What do you see in that, Mary Ellen?
>> Well, what's so fascinating to me, as I mentioned, coming back from Japan, seeing
these various traditions right in Japan, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and Shinto.
And they were all interacting with each other in ways that we don't see in
the west, where these traditions are very separate,
and where each claims exclusives a truth.
But in other part of the world, especially east Asia, these are interacting
traditions, and in that sense they are very fully a dimension of each other.
You would have a Buddhist funeral, but
you would have an early childhood coming of age as a Shinto.
And you would have all your ethics for your family and society from Confucianism.
So these were continually interacting syncretic traditions.
Now what he's saying here is something I think very special.
And that is to foster this meeting, to appreciate
the particularity of these traditions, the cultural context and so on.
But also to understand their global meeting.
>> Yes. >> As never before.
>> Yes, especially in this period of the emergence of the United Nations and
Thomas' travels then as a chaplain into Germany with the army.
His own encounter, growing encounter, in the late 40s he had gone to China, 1948.
So Thomas was aware of the interaction of traditions.
And I find this quote very interesting in terms of the emphasis upon particularity,
world religions, or specific religions.
And universality, that sense of completing one another.
There's something about the inward character of the traditions and
their outward meeting.
Something about the intimacy of these traditions to themselves, and
the distance that they have,
that he would see they need to travel in order to encounter the other.
So Thomas was situating this encounter of the world religions on a planetary scale.
I think this is what is calling him forward into his later understandings.
>> Right, and as we know, this is so critical for our own times, but
when you think that he was doing this 50 years ago.
And it's important to remember that in the Second Vatican Council in the early 60s
said that for the first time the Catholic church more than a billion people,
said there's actually truth in other religions.
And Thomas has this great phrase, not only truth in the other religions.
>> Yes, he would quote from one of the Encyclicals from the Vatican
of the statement of raise of truth and other traditions.
The recognition by the Catholic church of raise of truth.
And Thomas would look at us for a moment and he'd laugh, and he's say my goodness,
raise of truth, there's floods of truth in these traditions.
That was well springing out of his sense that the encounter of Christianity,
of Roman Catholicism, a form of Christianity, with other traditions,
opened up these floods of inner spiritualities within these traditions.
And that they had something to say to each other, not simply as a dialogue
in separate spaces, but in a communion,
a meeting together, and a participatory exchange.
>> Right, at the same time what's so
striking and the fact that we were trained as historians of religion,
as he is a historian as well of the world's cultures and religions.
And he actually went into great depth in each of these traditions.
He knew languages, he had studied Sanskrit, he taught us Sanskrit.
He wrote a book on the religions of India that's still in print from Colombia.
He did a book on Buddhism that's- >> Yes.
>> Still in print.
He's written many, many essays on the Chinese tradition which are powerful, and
Confucianism in particular affected me.
So he did the history, the culture,
the text, often the languages of these traditions.
And that Riverdale Library- >> Yes.
>> Had the church fathers as well.
>> Well that's an important point to make that the library was not simply
an assembly of secondary text or commentary.
Certainly there were significant commentaries on the tradition, but
at the heart of it were the scriptures or the recognized texts of these traditions.
The trapidica of Buddhism,
the sense of the heart of the tradition in the Chinese, in the original language.
And so the the library held a resource for those of us who were studying in world
religions to encounter these traditions in their literate forms, especially.
>> Right, and that included the western religions as well, and so on.
>> Wasn't there another quote we were going to
look at- >> Yes.
>> Too?
>> So here we have, continuing this discussion of the meeting of traditions,
but also the study of them.
Within this larger world of humankind the multiple, spiritual,
and humanist traditions implicate each other, complete each other, and
evoke from each other higher developments, which each is capable.
These traditions implicate each other, for each has a universal mission to humankind.
Each is panhuman in its significance.
None can be fully itself without the others.
Each has a distinctive contribution to make to human development that can
only be made by itself.
So once again, distinctive- >> Yes.
>> But universal, particular but planetary.
>> Mm-hm, and drawing out the nature of the human.
What is the character of the human?
So central to each one of these traditions, and
generally we collapse these traditions into separate realities but
Thomas is seeing, in our contemporary challenge, the reaching out.
Not simply in dialog, but
to understand how these traditions are implicated in each other.
To understand the relationship of this universal mission and
particular expression.
>> And one reason we like this quote is because he chose to [COUGH] talk about not
only the spiritual traditions, but the humanist traditions.
>> Yes. >> He had a tremendous feeling for
humanism, for culture, for the arts, and so on.
Even the so called secular world, and for him he is really fluid.
And how traditions, namely philosophies, worldviews,
implicate each other, was a continual source of fascination for him.
>> Yes, then the second part of this quote too, it goes on.
