Abstract
Mostly in this paper I shall deal with Buddhist and Hindu ideas and practice, so far as they bear upon notions of transcendence. Of course, that notion really splits into a number of varieties, since it is vital to say what something or other is supposed to be transcending. I consider, and have argued this in a paper originally presented in the 1960s,1 that the concept of transcending space can be coherently stated, and, with suitable religious embellishments, is the key notion in Western theism. But there are other usages such as that something or other transcends thought or description and so forth. In this paper I wish to explore analogues from South Asian religions. But by way of contrast to the key idea of transcendence mentioned above, let me start by delineating a different model, as found in the Jain tradition.2
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Notes
‘Myth and Transcendence’, The Monist 50 (1966), 475–87, reprinted in Donald Wiebe (ed.), Concept and Empathy (1988).
On Jainism, see Padmanabh Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (1979)
and Nathnal Taka, That Which Is (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), See also my book Reasons and Faiths (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958) which started the postwar crosscultural philosophy of religion.
Lately there has been published Thomas Dean (ed.), Religious Pluralism and Truth: essays on crosscultural philosophy of religion (1995).
As Steven Konstantine and I did in our book A Christian Systematic Theology in a World Context (1991).
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© 1997 The Claremont Graduate School
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Smart, N. (1997). Transcendence in a Pluralistic Context. In: Phillips, D.Z., Tessin, T. (eds) Religion without Transcendence?. Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25915-1_8
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