BPS Newsletter Cover Essay #24 (Summer-Fall 1993)
                                           
                                           
                        TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY
                                           
                            by Bhikkhu Bodhi
                                           
                                           
                                           
   
   Today all the major religions of the world must respond to a double 
   challenge. On one side is the challenge of secularism, a trend which 
   has swept across the globe, battering against the most ancient 
   strongholds of the sacred and turning all man's movements towards 
   the Beyond into a forlorn gesture, poignant but devoid of sense. On 
   the other side is the meeting of the great religions with each 
   other. As the most far-flung nations and cultures merge into a 
   single global community, the representatives of humankind's 
   spiritual quest have been brought together in an encounter of 
   unprecedented intimacy, an encounter so close that it leaves no room 
   for retreat. Thus at one and the same time each major religion 
   faces, in the amphitheater of world opinion, all the other religions 
   of the earth, as well as the vast numbers of people who regard all 
   claims to possess the Great Answer with a skeptical frown or an 
   indifferent yawn.
   
   In this situation, any religion which is to emerge as more than a 
   relic from humanity's adolescence must be able to deal, in a 
   convincing and meaningful manner, with both sides of the challenge. 
   On the one hand it must contain the swelling tide of secularism, by 
   keeping alive the intuition that no amount of technological mastery 
   over external nature, no degree of proficiency in providing for 
   humanity's mundane needs, can bring complete repose to the human 
   spirit, can still the thirst for a truth and value that transcends 
   the boundaries of contingency. On the other hand, each religion must 
   find some way of disentangling the conflicting claims that all 
   religions make to understand our place in the grand scheme of things 
   and to hold the key to our salvation. While remaining faithful to 
   its own most fundamental principles, a religion must be able to 
   address the striking differences between its own tenets and those of 
   other creeds, doing so in a manner that is at once honest yet 
   humble, perspicacious yet unimposing.
   
   In this brief essay I wish to sketch the outline of an appropriate 
   Buddhist response to the second challenge. Since Buddhism has always 
   professed to offer a "middle way" in resolving the intellectual and 
   ethical dilemmas of the spiritual life, we may find that the key to 
   our present problematic also lies in discovering the response that 
   best exemplifies the middle way. As has often been noted, the middle 
   way is not a compromise between the extremes but a way that rises 
   above them, avoiding the pitfalls into which they lead. Therefore, 
   in seeking the proper Buddhist approach to the problem of the 
   diversity of creeds, we might begin by pinpointing the extremes 
   which the middle way must avoid.
   
   The first extreme is a retreat into fundamentalism, the adoption of 
   an aggressive affirmation of one's own beliefs coupled with a 
   proselytizing zeal towards those who still stand outside the chosen 
   circle of one's co-religionists. While this response !o the 
   challenge of diversity has assumed alarming proportions in the folds 
   of the great monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, it is 
   not one towards which Buddhism has a ready affinity, for the ethical 
   guidelines of the Dhamma naturally tend to foster an attitude of 
   benign tolerance towards other religions and their followers. Though 
   there is no guarantee against the rise of a militant fundamentalism 
   from within Buddhism's own ranks, the Buddha's teachings can offer 
   no sanctification, not even a remote one, for such a malignant 
   development.
   
   For Buddhists the more alluring alternative is the second extreme. 
   This extreme, which purchases tolerance at the price of integrity, 
   might be called the thesis of spiritual universalism: the view that 
   all the great religions, at their core, espouse essentially the same 
   truth, clothed merely in different modes of expression. Such a 
   thesis could not, of course, be maintained in regard to the formal 
   creeds of the major religions, which differ so widely that it would 
   require a strenuous exercise in word-twisting to bring them into 
   accord. The universalist position is arrived at instead by an 
   indirect route. Its advocates argue that we must distinguish between 
   the outward face of a religion -- its explicit beliefs and exoteric 
   practices -- and its inner nucleus of experiential realization. On 
   the basis of this distinction, they then insist, we will find that 
   beneath the markedly different outward faces of the great religions, 
   at their heart -- in respect of the spiritual experiences from which 
   they emerge and the ultimate goal to which they lead -- they are 
   substantially identical. Thus the major religions differ simply in 
   so far as they are different means, different expedients, to the 
   same liberative experience, which may be indiscriminately designated 
   "enlightenment," or "redemption," or "God-realization," since these 
   different terms merely highlight different aspects of the same goal. 
   As the famous maxim puts it: the roads up the mountain are many, but 
   the moonlight at the top is one. From this point of view, the Buddha 
   Dhamma is only one more variant on the "perennial philosophy" 
   underlying all the mature expressions of mall's spiritual quest. It 
   may stand out by its elegant simplicity, its clarity and directness; 
   but a unique and unrepeated revelation of truth it harbors not.
   
