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
gates of which individual beings are composed; these aggregates attach
themselves to objects which are likewise perishable: their very
impermanence ensures that the aggregates of the being attached to
them will experience the phenomenon of suffering.
As regards anattā, the Buddha explains to his disciple Ananda
the meaning of the statement ‘The world is empty’ in the following
way: ‘… it is empty, Ananda, of a self, or of anything of the nature
of a self. And what is it that is thus empty? The five seats of the five
senses, and the mind, and the feeling that is related to the mind: all
these are void of a self or of anything that is self-like.’ 24
It should be immediately apparent that, in good Buddhist logic,
if there is no permanent, abiding ‘self’, Gautama the man cannot be
accused of having brought to the surface of his specific consciousness
anything residing in the innermost depths of his self. As will
be seen shortly, a fundamental tenet of Buddhist belief is that all
individual dharmas are baseless, empty, illusory. This applies, first
and foremost to the individual self. Only The Dharma, absolutely
transcending the individual is real. We say ‘absolutely’, for the two
domains—such and such a dharma, on the one hand, and the Dharma
as such, on the other—are incommensurable; it is like the difference
between light and darkness.
If the Buddha’s enlightenment taught him that the empirical
self is an illusion, the source of that enlightenment cannot possibly
be the empirical self, for this self is rendered illusory in the
light of that very enlightenment. The relative self cannot reveal the
relativity of the self. The ‘revelation’ of this relativity must, on the
contrary, be derived from something absolute, being that which
alone can reveal the self to be illusory, and that ‘something’ absolute
can only be the objective principle whence all consciousness,
life and being flow. 25 This principle must radically transcend the
particular man, Gautama Shakyamuni. In other words, we arrive
at the inescapable conclusion that Gautama, as a human being,
could only have attained his enlightenment by virtue of an objective
principle infinitely transcending his own humanity, and that
objective principle is the source of all revelation, that which in
Islam is called Allāh. One can then distinguish between enlight-
24. Samyutta Nikāya, 4:54, cited in ibid., p. 98.
25. See Marco Pallis, ‘Is There Room for Grace in Buddhism?’ in his A Buddhist
Spectrum (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), pp. 52–71, for a compelling argument
demonstrating that ‘grace’ is strongly implicit within Buddhist teachings.
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