On the Buddhas Answer to the Silence of God

·期刊原文
On the Buddha's Answer to the Silence of God
A Review of 'The Silence of God:
The Answer of the Buddha, By Raimundo Panikkar.
Translated from the Italian by Robert R. Barr
By Robert C. Neville
Philosophy East and West
V. 41 No. 4 (October 1991)
pp.557-570
Copyright 1991 by University of Hawaii Press

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p. 557

Raimundo Panikkar demonstrates once again that he is not only a master dialectician of religion and philosophy but also a major theological voice. Perhaps, in fact, he is the voice of the theological future. Many signs point that way. He is truly a person of world cultures, having embraced Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and, with The Silence of God, secular atheism in the profound humanistic sense. Native of India, professor in the United States, he writes in Spanish, Italian (this book was written in Spanish, he says, but translated into English from the Italian!), French, German, and English; he quotes Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Pali, among other languages. [1] His friends and connections span the globe, and he identifies with global humankind rather than with the people of any one nation. Most of us would rest somewhat easier if there were grounds for confidence that the theological future lay with someone as catholic and sympathetic as Panikkar.

The theological future lies elsewhere, however, if my hunches are right, and precisely because of the issues Panikkar raises in connection with Buddhism as a religion to contribute to that future. Because Panikkar states his position with such sophistication, and because it is attractive to so many, even to those without the sophistication, his theology is a major option in a firmament with very few options indeed, and deserves many serious analyses. His arguments are so much more serious than my hunches that it is a deep privilege for me to enter the dialogue.

First, some words about the book itself. It has three parts, the first of which is a consideration both of contemporary atheism and of the scholarly question whether Buddhism is atheistic. The world all over seems to have become atheistic, in Enlightenment secular forms and in romantic Marxist forms. Further, a point Panikkar could have stressed a bit more, even among many who continue to identify themselves as religious, indeed as theistic believers, is that their religion in practice boils down to therapies, social causes, and cultural enjoyments with nothing but rhetorical reference to the divine. Modern atheism is not only a cultural falling away from serious theism but also a philosophy among some serious thinkers, such as Sartre, who would be theists if they could.

If the world is becoming atheistic, then perhaps Buddhism, an avowedly atheistic religion, has an important contribution to make. Of course, that

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depends in large part on what it means to say that Buddhism is atheistic. With a delightfully cunning dialectic, Panikkar considers and rejects the views that the Buddha's atheism was just cynicism, a principled nihilism, an agnosticism, or a soteriological pragmatism. He is more sympathetic to the view that Buddha steered away from theism because either asserting or denying the reality of God creates unsolvable problems. The view that Buddha's atheism was dialectically motivated, for the end of coping with his insights "on the transcendence of reality with respect to both the phenomenological and the conceptual orders" (p.12), is even more persuasive to Panikkar. The view's limitation is that it reads much of the long history of Buddhism, especially Maadhyamika, back to Gautama Buddha himself. Panikkar takes finally to the view he calls "ontic (or ontological) apophaticism, "according to which ultimate reality not only cannot be known but has no being. Reality is not an object with existence. To realize this point is genuine enlightenment, and it requires the abandonment of all attachments that ascribe reality to a fulfilling something "out there." What does exist, described negatively, is suffering, and it can be eliminated because "existence" in that sense is unreal. Described positively (for example, on p.159), life is primordial joy precisely because there are no "ecstasies" of existence.

Panikkar obviously is in the business of reformulating Buddhism as a contemporary world philosophy and religious tradition ready to address a contemporary question posed in peculiarly Western terms. [2] He rightly admits this as a necessity if Buddhism or any traditional religion is to be taken seriously in our time. He then, in the second part of the book, undertakes careful analyses of the classical texts in Buddhism using four avenues that lead to the Buddha's religious atheism: the denial of the substantial soul, aatman; Nirvana as extinction; causal immanentism or pratiityasamutpaada; and Buddha's refusal to speculate about ultimate questions. He cites and translates the important texts for each of these points, and comments in such a way as to support his interpretation of Buddhism. This is not the place, nor am I the critic, to analyze his Buddhology in detail. He recognizes that there are other ways to read the texts, and argues for his own interpretation with sophistication.

