Quotes from John P. Keenan

the Mah?y?na Buddhists came to see emptiness as signifying a deep, second dimension of the earlier doctrine of dependent arising. It is not just the dependent arising of suffering and pain. It is the dependent arising of all that is, of the passing beauty and the painful history of all of our lives. The Middle Path, then, is the practice of holding the two—negative emptiness and positive dependent arising—in healthy and dynamic tension.

Deep, unmediated, and inexpressible experiences do occur.12 All the traditions agree that in moments of grace, moments perhaps almost unnoticed, a person may move apart from all mediated meanings. No language. No culture. No words. No images. For those moments, one abides in simple and pure consciousness, sharply aware of the mystery surrounding us all.

In a similar vein, Keenan's approach to reading Christian scripture and understanding Christian doctrine seeks to place these in the context of the spiritual experience out of which scriptural and doctrinal expressions emerge: "a mystic realm of meaning in which meaning is constituted not by thinking and judging, but by the immediacy of contact, of being touched. Indeed, this base experience is the source from which all theologizing springs."9

for no viewpoint has a vantage point (an advantage) from which it can experience all the traditions or gain true insight into the doctrine and practice of other peoples' faiths. No single perspective is ever capable of rendering judgment about other religions. A Mah?y?na philosophy of religions is a no-philosophy. It is a philosophy that empties philosophy.4