Joseph S. O’Leary

Reality Itself

Philosophical Challenges of Indian Mahāyāna

Reality Itself is a set of fifteen essays exploring interactions between Buddhist and Western philosophy. The first section presents the two traditions as sharing a quest for reality itself and illustrates this in discussions of everyday life, forgiveness, and religion. The second section engages with central concepts of Mahāyāna Buddhism: emptiness in the Heart Sutra, nonduality in the Vimalakirti Sutra, and skillful means in the Lotus Sutra. The third section focuses on Nāgārjuna’s Root Verses of the Middle Way, showing how their dialectical logic and their dyad of ultimate and conventional can be applied in discussing divine personality, time, and truth. The final section studies interactions between Buddhism and Western thinkers (Hume, Hegel, Husserl, and Sartre), chiefly on the topic of self and non-self. The book should be of interest to graduate students in philosophy and theology.

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“For the author, a Buddhist deconstruction of the Christian God would not mean that the biblical God would disappear into the Buddhist ‘emptiness,’ but would assert the Christian God’s identity in a fresh way, that is, more real in terms of the contemporary age… Reality Itself is the work of a pondering mind that definitely has the merit of an open approach to Christian dogma.” —Bart Dessein

“One of the most important philosophical challenges for Christian theology lies in its engagement with Indian philosophies of non-duality, and one of the most daring and creative theologians confronting this challenge is Joseph O’Leary. For the past two to three decades, O’Leary has pushed the Christian theological agenda to open it up to insights from Buddhist Mahayana thought, which he has consistently argued exercise a chastening and purifying effect on the Christian understanding of doctrine.” —Catherine Cornille