Interpretive matters aside, what has Buddhism to offer to our present situation so determined, as it is, by atheism? In his concluding three chapters, in the third major section of the book, Panikkar develops his theology for the future. As important as his specific conception of future theology are his assumptions about our present situation, and I want to focus the bulk of my remarks on the first of those last three systematic chapters in which he lays out his historical assumptions.

Not everyone in theology and philosophy takes the atheism of our day as seriously as he does. Much atheism is simply a rejection of childish notions of God occasioned by the failure of religious traditions to

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education people to maturity; a kind of Big Seven [3] Sunday School Failure. Other kinds of atheism are in fact the collapse of the conditions of cultural integrity required for serious religion, occasioned by modernization; the religious result is vague spiritual hunger, at best, or wild idolatry of the stomach or fevered brain. Yet other kinds of atheism are simply misnamed because theism is defined in too narrow a way; sophisticated comparative religious study can show that there are functional equivalents for divinity and divinity's call to salvation and obedience in some traditions that do not use Western theistic language (Marxism is a borderline theism, as Tillich argued). These several kinds of atheism are important to understand, but do not present themselves as serious religious or antireligious options to theism and its comparative parallels. Panikkar understands atheism in a more serious sense than these as an alternative to theism.

I

The heart of Panikkar's theory is that we are in something like a second axial age, with humankind evolving to a partially new nature by internalizing technology (p. 97). He understands this against the contrast with the first axial age, which he situates as follows. At its dawn, say up until the beginning of the second millennium B.C.E., humankind was preoccupied in innocent immediacy with the world of things (pp. 81-85), innocent of both transcendent deity and human subjectivity. Things were seen to point beyond themselves, however, and by the beginning of the first millennium B.C.E., human consciousness was preoccupied with the gods in, and transcendent of, the things of the world, and instead of immediate reaction to things, people understood life in terms of sacrifice:

Sacrifice is the religious moment par excellence: the presence of the numinous seems to absorb every human faculty. There is scarcely place for anything else: created things are considered unimportant, and the human being is overlooked. Human activity no longer turns to things, but to the sacred. Temples are more important than are houses. The best that society has to offer -- whether persons or things -- is dedicated to the divinity, from virgins to fields. (Pp. 82-83)

But, then, the meaningful concerns of the gods seem always to be an orientation to human beings. In that most transformative of centuries, the sixth B.C.E., termed by Jaspers the Axial Age, the logos of humankind replaced the mythos of divinities and represented both the world and divinity in the symbols of the primal human reason or speech, vac, logos. Prophetic Judaism had so replaced the centrality of the mythic sacrifice religion of the Temple that the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 did not destroy the tradition but strengthened it. Zarathustra in Iran represented the struggle between the cosmic forces of good and evil to turn on the free responsibility of human life. Both Confucius and Lao-tzu in China

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dethroned the transcendent divinities in a process Panikkar calls "personalization," albeit in different ways, Confucius by an emphasis on self-conscious behavior, Lao-tzu by an emphasis on "mystical union with the Tao, on a level superior to all ritual apparatus" (p. 87). In Greece, the pre-Socratic philosophers instituted the critical examination of the grounds of mythopoeic thought and made "man the measure of all things." In India, besides heterodox Buddhism and Jainism, which arose around this time, even "at the heart of orthodoxy itself we witness a whole movement of interiorization, antiritualism, and antitraditionalism" (p. 88). In his summary description, Panikkar says:

In all the cases I have cited from that remarkable sixth century, there is a common denominator: on the one hand, a reaction against pure objectivity, whether that objectivity goes by the name of ritualism, transcendence, God, tradition, custom, or what have you, and on the other hand, the ascent of humankind. The great prophets of Israel, the sages of the Upanisads, the great Chinese reformers, the Greek philosophers, and so on, only turn the searching regard of humankind inward, to discover that the intention is essential in any activity, and that a critical attitude is indispensable for any genuinely human act....What counts are not things, but humankind, Greece will say. The essential is not external sacrifice and ritual worship, but the human intention, and interiorization, the Upanishads will preach. The essential is consciousness of the harmony of humankind with the all, China will teach. The fundamental thing is conscious personal salvation, Zarathustra will preach. Yahweh does not save or hear unless our heart is pure, the prophets of Israel will cry.... Humanism, with its peaks and troughs, begins its course through human history. (Pp. 89-90)

The Buddha, of course, was part of the sixth-century axial revolution; and he carried it a step farther. Whereas the main burden of the axial century was to effect or begin to effect a transition from mythos to logos, the Buddha relativized both in terms of what Panikkar calls spirit.

