Copyright: This article is reprinted from Toronto Journal of Theology (15/1, 1999, 19- 29) on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ by permission.

Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. The Rev. Tim Dutcher-Walls is a pastor at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Etobicoke, Ontario.

I. The Western Spiritual Legacy

Augustine has been credited with initiating, in Western thought and spirituality, the focus on the self and its experience. With pious rhetoric and intellectual rumination, his Confessions present his own personal experiences and thoughts as the precise means used by God to bring him back to God. With this status, the self is given unprecedented reality and importance. Confessions "was the first [work] in literature to be concerned entirely with an introspective analysis of the author's own spiritual and emotional experiences."(1) We in the West are inheritors of this legacy to such a degree that exploration of the self is axiomatic in spiritual life.

The title of this article raises the natural question of what is meant by "the self." In this article a full, explicit definition is not possible. The concept of self has mutated in the Western tradition to such a degree that a separate essay would be required to describe adequately the variety of "selves." Nor is it necessary to provide here the historical range of meanings of "self." The contrasting spirituality I explore later assumes and requires only a general sense of the Western concept as it has applied since Augustine -- though, as noted, there have been significant shifts in the West in the understanding of the self.(2)

What is pertinent for our purposes here is the identification of spiritual consciousness that travels inward to the self variously defined. The inward spiritual orientation presupposes an object of focus -- a "self." Suffice it to say, the Western "self" has always entailed an individual and distinctive entity Cézanne with rational, emotional, volitional, and expressive capacities variously emphasized -- providing spiritual life and thought with at least a point of departure. The contrast I will propose later is with this point of departure and focus and, at times, fixation. The positing and sense of the self will be self-evident (!) as this essay proceeds.

Charles Taylor comments on the profound shift Augustine effected:

This was to make a turn to the self in the first-person dimension crucial to our access to a higher condition -- because in fact it is a step on our road back to God -- and hence to inaugurate a new line of development in our understanding of moral sources, one of which has been formative for our entire Western culture.(3)

Augustine's turn to the self, predating Descartes' famous cogito and its implications by twelve centuries, was both philosophical and autobiographical. Philosophically, in writings that are simultaneously theological, he examined the capacity and process of knowing, memory (the concept widened to mean implicit, preformulated knowledge), the movement of the will, emotion, the relationship between soul and body and other aspects of the mind knowing itself. Taylor labels Augustine's inward analysis "a turn to radical reflexivity,"(4) by which he means the shift to making oneself, as a knowing and experiencing agent, the explicit object of one's attention.(5)

Because of saving grace and the gift of faith, the self for Augustine becomes more (infinitely so) than the mind knowing itself. In the light of faith in the Triune God, one is given to experience the ascending components of the self -- from the physical and sensory through to the mental and spiritual -- as the avenue used by and to the divine. Mary T. Clark writes: "[Augustine} was fascinated with the mystery of the human self, which he tried to fathom in the light of the Trinity. This reflexive and anthropocentric orientation contributed to Western Christianity a valid interest in human experience. It also promoted the interiorization of Christianity."(6)

The autobiographical quality of Confessions reveals a personal reflexivity in addition to one that is philosophical and theological. Augustine recounts and analyzes his own life. He tells the story of his past, albeit selectively and with rhetorical purpose, as a witness to God's saving grace. There is thus a parallel in Augustine as philosopher and as one who undergoes and narrates his personal, spiritual conversion. The parallel is probably no accident; the common connection is the focus on the self.

In the self-disclosure of Confessions, Augustine prays:

See how I have explored the vast field of my memory in search of you, O Lord! and I have not found you outside it. . . . I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself.(7)

More than a philosophical method, the turn of the self was a necessary condition of Augustine's conversion.(8) His coming to faith presupposed the inner journey, which then continued seemingly unabated. According to Krister Stendahl: "His Confessions are the first great document in the history of the introspective conscience."(9)

As noted above, this legacy of Augustine has dominated spiritual life in the West. Whether it is a negative or a positive reading (or both) -- traditionally debased as laden with sin or more recently (with flavourings from the "New Age") elevated as a spark of the divine -- the "self" is the analytic focus in our relationship with God.

In an essay from 1947, Albert Camus observed: "Today's writers talk about what happens to them."(10) Camus was concerned that art suffered when literature became a mere report of personal experience.

