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
measure (6:91). No human conception of God—even if fashioned by
ideas received through Revelation—can be identified with the transcendent
reality of the divine Essence; it cannot overcome the incommensurability
separating the relative from the Absolute.
The Muslim conception of the Essence of God, transcending all
Names and Qualities, will be recognizable to Buddhists as an allusion
to that ineffable reality which ‘no words or speech can reach’. 17
This is a refrain in the Qur’ān: ‘Glorified be God above what they
describe’ (subhāna’Llāhi ‘ammā yasifūn) is a constant refrain in the
Qur’ān; it refers in the first instance to the false descriptions of God,
or false ascriptions of divinity to idols; but it also alludes to this
fundamental theological principle of Islam: the Essence of God is
utterly indefinable, above and beyond the divine Qualities manifesting
It, indeed, infinitely surpassing any conceivable ‘thing’: There
is nothing like Him (42:11).
Whereas the Qur’ān is full of descriptions of God’s actions and
attributes—thus expressing a cataphatic or even an anthropomorphic
conception of God, so far removed from the Buddhist conception of
an impersonal ultimate reality—one can nonetheless find both in the
Qur’ān and the sayings of the Prophet, certain crucial openings to
an apprehension of the Essence of God which utterly transcends all
categories of human language, cognition, and conception, including
all those which are fashioned by the very descriptions of God’s
acts and attributes given in His own revelation. Buddhist apophatic
philosophy can thus be read as an elaboration upon the nafy, the
negation, of the first testimony of Islam: lā ilāha, ‘no divinity’. The
ithbāt, or affirmation, illa’Llāh, ‘except the Divinity’, can be read
in this context as the intuition of an ineffable Reality which arises
in the very measure that all false conceptions of reality have been
eliminated. It is that Reality which is not susceptible to negation,
and that to which the Muslim mystics testify as being the content
of their ultimate realization: al-fanā’, extinction of the self (false
reality/divinity), gives way to al-baqā’, subsistence of the Self (true
Reality/Divinity). Mystic experience thus mirrors the two elements,
the nafy and the ithbāt, of the first testimony of Islam.
Shūnya and Shahāda
It is possible to argue that the implication of the doctrine of the ‘Void’
(Shūnya) or ‘Extinction’ (Nirvāna) is akin to the highest meaning of
17. Ibid., p. 291.
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