Gladness and sympathetic joy: Gospel witness and the four noble truths in dialogue

Abstract

Several years ago, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu published together, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (2016). If the famed Lama was calling on notions of joy developed in and through his own Tibetan Buddhist tradition to suggest a way forward for a fraught 21st-century world, the almost equally famous South African social activist and Anglican bishop was drawing from even more ancient Christian sources regarding rapturous and jubilational delight in order to propose engaging with the complexities of a globalizing third millennium. This article seeks to dig deeper into the scriptural tributaries feeding these contemporary proposals, focusing first on the 5th-century CE Indian Buddhist thinker Buddhaghosa, in particular his teachings regarding the role of joyful equanimity for the salvation of the monastic community found in the classic text Visuddhimagga, and on the appropriation of these ideas by contemporary Buddhist practitioners, and second on the apostolic writings of St. Luke, for whom joyful prayer and worship were central expressions of a Spirit-empowered proclamation of the gospel by the earliest followers of Jesus in their sojourn to the ends of the earth that has galvanized Christian mission historically. We will find that both traditions can learn something important in this dialogical process which can, in turn, also nurture in the present age a more humble and also, paradoxically, more potent Christian witness in Buddhist environments in the present 21st-century global context.