Each tradition, each must therefore be kept distinctive,
even as it reaches a universal diffusion among humans.
For any tradition to withhold itself from the other societies of humankind or
for any to exclude the other traditions is to vitiate and
stultify its own tradition and development, to condemn itself to
sterile isolation from the only forces that can give it life and creativity.
All human traditions are dimensions of each other.
The last line is almost a mantra, or
a phrase that has deeper meanings in Thomas' thought,
this sense of all human traditions are dimensions of each other.
>> Yeah, and it's been such a joy, I think, for us to teach world religions for
nearly 40 years and to realize that they are feeding the human community still.
These are wisdom traditions.
They're constantly changing their processes, in fact.
And that's what Thomas helped us to understand.
They're not static, they're changing, they're responding.
And eventually, this is where he would bring us all to
understand they need to respond to the ecological and social crises of our time.
>> Exactly, and Thomas would use the image of the rose window,
those beautiful windows in Gothic cathedrals.
And reflecting upon them and
talking about this central window in relation to the outer windows.
Say for example, the window also at St.
Peter's Basilica in Rome, the sense of this spirit image in the middle, the bird.
And then these beautiful outer windows.
And he would talk about the inner window as the core spiritual religion.
Often a religious tradition that one is given,
and sometimes not a religious tradition.
But a deep spiritual value or an ethical value.
And outside it then the world's religions, and
that a person can become fixated on the middle.
And that's, I think, what he's after in this quote also.
The sense of what is lost by binding oneself
simply to what one has been given in youth.
And not to understand that the beauty and the delight of these other traditions.
And of course, we're also aware that some people play in
a field of these beautiful traditions and lose their central core.
So Thomas is interested in exploring these very subtle psychological
realities also of how traditions speak to one another.
And yet we have to be very aware and nurture that central window of ourselves
to the outer window and central windows and their relationship to one another.
>> Well, I think that brings us to this final section here,
where he says there are presently four main religious
issues facing the human community in its spiritual aspect.
The first is the grounding of the various spiritual traditions,
just as John was saying.
There's a sense they are grounded in their own particular belief systems,
world views, scriptures, traditions, history, dogma, even.
And so that there's a grounding of these particular traditions,
and that's what we need to study.
At the same time as so many of them are interacting, they are syncretic.
The spread of Buddhism across Asia from India through Afghanistan and
the Silk Road all the way to China and Korea and Japan, and how it changed.
But there's this sense of a shared understanding of Buddhist beliefs and
values and practices.
>> Yes, it's a very good point.
This first one of grounding and
the place-based character of traditions that are still able to move beyond.
So Thomas was himself grappling with some of these deep methodological issues,
or approaches in the study of religions, about how they form particularity but
they're also interacting with one another.
And the second point then is the activation of the macrophase of each
tradition.
And again you can sense in these earlier quotes when they encounter one another,
how they begin to realize and
reflect upon dimensions of themselves that are reaching out.
So this sense of inner creativity towards a larger calling.
>> Right, and even at that macrophase, sometimes we see this complementarity.
A sense of a cosmic Christ of the universe that's in St Paul, and
the sense of the Buddha nature in all things.
And this becomes interesting for
this comparative study of world religions as well.
>> Yes.
>> His third point was this intercommunion of traditions,
which we've spoken a great deal about in this talk right now.
But I think we still have to emphasize that this is not easy,
that these traditions are committed, often to their own path, and
therefore there's obstacles to this intercommunion.
>> Yes, and
we've emphasized the particularity in relationship to the universality.
And that particularity we might also describe as a subjectivity,
that Thomas was very aware of unique voices within the tradition.
That the tradition as a whole,
Buddhism as a whole, might be described as having a subjectivity.
But within that are these many different voices.
The great scholars of Buddhism, the great missionaries who carried
Buddhism both across Asia and then from Asia, from China especially,
the rediscovery of traditions by Chinese monks returning to India.
That this intercommunion, then, is situating Thomas to understand
subjectivity as embedded in the grounding of these traditions and
how this subjectivity is speaking across traditions.
>> And the final point here- >> Is the entry of the traditions
into alliance with the newly developed cosmological myth of modern science.
This is a major step that Thomas would take in the late 60s and early 70s.
>> Right, and it brings us as well to our next talk on Teilhard.
Because Thomas realized the religions were insufficient for our times,
that they needed to be in dialogue with science.
>> Yes.
>> And that's exactly what Teilhard was doing.
>> That's it, that's the increasing attention that Thomas saw not
simply again in the dialogue or
speaking across from separated positions and trying to find a realm of tolerance.
But rather this exchange which led to an intercommunion and a deeper meeting
of the subjectivities, the voices of this tradition leading towards
a new expression of these traditions, a macrophase of these traditions.
