Abstract
This article investigates the structures of an identifiably Buddhist philosophy of religion, understood as the philosophical exposition and exploration of Buddhist religiosity. I thus theorize what forms a philosophy of religion structured according to Buddhist principles and paradigms might take, address various theoretical and methodological considerations, and survey a range of candidate schemas, which latter are arranged under textual, sectarian, and doctrinal rubrics. Overall, this project is undertaken on the understanding that the study of Buddhism, among other global traditions, need not and should not replicate conceptual structures imposed upon it from without, and that philosophy of religion is enriched by attention to the resolutely plural philosophies of religions worldwide.
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Notes
Joy is led to this conclusion by way of the observation that “philosophy of religion, in conjunction with theology, has been involved in dubious maneuvers in order to exclude even eastern religions from what has been considered ‘absolute truth’” (Joy, 2018, 20).
Mizrahi speaks specifically of analytic philosophy of religion, but his assessment is unfortunately true of the continental and other strands into which the field is customarily divided. Drawing on numerous prior studies, he goes on to provide copious statistical evidence in support of the claim that analytic philosophy of religion (and, I would unhesitatingly add, the field as whole) “does not pay much attention to religions other than Christianity” (Mizrahi, 2020, 560).
Irvine and Bilimoria’s Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion as a whole is aimed at critiquing what they perceive to be this “indefensible ignorance… passed off as deliberate sagacity” (Irvine & Bilimoria, 2009, 3). Much of what they say applies not only to philosophy of religion specifically but also to philosophy more generally, as for example the “excuse” they mention for excluding Asian philosophers from philosophy curricula, according to which “Either ‘Asian philosophers’ cannot compete with ‘mainstream’ philosophers, anyway, or ‘Asian Philosophy’ is not based on anything fundamental and universal, like ‘reason’” (Irvine & Bilimoria, 2009, 3). For a robust critique of this and related arguments, see Stepien, 2021.
As Morny Joy has rightly (but rather euphemistically) written, “errors have resulted from an approach in which the religions and philosophies of non-Western peoples have been interpreted by reducing or manipulating their ideas and values to fit solely with Western concepts and categories” (Joy, 2018, 15).
On this point, see also n. 16 below. As per Richard Amesbury,
Until relatively recently… Although philosophy of religion was not exclusively the property of Christians, its agenda was decisively shaped by Christian categories, and it frequently had an apologetic flavour… Occasionally, to be sure, philosophy of religion took up the topic of plurality… but the ‘problem of other religions’ was almost invariably approached from the standpoint of the Western (Christian) theist and with little attention to broader dynamics of history, power, and civilizational politics. (Amesbury, 2020, 4–5).
While Amesbury’s ‘until relatively recently’ may lead one to suppose that the tendency he describes is a relic of a bygone era, he goes on to assert that “This kind of philosophy of religion still exists. Indeed, it arguably remains dominant, structuring undergraduate courses and textbooks and exerting considerable pull in professional conferences and journals” (Amesbury, 2020, 5). Some of my argument in what follows is designed to demonstrate that this is not ‘arguably’ but incontrovertibly the case, and that much more needs to be done to rectify the situation or run the real risk of ushering in The End of Philosophy of Religion (Trakakis, 2008).
I thus consider Roy Perrett’s claim that “the shape of Indian philosophy of religion is often significantly different from that of Western philosophy of religion” (Perrett, 2001, xii) to be wholly applicable to the Buddhist case, Indian or otherwise.
The internal division of the field, moreover, between those urgently pressing for greater diversity and those maintaining the status quo, is signalled by Carroll’s further observation that, “depending on whom one reads, philosophy of religion either is in the midst of a decades-long boom or is a field in crisis” (Carroll, 2016, 40). Wherever one stands on this debate, I consider it beyond dispute that “the trend of rapid contraction of academic positions in philosophy of religion” is not unrelated to the fact that the field “typically focuses narrowly on worldview beliefs, often limited to a particular religious tradition (usually Christianity) or set of religious traditions (usually theisms)” (Wildman, 2021, 5).
In any case, any hopes I may harbour of initiating a long and fruitful enterprise are tempered somewhat by the fact that the opening paragraph of Perrett’s Introduction to his Indian Philosophy of Religion holds as true today as it did when written over three decades ago:
With a few notable exceptions, analytical philosophy of religion in the West still continues to focus almost entirely on the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In particular, it is all too customary to ignore the rich fund of concepts and arguments supplied by the Indian religious tradition. This is a pity, for it gratuitously impoverishes the scope of much contemporary philosophy of religion and precludes the attainment of any insights into Indian religions comparable to those that the clarity and rigour of analytic philosophy has made possible for the Judaeo-Christian tradition. (Perrett, 1989, 1).
