Book: In Spirit and in Truth
Author: Fr. Mervyn Fernando
Review by Prof. Gananath Obeyesekere
When Father Mervyn Fernando asked me to review this book I remembered a very apt Sinhala phrase: na kiyanne ba, ne? Translated this means, "how to say no, no?" Then I remembered that he has a wonderful exposition of other uniquely Sinhala quixotic idioms — nikan ava and nikan innava — in his earlier book, THIS PIECE OF PLANET EARTH, SRI LANKA. That work suggests to me something that many Sinhala-Buddhist intellectuals seem to forget, that Catholics have been here a long time, and they are as much Sinhala as the generality of us, as surely as they are Tamils in the North and East, or hybrid mixtures of both.

Further, the two religious communities speak Sinhala with the same expressive idioms and their middle-class Sinhala-English is spoken with the same intonations. And all of Father Mervyn’s work is permeated with an unabashed love for this piece of planet where we live, part of the time at least, and might yet begin to live in a more authentic manner if we think like Buddhists, and one might even say, like Catholics, not in official theology, but in ordinary discourse where the two communities have lived cheek by jowl with each other and have borrowed from each other as is inevitable in any such historical juncture.

Father Mervyn forthrightly recognizes the colonial heritage of Christianity: nothing obviously can erase that history but surely that past is long gone and the Catholic faith is as much part of Sri Lanka’s multicultural existence as is Hinduism. But our author is not naive enough to believe that all is sweet, all is sound, because he says in the book being reviewed that though Catholics live as neighbours with Buddhists they are ensconced in their own communities. He does recognize however that this must be qualified because there is considerable give and take between Catholics and Buddhists, in everyday interaction in office and market place; and the use of common speech idioms bind them even further, as do the bonds of marriage and friendship, and one might add somewhat wryly, that of caste. Further, on the popular level Buddhists go to pilgrimage places like that of our Lady of Madhu (who is the Goddess Pattini for them) as also do Hindus (for whom she is Kannaki or Durgha or any of the various refractions of the Mother Goddess).

However, horrendous these incursions may mean theologically for these religions they do make good sense sociologically and help the multiple elements in Sri Lankan society lurch (hopefully) towards a new nation that might yet be born.

Father Mervyn is not naive enough to believe that Buddhism and Christianity are similar on the ontalogical and soteriological or salvific levels because he realizes that Buddhism denies the idea of any stable entity that resists change and impermanence and is flatly against the reified Ego of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, "I think, I am." And it simply cannot accommodate within its worldview any creator god of the monotheisms. Buddhism’s doctrine of the ever-changing skandhas and the idea of "no-soul" cannot in any way cross connect with Christianity. Thus, as the author says, to postulate any interconnections on the soteriological or even epistemological, levels are "quite pointless." And he adds in a neat sentence: "As much as Christianity is inconceivable without God, so is Buddhism inconceivable with God." (p. 14)

The crosscurrents of that makes for possible dialogue between the two religions are therefore philosophical and existential. Father Mervyn recognizes that Buddhist "philosophy" has remarkable similarity with the existential thought of several modern European thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Satre. What then connects these thinkers with Buddhism? The author argues that it is, among other things, a preoccupation with the transience of human lives and pleasures, and the idea expressed by Heidegger that man is a being towards death. This preoccupation with transience and death involves, says Father Mervyn, the creation of a living philosophy on the basis of an authentic mode of existence or being (if one does not capitalize the latter word), or dasein as Heidegger would have it. The goals of such a mode of authentic existence is not identical in Buddhism and Western existential thought but here is a ground where it is possible to connect one faith with the other and open up oneself to the Other without necessarily becoming Buddhists or Western existentialists (though, I would say, that a Buddhist existentialism congenial to our times is perhaps around the corner awaiting philosophical formulation.)

