Encounters with Jan van Ruusbroec

·期刊原文
Mysticism Buddhist and Christian: Encounters with Jan van Ruusbroec,
by PAUL MOMMAERS, JAN VAN BRAGT
Reviewed by Roger Corless
The Journal of Religion
Vol.77 No.1 (Jan 1997)
pp.179-180
COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Chicago

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MOMMAERS, PAUL, and VAN BRAGT, JAN. Nanzan Studies in Religion and
Culture. New York: Crossroad, 1995.

During his many years in Japan, Jan Van Bragt, the former director
of the Nanzan institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, has
tried to solve the koan, "How can such a natural affinity in
religiosity [between Buddhism and Christianity] result in such an
incurable disjunction in doctrine?" (p. 3). This volume is an
invitation to enter into that koan. It began as a series of seminars
at Nanzan, and, although the style is impeccably literary, it
retains something of the flavor of a conversation. Seven chapters on
Ruusbroec by Paul Mommaers (professor of theology at the University
of Antwerp and the University of Louvain) are "braided" p. 3) with
six chapters on Buddhist spirituality.
Mommaers's contribution is focused and detailed. He has given us a
major study of this important but (in the English-speaking world)
much neglected Christian mystic. Van Bragt ranges more widely,
concentrating on Japanese Zen but offering remarks on other forms of
Buddhism, Buddhism as a whole, Hinduism, and even "Eastern"
spirituality and mysticism (passim). This makes the "braiding"
somewhat less neat than it might have been but opens the book up to
a wider readership. The concern of both authors is similar, although
it is more muted in Mommaers and more explicit in Van Bragt--they
both speak explicitly as Christians sympathetic to Buddhism and
curious about how Ruusbroec and Buddhism can illuminate each other.
Van Bragt appears to have begun the seminars with the notion that
this was possible: Mommaers admits that he came around to Van
Bragt's view only after finishing the seminars. The discussion of
mutuality centers on the definition of mysticism (chaps. 1-4) and
the phenomenon of what Ruusbroec calls "natural mysticism" (chaps.
10-13).
The authors know well the literature on mysticism published in the
West and in Japan, and they summarize it topically as it relates to
Ruusbroec and Buddhism. It is at first taken for granted that
Ruusbroec is a mystic, and it is then asked whether Buddhism is
mystical. The objections of some Catholic and some Japanese Buddhist
scholars, that Christianity is intrinsically mystical but that
mysticism is alien to Buddhism, are considered, and the tables are
turned: Van Bragt argues that mysticism is "the true factor of
salvation [in Buddhism], while in Christianity salvation is a
question of faith" (p. 42). By this, he does not mean that faith is
absent in, or unimportant for, Buddhism--he devotes several pages to
the discussion of faith in Buddhism as a whole and in Pure Land
Buddhism in particular--but that the tendency to Oneness, which is
regarded as a key element in what is called mysticism, is more
native to Buddhism than to Christianity, with its insistence on a
transcendent Other called God. Therefore, mysticism is easily
accepted by Buddhism but has often been regarded with suspicion in
Christianity.
Natural mysticism is treated in the four last chapters of the book,
which are a kind of contrapuntal dance. Ruusbroec accepts that the
human can, by "turning inward," experience God and experience him
truly, and on that score he writes in praise of natural mysticism.
However, he sees, at the same time, clear and present dangers in
natural mysticism, which, if not enlivened and elevated by grace,
sinks into quietism and places the mystic in peril of hell. He
writes with passion, having in mind what he regards as the dire
heresies of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, whose laissez-faire
piety is redolent of present-day New Age spiritualities. (A
reminder, if any were needed, never to call anything new or modern,
since indeed Ruusbroec himself is recognized as the leader of the
Devotio Moderna!) This conflict between a quietist spirituality,
identified as bogus mysticism, and true mysticism, characterized as
activity-in-quiescence, is found to have a close parallel in
Buddhism, particularly in the Sudden and Gradual controversy, which
has produced a tension in Mahayana for much of its history, and in
the disputes in Japan between quiet sitting and "real" zazen. Van
Bragt concludes by saying that the discussion of natural mysticism
in Ruusbroec and Buddhism "provides a final nudge in the direction
of a positive answer" as to whether "Ruusbroec's mysticism and
Buddhist contemplation can really illuminate one another" (p. 286).
Chapters 5-9 discuss the nature of the human in Ruusbroec and
Buddhism. The sophisticated and nuanced argument can be summarized
by a quote from Ruusbroec: "In each new now, God is born in us" (p.
173). Ruusbroec's Christian doctrine of soul is surprisingly
resonant with Buddhist anatman.