If there is a single concept in which we might capsulize the contribution that the Buddha could make to our times, it is the conviction that the logos cannot be divinized in any of its forms, either ontological or epistemological or cosmic. Mythos and logos can exist only in spirit. But spirit cannot be "manipulated," either by mythos or by logos.
The spirit is freedom, and freedom may not be converted into either mythos or logos, or indeed into both at once. And if the sixth century largely represents the awakening of the logos in the word of its great reformers, the Buddha's share in this great religious upheaval is all but unique, for it is the Buddha who directly stresses the importance of the silence of the spirit. (Pp. 84-85)

The culture of logos gives rise to human self-consciousness, as Thomas J. J. Altizer has made abundantly clear. [4] The Buddha rejected the sub-

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stantial self -- anaatman. The culture of logos gives rise to a scientific naming and description of things. The Buddha rejected the substantiality of things -- pratiityasamutpaada. The culture of logos gives rise to an equation of divinity with substantial being as such. The Buddha enjoined silence about any reference to transcendent substance or being. Rather than all these, the Buddha abandoned all substantialist thinking in favor of what Panikkar calls functionalist thinking. With regard to the functions of things, gods, and human life, their problem is that they give rise to suffering. Salvation is thus finding the functions that do not cause suffering. It is not that the Buddha asserts that there are no substances -- about that he is audibly silent. It is that living with joy, that is, without suffering, is simply a way of functioning, and Buddha's religion is about that.

The Buddha's contemporary relevance arises from three conditions of our age. We recognize that an objectivistic approach to things is dehumanizing. We cannot accept a transcendent divinity that would displace or distort human freedom and responsibility. We find the old certainties of self-consciousness concerning the human self undermined by the Marxist, Nietzschean, and Freudian hermeneutics of suspicion, and human nature itself is being altered by the internalization of the technological environment. Perhaps the Buddha's silence about all but the practical way to bliss provides a religious perspective on the spiritual significance of our conditions.

At this point it is necessary to repeat the earlier remarks about the sophistication of Panikkar's argument. He himself introduces many qualifications for which there is no room here. He also is careful to keep together what he distinguishes, and his evolutionary theory is no simple progress notion like that of Joachim de Fiore or Marshall McLuhan. By no means does he mean to reduce the world or God to the human alone, in that cheap sense of secularization. The point of the previous paragraph can be restated as follows:

The world, humankind, and God are as it were incompatible as three separate, independent entities. They are intertwined. A world without human beings is without meaning; a God without creatures would cease to be God; humankind without a world would be unable to subsist and without God would not be truly human. God is sublimated, as I have said, but the sublimation must now be condensed somewhere, and it is the human interior that will supply the walls on which God will crystalize in humanity -- not, however, as a distinct being, come to take refuge in our interior, but as something that is ours by right, and that had only been momentarily removed. But all metaphor is dangerous here, especially if it be interpreted in a substantialistic key. Perhaps God did die; but in that case what is happening now is that God is risen, albeit not as "God" but as humankind. But something similar should be said about humankind. Human beings are not God, not the center either. There is no center. (P. 97)

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II

There are five major themes I wish to raise in questioning Panikkar's position, reflection on which inclines me to believe that his direction is not quite right. The first is the emphasis on humanization. Although for him humankind is not the center, this is because there is no center. In all other respects, the human is the sphere within which all else is to be understood, and into which the conditions of nature and divinity are to be translated.

The theme of humanization is not new or without precedent within Christianity as well as Buddhism. It relates to the evolutionary theory of Teilhard de Chardin, for whom the Cosmic Christ is the omega point toward which all evolution tends. The notion of the Cosmic Christ itself is the development of Logos theology in a particular direction, and there are interesting parallels in the salvation theory of the ancient Eastern Fathers according to which sanctification consists in divinization. Alongside this theme, however, is that of the divine creation of the heavens and the earth, with humankind a latecomer. As Job learned when Yahweh addressed him from the whirlwind (Job 38-41), the human scale of judgment is simply too small to comprehend the scale of the created order or the creator's purpose.