In adopting Wildman’s term here, I am not to be taken as assuming agreement between our usages, not least since, while I am highly sympathetic to Wildman’s conception of “religious philosophy as multidisciplinary comparative inquiry… arc[ing] across the world’s religious and philosophical traditions” (Wildman, 2010, xiv, xv), I find his repartitioning of this field into the “onto-theological, cosmo-theological, physico-theological, psycho-theological, axio-theological, and mystic-theological” (Wildman, 2010, xiv; see 247–305 for discussion) strands to be, for all the in-principle globality, distinctly theological, and thereby manifestly ill-suited to the Buddhist case, among others.
In that work, I go on to provide a damning account of the near-total absence of non-Christian materials in field-wide surveys (Stepien, 2020, 7–8, 16 nn. 4–6). Knepper likewise reviews the content of numerous leading field-representative publications to support in detail his assessment that “Examples of neglect of the historical religions in general and the non-Abrahamic religions in particular abound… And when there is consideration of the historical religions, it is usually cursory and Christian” (Knepper, 2018, 121 n. 9). These accounts only serve to substantiate Wesley Wildman’s assessment that,
Where religious studies textbooks have changed dramatically in the last half century, reflecting the rapid development and diversification of scholarly work in the academic study of religion, most philosophy of religion textbooks remain in the ‘classic Western questions’ mode, perhaps with a conciliatory chapter about the world religions and religious pluralism appended in recognition of changing times. (Wildman, 2010: xii).
Though Wildman presents the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion (Meister & Copan, 2007) as “a welcome exception to this dominant and disastrous trend” (Wildman, 2010, xiv), I would consider it (along with its sequel Meister & Copan, 2013) as among those works which, though they
at least make an effort to include some non-Judeo-Christian elements… such contributions are typically so peripheral to the central questions and so briefly (therefore shallowly) treated in comparison to the core tradition that they can only serve to reinforce the prevailing bias according to which “other” traditions are taken to be less sophisticated – a wonderfully vicious circle if ever there was one. (Stepien, 2020, 7–8).
For a premier example of the tokenistic treatment of religious plurality, see Rea and Pojman (2015), surveyed in n. 21 below.
Neville’s full passage is quoted and discussed at the very outset of Irvine and Bilimoria’s Introduction to their venture in Postcolonial Philosophy of Religion (Irvine & Bilimoria, 2009, 1). As for the focus on epistemology, Schellenberg agrees that “The larger part of philosophy of religion today is epistemology of religion” and hypothesizes that “The dominance of epistemology… comes mainly from the felt need among Christian philosophers to show that Christian belief is intellectually respectable” (Schellenberg, 2015, 452, emphasis original).
Note that Trakakis is not so overt in 2018 as in Trakakis, 2008.
My reference is to Leftow, Anderson, and Schellenberg, 2015, in which, rather surprisingly or unsurprisingly depending on one’s point of view, one finds extended discussions of “the theist-atheist debate” (Leftow, 2015, 441), “God’s omni-attributes… [as] theistically thick ethical concepts” (Anderson, 2015, 445), “the characterization of God as masculine” (Anderson, 2015, 447), and “what religion is” and “how much of philosophy… has managed to penetrate the subject” (Schellenberg, 2015, 451–452, emphases original), but, apart from (welcome but) merely passing references to “pay[ing] more attention to conceptions of God beyond standard Western theism” (Leftow, 2015, 442), to “widening the subject matter and conceptual frame of what is written” (Anderson, 2015, 445, emphases original), or to overcoming the “continued focus exclusively or largely on what one finds in Christian or theistic philosophy” (Schellenberg, 2015, 453), no attention is given to any topic in any non-Christian religion. As for philosophy of religion being accounted ‘harmful’, I take Knepper to be referring, inter alia, to the field’s overwhelmingly apologetic attitude toward Christianity and (therefore) its marked “unwilling[ness] to acknowledge such an allegiance [of “Christianity as being closely allied with colonialism and former imperial ambitions”] and past complicity in the objectification and demeaning of others, especially on matters of assigning degrees of rationality” (Joy, 2018, 20). If with this background philosophy of religion can nonetheless be seen as enjoying a “platinum” age deserving of a “back-pat… keep it up, please” (Leftow, 2015, 441), then I admit to being left wondering as to not only the intellectual value but also the moral worth of the field.
Schellenberg does not specify what he means by “again” (after the Middle Ages? the Cambridge Platonists?), but it is not in dispute that philosophy of religion as a field of scholarly inquiry emerged in the twentieth century (see also Taliaferro, 2021: §1 cited above). For an authoritative survey of the major thinkers, debates, and developments in what he pleonastically calls “Western” philosophy of religion, see Long, 2000.
