[Buddha-l] Universalism?

[Richard Hayes]

I'm not sure how universalism got into this discussion. There has been some talk of pluralism, but I don't recall anyone advocating universalism recently on this forum. Despite that, it has come to be designated as dangerous and intrinsically immoral. That, of course, has been the position of the Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations for years.

Universalism, also known as apokatastasis, is the theological doctrine that all beings are destined to be saved. As a Christian doctrine, it has emerged at various times as the logical conclusion to be drawn from the premisses that God is fully benevolent and omnipotent and that ultimately no one anywhere will be able to resist God's unconditional love, and so everyone, including Satan and all the demons of hell, will ultimately be reconciled with God. Some have claimed that the doctrine was widely held in the patristic era, but this claim has been disputed. Perhaps it is best to leave it to experts in the literature of the early church fathers to settle that dispute. It is well out of my area of expertise.

Universalism made its presence felt in the 17th century in England and had a following in New England in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a Universalist denomination, which attracted mostly farmers and uneducated artisans. It was widely criticized by Unitarians (at the center of whose universe was Harvard University), by Presbyterians, and by Roman Catholics. The principal complaint against the doctrine has been that it undermines morality, because if the doctrine is true, then miscreants and non-believers (such as Jews and Buddhists) won't be condemned to eternal punishment for their stiff-necked folly. The reasoning seems to be that if evil-doers are not punished, then they'll have no reason not to do evil, and if wrong-thinkers are not punished, they'll never have any reason to learn to think aright. In response to this criticism, some Universalists held the view that some people would be punished in the afterlife for a period of time commensurate with the gravity of their evil deeds and folly, and then would be fully reconciled with God. Others stuck to the view that with the second coming of Christ, all sinners would immediately be reconciled with God without an intervening period of punishment. As everyone knows, in the 1960s the Unitarians and Universalists joined together to form a single denomination, the Unitarian-Universalists. That made it easier for trinitarian Christians, who hated Unitarians, and Presbyterians, who feared that all hell would break loose if reprobates were not guaranteed an eternity of damnation, to focus all their attention on a single dangerously evil target and to blame all the world's problems on Harvard University and to become feverishly enthusiastic about Michele Bachmann as a presidential candidate.

Not only members of the Universalist denomination were universalists, of course. One finds some Quakers, some Congregationalists, some Pentecostals and some evangelicals who also subscribe to doctrine of apokatastasis. (In the interest of full disclosure, I come from a long line of apokatastatic Congregationalist ministers, so be warned that my genetic and cultural heritage might undermine your morality if you agree with anything I say.)

Given that universalism is a doctrine having to do with the problematic of being alienated from God and is an attempt to respond to some of the criticisms leveled by Hume and others against the notion that an omnipotent and omniscient God whose essence is love would never allow anyone to face eternal damnation, I am not sure how the doctrine would have to be modified to suit an essentially atheistic religion such as Buddhism. What on earth would a Buddhist universalist look like? Any ideas? 

I guess perhaps the Lankāvatāra Sūtra could be seen as advocating something akin to universalism. In that text we learn of icchantikas, beings so depraved that they cannot even form the aspiration to follow the dharma, and we also learn that for every icchantika there is an icchantika-bodhisattva, who will never give up in her efforts to bring the icchantika back to his senses. And some passages in the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka might offer a Buddhist version of some kind of inevitable reconciliation of all sentient beings with the True Dharma. After all, all those beings who will surely to to hell according to the Lotus Sutra will stay in hell only for a few incalculable aeons, but eventually Śākyamuni will win them all over to the True Dharma. Perhaps that is what Buddhist apokatastasis might look like. At least one fellow who contributes regularly to the Unitarian-Universalist Buddhist Fellowship discussion group is a Nichiren Buddhist who reads the Lotus Sutra in this way.

Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM