The nine essays of this volume were originally presented at various Asian conferences of theologians or were requested by editors of Asian and Western journals. When brought together in one book, they have an even greater impact in light of East-West dialogue and for monastics in general—East or West. For, as Paul Knitter, general editor of the Series, comments in his foreword: Pieris confronts “two of the most urgent, complex and therefore promising questions that face any religion today . . . the question of the many poor and the question of the many religions.” Pieris’ vision is both creative and challenging.

The book is divided into three parts with three essays under each heading: I. Poverty and Liberation, II. Religion and Liberation, III. The Theology of Liberation in Asia. Each chapter begins with an excellent though brief historical background on the topic.

In chapter l, “Spirituality in a Liberative Perspective,” Pieris lays the groundwork not only for later chapters but also for the later development in his second book in this series: Love Meets Wisdom. That is, the irreconcilable antinomy between God and Mammon and the irrevocable covenant between “God and the poor.” (Cf. also ch. 9, p. 120f.) [Note: the italics are Pieris’ throughout this review.]

Chapter 2, “To be Poor as Jesus was Poor?”, takes up the theme of voluntary poverty vs. forced poverty, expanded in chapters 3 and 7 with strong refutations of Marxism. In fact, it is well to note that the author feels Marxism is bound to fall short in Asia because it fails to acknowledge an absolute future or “further shore” outside its own ideological categories—which immediately discounts the inherent religiousness of the Asian peoples.

Chapter 4 (p. 43) brings out definitions important to the understanding of Pieris’ themes. He sees “religious socialism” as being applicable to the early Apostolic community as much as to the Marxist axiom: “To each according to need; from each according to ability.” He goes on to develop this “religious socialism” in two Asian versions: the clannic religions whose belief system is “cosmic” (his word preference over “animistic”), where nature and society overlap and commune; and the monastic religions whose belief system has a “metacosmic” religiousness, pointing to a salvific “beyond” attainable within a person through “gnosis.” The metacosmic religions do not negate the cosmic reality but maintain a “nonaddiction to cosmic needs.”

The meaning of Jesus’ double Baptism—at the River Jordan and on the Cross of Calvary—also receives an Asian interpretation in which the religiousness of Asians poor by choice (monastics) and the (forced) poverty of the Asian people meet to form the ideal community of total sharing. That this would include non-Christians is to be expected—even hoped for (Cf. ch.9, p. 120f).

In ch. 8 (p.107) this religiousness or religious instinct develops a “revolutionary urge, a psychosocial impulse, to generate a new humanity. It is none other than the piercing thrust of evolution in its self-conscious state, the human version of nature’s thirst for the higher forms of life. The religious quest . . . is an irresistible drive to humanize what has merely been hominized.”

This book is a must for those working in Asia or with Asians or interested in East-West dialogue based on a truer understanding of the Asian peoples. (Pieris includes not only Sri Lanka and India but Southeast Asia, China and Japan in his considerations.) Western monastics too will find his words pertinent for a rediscovery of their own “monastic theology.” “If praxis is the first formulation of theory, then the monastic tradition conceals a theology that, if discovered, could redress the imbalance caused by academism” (p. 56). And, one might add, could give the right use of technology, which “becomes humanized only by its metacosmic orientation” (p. 108).