There is more to be said, but today, this is as far as I can go. In the end, I must join de Lubac with a caveat: though the Names of Amida are so very like the Names Dionysius finds reflecting from God, and though they express something approaching a sacramental and salvific ontology, if the challenge that Buddhists offer Christians is the particularity of Christ, then that too is the challenge Christians must offer Buddhists: for it is in the incarnation of Christ and His self-gift in the physical matter of sacraments, in the theurgic sunthēmata of water, bread and wine, that the Church’s hymn of praise reaches its crescendo and fully disrupts the dualism of matter and spirit, creator and creation. This is a challenge which sacramental Christianity might equally level at non-theurgic Platonism. But it is not for me to respond to that challenge, and so I retreat with palms together into the silent harmonies of the eternal song.