The implications of Father Mervyn’s argument are quite profound, I think. He seems to imply that Christians need not accept Buddhist epistemology but they can live comfortably with its existential message. And Buddhists in turn can gain considerable insight into life from the work of the philosophers mentioned above, only one of whom may be characterized as truly Christian, namely Kierkegaard. Father Mervyn recognizes that Nietzsche is the European thinker who shows the closest affinity with Buddhism because Nietzsche not only proclaimed the "death of God" but also devastatingly criticized mainline Western philosophy, especially (for Nietzsche) the philosophy of the detestable Kant. But beyond this Nietzsche denied the idea of the Cartesian Ego or any form of a soul theory as well as the widespread Western assumption that the limits of language indicate the limits of thought. In this regard Father Mervyn approvingly quotes the Venerable Rahula’s statement: "[T]here is no thinker behind the thoughts. Thought itself is the thinker. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. Here we cannot fail to notice how this Buddhist view is diametrically opposed to the Cartesian ‘cogito ergo sum’..." (p. 5) In similar vein "Thoughts without a thinker" is the very Buddhist title of a recent book by an American Buddhist psychoanalyst, Mark Epstein, a phrase that Epstein borrowed from a Christian psychoanalyst W. R. Bion.1

A strikingly similar idea was expressed by Nietzsche long before these mystically oriented psychoanalysts emerged on the scene: "A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but that this "it" is precisely the famous old "ego" is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an immediate certainty."2 I might add that these thoughts were re-echoed by another great modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Wittgenstein also insists — contrary to what a philosopher like Husserl might claim — that there is no evidence for any sort of impersonal, transcendental ego or centre constituting the world, since there is only the world that is experienced and no evidence of anything else. The expression "I" can therefore be eliminated in the context of primary experience: what we should say is ‘it thinks,’ like ‘it rains,’ and not ‘I think’."3 This is not to say that either philosopher would have found the Buddhist salvation quest appealing but they would certainly have found strong intellectual affinity with some of Buddhism’s philosophical positions.

But while Wittgenstein has some sympathy with the Christian mystical traditions, this is not so with Nietzsche who was an out and out atheist. Thus Father Mervyn provokes me to ask whether there are some crosscurrents linking the mystical thought of the two great religions. He has noted the Buddha’s symbolic uses of silence, especially when asked about nirvana. But as Father Mervyn points out (following Walpola Rahula) that nirvana is often defined negatively, though not as the Satrean idea of "Nothingness." Here we are posed with the nature of language: language and discursive thought in general cannot express the ultimate nature of the salvation quest in Buddhism (hence the Buddha’s silence). This silence is also startlingly similar to the "not this, not this" of the Upanishadic sage as he attempts to grasp the unspeakable nature of union of atman with Brahman. But remember that Meister Eckhart also tried to express the unknowable nature of God in a similar phrase: not this, not that. And all of "negative theology" or apophatic mysticism found in medieval Christian thought, coming from diverse thinkers like St. Augustine and the great Eastern Christian mystic Dionysius (c. 500 CE), has a similar idea — that because God cannot be fully known positively, there is not much choice but to grasp his presence through a negative theology, the "not this, not this" or "the cloud of Unknowing" of the baffled mystic as he or she tries to express in ordinary language what is inherently inexpressible but must be experienced in order to know. But then as Father Mervyn says the originator of negative theology was a non-Christian Greek philosopher Plotinus (c. 204-270 CE) who, I might add, not only believed in rebirth but also developed a theory of causality that shows striking resemblance to the karma doctrine. Surely these kinds of cross currents must appeal to those who want to effect a Buddhist-Christian dialogue on a sophisticated intellectual level, rather than the agonistic and confrontational discourses one is familiar with in many newspaper articles and public speeches.

It seems to me that Father Mervyn exemplifies a brand of liberal Catholicism that is willing to grant respectability and intellectual integrity to other religions without renouncing ones own faith. I am sure such persons are found on the Buddhist side of the divide also but their voices have been supplanted by more strident nationalistic voices, alas. But the author generously avoids mentioning these disturbing voices and posits instead the failure of Buddhism to produce a corpus of critical thinking that parallels the enormous output of Biblical and theological hermeneutics (coming at least from the time of the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schliermacher, 1768-1834, I would think). I not only agree with him but I might also add that there are Buddhists who in theory would quote texts like the Kalama Sutta to demonstrate the open nature of Buddhist discourse but in fact end up with closed minds. However, given our current historical situation one might hope this is a temporary dilemma and there might yet emerge a time when Buddhism can fulfil its ancient promise in our new modern or postmodern age.

I have selected those areas of Father Mervyn’s book that interests me most and other readers might find other topics more interesting. I can only affirm that I enjoyed reading all of this work enormously and recommend it to the intellectually curious among our English educated reading public.