Reconsidering Epistemological Primacy in Hick's Pluralism: A Japanese Perspective on Conversion — Epoche C2
Hick's single criterion, and the question it raises John Hick's An Interpretation of Religion (1989) offers exactly one test for assessing a religious tradition — the extent to which it moves people from self-centredness to what he calls Reality-centredness — and the question pursued here is whether that test, applied to two Japanese Buddhist cases, quietly readmits the ranking of traditions it was designed to exclude. The cases are Zen awakening, described in its own literature as sudden and self-authenticating, and the Pure Land experience of entrusting, described as instantaneous but as not the practitioner's own doing at all. The proposal to be tested is that experiences of the first kind carry more epistemic weight than ordinary moral improvement does, and therefore that Hick's framework contains an asymmetry he did not intend. The conclusion will be that the proposal fails in the form usually given to it, that Hick's own architecture is what defeats it, and that something narrower and more interesting survives the failure. What the pluralist hypothesis actually asserts Hick's hypothesis, developed in the Gifford Lectures of 1986–87 and published as An Interpretation of Religion , has three moving parts, and the argument below depends on all three, so each needs stating. The first is a distinction he takes over from Kant while explicitly declining Kant's account of how the categories work. There is the Real as it is in itself, which Hick writes of as transcategorial, and there is the Real as humanly experienced. The second part specifies how the second arises from the first: the traditions schematise the Real under one of two very general categories, the Real as personal and the Real as non-personal, and each category is filled in by the concrete resources of a culture. Under the first fall what Hick calls the personae — Yahweh, the heavenly Father, Allah, Vishnu. Under the second fall the impersonae — Brahman, the Dharma, the Tao, Śūnyatā. The third part is the criterion: since none of these can be checked against the Real as it is in itself, the traditions are to be assessed by their fruits, that is, by the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Reality-centredness. The strength of the transcategorial claim is easy to underestimate. Hick does not say that our concepts apply to the Real approximately, or partially, or analogically. He says that the Real cannot be said to be one or many, personal or impersonal, substance or process, good or evil, purposive or non-purposive. Writing $R$ for the Real as it is in itself and $C$ for any substantial concept, the position is that neither $C(R)$ nor its contrary is assertible; the concept does not fail to hold, it fails to apply. What remains sayable are purely formal and relational predicates: that $R$ can be referred to, and that it is the ground of the experiences the traditions report. One further point of Hick's own must be on the table before the argument begins, because it is often mistaken for the argument's target. Hick does not deny that traditions could in principle be graded. He denies that they can be graded in practice, and for a stated reason: the soteriological criterion is a claim about aggregate moral and spiritual fruits across whole populations and long historical periods, and we possess no way of totalling those. In Problems of Religious Pluralism (1985) he allows the grading of particular elements within traditions while refusing an overall verdict. His block on ranking is therefore epistemic and practical, not a matter of principle. The proposal examined here is a different one, and it must be defeated, if at all, on different ground. Why the symmetry reading follows, and what it costs The standard reading of Hick runs as follows. If Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and the Vedāntic traditions all produce, in comparable proportion, people who have moved from self-centredness to Reality-centredness, then by the only available criterion they are on a level. Their doctrines, being schematisations of what cannot be characterised, are not descriptions that could be more or less accurate; they are culturally conditioned means. No tradition therefore enjoys privileged access to the Real, and any claim of such access is exclusivism in a new dress. That reading is a good deal stronger than a mere counsel of tolerance, and it is worth being honest about its cost. Paul Griffiths (1991) argues that religious communities which make truth-claims are under an obligation to defend them against rival claims, and that the obligation follows from the communities' own understanding of what they are asserting. On the symmetry reading, that obligation dissolves: if doctrinal content is soteriologically inert, there is nothing for inter-religious argument to be about, and the practice of apologetics — which is not an aberration but a constant of the traditions' histories — becomes a category mistake. A description of religion that cannot accommodate what the religions take themselves to be doing has paid something for its even-handedness. The proposed asymmetry, stated precisely The refinement to be tested can now be put without slogans. Hick's criterion is indexed to an outcome: Reality-centredness attained. It is silent about the route. But the routes differ, and in one class of case the difference looks epistemically loaded. Consider satori, the awakening that the Rinzai line of Japanese Zen treats as the point of its kōan curriculum — a kōan being a formulated case, put to the practitioner by a teacher, which cannot be resolved by discursive reasoning. D. T. Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927), the text through which this material chiefly reached Western philosophy of religion, presents satori as a sudden reorganisation of perception, non-discursive, and carrying its own certification: the person who has it is said not to need, and not to be able to supply, any further warrant. If some experiences present themselves