   On first consideration the adoption of such a view may seem to be an 
   indispensable stepping-stone to religious tolerance, and to insist 
   that doctrinal differences are not merely verbal but real and 
   important may appear to border on bigotry. Thus those who embrace 
   Buddhism in reaction against the doctrinaire narrowness of the 
   monotheistic religions may find in such a view -- so soft and 
   accommodating -- a welcome respite from the insistence on privileged 
   access to truth typical of those religions. However, an unbiased 
   study of the Buddha's own discourses would show quite plainly that 
   the universalist thesis does not have the endorsement of the 
   Awakened One himself. To the contrary, the Buddha repeatedly 
   proclaims that the path to the supreme goal of the holy life is made 
   known only in his own teaching, and therefore that the attainment of 
   that goal -- final deliverance from suffering -- can be achieved 
   only from within his own dispensation. The best known instance of 
   this claim is the Buddha's assertion, on the eve of his Parinibbana, 
   that only in his dispensation are the four grades of enlightened 
   persons to be found, that the other sects are devoid of true 
   ascetics, those who have reached the planes of liberation.
   
   The Buddha's restriction of final emancipation to his own 
   dispensation does not spring from a narrow dogmatism or a lack of 
   good will, but rests upon an utterly precise determination of the 
   nature of the final goal and of the means that must be implemented 
   to reach it. This goal is neither an everlasting afterlife in a 
   heaven nor some nebulously conceived state of spiritual 
   illumination, but the Nibbana element with no residue remaining, 
   release from the cycle of repeated birth and death. This goal is 
   effected by the utter destruction of the mind's defilements -- 
   greed, aversion and delusion -- all the way down to their subtlest 
   levels of latency. The eradication of the defilements can be 
   achieved only by insight into the true nature of phenomena, which 
   means that the attainment of Nibbana depends upon the direct 
   experiential insight into all conditioned phenomena, internal and 
   external, as stamped with the "three characteristics of existence": 
   impermanence, suffering, and non-selfness. What the Buddha 
   maintains, as the ground for his assertion that his teaching offers 
   the sole means to final release from suffering, is that the 
   knowledge of the true nature of phenomena, in its exactitude and 
   completeness, is accessible only in his teaching. This is so 
   because, theoretically, the principles that define this knowledge 
   are unique to his teaching and contradictory in vital respects to 
   the basic tenets of other creeds; and because, practically, this 
   teaching alone reveals, in its perfection and purity, the means of 
   generating this liberative knowledge as a matter of immediate 
   personal experience. This means is the Noble Eightfold Path which, 
   as an integrated system of spiritual training, cannot be found 
   outside the dispensation of a Fully Enlightened One.
   
   Surprisingly, this exclusivistic stance of Buddhism in regard to the 
   prospects for final emancipation has never engendered a policy of 
   intolerance on the part of Buddhists towards the adherents of other 
   religions. To the contrary, throughout its long history, Buddhism 
   has displayed a thoroughgoing tolerance and genial good will towards 
   the many religions with which it has come into contact. It has 
   maintained this tolerance simultaneously with its deep conviction 
   that the doctrine of the Buddha offers the unique and unsurpassable 
   way to release from the ills inherent in conditioned existence. For 
   Buddhism, religious tolerance is not achieved by reducing all 
   religions to a common denominator, nor by explaining away formidable 
   differences in thought and practice as accidents of historical 
   development. From the Buddhist point of view, to make tolerance 
   contingent upon whitewashing discrepancies would not be to exercise 
   genuine tolerance at all; for such an approach can "tolerate" 
   differences only by diluting them so completely that they no longer 
   make a difference. True tolerance in religion involves the capacity 
   to admit differences as real and fundamental, even as profound and 
   unbridgeable, yet at the same time to respect the rights of those 
   who follow a religion different from one's own (or no religion at 
   all) to continue to do so without resentment, disadvantage or 
   hindrance.
   
   Buddhist tolerance springs from the recognition that the 
   dispositions and spiritual needs of human beings are too vastly 
   diverse to be encompassed by any single teaching, and thus that 
   these needs will naturally find expression in a wide variety of 
   religious forms. The non-Buddhist systems will not be able to lead 
   their adherents to the final goal of the Buddha's Dhamma, but that 
   they never proposed to do in the first place. For Buddhism, 
   acceptance of the idea of the beginningless round of rebirths 
   implies that it would be utterly unrealistic to expect more than a 
   small number of people to be drawn towards a spiritual path aimed at 
   complete liberation. The overwhelming majority, even of those who 
   seek deliverance from earthly woes, will aim at securing a favorable 
   mode of existence within the round, even while misconceiving this to 
   be the ultimate goal of the religious quest.
   
   To the extent that a religion proposes sound ethical principles and 
   can promote to some degree the development of wholesome qualities 
   such as love, generosity, detachment and compassion, it will merit 
   in this respect the approbation of Buddhists. These principles 
   advocated by outside religious systems will also conduce to rebirth 
   in the realms of bliss -- the heavens and the divine abodes. 
   Buddhism by no means claims to have unique access to these realms, 
   but holds that the paths that lead to them have been articulated, 
   with varying degrees of clarity, in many of the great spiritual 
   traditions of humanity. While the Buddhist will disagree with the 
   belief structures of other religions to the extent that they deviate 
   from the Buddha's Dhamma, he will respect them to the extent that 
   they enjoin virtues and standards of conduct that promote spiritual 
   development and the harmonious integration of human beings with each 
   other and with the world.
   
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