At the recent meeting of the European Academy of Religion held in Bologna (Italy) in June 2022, scholars from all over the world were finally able to meet again in person – some for the first time since this conference was last held in the same location in 2019. As usual, the European Network of Buddhist-Christian studies – the European sister organization of our Society- organized a few panels. One of them was devoted to Perry Schmidt-Leukel’s new work Das himmlische Geflecht (The Celestial Web), a monograph published in German in May 2022 that is not yet available in English. Many readers will be familiar with Schmidt-Leukel’s numerous contributions to Buddhist-Christian dialogue, such as his commentary on the Bodhicaryāvātara.

What does this volume seek to accomplish? Schmidt-Leukel starts off the image of Indra’s net, a celestial web whose knots carry marvelous and resplendent jewels - and where every jewel reflects the whole web in its own way. This image -rooted in the Atharva Veda, but also explored in Buddhist texts such as the highly-influential Avataṃsaka sūtra- perfectly encapsulates the emptiness – the lack of an unchanging substantial ground- that constitutes the totality of the universe. At the same time, this vision of the world suggests that whoever can see the entire world in a fragment never loses sight of the distinguishing characteristics of its totality, envisaging the whole and its parts as mutually penetrating and complementary realities.

Once this theory is applied to Buddhist-Christian dialogue, Buddhism and Christianity are no longer seen as homogenous realities, but rather as multi-layered and partly heterogeneous structures. In the 1990s and early 2000s, as the discipline of comparative theology came to acquire a distinctive character setting it apart from comparative religious studies, the question of the theological rational of religious diversity acquired renewed relevance. Many theories of religious pluralism were grounded in theological metanarratives that appeared increasingly untenable or questionable, and often relied on essentialist readings of different religious traditions. To overcome this impasse, Schmidt-Leukel retrieves Benoit Mandelbrot’ work on the fractal character of the natural order and its tendency to self-replicate identically at different levels- something one can see in the replication in individual mountains or smaller rock sections of the structure of whole mountain chains. This fractal approach helps us discern the parallels between interreligious and intrareligious differences, thereby rediscovering the complementary ways different traditions develop conceptual maps of ultimate reality and its multiple facets. In this way, you can finally ground a theology of religions that affirms different religious traditions as distinct, yet complementary ways of salvation. At the same time, you can also offer a renewed pathway into the study of religious experience.

If we apply this approach to Buddhist-Christian dialogue, we can discover many interesting points of contact. In late Byzantium, scholars debated whether individuals could apprehend the divine essence with their mind. Some argued that this was possible; others claimed that this approach reduced religious experience to an intellectual insight, and also failed to account for God’s radical otherness and transcendence. Supporters of the former position (such as Barlaam of Calabria, who lived between 1290 and 13480) were influenced by Latin scholasticism. On the contrary, Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) affirmed a distinction between the divine essence and the divine energies, claiming that one could only access the latter through a participation in the sacraments that had a psycho-somatic impact on the practitioner. Byzantine supporters of the Palamite position were accused of threatening the unity of the divine essence.

A portrait of Gregory Palamas (1296-1347)

If we look at Tibet, we will see that an analogous discussion happened around the interpretation of an important text known as the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. Some authors affirmed that this text taught the existence of three Buddha bodies: two (the so-called rupakāyas) belonged to the conventional realm – the lower one to our ordinary reality, the higher one to the ‘pure realms’ of individual Buddhas and bodhisattvas- whereas the third one (known as dharmakāya) was the undifferentiated emptiness of Buddhahood. Other authors – such as the members of the Gelugpa sect, which counts the Dalai Lama as its member- thought that the dharmakāya comprise a lower dimension open to all sentient beings, and a higher one (the svabhavikāya) that epistemologically exclusive to the Buddha. Supporters of the former position emphasized a yogic-experiential approach to Buddhist practice and emphasized that everyone could access Buddhahood in its entirety. Supporters of the latter did not deny this last point, but sought to emphasize the extraordinary character of Buddhahood and sought to conceptualize it from a logical and metaphysical point of view. Even here, the supporters of this distinction were accused of introducing an ontological wedge into the Buddha nature.

An imaginary portrait of Tsong kha pa (1357-1419), one of the supports of the four-body theory

This application of Schmidt-Leuke’s method shows that these two traditions encompass both positions – one emphasizing the unity of ultimate reality, the other seeking to draw a distinction between its transcendent core and its immanent and accessible dimension- within their larger history. The difference is that in Tibet it was the supports of the four-body theory that leaned more heavily on logic and metaphysics, whereas in Bzyantium it was the supporters of strict divine simplicity that chose to do so.

The session in Bologna invited all scholars of Buddhist-Christian dialogue to adopt a new approach to interreligious dialogue, showing how much we can learn about a different religious tradition once we move beyond essentialist models of religious pluralism. Perhaps this fractal method will also open up new perspective on the dialogue between Buddhism and Eastern or Byzantine Christianity, which has always played a rather marginal role in the context of the European and American academy.

Thomas Cattoi is Associate Professor of Christology and Culture at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He is co-editor of the journal Buddhist-Christian Studies. Recently he co-edited the Handbook of Buddhist-Christian Studies for Routledge (available in November 2022).