Whether understood in terms of a neolithic awe at the gods, in the incomprehensible powers of nature, or in terms of contemporary scientific cosmology, the scale of the universe in most respects extends beyond the relevance of the human. Who knows what lies beyond our neighborhood in the galaxy? The eons before the conditions for human or even biological life dwarf the time of human sentience. The trajectories of natural elements as we know them foreshadow a vast future when the conditions for life will not obtain. There are no grounds for saying that the process of humanization has any cosmic importance beyond that which it has for human beings themselves.

To this Panikkar might object that my argument assumes the standpoint of objectified worldly things, and that this misses the point of human subjectivity and self-consciousness. True, my argument takes nature as its starting point, and I believe it can be shown how human consciousness, intentionality, and freedom are part of nature. [5] This does not invalidate my point, however. There simply is much more in the cosmos than that to which humanization is relevant. A theological understanding of this must find some way of approaching nature before history; there are a great many ways to do this in Christianity as well as in Buddhism.

Panikkar might also object, and did so in the quotation above, that a world without human beings is a world without meaning. Indeed, such a world would lack human meaning. There might be meaning for other kinds of sentient creatures, however, to whom human history is irrele-

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vant. And there might be much that simply is not meaningful in any terms we can understand. The Christian way of saying this is that the point of creation is the glory of God, not the perfection or satisfaction of human beings. Further, Christianity has gone farther to say that what glorifies God within the human sphere is the paradoxical life of analogues of crucifixion and a peculiar resurrection. A "theology of the cross" is difficult to reconcile with what used to be called a "triumphalist theology" of Panikkar's sort, although in his theology it is humanity that triumphs rather than a transcendent God.

Both of these objections to my relativizing of humanization, which are latent in Panikkar's text, reflect an underlying transcendental philosophy of the sort used by Rahner and other thinkers since Kant. [6] Panikkar argues consistently that his concerns are ontological rather than epistemological; but what I find disconcerting is his epistemology here. His transcendental philosophy starts with the "facts" of human subjectivity and meaning, asks for the conditions under which these are possible, and then concludes that the limits of reality consist of these conditions. By the assumptions of this argument, of course, reality consists of humanization, the conditions for human subjectivity and meaning. Often the transcendental argument is put forward as a special kind of humility, a limitation of claims to what can be shown to fit into validating human experience. Much of contemporary philosophical atheism comes from the acceptance of the transcendental strategy. In fact it is the opposite of humble, for it absolutizes its starting "facts" and claims that nothing can be learned that relativizes them. The conditions for the possibility of human subjectivity and meaning are small stuff compared with the conditions for the possibility of the Big Bang or Divine Glory.

III

Related to the humanization theme is that of history. For Panikkar, the theological problem that he would like to confront with Buddhism is our contemporary historical situation. To this end he tells a story of humankind's evolution. Reading his story I am instructed and stirred. Generalizations of his sort, particularly when handled with the erudition and nuance of a master such as Panikkar, provide the kind of frame within which many things suddenly make sense. Yet there is no one big story with which to understand affairs as complex as religion. Better than any deconstructionist, David Tracy has shown, in Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, that there are many histories with many, often with opposed or incommensurate, meanings. [7]

In the case of Panikkar's argument, we must ask how the cultures of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania fit into the story. Either they do not fit at all, and come into the story only in the latter age of Western imperialism, or they have no meaningful history, or they are

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stuck in some pre-axial age. Hegel could dismiss those who missed out on the march of reason in history by saying that their actuality was only accidental and does not count; it is as if they were only possibilities that were never realized. [8] That argument, however, begs the question about the comprehensiveness of a unitary history. A valid story of humankind cannot neglect vast numbers of humans.

Moreover, although there is a truth to the axial-age theory of the mythos-logos move, that is only a small part of what was happening that might be religiously relevant. Seen from the standpoint of twentieth-century world travelers, the progress from travois to telecommunications might seem to be the important truth about human history. But that smacks very much of the modern myth of progress, a myth now exploded by dialectical logos-wielders of our age. To be sure, there has been technological progress, but also moral erring. Who is to say that the story of spiritual matters rests so much with the technological myth of progress? This is not to suggest that human nature is not being affected by technology, only that this is but one story among others.

