Common Ground - Islam and Buddhism

Oneness: The Highest Common Denominator
it is the world, together with all its reified ramifications in thought,
that is empty. The apophatic definition of the Void can thus be seen
not as being more indicative of the reality of the Dharma than are
the cataphatic descriptions thereof: the dialectical stress is on the
transcendence of the Dharma vis-à-vis both positive and negative
designations of its reality. The discourse on the Void appears to be
aimed at generating receptivity to a mystical state rather than generating
logical conclusions from a series of premises. One is invited
to grasp, in a moment of supra-rational intuition, the impossibility
of attaining an adequate representation of the Dharma in terms
of any negative/positive polarity, whether conceptual or linguistic.
This very intuition enhances, in turn, receptivity to the sole means
of ‘understanding’ the Dharma. The only way in which the Dharma
can be understood is if it be realized, in the sense of ‘made real’,
spiritually and mystically. Such a realization strictly presupposes
transcending the empirical self and all the relative faculties of perception
and cognition appended to that self. As will be seen below,
such an approach to realization resonates deeply with the mystical
tradition in Islam.
In some Buddhist texts it seems that the very emptiness of
things constitutes their ‘suchness’, 25 and it is this emptiness/suchness
which relates the thing to the ‘suchness’ of the Dharma, as it
were by inverse analogy. It would appear that the Dharma is indeed
the true suchness of all things, but these ‘things’ have no access to
this suchness except through the negation of their own specificity,
compounded as they are of various aggregates arising in mutually
dependent chains of causality (pratītyasamutpāda)—all of which
are empty. So, in spiritual terms, the negation of this emptiness
implies being empty of emptiness, and this double negation is the
sole means of realizing, in supra-conceptual mode, the Suchness of
Tathatā.
The Dharma is therefore absolute plenitude in its own suchness;
but from the point of view of the apparent ‘suchness’ of the
world, it appears to be ‘empty’: it is empty of all the illusory suchness
of things, so, being empty of emptiness, it is infinite plenitude.
Thus, when applied to Absolute reality, the same term, ‘dharma’,
implies an emptiness which is not only absolute plenitude, it also as
it were ‘fills’ the emptiness of all other dharmas, which are thereby
25. ‘What is empty is Buddha-nature (Buddhadhātu)’, according to the
Mahāparinirvāna Sūtra. Cited in ibid., p. 60.
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