with Hune Margulies
A lecture and discussion on the confluence of Martin Buber’s Dialogical Philosophy and some aspects of Zen and Ch’an Buddhism. I will read a brief abstract of my book “Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Systems: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination,” explain the basic insights of the work, and engage in a conversation and interaction with the audience.
My reading of Martin Buber takes me to this principal insight: God is not in heaven nor on earth. God is not above nor below. Not within and not without. Not in the soul or in the flesh. God is not an entity anywhere: God is the between of an I and a Thou. There is an in-depth conversation between philosophies of dialogue, particularly as espoused by Martin Buber, and those found in wisdom traditions of the East, principally in Buddhism and its Zen school,with a more specific focus in the Zen Pure Land teachings. Writings from Sufism, Hasidism, Hinduism and other wisdom traditions are discussed as well, as they all draw their essential teachings from what I refer to asprimordial moments of deep poetic insight. Primordial events occur when we enter into I-Thou relationships with one another and with nature. The principle of relationship establishes that God is not the wholly-other, nor is God the wholly-same: God is the wholly-between. The realm of the Between is the existential alternative to the realm of the transcendence and the realm of the immanence. In regard to the question of God, the insight I offer is an alternative to the prevailing doctrines of theisms and atheism: We affirm the principle that God is the between of I and Thou. We are in search of lost betweens, forgetting that the recovery of relationship is as near to us as our will to say Thou to the neighbor and the grace of saying it again.
About the Presenter:
Hume Margulies is the founder and director of the Martin Buber Institute for Dialogical Ecology (in New York, USA, and in Goa, India.) His primary work is on the confluence of Dialogical philosophy and some aspects of Zen. He is the author of “Will and Grace: Meditations on the Dialogical Philosophy of Martin Buber” (Sense-Brill 2020) and “Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom Teachings: The Recovery of the Spiritual Imagination” (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2022). I’ve also authored “Hasidic Utopianism” (Columbia U. Ph.D dissertation 2000.) He is the author of the chapter on “Martin Buber and Eastern Wisdom” in the 100 year anniversary “I-Thou Companion Book” edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr (Chicago University Press, 2025.) He has also authored “Martin Buber and Social Justice” published in the Journal “Religions,” as well as several articles on Buber and Buddhism in academic journals in Mumbai, Taiwan, China and Thailand. His website is: martinbuberinstitute.dialogicalecology.org.