Asian Theology: Sacramentality and Asia/Asian America

The aim of this year's session was to explore how the CTSA's 2012 general theme on Sacrament/s and the Global Church could speak more concretely from or to various facets of Asian and/or Asian American Catholic communities.Joseph Cheah's presentation, "White Supremacy and the Sacramentality of Asian American Experience," focused on a few salient points which he has elaborated more completely in his recently published monograph entitled Race and Religion in American Buddhism (Oxford University).Cheah began inquiring about the religious roots of the typical Asian American experience commonly known as the "perpetual foreigner syndrome."He proposed a link with a late Victorian era's ambivalence about Asian religions in the west.For instance, although Buddhism was considered a repository of wisdom, it was at the same time denigrated.Such an attitude could be traced to an entrenched Western superiority complex exemplified even in such renowned scholars as Eugene Burnouf, considered one of the founding fathers of Buddhist Studies in the west.After translating many Buddhist sutras into French, Burnouf had the audacity to claim that he knew the Asian religious tradition better than the Asians themselves.He made the claim based on the Western, Protestant principle that knowledge of a primary text supersedes that of experience.The academic corollary was to style Asian Buddhism as having been corrupted by practitioners who made it accrue nontextual practices and beliefs.Hence, Cheah argues, Buddhism in the west was a carefully constructed entity based largely on a Western superiority complex.Cheah concludes that the sacramentality of Asian/Asian American experiences will remain obscured until Westerners welcome an Asian perspective.The main thrust of Kenan Osborne's presentation, "Euro-American Sacramental Theology-It's Need for Asian Help," was to argued its main point specifically through the concept and value of "interrelationality."This notion contrasts the dominant and traditional Western approach to philosophy and theology in general, as well as to sacramental theology in particular, centered on the notion of essence.The traditional approach is showcased by the Aristotelian, Thomistic language of "form" and "matter," valid performance, and valid reception dominating the Catechism of the Catholic Church's section on sacraments.Osborne juxtaposes the Catechism's language to a typically Asian way of viewing the world founded on the interrelatedness of everyone and everything, a relationality maintaining balance between yin and yang.Osborne argued that if this interrelationality is brought to bear on sacramental theology, a richer view of the sacraments and sacramentality itself emerges, one that is more firmly anchored on life experiences and not limited by the Western myopic focus on essence language and validity.Ultimately, an Asian sacramental approach based on interrelationality illumines the fact that life itself, human relationships, and even the whole cosmos are full of sacraments in that one can be profoundly touched by the divine through them.

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