INTRODUCTION Three Weddings “It is not good for man to be alone.” —Genesis 2:18 “Only a Buddha with a Buddha can fathom the reality of All Existence.” —The Lotus Sutra I. What if truth were a marriage? What if the great height to which the philosophical seeker so zealously aspires were not so much a kind of knowledge, but more a kind of matrimony? After all, is the claim that “truth is known,” any less of an analogy? Truth as an object of knowledge is the more familiar metaphor, but now I suggest that we make the discovered object of our longing (truth as knowledge) into a kind of existential relationship or acting subject (truth as marriage). Truth is no longer a single knowable proposition, but rather the successful cohabitation of two opposing propositions—both extremely valuable, but each of which is possessed of a claim that competes with the other (individual freedom vs. communal solidarity, religious faith vs. scientific rationalism, pure knowledge vs. action in the world). Yet, if it be the case that truth is something of a marriage, what is there to say about the seeker of this hitherto much exalted pursuit of unsurpassable bliss? Now his goal is to mediate opposites, not unlike the attempt that people who are often utterly different make to live together—in such a way that neither denies the other, but indeed so that the “union” of the two yields new life. But, we ask, if truth is matrimony, who is the seeker of truth? What is his character? What is his virtue? The impassioned seeker is a master of the method by which seemingly inescapable antinomies are skillfully resolved. Decidedly not a dialectician who synthesizes difference into unity, he is an advocate of the possibility that difference can stand while at the same time fruitful negotiation ensues unimpeded. He has created a methodology whereby the level and productivity of discourse is actually elevated by that distasteful quality which seems to hinder it most—conflict. This transformation of conflict from an obstacle into a catalyst becomes his hallmark—in it tension bears fruit, discord fuels creative capacity. The singular artistry of the seeker in the enterprise of mediating truth can ensure the momentous arbitration of an unusual paradox—this marriage of opposites. II. This is meant to be the wedding canopy. Here we witness three attempts at veritable matrimonial unions. What such matrimony might entail is for now ambiguous. However, let us begin by making introductions. In the fall of 1922 a promising student of Western philosophy from Japan, Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962), traveled to Europe under the auspices of the Japanese Ministry of Education. He was granted a two-year research sabbatical from his position as associate professor of Philosophy at Kyoto University where he was teaching under the tutelage of the well-known Nishida Kitarô (1870–1945), founder of Japan’s Kyoto School of Philosophy. Tanabe shared his mentor’s vision, which, in its most grandiose articulation, amounted to nothing less than a totalizing attempt to synthesize Western and Eastern religious and philosophical thought. With a mastery of English, German and French, a background in classical Chinese thought, and an intimate familiarity with Nishida’s unique expression of traditional Japanese Zen intuitionism, Tanabe suffered from no lack of preparation for this journey. Though he did not arrive in Europe on time to study with the Neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen,[1] which was Tanabe’s original desire, he did have the opportunity to pursue his newfound interest in phenomenology at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg under the mentorship of philosophers like Martin Heidegger. After returning from Europe, Tanabe, like Nishida, would be instrumental in the process of introducing Western philosophy to Japan. Not until the late nineteenth century was Japan exposed heavily to Western thought. As Japan entered modernity the issue of how important Western philosophy should be in the Japanese consciousness was fiercely debated. Tanabe would lay much of the groundwork for that highly controversial debate. He also lived with the tensions and inconsistencies this controversy created. What is more, the way he resolved those tensions—his creative integration of Western and Eastern thought—would contribute enormously to the formation of Japan’s own unique philosophical tradition. Had Tanabe stayed at the University of Berlin another year or so, he may have had occasion to pass another student of Western philosophy in the university hallways. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903–1993) z”l, matriculated to the University in 1925, ultimately pursuing a doctorate in Philosophy.[2] Also studying with philosophers such as Heidegger, Soloveitchik would go on to focus on Neo-Kantian thought and write a dissertation entitled The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Hermann Cohen.[3] Though he was just embarking on his intensive study of Western philosophical thought when he entered the university, Soloveitchik had already mastered much of traditional Jewish scholarship. Soloveitchik’s education prior to entering the secular academy was primarily geared toward preparing him to inherit the leadership of an eminent family of Eastern European Torah scholars from his father. He would be the scion of the great Brisker line of rabbis, known since the days of Soloveitchik’s grandfather, Rabbi Chaim, for their rigorous analysis of sacred texts and uncompromising dedication to Jewish life. As it did for Tanabe, the study of classical Western philosophy would present a formidable problem for Soloveitchik. Entering the academy would mean a notable departure from the traditional training of his forefathers. Having exposure to and pursuing mastery of non-Jewish thought in any serious capacity was not expected of Soloveitchik; nor was it accepted without suspicions of its inherent difference and possible dangers. The compatibility (or lack thereof) of secular and Judaic thought was a much debated topic at the highest levels of Torah scholarship at that time. The great tensions built up in those debates, as they did for Tanabe when he faced similar difficulties, necessitated that Soloveitchik attempt a creative resolution of these contrasting worlds as he continued his self-formation. Though he would struggle a great deal in his life because of it, Soloveitchik’s decision to pursue training in Western philosophy stands out as one that would alter the character of Judaic thought in the coming century. Pursuing the possible outcomes of a hypothetical encounter between two aspiring young philosophers from such undeniably different points of reference is but one purpose of our undertaking—one of our proposed marriages. The second is the way each man proposed to marry a non-Western world view with the tradition of thought emerging from the classical West. Our third and final marriage is somewhat independent of our comparison of Tanabe and Soloveitchik. There the proposed union is between what is lowest and what is highest in life—failure and triumph, sinfulness and sainthood, suffering and exaltation. Using our thinkers as sources of philosophical insight, we will investigate how the marriage of such contradictories unfolds in and as human life. Though the chapters are not organized according to them, these three matrimonial unions will be the general themes driving our philosophical exploration.                     *     *     *     *     * Before immersing ourselves in the philosophical subtleties of our proposed marriages, the larger religious implications at hand in our project should be recognized and discussed. Though this was neither the motivation behind this study, nor even one of its central themes, the dimension of inter-faith dialogue inherent within it should be acknowledged. Perhaps none may have existed when Soloveitchik and Tanabe were studying in Berlin, but there is today substantial justification for embarking upon a journey into the many religious and philosophical dimensions of a Buddhist-Jewish dialogue. At the most basic level, over the past twenty-five years a surprising number of people with a Jewish background have investigated Buddhist spirituality as an alternative or complement to the religion into which they were born. Though a sociological study remains to be done on the topic of Jewish born Buddhists, at a cursory glance one notes that a significant number of these individuals have aspired to and attained positions as teachers, scholars and spiritual leaders within the Buddhist community.[4] An intensive study of salient thinkers and ideas from these radically different traditions, which are however in reality intermingling more and more with each other, might be interesting for the so-called “Jewish Buddhist.” The more serious incentives to begin laying the groundwork for a meaningful mediation of Buddhist and Jewish religiosity are philosophical and theological in nature. What is at stake philosophically in such an encounter may be illustrated by a statement made by one of the most highly esteemed members of Japan’s Kyoto School, Nishitani Keiji (1900–1990), in his seminal work, Religion and Nothingness: In his book An Historian’s Approach to Religion, Arnold Toynbee argues against the view that the gap between liberalism and communism represents the greatest cultural gap of our times. While the opposition between them is highly conspicuous in our day, it cannot be regarded as fundamentally determining the future course of mankind. When we look into the source of these two movements, Toynbee goes on, we find that both of them belong to the same cluster of religious ideologies stemming from Western Judaic traditions… The confrontation that is deep enough to determine the problems of the whole of mankind, Toynbee asserts, is to be seen in the gap between Buddhaic thought and Western Judaic thought.[5] This distinction between Judaic and “Buddhaic” thought comes at a crucial point in Nishitani’s text. It is followed by an outline of Toynbee’s thesis, which entails what the latter believes are the chief characteristics of these two religious traditions and an explanation of why they stand in such critical conflict. Nishitani’s summary of Toynbee is followed by his own statement: “This, in rough outline, is Toynbee’s thesis. And it seems to me to put its finger on the core of the matter.”[6] In his assertion that the difference between the Jewish and Buddhist world views is the pivotal issue of our era, Toynbee enjoys the support of arguably the most important philosopher in modern Japanese history. A substantive exchange between Buddhism and Judaism at any level, in any language has been virtually non-existent. There are very few publications that pursue the possibility of a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. Two volumes have been published under the auspices of Kyoto School philosopher Abe Masao with the intention of providing a forum for fruitful exchange between a variety of Jewish, Buddhist and Christian thinkers. [7] In each edition, Abe proffers an essay dealing with central ideas from Mahayana Buddhism such as ‘sûnyatâ, and then addresses relevant points of interest for both Christians and Jews. Abe finds his main point of departure for dialogue with Christians in the mystical idea of kenosis. Dealing with Judaism, he chooses the very difficult issue of Holocaust theology as a basis for beginning an exchange. The little that remains in this vein of scholarship is either not properly identifiable as scholarly in nature or is methodologically suspect. Rodger Kamensetz’s The Jew and the Lotus is the account of a Jewish journalist’s experience as an observer at a meeting of the XIV Tibetan Dalai Lama and a group of Jewish delegates in Dharmasala in October of 1990. Zen and Hasidism, edited by Harold Heifetz is a collection of essays from the traditions mentioned in the title that identifies as its explicit goal to be an exploration of “the similarities between two spiritual disciplines.”[8] Many of the essays in the volume were not written with the intention of examining issues of inter- faith dialogue. However, much of what is included is of interest for individuals because of its emphasis on the concrete practicability of seeking to somehow appropriate both Buddhist and Jewish religiosity into a single life. Characteristic of all these attempts at a Buddhist-Jewish dialogue is a too broadly defined comparative enterprise which has yielded a fragmented, poorly articulated basis for comparison. What further impedes these projects is an attempt to dialogue without first establishing a common language for discourse. Establishing such a language means more than simply making sure that all terms used by the respective traditions are carefully defined. What is necessary is a methodology that systematically reveals the larger world views behind propositional or even theological/philosophical statements made by each side in the dialogue. The quality of the exchange depends on the ability of the one side to deepen his understanding of the other, not by reinterpreting the other in his own terms, but by sympathetically and critically learning what life might be like for the other. One achieves this by imaginatively entering the other’s religious world and using both elements of difference as well as sameness between himself and that other world to aid the discovery of the explicit and implicit assumptions that go into forming it. Nothing short of a new language of discourse—a kind of philosophical Esperanto—is necessary if we aspire to this level of exchange. Ideally, this language (unlike Esperanto) would not have been developed specifically for the sake of facilitating or perpetuating the comparative discourse itself. That sort of language would be too aritificial, provisional and functional to be ultimately meaningful. If, rather, the language of discourse were an independent creation, one that each of the parties individually simply happened upon in a sort of happy existential coincidence, the possibility for discourse would be facilitated markedly by the relative neutrality of its terms. My project will be to show that the languages of German idealism, phenomenology and religious existentialism, all of which both Tanabe and Soloveitchik knew fluently, provides the occasion for such a happy coincidence, making Soloveitchik and Tanabe ideal candidates for participation in a study that might be the beginnings of a Jewish- Buddhist inter-faith dialectic. Though prima facie Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s respective projects closely approximated each other, there is reason to doubt very much that either would have been very interested in the thought of the other when they studied at the University of Berlin. Neither was yet mature enough in his own philosophical framework to appreciate what an exchange with the