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10.6: Notes

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    41202
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    1. A reminder: words or phrases that are italicized and marked with a degree symbol are generic place-holders for a corresponding word or phrase from a specific tradition that articulates a specific conception uniquely suited to that tradition's conception of ultimate realityo. Strictly speaking, the word theology has little if any application in Buddhism. "Theologyo" is used here and elsewhere to refer generically to the process and results of the way of reasoned inquiry into ultimate matters within any given religious tradition.
    2. Bhikkhu Pesala, The Debate of King Milinda: An Abridgement of the Milinda Panha (Buddhist Traditions, vol. XIV; Dehli, India: Motilal Banarsidass, 1991), pp. 3-6, 19, and 83-86.
    3. It was believed in ancient India that the great ocean did not retain the dead but cast up their corpses onto the shore.
    4. Earlier in the Milindapanha, virtue is characterized as the supporting basis of all good qualities, as Theravada Buddhism accounts for them, namely, those that are conducive to Enlightenment.
    5. See Jean Leclerq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).
    6. The first selection is from Benedicta Ward, "Anselm of Canterbury: a Monastic Scholar," Fairacres Publication 62 (Oxford, England: SLG Press, 1973/1990), reprinted in Benedicta Ward, Signs and Wonders: Saints, Miracles and Prayers from the 4th Century to the 14th (Brookfield, VT: Variorum/Ashgate, 1992), pp. 8-12. The second is from The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Benedicta Ward (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 239-246.
    7. Ward is here quoting in her own translation Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, Vol. 1, xix. An English translation of the work is Eadmer, Life ofSt. Anselm, ed. and trans. by R. W. Southern (Oxford, 1972).
    8. For a fine discussion of the entirety of the Proslogion in a manner consistent with the interpretation given here, see Anselm Stolz, "Anselm's Theology in the Proslogion," in The Many-Faced Argument: Recent Studies on the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, ed. John Hick and Arthur C. McGill (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 183-206.
    9. Some recent attempts to rethink the nature of the existence of God coming out of the Buddhist-Christian dialogue-to rethink it in a manner true to Scripture but letting go of some cherished categories of traditional Christian theism deriving from ancient Greek philosophy-suggest that the apparent contradictions between Christian theology and Buddhist teachings may not be so radical as they first seem to be and that there may be a way to reconcile some of the differences. See Roger Corless and Paul F. Knitter, eds., Buddhist Emptiness and Christian Trinity: Essays and Explorations (New York: Paulist Press, 1990); Julia Ching, "Paradigms of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity," Buddhist-Christian Studies 4 (1984), pp. 31-50; and Donald W. Mitchell, Spirituality and Emptiness: The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity (New York: Paulist Press, 1991).

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