[W]e do what is quickest, which is to report what we have done and what we have seen. And it is true that any great work is, in a way, the account of a spiritual adventure. But generally such an account is suggested or transfigured. Today we go no further than the account.(11)

For Camus, art required a certain "restraint," a distancing from the necessary experience so as to allow for creative insight.(12) More important than what was, in Camus' view, the inflated virtue of candour, is a disciplined hesitancy that awaits transfiguration. Art is more than personal reportage.

In the practice of writing, Thaisa Frank distinguishes between the telling of an "anecdote" and the telling of a "story." She explains: "There's no map . . . for turning an anecdote into a story. This comes to writers through grace, serendipity, hard work, and a willingness to discover something new about themselves and the people in their lives."(13) An "anecdote" is a mere report, whereas a "story" requires inspiration and imagination. It transforms not merely the anecdote but the writer and the reader as well.

Analogously, faith and the spiritual life entails more than a discussion of personal occurrences. The spiritual journey unfolds at its best with a restraint that allows the presence of what is more than the empirical self to emerge. Spirituality should transcend the self, while including it.

Camus' criticism of his contemporary writers can apply to much of today's spiritual scene, particularly (although certainly not exclusively) in the Christian arena, especially at the popular level. We in the West are like children of Augustine, taking the parent to the extreme. Popular spiritualities today such as those espoused by Thomas Moore or Scott Peck keep "oneself at the center of the moral and spiritual universe."(14) We talk introspectively about what happens to us, often without Augustine's overarching context of divine justice and mercy. In positivism of the self, the "art of faith" is wanting.

In some current spiritual views which affirm and elevate the self, the focus on self is evident. But in more traditional penitential pieties, ironically, the self is no less fundamental, though given an opposite hermeneutic. Martin Luther's dictum to "sin boldly" is a hyperbolic, liberating reaction against the self obsessed with itself (in this case, as sinner).

While inward exploration of oneself and one's past, in a spiritual-psychodynamic mode, can at times be healing and can further personal growth, it is not the only spiritual method. Western inward spirituality can be, and certainly has been, fruitful. But it can also be complemented. The self may not be as foundational as is presupposed. Let us now consider a different spiritual view not based on the reified self. This variation modifies the Western legacy in which it is also found.15

II. Another Spiritual Approach

The "paradox we are to ourselves" is shown in a thoughtful reading of David Steindl-Rast's example of Haiku poetry.

Evening rain
The banana leaf
Speaks of it first.

. . . This is not a poem about rain, but about the silence before the rain. A strange poem, the Haiku!
. . . Every word that hits the mark returns to that silence out of which it has come.
Does this sound paradoxical? It certainly is, yet, no more paradoxical than you are to yourself.(16)

The poem is not about a "self," which hears the rain strike the broad leaves of the banana trees. It is, rather, about the hearing itself of rain on the leaf, set in relief by the silence that allows sound (and, by metaphoric extension, all that is) to occur. An introspective self is not necessary for this ordinary revelation to happen; in fact, a self absorbed in introspection will miss the experience of what is. Instead, a sensitive, mindful self is required, one which is drawn, paradoxically as Steindl-Rast indicates, beyond itself, a cancellation of itself, and in attention to what is encountered. What is is not a separate self, but the encounter or relationship experienced with things, with nature, with other persons . . . and with God.

Spirituality need not entail endless exploration of the individual self, but can practice mindful attention to "what is."(17) In this attentiveness, one's self is engaged, but as a by-product of the awareness. In fact, a "substantive self" (one considered fundamental, fixed and independent) is surpassed, and experienced to be secondary if not irrelevant. Within this mindful awareness, God is present and known. This is the point of non-introspective spirituality.

Before moving to the hermitage at his monastery in the 1960s, Thomas Merton (with characteristic humour) taught the monastic novices the following:

We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. . .
You have to leave the rabbits what they are -- rabbits. And if you just see that they're rabbits, you suddenly see that they're transparent, and the rabbitness of God is shining through in all these darn rabbits.(18)

Merton exhibits the contemplative's awareness of the permeating presence of God in the daily and the ordinary. God is visible in all that surrounds us in a way that may seem like pantheism, but is not. The transparency of all beings allows them both to be what they are and to reveal the particular presence of God. For Merton, this applies not only to rabbits (!) but to human beings. He remarks further that "people are transparent, and . . . the humanity of God is transparent in people. And . . . you don't have to take each person as an opaque package."(19)

This transparency, however, is often not experienced. Why? According to Merton, it is because we invest our thinking and acting with "care." By this he means our excessive analyzing of situations, anticipated events, people, ourselves, etc., with the anxious need to change and to control what is. Care is the failure to recognize things as they are in their givenness. It, as Merton says, "makes the world opaque, and makes it not transparent anymore."(20) "Care" -- anxious care -- entails the insertion of a reified self into ongoing experience in its givenness.