other may have meant. The climate for discourse might have been more favorable for our odd couple sometime later when each was regarded as a spokesman for the philosophical standpoint of his particular faith community. Yet, even the older and more mature Soloveitchik and Tanabe are not exactly the most natural choices as participants in a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue. The insular nature of Orthodox Judaism when compared to other, more liberally inclined denominations of Judaism, would seem to make somebody with a less conservative background than Soloveitchik’s more desirable for comparison. With regard to Tanabe, we must admit that his interest in Pure Land Japanese Buddhism does not catch the attention of many Westerners who are more readily eager for dialogue with figures from the Zen tradition. What is more, when we hearken to Soloveitchik and Tanabe to assess whether or not a project of this nature might attain the blessings of its subjects of study, the answer also seems to be negative. Soloveitchik makes several observations about the nature of “faith communities.” Of faith communities in general, Soloveitchik’s assertion that “there is no identity without uniqueness,”[9] hinges on his belief in the radical incommensurability of what is singular in any two given religious traditions. With regard even to a possible Jewish-Christian dialogue, Soloveitchik maintains that the singularity of each faith community’s ritual practice and normative ethos, makes it “futile to try to find common denominators” between them.[10] The axiological awareness within each community is singularly, even exclusively, its own. Its soteriological vision is uncompromising, and irreducible to the ultimate freedom or salvation of other faiths. Thus, according to Soloveitchik, efforts toward substantive comparison are expended in vain. Any comparison that does not respect the radical singularity of each faith in the inter- faith encounter jeopardizes the integrity of the traditions it studies. Though faith communities may be united in the mutuality of a common human predicament, when they are compared, what is unique about each should be emphasized equally as much if not more than what is common to them. In the same manner as Adam and Eve each confronted and attempted to subdue a malicious scoffing nature and yet nevertheless encountered each other as two separate individuals cognizant of their incommensurability and uniqueness, so also two faith communities which coordinate their efforts when confronted by the cosmic order may face each other in the full knowledge of their distinctiveness and uniqueness.[11] The Western Jew confronts the physical world, on the one hand, in which he may be partnered indistinguishably with his non-Jewish counterpart, but also he confronts the world of faith where no such self-identity is possible. This dialectic allows for both the possibility of cooperation and of conflict. The challenge of the latter possibility of conflict because of the Jew’s unique spiritual destiny, according to Soloveitchik, however precarious, is an immanent one for the Jew in the contemporary world. In order to protect the individuality of the participants in the conflict of faiths, Soloveitchik insists upon a particular condition. He emphasizes the resistance of religious logos, the words and language of religion, to standardization. As an emotionally informed expression of what is uniquely numinous in a faith community, “it is important that the religious or theological logos should not be employed as a medium of communication between two faith communities…”[12] For Soloveitchik, this position finds expression in the pithy proverb of Micah (4:5): “Let all the people walk, each one in the name of his god, and we shall walk in the name of our Lord, our God, forever and ever.”[13] According to the standard Soloveitchik establishes, the possibility for meaningful exchange diminishes dramatically. There is, however, a historical exigency particular to the modern and contemporary eras that might facilitate markedly the encounter of faiths, and in the light of which we would perhaps even merit Soloveitchik’s approval. This issue, as it is identified by both Kyoto School philosophers and modern Jewish thinkers, is the crisis of secularism. The terms of this particular problem provide a common language in the dialogue between disparate traditions. Whether confronting the alarming dearth of subjectivity in mass society—the emergence of what Soloveitchik calls “man-object”—or facing the particularly empty way in which humanistic existentialism conceives of subjectivity, i.e. - as the human being’s constant self-creation out of nothing where “nothing” means the existence of no prior locus of meaning or absolute referent prior to or beyond the immediate actual, religion as a category is threatened in its encounter with the modern world.