A healthy attitude towards traveling anywhere, no matter how far the distance, pushes the traveler out of her comfort zone. Her prevailing assumptions about the world, its people, and the environment are less applicable in a new space than in other familiar spaces. Otherwise identified as a sort of hermeneutical openness, travelers are called to exercise ethical responsibility in seeking to understand the new community and new surroundings.¹ The self’s preferences are decentered in order to understand the other in their own right and as they desire to be understood.

In November of 2018, I embarked on my first trip to Eastern Asia since I emigrated out of the Philippines; however, my destination this time would be Shanghai in China. The above notion rang especially true in my first exposure to Buddhist temples throughout Shanghai in numerous visits. As a Protestant Christian raised primarily in the Deep South of the United States, alongside Bibles and hallelujah corners in churches, my first-hand encounters of Buddhism in China were novel experiences. These temple visits ultimately revealed to me the potential of experiencing sacred spaces and sacred rituals of other religious traditions as transformative moments. I believe these moments have a capacity to help the observer experientially recognize and witness the beauty of people belonging to other religious traditions and in the religious tradition itself while also deconstructing what could be latent stereotypes or caricatures that are at best neutral and at worst discriminatory.

My aim here is to explore what possibilities lie in observing and witnessing—and if respectfully possible, even participating in—sacred rituals of religious traditions other than one’s own.

My first visit to a Buddhist temple, the Jing’an Temple, was my initial exposure to ceremonial practices like praying with incense, moving clockwise in the temple for prayer, and presenting various offerings at altars. Being present enabled me to learn about a handful of diverse practices in Buddhism. I continued to learn with subsequent visits to other Buddhist temples were highly informative in nature.

On my final day of travel in Shanghai, I arrived at the Jade Buddha Temple sometime during the afternoon, right around the same time that what appeared to me to be a service was beginning. Though I did not participate in the ceremony, the experience of observing people expressing devotion—even with myself as an outsider—was indescribable. Though I belonged to a different religious and cultural tradition altogether, I could not help but feel connected to this community as I witnessed them enter into a transformed, tangibly sacred space through their ritual practices. My own experiences of rituals transforming spaces from ordinary to sacred imbued with the divine through my own tradition served as a point of connection to relate, though not fully understand, this new sacred space opening up and taking place right in front of me. What took place over the length of at least over an hour felt like fleeting minutes.

The sense of connection and community in that place, a kind not previously attained through factual information alone, I argue, is a seedbed of potential for transformative interreligious engagement. As a disclaimer, in no way do I desire to present myself as an authoritative voice on the interface of Christianity and Buddhism. Rather, my aim here is to explore what possibilities lie in observing and witnessing—and if respectfully possible, even participating in—sacred rituals of religious traditions other than one’s own.

Professor of theology and hermeneutics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Marianne Moyaert integrates this practice of interreligious engagement in her pedagogy to teach interreligious literacy and hospitality through experience.² Witnessing or even participating in sacred rituals with adherents from other religious traditions humanizes the tradition. As Moyaert describes:

Religions never exist in the abstract; they are always lived in concrete contexts and intertwined with the lives of their adherents. In interreligious learning religion receives a human face. Involvement rather than distanciation is part of this learning process, and it is in this personal involvement that is most needed for building meaningful relations across communities.³

As I learned from my first visits to the temples, factual knowledge necessarily substantiates experiencing that which is sacred in other religious traditions, but the knowledge in no way can replace the experience. Being present to witness the sacred space, whether in a Buddhist temple or through different instances, is an opportunity to decenter the self while affirming through experience the “beauty and wisdom of another tradition.”⁴ Symbols and rituals invoked to inspire the sacred reveal a greater depth of understanding both about the religious tradition and the adherents expressing devotion. Finding commonality (though not uniformity) through the sacred is a powerful platform with potential for seeking and building solidarity and relationship across lines of religious traditions.

1. Marianne Moyaert, “On the Role of Interfaith Education,” Religious Education 113, no. 1 (2018): 52.
2. Moyaert, “On the Role of Interfaith Education,” 49.
3. Moyaert, “On the Role of Interfaith Education,” 51.
4. Moyaert, “On the Role of Interfaith Education,” 56.