We should not think that the solution to the totalization and oversimplifications in the progress-historicizing myth is to make it more complicated and complex. On the contrary, there are simply more stories to be told, interacting with Panikkar's perhaps, but then perhaps not. Because every episode means something different to the different participants, having different meanings within their own stories, the overall form of all the stories is not a superstory. Indeed, we have no reason to believe there is an overall form. David Hall is right to say that the sum of all orders is chaos, not order. [9]

This leads me to suggest a basic metaphysical and comparative point in opposition to Panikkar. On the one hand, every determinate thing has a form; on the other hand, it has components united in its form. Each component has a form, but also further components. Now, that the components are harmonized in a given thing by means of its form is often a contingent matter. The components have careers of their own, and join together with one another only under the special conditions obtaining when their unifying form is possible. The career of a protein molecule might run from the wheat to the cow to the steak to the gourmet to the cemetery. Its temporary residence in the person's body may be crucial to the person's story, but not so important in its own. So also with the components of life, of atmosphere, gravity, temperature, and the availability of food, shelter, safety from enemies, and the rest. The scale of human life is fixed on certain forms being ready for the integration of certain components, and their mixture is a highly contingent matter.

The point of the distinction between forms and components is that they are not commensurate. Although every component and every mixture has form, the components still have a force of their own not super-

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vened by a determining form. Nor can the vicissitudes of forms be reduced to some substratum component; they always are functions of the forms of the components. In religious history, this fundamental incommensurateness of form and components, always mixed, is expressed in the symbologies of the order-giving sky god in contrast to those of the earth mother who interweaves patterns of components on scales that are not governed by the forms of human order. The nonhuman movements of the earth mother seem amoral, if not immoral, to the moral champion of order. Order, even moral order, seems like sheer arbitrary constriction to the forces of natural tides and seasons. Perhaps the shift from mythos to logos is not a progress toward humanization but an episode of shift toward the sky god, for which other elements make compensating shifts. At any rate, to understand the religious situation by historical form, or even a plurality of historical forms, is but partial. We need also an account of the components, especially those for which human concerns are only accidental. Surely the pleroma of Buddha worlds illustrates the point. [10]

IV

A third theme generalizes the first two. Panikkar treats the temporality of affairs without reference to eternity. This is surely paradoxical in an account of Buddhism and Christianity, which have both had such strong eternalist elements. My thesis is that an attempt to emphasize temporality without putting it in a context of eternity results in a weakened sense of temporality.

To be sure, Panikkar has a strong sense of the past, present, and future, and his book is filled with a sense of crisis. His time line has the immense scale of evolution. Nevertheless, the extreme historicism of his evolutionary theory gives a peculiar priority to the present, despite his attempt to focus on the future. In his argument, the past is gone and has meaning only insofar as it can be appropriated in the present: his brilliance in making ancient Buddhism relevant highlights the point. Further, the future is not yet, is not real in itself in his argument, and serves only to point up the incompleteness and possible direction for present movement.

But is it not the case that the past is essentially what has been achieved in actuality, and this irrespective of the fact that the past provides the conditions with which the present has to operate? The reality of the past is a harmony of its essential finished actuality and the conditions it provides the present. [11] The future, too, is not merely possibilities that condition present potentialities but also the logical form and value that determine what is possible in general. The identity of a person thus consists not in what the person is now, or has finally accomplished at the end of his or her life. The person's identity is every moment of life as future, every moment as finished past, and every moment as the

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creative present of change and freedom. Further, the person's identity integrates all these with the changing of the present from date to date. That identity is not temporal, because it integrates all the temporal modes. It is eternal. Eternity is not static accomplishment, like the past, nor a totum simul like a specious present, nor a cosmic goal like the future. It embraces all of these in a nontemporal dynamism. Not to acknowledge the eternal togetherness of all the modes of time in the identity of things is to privilege one mode over the other, usually the present. Then the true temporality of the shifting dates of the present, past, and future, with all the dynamic creativity this involves, gives way to a pale temporality of presentness. This, I believe, is an underlying component of Panikkar's presentation.