[14] From the perspective of the faith community in its encounter with secularism, “confusion reigns in today’s world at the most basic level concerning what human beings are and how they are to live.”[15] Facing a common challenge in the form of a confrontation with the larger secular world, faith communities of most any persuasion are in a sense bound up in the same dilemma, allowing them a possible point of entry into engaging philosophical discourse, even by Soloveitchik’s standards. Establishing the legitimacy of our project from Tanabe’s perspective is at once both more and less problematic than it is for Soloveitchik. Though we will deal with him in his capacity as a Buddhist thinker, Tanabe’s own interests in his career as comparative religious philosopher were manifold. Upon the completion of Philosophy as Metanoetics, his seminal work which relies mostly upon an existential reappropriation of the medieval Japanese Pure Land Buddhist thought of Shinran (1173–1262), Tanabe is consumed for several years by a search for religious traditions in which history and ethics play a different role than they do in Pure Land Buddhism.[16] Though this ultimately led to an exhaustive treatment of Christianity and Marxism for Tanabe, his philosophical sensibilities did not lead him to consider Judaism, separate from Christianity, as a distinct possibility in his search for historically oriented religious traditions in the West. His image of Judaism was colored by a Christian reading of Jewish religiosity. This, coupled with the unavailability of any forceful or coherent speculative philosophical presentation of traditional Judaism, made the consideration of the tradition as a likely candidate for ethico-historical mediator of Buddhism impossible for Tanabe. The little that Tanabe does say about Judaism as a religious tradition is really made in passing on the way to a larger critique of the Western notion of a personal God. He desired demythologization of the personal God from a Buddhistically informed standpoint of Absolute Nothingness.[17] But in the process, Tanabe cut himself off from practically all other religious discourse outside of the Buddhist and Christian worlds; this is true even with regard to Japan’s native Shinto religion, in which Tanabe seems to take very little interest. Though limited to Buddhism and Christianity, Tanabe ultimately seems to embrace neither wholly, but retains his identity as the religious philosopher par excellence—uncommitted to but thoroughly knowledgeable about the traditions he studies throughout his philosophical career.[18] Perhaps the present study will give us a hint as to what would have resulted had Tanabe turned his philosophical attentions to a study of Judaism as a real religious possibility. III. Methodology The comparative enterprise is better initiated at the level of the particular than on that of the abstract. The goal of this study is not to inaugurate a Jewish-Buddhist dialogue on a grand scale. The comparison will focus on a close reading of very particular, perhaps even obscure questions in the minds of Tanabe and Soloveitchik. It is a study of the lives and thought of two religious personalities intended primarily to foster a process of existential familiarization with the immediate in each man’s religious universe. Chapter One, which precedes the more theoretically rigorous presentation of Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s philosophical thought, will be devoted to the historical formation of each individual as religious thinker. To locate each thinker historically, we will point to the critical events and circumstances precipitating their respective philosophical crises, and how historical determinants shape their resolution of these crises. Included in this project will be an attempt to trace the emergence of each man’s particular religious persona, scrutinizing just how the character of the religious personality forms in the texts Tanabe and Soloveitchik wrote. Also important here will be the portrait of each as ‘philosopher’ and how that ideal becomes a typological identity that competes with another persona, more religious in nature, for both thinkers. In the second chapter we reenter the religious and philosophical discourse as such, with two tasks in mind. The first will be to trace the role of the classical West in determining each thinker’s formulation of his religious predicament. Then we will look at Soloveitchik’s and Tanabe’s critique of Western philosophy. Here the focus is their approaches to a critique of Western philosophical dialectics. We will see that both Soloveitchik and Tanabe, in different ways, claim to have developed from the sources of their native traditions a more thorough and philosophically rigorous dialectical method. This sets the groundwork for Tanabe and Soloveitchik’s legitimization of their more strictly religious world views over and against the philosophies of the West. Chapter Three brings us to the topic of repentance, zangedô, as it is rendered in the Japanese Pure Land tradition, or t’shuva in Hebrew. Juxtaposed