Plurality of Self: Buddhist Anthropology and the Two Natures of Christ

Abstract

The union of divine and human in Jesus Christ was codified at the Council of Chalcedon. However, while this position makes good theological sense, in terms of soteriology, it remains a conceptual problem. How do two distinct entities combine into a single entity without the loss of their respective distinctiveness? This article recommends a move from a Greek metaphysic of “substance” to a Buddhist understanding of selfhood as emptiness. By understanding the self as an interweaving of multiple energies, rather than a fixed substance, Chalcedonian Christology can retain its soteriological integrity with a more helpful conceptual understanding of how two may become one.

Self-Determination and Absolute Dependence: A Comparison of the Relationship between the “Self” and the “Other” and Its Dimension in The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch and Schleiermacher’s Christian Philosophy

“…Such studies include Julia Ching's Paradigms of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity (Ching 1984), which argued that both Christianity and Buddhism seek to destroy the emptiness of the "false self", that in Christianity man, as a created being, has no real "self" in relation to God, and that in Buddhism there are only all living things 众生, and that perception of the self is an illusion, so there is no fundamental distinction between the self and God. Jeffrey K. Mann's Plurality of Self: Buddhist Anthropology and the Two Natures of Christ (Mann 2017) also argued that Christianity denies the "self" and achieves this by uniting the "divine" and the "human" in a single subject; however, this unity is confronted with various contradictions. In contrast, Buddhism resolves this contradiction with a more radical dissolution of the "self".…”