Ultimately, care is centred on the self and belies trust in God. The substantive and separate self is both care's creation and its cause. Desirous care, in its opacity, constructs the self for which it then becomes anxious.

Care has deep roots in one's emotional past. Psychiatrist Mark Epstein sees the unconscious wish for security and perfection (a return to the undifferentiated stage of infancy) as that which drives the crafting of the fixed self, which can then (seemingly) be controlled in oneself and others in pursuit of early emotional security.(21)

Joseph Goldstein notes the ontological, not just the psychological, process of "identification," which is at the basis of what Merton means by "care":

When we are not mindful . . . we become identified with the different phenomena that arise. Sometimes we become identified with the objects that arise and sometimes with the knower or the knowing of them. It is that very moment of identification that creates the sense of "self."(22)

Since, as Buddhists see it, the self is fundamentally empty (and the projected self, illusion), its content gets crystallized in the process of attachment to what is otherwise transient and relative. We "become" in a substantive and definitive way, certain experiences, roles, labels, self-interpretations or identities put on us by others, feelings of grandiosity or self-disdain, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, etc. When, through "mindfulness" (meditative awareness), this self is recognized as illusory, as impermanent and relative, identification is broken and care diminishes. It is then, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, that "The world is charged with the grandeur of God."(23) Merton viewed his move to the hermitage as responding to the call "to live without care" (a call, he noted, for non-hermits as well), so the world can be seen in its transparency to the grandeur of God.

Buddhist thought includes the principle of anatta (in Pali) or "no-self." Goldstein explains the teaching and experience of anatta by way of the paradoxical, foundational concept in Buddhism of "emptiness": "It [anatta] is related to the notion of shunyata, 'emptiness,' which points to the fact that all things lack independent existence. Applied to each individual, shunyata becomes anatta, meaning that there is no self or being that exists independent of conditions."(24) Of course, we may differentiate between individual persons, with their own personalities and identities. When we say someone's name, we connote a unique human entity. Daily, in our thinking and interacting, we implicitly assert unique personhood of ourselves and others. But Buddhists believe delusion occurs in positing a self that has reality unto itself, a self that is somehow above the complex of physical, social, and interpersonal conditions in which one exists, and is ontologically separate from other persons, animals, the natural environment, and the world.

What is unique about a person is not one's unchanging and separate "self," but, as Joanna Macy remarks, "his or her particular stream [of being], with its cultural and geographic flavour, and its idiosyncrasies."(25) In life, we find ourselves in a "stream of being," in fact, as a stream of being who thinks and makes choices. The self is a projection superadded to the interlacing streams of experience we together are. Stephen Batchelor indicates that with awareness the self is seen as illusion. "You recognize that who you are is not some kind of metaphysical substance or essence that is tucked away inside you somewhere, but rather is determined by the unrepeatable matrix of relationships that constitute your own history."(26) With attentive awareness acquired through meditation or careful observance of phenomena, we experience not a self per se but life as interrelational.

In Buddhism, various methods of meditation are the means whereby anatta is realized. "In fact, the distinguishing characteristic of Buddhist meditation is that it seeks to eradicate, once and for all, the conception of self as an entity."(27) As the self dissolves in meditation -- what is left is perceptive awareness ("mindfulness") of phenomena as passing and not to be craved, the experience of the natural interconnection with all things ("compassion"), and the peace that results from relinquishing anxious care. Meditation has the effect of deconstructing the self.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from a Nazi prison cell during World War II: "One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one."(28) One should not be concerned with projecting an image -- whether the religious, righteous, sinful, holy, or humble. The gloss of spiritual ideology or pietistic rhetoric is unnecessary and ultimately false. This "gloss" is, in Buddhist terms, the stuff of a self.

At the same time, it must be noted that contemporary secularism with its spiritual indifference provides the context for the projection of a self for many today -- late-twentieth-century Western materialism and market setting the terms. We allow Time magazine, the internet, and marketing strategies to determine who we are to become. The lure of comfort, wealth, and apparent freedom encourages attachment to a defined self, maintenance of which requires much "care." Long before the modern and postmodern eras, Jesus spoke to the anxious self with its material concerns: "Consider the lilies of the field . . ." (Matt. 6:28). In other words, live without care.