along side each other will be first Tanabe’s and then Soloveitchik’s thought about several themes important to both on this topic. Comparing Tanabe and Soloveitchik on repentance will bring us into the world of theology, Buddhist and Jewish. This is a world that seems simultaneously more concrete and more mythological than the historical (Chapter One) and philosophical (Chapter Two) worlds we will just have exited. Whereas in the historic and philosophical modes, we will speak of war and peace, famine and plenty, living and dying (history) or, negation and affirmation, relative and Absolute, meaning and discourse (philosophy), in the theological we will instead invoke terms like sin and redemption, man and God, teaching and Scripture. Engaging Tanabe and Soloveitchik theologically with each other will mean looking for parallel discourse, common language, points of comparison and contrast in the description of the religious experience as well as in exploring the nature of the experience itself. Of central importance will be several questions from classical Christian theology—theodicy, the anthropomor­phization of God, the possibility of man- sinner approaching the divine, final redemption. Beyond this, however, it will also be crucial to discover the kind of logic that underlies the processes which allow Tanabe and Soloveitchik to resolve seemingly irresolvable theological dilemmas as they arise in their own religious worlds. Establishing distinct patterns of such logic in our thinkers gives us insight into the assumptions of the broader, deeper world view and framework from within which each is working. Based on such discoveries, we may even be able to make generalizations about Tanabe’s Buddhist perspective in distinction to Soloveitchik’s Jewish standpoint. As our understanding of how each one’s logic develops deepens, so also will our understanding of the substance of the issues involved. In exploring parallels and points of divergence in their respective religious logics, we might be able to creatively engage seemingly incommensurable differences between Tanabe and Soloveitchik. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1]. Tanabe originally planned to go to Marburg to study with Cohen years earlier during his time as a faculty member in the Tôhoku Imperial University’s Department of Natural Sciences, where he was appointed as professor of philosophy in 1913. Investing himself profoundly in Cohen’s thought, in 1914, Tanabe published a critique of Cohen’s philosophy entitled “The Limits of Rationalism in Epistemology.” After Cohen’s death in 1918, Tanabe’s dreams were shattered. [2]. Though Rabbi Soloveitchik was affectionately called “The Rav” by his followers, an appellation also suggesting great respect and reverence, because of the academic nature of this paper, we will refer to him as “Soloveitchik” throughout. [3]. This title is a loose translation of Josef Solowiejczyk, Das reine Denken und die Seinskonstituierung bei Hermann Cohen (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1932). [4]. Rodger Kamenetz, The Jew in the Lotus, p. 3. [5]. Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, p. 202. [6]. Ibid., p. 203. [7]. John Cobb, Christopher Ives, eds., The Emptying God, and ed. Christopher Ives, Divine Emptiness and Historical Fullness. [8]. Harold Heifetz, Zen and Hasidism. [9]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” p. 18. [10]. Ibid., p. 18–19. [11]. Ibid., p. 20. [12]. Ibid., p. 24. [13]. Cited in a statement adopted by the Rabbinical Council of America at its mid- winter conference, February 3–5, 1964. [14]. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “Dual Aspects of Man,” (taped lecture). This idea is developed further later in this paper. See also Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, especially ch. 9, “The Meaning of Nihilism for Japan.” [15]. Nishitani Keiji, The Self-overcoming of Nihilism, p. 190. [16]. Tanabe was especially interested in traditions that would compensate for what he believed was a deficiency in the socio-historical dimension of Shin Buddhist thought. There was a time when Tanabe saw in Shin Buddhism a deficiency of socio-historical consciousness and a tendency to construct an absolute subjectivity that does not posit the centrality of historical being. He would never be completely convinced of the validity of these criticism of Pure Land Buddhism, but such concerns were significant in his decision to study Christianity. This topic is also further expanded upon below in the first and concluding chapters. [17]. Ozaki Makoto, Introduction to the Philosophy of Tanabe, p. 120. [18]. That is not to say we cannot treat Tanabe in his capacity as a Buddhist thinker, when his efforts were most squarely oriented in that direction, or talk about how his logic is affected permanently by his encounter with Shin Buddhism. The question of to what extent we can speak of Tanabe as a Buddhist thinker will receive further consideration below.