15.2: Study Questions
- Page ID
- 37145
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- Do a research project.juxtaposing and then comparing and contrasting parallel phenomena from Buddhism and Christianity other than the phenomena juxtaposed in Chapters 9 through 14.
- Reflect on what you have learned through studying Chapters 9 through 15. What are the chief understandings and principal insights that you have come to about Buddhism and Christianity and their relationship?
- Has this comparative study given you a sense of the great diversity and complexity of the traditions? Has it helped to make that diversity and complexity more understandable?
- Which of the understandings and insights identified in questions 2 and 3 seem to have been specifically due to (or aided by) use of the framework of ways of being religious to guide the comparative study? In what specific ways do you think it has helped in highlighting things that otherwise might be missed? Are there ways in which you think it has limited the study?
- What other correlations between Buddhism and Christianity are suggested to you by the framework that you think would be worth study?
- What sorts of practical lessons and insights embodied in any one of the traditional practices exemplified in Chapters 9 through 14 do you imagine might be useful to persons pursuing the same way of being religious in the other tradition? In other words, what things do you think would be fruitful points of common interest for dialogue between Buddhists and Christians?
- Are you inclined to agree, or not to agree, with the idea that each of the ways exemplified in the practices presented in Chapters 9 through 14 are needed in some sense to fill out the whole of Buddhism on the one hand and Christianity on the other? What reasons would count for that idea? What reasons would count against it?
- What are the most significant differences you have noted between Buddhism and Christianity, both in general and in relation to specific ways of being religious? Are those differences reconcilable? If you think so, what evidence supports your opinion? Or are they fundamentally irreconcilable? If you think so, what evidence supports your opinion? In respect to these questions, what do you think of the prospects of Buddhist-Christian dialogue?
- Do a research project juxtaposing and then comparing and contrasting parallel phenomena from other religious traditions with phenomena from Buddhism or Christianity in the manner exemplified in Chapters 9 through 14.