In his citation against self-fabrication above, Bonhoeffer makes a particularly (though not exclusively) Lutheran point.29 The Reformation doctrine of justification by grace liberates one from the self; justification surpasses the reified self. Paul Tillich remarks:

Justification by grace through faith . . . is an act of God which is in no way dependent on man, an act in which he accepts him who is unacceptable. In the paradoxical formula, simul peccator, simul justus, which is the core of the Lutheran revolution, the in-spite-of character is decisive for the

whole Christian message as the salvation from despair about one's guilt.30

Simul justus et peccator -- that we are at once sinner and made right before God, by grace -- implies we need not be concerned much about who or what we are. The focus, rather, is on the divine embrace of us in faith. The paradoxical character of justification "enables man [sic] to look away from himself and his state of estrangement and self-destruction to the justifying act of God."(31) The self as construct or projection is irrelevant to the reality of faith in Christ -- in fact, it obstructs it.

In the encounter of faith, there is great relief, as Luther himself experienced when he realized it was not necessary to be an ascetic monk. Buddhist Joanna Macy writes:

In truth, we don't erase the self. We see through it. Throughout our lives we have been trying so hard to fix that "I" we have each been lugging around. So when we drop the endless struggle to improve it or punish it, to make it noble, to mortify it, or to sacrifice it, the relief is tremendous.(32)

For the Christian, faith by grace is analogous to Buddhist enlightenment or awareness in rendering tedious self-assemblage outmoded. Both faith and enlightenment liberate.

A spirituality whose focus or methodology is not the self involves less introspective analysis of one's motives, intentions, feelings, experiences, relationships, etc. "We walk by faith" (2 Cor. 5:7) in freedom of the Spirit, not by self-analysis. This type of spirituality moves neither in an overly penitential direction (self as "wretched sinner"), nor in a self-glorifying one (self as "divine spark"). Once the self "drops out," both directions (and in-between) may be experienced from time to time without attachment to either pole. The focus, as noted, is on God's embrace of us at once saint and sinner.

In this spiritual approach, prayer entails more praise and thanksgiving, less confession based on examination of oneself, and fewer petitions and intercessions motivated by "care." Without the obscuring interference of a "self," prayer becomes more an experience of God's presence in all things, or, as Merton taught, of the world's transparency to God. Fewer words are necessary as one encounters the divine presence in the here and now and experiences gratitude. Prayer and life become more contemplative. Words used in prayer, preaching, reflective conversation, poetry, etc. become more descriptive and relevatory of what is.

In a spirituality beyond the substantive self, worship services tend to be more liturgical and less subjective. There can be personal references included in the objective liturgy, but within limits. "[W]hat is most personal is not most profound," the Jungian analyst in Robertson Davies' The Manticore tells her client after a long period of his self-exploration.(33) She advises him it is important, if he wishes to continue therapy, to examine the archetypes, "and we shall go beyond what is personal in them."(34) Analogous to this kind of psychotherapy, liturgical worship engages the individual person, in all given particularity, while connecting one to deeper psychological and spiritual reality. A too-subjective or introspective method or style diminishes this encounter with reality. The "self" gets in the way.

In his poetry, Rainer Maria Rilke sought ontological objectivity through relevatory words. He responded in a letter to his wife, Clara, about his collection of poetry, New Poems: "In the poems, there are instinctive beginnings toward a similar objectivity."(35) The similarity he postulated was to the paintings of Paul Cézanne, as Rilke understood them. He saw in Cézanne's work a kind of artistic-spiritual objectivity lacking in Impressionism, the preceding artistic movement. About the Impressionists (apparently), Rilke wrote: "They'd paint: I love this here; instead of painting: here it is."(36) Rilke criticized (somewhat unfairly) their insertion of a "self" into the artistic process.(37) Doing this, he believed, captured not the reality of a scene encountered and artistically interpreted, but subjective taste and feeling. In C‚‚zanne, Rilke saw genius in the artistic hermeneutic of reality painted in still lifes and landscapes, that is to say, in the depiction of reality.