In this, of course, philosophy of religion is alike to the study of religion, both of which claim to be of religion without qualification but have proven to proceed, effectively if not avowedly, according to the principle that “Christianity is die Religion—the absolute religion, in which all others find their fulfilment” (Sharpe, 1986, 127) and according to whose criterial yardsticks all others are appraised. Indeed, Tyler Roberts attributes the fact that “philosophers of religion have focused on religious belief” to the determinative place of Christianity in the study of religion generally, which “has tended to conceptualise ‘religion’ on the model of Christianity as a discourse of belief” (Roberts, 2018, 196). As an anonymous reviewer helpfully noted here, Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion (Asad, 1993) of course offers “a comparable critique of Religious Studies, as being historically, predominantly, through the Christian lens and rooted in colonialism.”
In case anyone think that Christianocentric conceptual limitations no longer animate, as once they indubitably dominated, the study of Buddhism, allow me to point out that there has only been one book that I know of explicitly devoted to charting an identifiably Buddhist philosophy of religion, and it unfortunately simply reproduces Christian paradigms such as those I outline. I am referring to Arvind Sharma’s The Philosophy of Religion: A Buddhist Perspective (Sharma, 1995) which, far from introducing any distinctively Buddhist perspectives, upon inspection actually proceeds by imposing a straightforwardly Christianocentric perspective from standard philosophy of religion upon Buddhism. With chapter titles such as ‘The Concept of God’, ‘The Problem of Evil’, ‘Revelation and Faith’, etc., this book is not only wholly at odds with the disciplinary agenda I am proposing but, I submit, parasitical on Christian philosophy of religion and therefore unacceptable as a work of Buddhist philosophy of religion.
Knepper provides a survey of such ‘confessional moments’ in Knepper, 2018, 123 n. 13, where he furthermore underlines “I do not mean to suggest that the mere articulation of Christian-theistic commitments is problematic. It is only so (in the context of philosophy of religion) when unbalanced and unchecked by other religious-philosophical commitments”—a position with which I agree entirely. As for my own placement vis-à-vis Buddhism, this is a topic I broach shortly.
The Sutta Piṭaka is itself divided into five nikāyas (volumes) or āgamas (collections): the Dīgha Nikāya or Long Discourses of the Buddha (Walshe, 1995), Majjhima Nikāya or Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Ñāṇamoli & Bodhi, 1995), Saṃyutta Nikāya or Connected Discourses of the Buddha (Bodhi, 2000), Aṅguttara Nikāya or Numerical Discourses of the Buddha (Bodhi, 2012), and Khuddaka Nikāya or Short Discourses of the Buddha (see e.g. Horner 1974, 1975; Ñāṇamoli, 1982; Thanissaro, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015, 2016, 2017; Walters, 2018).
“The Abhidhamma-piṭaka comprises seven treatises: the Dhammasaṅgaṇi, the Vibhaṅga, the Dhātukathā, the Puggalapaññatti, the Kathāvatthu, the Yamaka and the Paṭṭhāna” (Ronkin, 2005, 28).
I take as exemplary what is perhaps the most widely used textbook in the field, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (Rea & Pojman, 2015), now in its seventh edition. This is divided into: Part I: The Concept of God (with sections on: Concepts of God and the Ultimate; Classical Theistic Attributes); Part II: Traditional Arguments for the Existence of God (The Ontological Argument for the Existence of God; The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God; The Teleological Argument for the Existence of God); Part III: Evil and the Hiddenness of God (Historical and Literary Perspectives; The Problems of Evil and Divine Hiddenness; Responses); Part IV: Religion and Experience (Mystical Experience and the Perception of God; Miracles and Testimony; Science and Religion); Part V: Faith and Reason (The Nature of Faith; Pragmatic Justification of Religious Belief; Rationality and Justified Religious Belief); Part VI: Religious Pluralism; Part VII: Death and Immortality.
As Walser specifies, the five aggregates are “form (rūpa), feelings (vedanā), concepts (saṃjñā), formations (saṃskāra), and consciousnesses (vijñāna)”—a list which Walser, drawing on Frauwallner (1995), states the Abhidharmasāra repurposed “into a categorical scheme for all existents, both sentient and nonsentient” (Walser, 2016, 164).
The conditioned are standardly divided into “three broad categories: consciousness (citta), associated mentality (cetasika), and materiality, or physical phenomena (rūpa)” (Ronkin, 2005, 47), while the unconditioned category is reserved for nibbāna / nirvāṇa alone. See also Walser (2016), 165:
Frauwallner (1995) points out that there was another, competing categorical scheme predating the Abhidharmasāra, the “Five Topics” (pañcavastu)…: (1) form (rūpa); (2) mind (citta); (3) mental factors (caitta = Pāli cetasika); (4) conditioned factors not associated with the mind (cittaviprayuktasaṃskāra); and (5) the unconditioned (asaṃskṛta),” with the fifth and final category reserved for nirvāṇa alone.
The five precepts are “to refrain from harming living creatures, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, false speech, intoxicants that cause heedlessness” (Gethin, 1998, 170).
I owe the term ‘buddhalogy’ to Griffiths (1994).
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Stepien, R.K. Prolegomena to a Buddhist philosophy of religion. Int J Philos Relig 94, 63–89 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09867-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11153-023-09867-0