The Spirit Of Contradiction In Christianity And Buddhism

Both doctrines are maximally counterintuitive, in the sense that they violate the default expectations that human beings spontaneously make about the basic categories of things in the world. Nicholson argues that that these doctrines were each the products of intra- and inter-religious rivalry, in which one faction tried to get the upper hand over its ingroup rivals by maximizing the contrast with the dominant outgroup. Thus the "pro-Nicene" theologians of the fourth century developed the concept of Consubstantiality in the context of an effort to maximize, against their "Arian" rivals, the contrast with Christianity's archetypal "other," Judaism. Similarly, the No-self doctrine stemmed from an effort to maximize, against the so-called Personalist schools of Buddhism, the contrast with Brahmanical Hinduism with its doctrine of an unchanging and eternal self.

• | Author: Hugh R. Nicholson
• | Publisher: Oxford University Press
• | Publication Date: Mar 01, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 345 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Religion
• | ISBN-10: 0190455349
• | ISBN-13: 9780190455347