By Schubert Ogden
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In Hartshorne's view, Mahayana Buddhism often seems close to Advaita Vedanta, i.e., "Sankara's view that the highest reality is not like a person loving other persons, but is entirely beyond plurality and relationships, being nontemporal, nonspatial, untroubled pure bliss" ("Theism in Asian and Western Thought": 401). Thus he naturally draws a comparison between a Chinese Buddhist thinker like Fa Tsang of the Hua Yen school and Western thinkers such as Spinoza and Bradley (d., e.g., "'Emptiness' and Fullness in Asiatic and Western Thought": 412 f.; "Theism in Asian and Western Thought": 404). In this, he seems to be guided by Tscherbatsky's view, according to which while "the Hinayana or Theravada doctrine was a radical pluralism, the Mahayana \[was\] an equally radical monism" ('''Emptiness','' etc.: 416); and he can speak of "the extreme pluralism of the Theravada and the extreme monism of the Hua-yen doctrine of universal interdependence" ("Theism," etc.: 408). |