Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism

c o m m o n g r o u n d between i s l a m a n d b u d d h i s m
your Lord ye will be brought back. (The Holy Qur’ān, Al-
Jathiyah, 45:14–15)
The same is clear in the following passage from the Holy Qur’ān
which starts by citing a prayer of earlier believers:
‘Our Lord! Make us not a trial for those who disbelieve, and
forgive us, our Lord! Lo! Thou, only Thou, are the Mighty,
the Wise’. / Verily ye have in them a goodly pattern for everyone
who looketh to God and the Last Day. And whosoever
may turn away, lo! still God, He is the Absolute, the Owner
of Praise. / It may be that God will ordain love between
you and those of them with whom ye are at enmity. God is
Mighty, and God is Forgiving, Merciful. / God forbiddeth
you not those who warred not against you on account of
religion and drove you not out from your homes, that ye
should show them kindness and deal justly with them. Lo!
God loveth the just dealers. (The Holy Qur’ān, Al-Mumtahinah,
60:5–8)
Thus Muslims must on principle show loving mercy and respect to
all those who are not waging war on them or driving them from their
homes (these thus being the conditions for just, defensive war in Islam).
Muslims must not make their mercy conditional upon other people’s
mercy, but it is nevertheless psychologically almost inevitable
that people will better appreciate their fellows more when they know
their fellows are also trying to show mercy and respect to all. At least
that was one of our chief assumptions in commissioning this book.
the Common Ground
Turning to the book itself, we think it not amiss to say that it has
proved to be, by the grace of God, in general a stunning piece of
scholarship and a display of depth of understanding and grandness
of soul on behalf of the author. That is not to say that every Muslim
— or every Buddhist — will accept, or even understand, everything
that the author says, but nevertheless it can fairly be said
that the book is generally normative from the Islamic point of view
(especially in that it is deliberately based on the Holy Qur’ān, the
Hadith and the insights of the great scholar and mystic Abu Hamid
Al-Ghazali) and that it examines all the major schools of Buddhist
thought (as I understand them). Moreover, the book shows beyond
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