One of the problems religious men and philosophers often face is how to convey enlightenment or wisdom to others so that sentient beings can be enlightened or awakened from dogmatic views. This problem is also the question of how truth (the Word of God or Buddha's Dharma) is made known to men. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of communicating truth in Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.

In what follows I argue for two interrelated theses: (1) that early Buddhism is not a form of empiricism, and (2) that consequently there is no basis for an early Buddhist apologetic which contrasts an empirical early Buddhism with either a metaphysical Hinduism on the one hand, or with a baseless Christianity on the other.

Kierkegaard's leap of faith is one of the most thoroughly explored topics in modern philosophy. What can yet another inquiry into this notion hope to achieve? A number of significant things, I think, of both historical and systematic value.

The main contention of this paper is that the leap of faith, often associated with the emergence of existentialism, is Kierkegaard's response to a problem which is essentially Kantian in origin and structure. Kierkegaard wants to accomodate both the Kantian interpretation of morality as rational command and Kant's insistence on morality as the sole point of access to religion, while rejecting the Kantian moralization of religion and rationalization of faith. The leap of faith is not, as existentialism would have it, an absolute beginning in philosophy or in individual reflection but a transition from morality to religion within an essentially Kantian context.

Why does the paradox (i.e. the incarnation) play such a crucial role in Kierkegaard's notion of truth as subjectivity? Richard Schacht explains it as follows:

Eternal happiness is possible for a man only if it is possible for him to relate himself to God. A man, however, is a being who exists in time; and it would not be possible for such a being to enter into a ‘God-relationship’ if God had not also at some point existed in time. Through the ‘leap of faith’ in which one affirms the proposition that God did exist in time, one is able to enter a ‘God-relationship’ and thereby attains ‘an eternal happiness’.

Notable among the current fashions in philosophical theology is the movement away from the view that the mode of being properly attributable to God is some form of atemporal eternity. It sometimes seems almost to be the case that a consensus is in process of formation in support of the contention that the only rationally defensible interpretation of the divine eternity is in terms of sempiternity, i.e. of beginingless and endless temporal duration. This is true not only of the so-called ‘process theologians’, for leading theistic philosophers throughout the English-speaking world seem to be in something of a rush to espouse this particular cause.

The difficulty of ascribing metaphysical predicates such as absoluteness, necessity and perfection to God while simultaneously ascribing personal predicates such as compassion, freedom and agency has often been noted. Most efforts to resolve this dilemma have tended to fall into one of three categories: (I) a merely verbal solution such as that God is ‘compassionate in terms of our experience but…not so in terms of [God's] own’; (2) the univocal and unqualified ascription of the metaphysical predicates to God coupled with equivocation with respect to the personal predicates which results in the final elimination of the latter; (3) the fideistic denial that intelligible language is applicable to God. Unfortunately, none of these is satisfactory. The first solution is seen to be but a version of the second, and it is arguable that the second is, as Feuerbach contends, tantamount to a ‘subtle, disguised atheism’, since ‘to deny all the qualities of a being is equivalent to denying the being himself’ or, alternatively, ‘an existence in general, an existence without qualities, is an insipidity, an absurdity’. The third ‘solution’ is no better and is hardly more than an evasive tactic.

The concept of orthodoxy is not prominent in the thinking of mid-twentiethcentury writers on religion. There are many reasons for this. It is, for instance, always more interesting to challenge accepted traditions than to defend them, and publishers know that radical questioning generally attracts more attention than defence of received ideas. But the task of defending orthodox beliefs is an absolute necessity for the adherents of a revealed religion. It may be unpalatable to have to examine a long succession of ‘reinterpretations’ of Christianity, but it is important, since the new thinkers may often get things badly wrong, and the faithful (often woefully ill-armed–considering their individual capacity–for the intellectual fight) may be seduced by superficial plausibility or flashy modernity.One can well imagine a person who has found Christianity attractive enough for him to pray and to attend church services occasionally, but whose world-view has been largely formed by the mass media, discovering one of the modern ‘reinterpreters’ of the Christian faith with an enormous feeling of relief.

Josiah Royce wrote three major works dealing with religion, The Religious Aspects of Philosophy, The Sources of Religious Insight and The Problem of Christianity. In these are insights which I believe need to be recalled today in order to achieve a fresher vision of the nature of religion and more particularly of the nature of Christianity. Moreover, Royce treats various aspects of individual and communal development which I believe are of some philosophic importance.

In a recent article in Religious Studies, Professor P. W. Gooch attempts to wean the orthodox Christian from anthropological materialism by consideration of the question of the nature of the post-mortem person in the resurrection. He argues that the view that the resurrected person is a psychophysical organism who is in some physical sense the same as the ante-mortem person is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body; rather, according to him, Paul's view is most consistent with that which affirms the disembodied survival of the person. ‘I want to argue’, he writes, ‘for the thesis that a Pauline resurrection body may well be ontologically the same as a disembodied person (204).’ I intend to show that Professor Gooch has failed to provide any support for this view and indeed that his own view falls prey to the criticisms which he has raised against other views.

In the above reply Professor Reichenbach repeatedly announces or suggests that my thesis is this: the view that persons are resurrected in some physical sense is inconsistent with the Pauline view of the resurrected body. Having consulted both my original intentions and my text, I must affirm again my basic point in section III of the article: the belief that resurrected persons are not embodied is not incompatible with what Paul says about resurrected bodies. While not wishing to attribute such a belief to Paul himself (pp. 205, 211), I claimed that seeing resurrected persons as non-corporeal is a ‘supportable interpretation’ of the Pauline concept (p. 205), not forbidden by the text (p. 211), whereas the materiality of the resurrected body is ‘not necessarily implied’ (p. 209). So, of two interpretations, I have not attempted to show one inconsistent with the text; I have instead tried to argue that a rival interpretation is also consistent with the same text.