The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Asian Connections)

Kant thought of religious belief and institutions as having become infected by the ‘bounded will’, or the propensity to evil.

Much of this book has dealt with the descriptions and expressions of dialogical transcendence – a reaching beyond the self that is not committed to a single all-powerful God, truth or eschaton.

Working with the Abrahamic religions, Ricoeur identifies faith, hope and the sacred as a primordial complex identified with ‘manifest communities’ founded on numinous and preverbal experiences of the sacred in nature before they become book-centered, interpretive, intratribal and iconoclastic ‘proclamation communities’.

Ricoeur gives us a useful way to imagine new modes of relating the sacred to rationality.

saffronization

Modern universalisms have tended to lack confidence in investing the transcendent or utopian truths they propose with symbols and rituals of sacred authority.

I am reminded of the Jewel Net of Indra, particularly as it is interpreted in the Huayan school of Chinese Buddhism,

In many respects they represent a weak force but can be sufficiently resilient to outlast the strong. One of their great strengths as a moral force is their ability to mediate the sacred with the rational. Armed with scientific, legal, technical and, not least, local knowledge, these coalitions represent our principal hope.

Can we link the sacrality of figures of hope to this connectedness?