A startling change has taken place in Buddhist–Christian dialogue lately. In the early years of that dialogue, those of us who took part in it spoke with some confidence about the (one) Buddhist position on a given point, comparing it with the Christian one, and vice versa. That confidence has largely been lost. Today we recognize many different positions on each side. A greater variety of Buddhist groups has begun to meet a greater variety of Christian groups. Thus, when a particular point, say, of doctrine, is being put forward as the Christian view, other Christian participants are likely to challenge that view, long before Buddhists do. When a Buddhist, in turn, makes a statement in the name of Buddhism, other Buddhists will challenge that view, before Christian participants have had time to look at it from their own perspective. Where we may have dared to speak of the Christian position in earlier phases of the dialogue, a Christian position is all we can put forward, nowadays. And our Buddhist partners in dialogue are being led to an equally humble stance.

This means that the Buddhist–Christian dialogue has become a good deal more realistic. Our more humble stance is more down to earth. Humility, after all, takes its name from humus. Those who catch on to the recent shift in the dialogue are coming down from the clouds. The exchange gets more grounded. And since humility is a cousin of humor (not only linguistically) the shift is apt to bring humor into our dialogue. Nothing is more disconcerting than to have someone on your own side of the debate pull the rug out from under your position. All the more so, when you thought you were standing on solid rock. That’s a moment when humor makes the difference between embarrassing humiliation and liberating humility. If we can laugh in a situation like that, we’ll all be the better off for it. Besides, humor increases your chances for landing on your feet as you are brought down to reality. But there is still more basic grounding of interreligious dialogue. It comes about, when we base our exchanges on the common ground of our being human. It is this process I propose to scan in this brief essay.

Incarnation, Resurrection, Trinity, Grace—what do you really mean by it? And as soon as it has been raised, Christians will begin to disagree among themselves. Buddhists, in turn, disagree just as widely among themselves on concepts which are equally basic for Buddhism. Once we have asked the question, “What does it mean?” and the different answers are in, we cannot avoid asking one another a second question, “How do you know?” Well, how do we know? Is there a common standard against which to check our convictions? In science, we fall back on experiment. But in religion, where is there a comparable common ground? It may take us a while to find it, but sooner or later we are bound to come to the only common ground there is, our human experience. Engagement in the Buddhist–Christian dialogue pushes us to discover experience as our common ground sooner rather than later. Even those who speak of divine revelation will admit that revelation has not yet arrived until it has become our experience, ultimately your own personal experience and mine.

Where, then, are we to look for the experiential grounding of religious conviction? The answer is clear: in mysticism. As I am using this term, mysticism means an experiential awareness of communion with Ultimate Reality. For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter whether Ultimate Reality is conceived in a theistic or in a non-theistic sense. Nor does it matter whether the awareness of which we are speaking bursts in on us in one overwhelming breakthrough, or seeps into our consciousness slowly and almost imperceptibly. What does matter is that communion with the Ultimate becomes our own personal experience. Whether we speak of Conversion (sudden or laboriously gradual) or of Enlightenment (which is also an early Christian term for baptism) we are referring to an experience, or to nothing at all. There is at the very core of Buddhist as well as Christian tradition an experiential reality, an awareness, which is in the strictest sense mystical.

The great Masters and Saints of all spiritual traditions seem to have been steeped in mystical awareness to an extraordinary degree. Note, however, that the difference between their experience and our own lies only in the degree not in the awareness as such. That awareness is something all human beings potentially share. In each one of us it flares up occasionally. And it can be cultivated, which is what spiritual practice is all about. The spontaneous flare-ups have been studied by psychologists as Peak Experiences, peaks of human consciousness. Abraham Maslow, the great explorer of that realm of the human psyche, originally called the Peak Experience a mystical experience. Even after he changed the name, he continued to insist that the awareness which every human being seems to attain in Peak moments cannot be distinguished psychologically from the kind of awareness great mystics described.

Every spiritual tradition acknowledges mysticism as constituting its very core. (This is true even of those protestant traditions which are allergic to the term “mysticism.” What could be meant by Conversion, by Grace, even by reading the Bible as Word of God in human words, if not “an experiential awareness of communion with Ultimate Reality?”) But psychology has come as close as it can to showing that mysticism is a universal human phenomenon. Thus, what constitutes the very core of the different spiritual traditions in all their diversity is at the same time an experience which all humans have in common. There is our common ground for dialogue: mysticism.

There are those who stress the fact that the term “mystical” characterizes not one, but a multitude of experiences. Some of these experiences differ so widely from each other, they claim, that one must ask, do they have anything in common except the label “mystical”? They do! is my answer. But before I try to give reasons for my position, let us admit that we are indeed dealing with a sheer infinite variety of mystical experiences. Are any two experiences ever the same? Not even one and the same person can have the same experience twice. Those who deny a common reality to the variety of mystic experiences have one particularly weighty argument: experience cannot be separated from the conceptual framework one brings to it. Interpretation is not added on later to pure experience. Interpretation shapes our experience, as a cup gives its shape to the water that flows into it. Our frame of mind frames what we experience. Not, however, as a decorator framing a picture. More like an orator framing a statement; or even a crook framing a prizefight. It makes a difference, e.g., whether our mind brings to a Peak moment a dualistic frame of reference, a monistic one, or a Trinitarian one (which includes and transcends the other two). The Peak Experiences which result will differ. How, then, can we hope to find in mystic experience a common ground?

