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De Lubac, Christ and the Buddha
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Cardinal Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) considered Buddhism to be, after Christianity, the greatest spiritual fact of history. His groundbreaking studies of it have nevertheless received little previous scholarly attention. De Lubac focuses on Amidism, also known as Pure Land Buddhism, because he regards this as the form of Buddhism possessing greatest affinity with Christian faith, particularly in its conceptions of charity and divine personality. Religion cannot be considered in isolation from culture, however. De Lubac argues that Christian-Buddhist encounter is, wherever it occurs, necessarily also an encounter between Western culture and Buddhism, in the course of which boundaries between religions and cultures are continually defined, dissolved and redefined, especially in the understanding of human personhood. He nevertheless defends the universality of faith in Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom the desire of nature for God characteristic of the whole of humanity is fully expressed and realized.
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Footnotes
1
I am grateful to Gavin D'Costa, Wendy Dossett, Owen Gartside, Tom Plant and Andrew Unsworth for comments on this article. It was first presented at the Society for the Study of Theology 2006 Annual Conference at the University of Leeds, UK, the subject of which was “Theology and the Religions.” A revised version was presented at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego, in the Roman Catholic Studies Group.
References
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