The tyranny of the present manifests itself in a peculiar progressivism in Panikkar's presentation. He does not note that one of the functions of theology is to provide the abstract categories and the intellectual context with which both the validity and limits of religious symbols can be understood and expressed. He replaces this theological function with the function of assessing what remains viable today and might be useful for development in the future. Of course, there is much overlap between the functions. He never says, for instance, that there is no truth in an objectivist approach to nature, or in a theism aimed at a transcendent individual, only that these are no longer believable in an unqualified way today, and that they must be harmonized in the current stage of humanization. Yet there might be contexts today in which the great adventure of humanization is at a different stage, or is not the business at hand at all. Then the "outmoded" forms of religion might be entirely valid within those limits. Turned the other way, perhaps the historicized determinants of the present generation of intellectuals are themselves of value only within limits not perceived by them but set by wider contexts.

Of course, our own categories are limited to our own historical contexts, and this includes the nonhistorical categories of the sort I have used to relativize time and history. But any set of historical categories also presupposes nontemporal metaphysical categories. Each is a check on the other while being presupposed by it. Not to balance them is, in Panikkar's case, to side with the historical and its emphasis on evolutionary progress. This is peculiar, because Panikkar is a master metaphysician. His handling of metaphysical abstractions is clear and easy; he is at home with Aquinas and Naagaarjuna. Yet they are subtly historicized without a counterargument.

V

The fourth theme to be lifted up is Panikkar's polemic with substance thinking. He assumes himself, and interprets the Buddha to assume, that reference to things in the world, to God, and to selves must take the form of referring to them as substances. Because they are not substances (for

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many good reasons he rehearses), one ought not to refer to them with any kind of independence. This is the silence of the Buddha. Rather, we should restrict our reference to orthopraxis with regard to function.

Substance theory is not the only option regarding reference, however. Process philosophy, for instance, has developed an elaborate theory whereby things in the world exist only as coming to be with creativity; having come to be, they are real and can be referred to directly; coming to be, or possibly coming to be, they can be referred to indirectly by imaginative reference. In no way does reference to things interpreted by a process metaphysics fall into the hypostatization problems of substance theory. Process philosophy is particularly good at representing pratiityasamutpaada.

With regard to God, we may freely admit that God is not to be referred to as a transcendent substance, a being, or Being itself construed substantially. Yet we can say that God is the creating of the world ex nihilo. As ground of the world's being, God is transcendent. As present in the things created as that which makes them be, God is immanent. Because temporal things are among those created, and time itself is created, the divine creative act is that eternal context within which past, present, and future are united in the identity of any temporal thing, as suggested in the previous section. The theistic traditions have interpreted the creator as having a personal character, on the ground that the world is the sort of thing exhibiting the order and components one would expect of an intentional agent; there is room for that analogy. Confucians, on the other hand, find the world to be a dynamic of harmonization of the sort that would suggest that the creator is a Principle rather than a person; that analogy also has application. Buddhists interpret the contingency of sa.msaara by the dependence of form on emptiness, which is neither a person nor a principle, though filled with compassion. Whether these interpretations of the creator are complementary, contradictory, or just irrelevant to one another is not the point here. The point is that the idea of creation ex nihilo provides a metaphoric system for referring to the transcendent and immanent divine without silence; insofar as the idea can be qualified regarding its theistic origins and applied to Mahaayaana metaphysics, Buddhism might not be regarded as silent in all ontological respects. [12]

My concern about Panikkar's argument is not to defend substance thinking against his criticism, but to show that there are alternatives to his silence as a response to his criticism. At least some of those alternatives allow reference to things and the divine without reduction to the humanism of atheistic religion.

VI

The final theme unites or builds upon all the others. Panikkar's treatment of humankind ontologizes the human. In his complex and subtle

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vision, human beings are the transcendental center of evolution, their history embraces nature rather than the other way around, the fact that their consciousness is fixed in present time diminishes the sense of the reality of the past and future, and creation ex nihilo and creativity are ignored because human beings cannot comprehend them as substantial identities. The result of all this is that the comprehensive term for reality, at least for religiously relevant reality, is the human, noting that the world and God are to be embraced within the human and the human is not to be understood substantially.

I think rather that humanity is but an episode in the cosmic spread, and is to be understood not ontologically but cosmologically. Anything whatsoever can be understood ontologically when queried regarding its contingent existence. But there is nothing special about humankind in this regard. What is interesting about human beings is their cosmological situation.