Any attempt to find common ground on the side of the object of our mystic awareness is bound to fail. Neither God nor Emptiness can be said to be objects in any proper sense. Is the horizon an object? Every mystic experience is an experience of horizon, though landscape differs from landscape. Only, to speak of a horizon as common ground proves by the very awkwardness of the expression that this won’t do. Instead, how about looking for our common ground not on the side of the object, but of the subject; not out there, but in here; not in what we encounter in mystic experience, but what the experience does to us? It makes us human.

This aspect of the Peak Experience has not been sufficiently explored. It normally remains in the periphery of mystic insight. We can, however, bring our peripheral vision into focus. We can ask ourselves: Is there not a byproduct, as it were, to our awareness of communion with Ultimate Reality? There is such a byproduct, a side effect of great significance, and it is this: In and through our mystic awareness we know at the same time what it means to be human. We know it implicitly, not explicitly. But we know it. We are aware that it is the mystic encounter with our inner horizon that makes us human. And so we cannot deny the unity of mystic experience, unless we are prepared to deny our common humanity. That common humanity is the common ground to which Buddhist–Christian dialogue brings us down.

The finer a point of doctrine, the further out we are on one or another limb of interpretation. The more basic the tenet in question, the closer we are to the experiential roots of that which doctrine interprets. This principle can be verified, time and again. Basic doctrines of one tradition may appear to disagree with those of another tradition, or even to flatly contradict them at first sight. At closer examination, however, we find something else: the more basic a doctrine, the more likely it is an expression of that basic human self-understanding which we all share. It stands to reason that we should encounter apparent contradiction between the traditions. They result from the human struggle to express the inexpressible; from our human urge to speak of the unspeakable. What appears to be flat contradiction may be the expression of deep paradox. Even within one and the same tradition we encounter paradox in the guise of contradiction. All the more so, the closer we come to the inner core of its teachings. Should this surprise us? Not, if we remember that at the core of every spiritual tradition lies the paradox of mystic experience.

Experiential awareness of our communion with the Ground of Being makes us humans what we are and so constitutes our most basic common ground. This helps us understand two further observations. Those glimpses of what it means to be human mark not only the starting point which all the spiritual traditions have in common, but they set also the goal which unites them all. (More about this in a moment.) This first observation allows us to state more fully a second one, which we have already touched upon. The teachings of a given tradition may explicitly concern a great many different topics. Ultimately, however, they are held together by one and the same concern implicit in all of them, our common concern for human self-understanding.

Our two questions, “What does it really mean?” and “How do you know?” have helped us to get at the experience which lies at the roots of Buddhist as well as Christian teachings. Now we have to ask a third question, “So what?” Put more politely, the question runs, “Why do you feel impelled to mention this?” Apply this question to any doctrinal point, pursue it with honesty and insistence, and it will lead you to discover the deepest reason for all our assertions, especially for those which we make with religious conviction. Yes, it is true, we express a conviction about this or that, some fact out there. In and through it, however, (and far more passionately) we express a conviction about ourselves. What impels us, in last analysis, to make any statement whatsoever with religious conviction is our need to tackle again and again the paradox we are to ourselves. In this struggle, we humans stand on common ground.

It would be a vast undertaking, far beyond our scope here, but it could be pursued: the Christian struggle throughout the ages to formulate teachings which are explicitly Christological or Trinitarian could be shown to be implicitly a struggle for human self-understanding. In Buddhist tradition, a parallel process is even more obvious. This does not mean that Buddhist or Christian teachings amount to no more than an understanding of what it means to be human. But it does mean that they amount to no less. To claim that much is to claim much indeed. It means that both traditions have staked a claim to ground they share. They share it, moreover, with all human beings. At a crisis point of history, when human survival depends on common effort, the discovery of common ground on so deep a level of concern is a weighty matter. If Buddhist–Christian dialogue leads us there, it deserves attention.

This brings us back to our observation that both traditions start with a glimpse of true humanness and share the goal of making that vision a reality. At times, both traditions may have presented that pursuit in all too individualistic terms. At their best, however, neither of the two ever lost sight of the fact that becoming fully human can never be a private affair. It is a communal task because we can accomplish it only together. Only humanity united will be able to show forth what being fully human means. Christians have at times behaved as if one could attempt to become a good Christian at the expense of being fully human. Buddhists who became fanatics may have been caught in the same confusion. But all the great revelations and sacraments which the Christian tradition offers aim at one goal: to help humans become truly human (never forgetting that the fully human infinitely surpasses the merely human, as Pascal taught). And all the great treasures and insights which the Buddhist tradition puts at our disposal have the same goal: to help humans become truly human. Does it make any sense to think that Buddhists and Christians could reach this shared goal without sharing?

Dialogue is an aspect of that sharing. But sharing is more than mere dialogue. In dialogue, the emphasis falls on word and speech. This emphasis is a typically Christian preoccupation. Why should it be imposed on Buddhists? Silence, too, can be shared. Sharing, moreover, includes social responsibility. We humans are animals with mystic awareness. Our deepest concerns are common to all humans. This implies a responsibility to be deeply concerned for all humans. East–West dialogue must inevitably expand into South–North dialogue, if it is genuine. The recent shift in Buddhist–Christian dialogue helps us to see why this must be so. We still have a long way to go. But the direction is clear. Could this be the bend in the road where a further phase of Buddhist–Christian encounter emerges?