![]() According to one natural way of developing this idea, the hierarchy has a bottom: the Fundamental with the capital ‘F’. Reality is structured in a hierarchy of fundamentality. Trees are more fundamental than wooden tables and chairs, atoms are more fundamental than molecules, and cheese is more fundamental than cheese’s holes. In the first section, I propose a theistic reading of Wang Bi’s commentary on the Daodejing in the second, I elaborate on that model to provide my interpretation of wuwei as a state of union with God.Ībstract: Some things seem metaphysically more fundamental than others. More precisely, I claim that wuwei is a state in which our acting becomes part of the perpetual flow of divine creativity. I propose a theistic reading of the Daodejing 道徳經 as interpreted by the Neo-Daoist philosopher Wang Bi 王弼 according to which wuwei is a state of union with God in action. Wuwei is a state of perfectly efficacious albeit effortless acting that is achieved by means of attaining a particular harmony with the cosmic order. This paper aims to propose a Daoist model that centers around the notion of wuwei 無爲 (lit. An important task for the philosopher of religion is then that of developing plausible models of such a union. According to the Unlimited Nature Model, the nature of all ordinary beings is metaphysically limited as a result of realizing only a small portion of the potential of what could be, and God is maximally great because he only has a completely unlimited nature (§3).ĭancing with the Dao: Wuwei and Divine CreativityĪbstract: One type of theistic soteriology sees the ultimate goal of our lives as the union with the divine. Finally, I will propose the Unlimited Nature Model as an alternative way to account for God’s maximal greatness that suits Pratyabhijñā’s theism. Briefly, my argument is that the Hierarchical Model requires a comparison between God and other beings that cannot be made with the Pratyabhijñā God (§2). I will then offer an analysis of the form of theism advocated in the Pratyabhijñā tradition by discussing passages from the work of Somānanda, the founder of the school, and of Utpaladeva, the most prominent of Somānanda’s disciples, and argue that the Pratyabhijñā theist cannot account for divine greatness in terms of the Hierarchical Model. According to the Hierarchical Model, God is that of which nothing could be greater in virtue of being better suited than all other beings with respect to certain attributes known as great-making properties (§1). First, I will extract a model of divine greatness, the Hierarchical Model, from Nagasawa’s recent work Maximal God. But how should we understand the idea of maximal greatness? The aim of this paper is to provide a Śaivist answer to this question by analyzing and discussing the form of theism advocated in the Pratyabhijñā tradition. If something greater than God was even merely possible, then it seems that that would be God. Unlimited Nature: A Śaivist Model of Divine GreatnessĪbstract: The notion of maximal greatness is arguably part of the very concept of God. Since the method of PBT leaves open what descriptions are to be inferred, my argument allows me to conclude that a text contains a notion of God without previously committing to any particular conception of the divine, which makes it particularly versatile and powerful. Second, I argue through textual evidence that The Awakening articulates a PBT, concluding that it contains a notion of God. First, I argue that, since PBT is a method for providing a description of God starting from a definition of God, any text that contains a PBT ipso facto contains a notion of God. I defend this claim by interpreting a central text in East-Asian Buddhism – The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna – through the lenses of perfect being theology (PBT), a research programme in philosophy of religion that attempts to provide a description of God through a two-step process: (1) defining God in terms of maximal greatness (2) inferring the properties or attributes that God must have in virtue of satisfying the definition. Ībstract: My claim in this article is that the thesis that Buddhism has no God, insofar as it is taken to apply to Buddhism universally, is false. “Towards a Buddhist Theism.” Religious Studies, 1-13. ![]()
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