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No-God: Reflections on Masao Abe's Symbol of God As Self-Emptying
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
Buddhist thinking centers not on a transcendent God, but on the nothingness and emptiness of Sunyata. Nevertheless, Masao Abe's reflections on the symbol of God as self-emptying can enhance our understanding of what God means. Abe interprets the self-humbling and self-sacrificing act of Jesus as a manifestation that God has vacated the transcendence of otherness in becoming world. These reflections allow us to consider a religious perspective that centers not on God, but on world and the continuum of living-dying-relatedness that represents the reciprocal and mutual interrelatedness that is world. In being returned to world, we are invited to participate in the original and originating activity of God as giving of self in compassion to one another. God is to be experienced not as a transcendent center, but as the fundamental meaning of world and its context of interrelatedness.
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References
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2 Masao Abe's discussion of contingent co-arising appears throughout his writings. In particular, see Zen and Western Thought, ed. LaFleur, William (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 125–26 and 152–58.Google Scholar Also see the discussion of Keiji Nishitani who uses the term “circuminsessional interpenetration” to translate pratitya samutpada in Religion and Nothingness, trans. Bragt, Jan Van (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 146–67.Google Scholar
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18 Lk 17:33: “Anyone who tries to preserve his life will lose it; and anyone who loses it will keep it safe.”