To borrow from Rilke, I would suggest that prayer and worship convey "here it is" -- here is the reality of God's presence, before us and among us. The words of prayer, if not focused on a self, can be experiential of the encounter with God by grace, thus revealing "here it is." This is when words become "Word." Personal concerns and feelings, as well as individual identity, are of course incorporated into the prayerful encounter, but are not the focus. The encounter is.

III. Conclusion

The Western spiritual tradition since Augustine has promoted (though not exclusively) introspective analysis of one's thoughts and feelings, actions and motivations, sinful failures and moral accomplishments as the means of finding and relating with God. Such introspection presupposes a "substantive self" -- a self that has an identity that is more or less fixed, distinct and unique. One's relationship with God is contingent upon the reality of this identity; without it, in effect, God does not exist. To find and know God, one looks at one's own self. The benefit of this approach has been the inclusion of the uniquely personal in spiritual life.

But, as I have tried to show, this is not the only type of spirituality. A Buddhist approach (but not strictly so, as Christian referents in this article illustrate) relativizes and de-emphasizes the self, and even seeks to expose it as illusory and empty.38 To highlight the contrast between approaches, think on the one hand of the traditional practice of examination of conscience (one example of Western "spirituality of the self") and, on the other, of Zen meditation (the emptying of the mind through mental-physical method). These are fundamentally different spiritual practices, the difference hinging upon one's experience and interpretation of the "self." For those formed in a more "Western" mode, a spirituality beyond the self can provide an alternative to, while it complements, one of reflexive analysis.

Spiritual and emotional analyses of one's historical self should continue, and will bear the fruit of personal, reflexive knowledge. At the same time, one can come to see as illusory one's role as an independent subject. "It is enough, these practices [of meditation] reveal, to open to the ongoing process of knowing without inputing someone behind it all."39 The extended and arduous journey taken by Augustine and his spiritual descendants through the self to God discloses the external God who was already there to be encountered not merely in retrospection and autobiography, but in the givenness of the present moment.

--------------------

End Notes

(1) Bruce Murphy, ed., "The Confessions of Saint Augustine" in Bénet's Reader's Encyclopedia, 4th ed. (New York: Harper-Collins, 1966) 222.

(2) Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 28. In discussing personal identity and the self, Charles Taylor remarks: "Talk about 'identity' in the modern sense would have been incomprehensible to our forebears of a couple of centuries ago." Taylor mentions in this regard Erik Erikson's twentieth-century reading of Martin Luther's crisis of faith as an "identity-crisis," which presupposes a different kind of self than was understood in the late Middle Ages.

(3) Ibid, 132.

(4) Ibid, 131.

(5) Ibid, 130.

(6) Augustine, Augustine of Hippo: Selected Writings, introduction by Mary T. Clark, with a preface by Goulven Madec, translated by Mary T. Clark (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 15-16.

(7) Augustine, Confessions, introduction by R.S. Pine-Coffin, translated by R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 230,231.

(8) Augustine, Confessions, Volume 3, introduction and commentary by James J. O'Donnell, edited by James J. O'Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 217. O'Donnell states: "[Confession] is the means by which the 'self' of the speaker is constituted. In and of himself, A. does not exist: he derives existence not from his own words, which are powerless, but from the creative Word of God, dispensed out of mercy (not justice). We are not who we think we are." This important point qualities Augustine's turn. The self can only be discovered, or even emerge, in the honest opening of oneself to God. This relativizes the self. The psychological-spiritual question, however, can be raised. When and how does "confession" shift from introspective analysis without end to the opening to what is infinitely beyond, yet present with, the self? How does one avoid "paralysis of analysis" in this context?

(9) Krister Stendahl, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," Paul Among Jews and Gentiles and Other Essays (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 85. In this essay, Stendahl contrasts Western inward spirituality with one that takes another approach: "Judging at least from a superficial survey of the preaching of the Churches of the East from olden times to the present, it is striking how the homiletical traditions is either one of doxology or meditative mysticism or exhortation -- but it does not deal with the plagued conscience in the way in which one came to do so in the Western Churches." These Eastern modes -- doxology," "meditative mysticism," and "exhortation" -- imply, of course a self but without the focus given to it in the West. It is subsumed and deemed less relevant in the encounter with the all-encompassing reality of the divine. Stendahl's comment about Eastern Christianity suggests the spirituality I wish to pursue here.

(10)Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited, with notes by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 242.

(11) Ibid, 243.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Thaisa Frank, "Families, Anecdotes, and Taboos: Translating Life into Literature," The San Francisco Review, 21 (November/December 1996):43.

