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
‘Shall I not tell you about the best and purest of your works for your
Lord, and the most exalted of them in your ranks, and the work that
is better for you than giving silver and gold, and better for you than
encountering your enemy, with you striking their necks and them
striking your necks?’ The people addressed by him said: ‘What is
that, O messenger of God?’ He said, ‘The perpetual invocation of
God’. 79
The practice of the Nembutsu is strongly predicated upon the
power of the ‘absolutely Other’, tariki, as opposed to one’s own
power, jiriki. One might argue that tariki is precisely what tawakkul,
reliance or trust, means in Islam: one relies totally upon the grace
and power of the ‘Other’, which is absolutely other than oneself.
In this total trust, this gift of self to the Other, one sees the Islamic
conception of tawakkul (and the meaning of ‘Islam’ itself, literally
‘submission’) also evoking the idea of anattā, no-self, in Buddhism:
the totality of one’s trust in, and submission to the Other disposes
the self to a radical mode of self-effacement: one relies not on oneself
but on the absolutely Other. In the Pure Land school, this faith in
the Other is faith in the power of the grace emanating from Amida,
principle of infinite light.
Both tariki and tawakkul are aimed at realizing in practical
mode, the existential concomitant of the anattā doctrine: removal
of self-centred consciousness, reliance on the Absolute, which is
the absolutely ‘Other’. Indeed, one can go further, and assert that
tawakkul is not only governed by the same spiritual goal as that to
which the anattā doctrine is attuned; the principle of tawakkul also
makes explicit that which is logically necessary, while remaining
unarticulated, in the earliest expressions of the anattā doctrine. For,
as will be further argued below, it is logically impossible to overcome
the sense of self by means of the self—there must be something
radically ‘other’, utterly beyond the self, which, alone, enables
one to transcend one’s congenital sense of self-preoccupation. This
self-preoccupation in turn generates a false sense of self-sufficiency.
The authentic quality of self-sufficiency is the exclusive preserve
of the one Reality; in the measure that the human soul attributes to
itself this quality, it ‘rebels’ against the true nature of its own utter
dependence on God as the Other, and rebels against the One which
79. Cited in Al-Ghazālī: Invocations and Supplications (Book IX of Ihyā’ ‘ulūm
al-dīn), trans. K. Nakamura (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1990), p. 8. We
have slightly modified the translation of the last sentence of the hadīth.
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