Regarding the cosmological situation, I would recommend that we develop the metaphor of covenant or sa^ngha to understand the religious dimensions of human life. That is, a constituent component of human life, without which we would be less than human, is that we face the world, each other, and the creator in normative ways, as in a covenant. The metaphor of covenant expresses this built-in obligation as normative even when we ignore or thwart it. As Yahweh made covenants with people whether they wanted them or not, so we are made with these covenantal obligations, and our identity is in large measure determined by how we address them. The whole of the covenantal obligations toward the rest of creation are also to be understood in terms of the relation between the created world and the creator as such. This is an ontological dimension to the cosmological situation of humankind. We are covenanted with God as well as with the rest of creation, one covenant with dual-reference expressions.

The idea of covenant, of course, is a metaphor developed from the Hebrew Bible. The brief rendition here is my own version. [13] Its community theme, however, interpreted as metaphysically important, is common to most religious traditions. The advantage of developing the covenant idea is that the history of religions can then be read, in one of the many required readings, as a tracing of the development of the covenant. The covenant now, Panikkar would urge, has a technological component with which Moses and William Bradford did not have to cope.

VII

There are many extraordinary powers in Panikkar's The Silence of God: The Answer of the Buddha. One is the subtlety of his interpretation of Buddhism. Admitting that he is attempting to use the Buddha for the purposes of contemporary theology, Panikkar is nevertheless scrupulous

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in his scholarship and qualified in his claims. Another is the extraordinary range of his own theological vision; Panikkar's is the most cosmopolitan of the great humanist theologies, embracing and transforming rather than rejecting the secularist alternative.

Yet the more one reflects on his vision, which I have only begun to explicate in this review, the more one sees alternatives. Like this review essay, the experience of reading and reflecting on Panikkar's book generates increasingly staccato critiques and ricochets of alternate ideas. Naturalism is balanced against humanism, eternity against evolutionism, creation against substance/silence.

In the end I should say that the alternatives I have sketched, with the critiques of Panikkar's position, are at best hunches, not at all so well developed as his own argument. That his argument stimulates the hunches says something very good about its power to engage and grapple with the issues. We must remember as well that, as his title indicates, Panikkar begins with the silence of God, to which the Buddha answers in a subtle silence of his own. If we reject the interpretation of the divine silence as an internalization of the divine in the human, then we need to provide another account of the silence of God of which contemporary atheism is but one manifestation. One of the beautiful ironies in Panikkar's account is that the silence of God means God is not all voice. Only if God is wholly logos should one get upset at silence.

NOTES
1. These points are adduced from The Silence of God. Who knows how many other languages, particularly in India, are at his command?

2. For a fascinating discussion of the "world" character of philosophies and religious traditions, that is, their claim to be relevant and true irrespective of national or other limited traditions, see David A. Dilworth's Philosophy in World Perspective: A Comparative Hermeneutic of the Major Theories (New Haven: Yale University Press). David Hall and Roger Ames are attempting a similar reformulation of ancient (pre-Mencian) Confucianism as a contemporary world philosophy, and their project is remarkably similar to Panikkar's in certain respects. Instead of hunting for a philosophy that embodies what truths are to be found in atheism, their goal is to articulate a position with an anti-transcendence bias. See their Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

3. Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism.

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4. See, for instance, his History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

5. See my Recovery of the Measure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

6. See, for instance, Rahner's Foundations of Christian Faith (New York: Crossroad, 1989).

7. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987.

8. See my extended analysis of this, with the relevant texts, in "Hegel and Whitehead on Totality: The Failure of a Conception of System," in Hegel and Whitehead: Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy, ed. George R. Lucas, Jr. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

9. See his Eros and Irony (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). See also Justus Buchler, "On the Concept of 'The World'," Review of Metaphysics 31, no. 4 (June 1978): 555-579.

10. The distinction between form and components as incommensurate is argued as a metaphysical point in detail in my Recovery of the Measure (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); my Behind the Masks of God (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991) applies the point to the distinction between the sky god and earth mother.

11. See my Recovery of the Measure, chaps. 9-10.

12. For an extended defense of this theory of creation ex nihilo, see my God the Creator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

13. See my Behind the Masks of God, and A Theology Primer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).