(14) L. Gregory Jones,"Spiritual Life: Thomas Moore's Misguided Care of the Soul," The Christian Century, 113 (November 6, 1996): 1074. This quotation refers specifically to Moore but would apply equally to Peck: "The goal of his spiritual/therapeutic quest is nothing less than for the conscious self to attain divinity." ("Briefly Noted," Cross Currents, 46 (Winter 1996/1997): 576.

(15) The point of this somewhat confusing sentence is that the kind of spirituality beyond the self which I recommend in this essay is Eastern and Buddhist yet also appears at various points in the Western and Christian tradition, as is evident from my affirmative use of several Christian authors. Nonetheless, I continue to maintain the typological and heuristic contrast because (a) Western Christianity inherently assumes, for better or worse, a "self," while Buddhism does not, (b) it can be a fruitful exercise to contemplate the implications of spirituality or religion without a "self," and (c) the similarities of the Buddhist approach to what does in fact surface in the Western spiritual and mystical tradition, as one elaborates the contrast, provides a dimension of immediate interreligious dialogue, if not unity. This essay does not attempt to promote one religion over another, to the contrary.

(16) David Steindl-Rast, A Listening Heart: The Art of Contemplative Living (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 70.

(17) Attention to "what is" can be applied to one's own emotional psychological-spiritual condition and history -- for example, in psychotherapy. If the approach is the kind of attentiveness proposed in this essay (and not preoccupation with a projected "self"), the object of the attention is not inflated but experienced in its mere givenness, as are all phenomena.

(18) Thomas Merton, "Solitude: Breaking the Heart," recorded on Credence Cassettes (Kansas City, MO: National Catholic Reporter Publishing).

(19) Ibid.

(20) Ibid.

(21) Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychology from a Buddhist Perspective, with a foreward by the Dalai Lama (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 86-87.

(22) Joseph Goldstein, "The Flavors of Anatta: Reflections from a Theravada Perspective," Inquiring Mind, 11 (Spring 1995):4.

(23) Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, selected with an introduction and notes by W.H. Gardner (Hamondsworth: Penguin, 1953), stanza 1, line 1, 27.

(24) Goldstein, "The Flavors of Anatta," 4.

(25) Barbara Gates,ed., "The Incredible Exploding Self: An Interview with Joanna Macy," Inquiring Mind, 11 (Spring 1995): 7.

(26) Stephen Batchelor, "Anatta and Shunyata: A Mahayana View," Inquiring Mind, 11 (Spring 1995): 5.

(27) Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker, 138-139.

(28) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, enlarged ed., edited by Eberhard Bethage, translated by Reginald Fuller, Frank Clarke, John Bowden, et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 369-370.

(29) Ibid, 369. Bonhoeffer comments in the same letter in which he proposes faith without other-worldly embellishment: "I think Luther lived a this-worldly life in this sense."

30Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 2: Existence and the Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 178.

(31) Ibid.

(32) "Interview with Joanna Macy," 6.

(33) Robertson Davies, The Manticore (Toronto: Penguin, 1976), 237.

(34) Ibid.

(35) Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, edited by Clara Rilke, translated by Joel Agee (New York: Fromm International), 51.

(36) Ibid.

(37) The distinction between Impressionism and Post-Impressionism is relative, the latter's departure having to do with vibrant use of colour, focus on structure, and dynamic stroke. Both movements broke with the academic formality of nineteenth-century art, and allowed the painter more freedom and personal expression in the artistic process. It should be noted that each movement included different styles of painting. Rilke, I think, was reacting against the emphasis on subjective feeling -- tones aroused by the soft strokes and pastel colours in some Impressionistic paintings. Yet the "objectivity" he admires in Cézanne can also be found (though in a different way) in Impressionist Claude Monet's studied attention to natural light.

(38) It should be noted that in Hinduism and ancient Indian thought -- also Eastern, like Buddhism -- there is belief in the reality of a self. However, the self in Hinduism is that which is deepest in a person, beyond all particulars. It connects the individual with ultimate reality. Atman is the Sanskrit word for self or soul. It refers to the self both in its universality and as it inheres deeply within each person. This understanding of self is not the Western spiritual-psychological identification of unique persons: in fact, it is the opposite. Nevertheless, historically, Buddhism rejected the Hindu principle of absolute self, even as it relativizes the psychological and/or spiritual self of today in the West.

(39) Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker, 155.