Korean Buddhist Philosophy - The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy

 Korean Buddhist Philosophy

Jin Y. Park

The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy

Edited by William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield

Print Publication Date: May 2011 Subject: Philosophy, Non-Western Philosophy Online Publication Date: Sep 2011 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328998.003.0032

Abstract and Keywords

This article provides an introduction to Korean Buddhist philosophy. Korean Buddhism is a part of the East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition. During its fifteen-hundred-year history, which began in the fourth century and continues to today, Korean Buddhism has developed in a close relationship with Chinese Buddhism and at the same time generated its own unique views. Buddhism, together with Confucianism, constitutes one of the two veins of philosophical traditions in Korea. This article discusses five Buddhist thinkers: Ŭisang (625–702), WOnhyo (617–686), Pojo Chinul (1158–1210), T'oe'ong SOngchOl (1912–1993), and POpsOng (1913–), with respect to the three themes of HwaOm (Ch. Huayan) Buddhism, SOn (Ch. Chan; Jap. Zen) Buddhism, and Buddhist ethics.

Keywords: Ŭisang, WOnhyo, Pojo Chinul, T'oe'ong SOngchOl, POpsOng, Buddhist ethics, Buddhism, HwaOm

KOREAN Buddhism is a part of the East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition. During its fifteen-hundred-year history, which began in the fourth century and continues to today, Korean Buddhism has developed in a close relationship with Chinese Buddhism and at the same time generated its own unique views. Buddhism, together with Confucianism, constitutes one of the two veins of philosophical traditions in Korea. Five Buddhist thinkers are discussed in this essay: Ŭisang (625–702), WOnhyo (617–686), Pojo Chinul (1158–1210), T'oe'ong SOngch'Ol (1912–1993), and Pópsóng (1913–), with respect to the three themes of HwaOm (Ch. Huayan) Buddhism, SOn (Ch. Chan; Jap. Zen) Buddhism, and Buddhist ethics.

Ŭisang is credited as the founder of the HwaOm school. From 661 to 668, Ŭisang studied in Tang China with Zhiyan (602–668), the designated second patriarch of Chinese Huayan Buddhism. During this time, Ŭisang also became a colleague of Fazang (643–712), who later became the third patriarch of the tradition. Ŭisang's thought on HwaOm Buddhism is well articulated in a short piece titled The Diagram of the Reality Realm of the One Vehicle of Hwaöm Buddhism (HwaOm ilsüng pOpkye to), which has had a significant impact on Korean HwaOm thought up to today.

WOnhyo, Ŭisang's contemporary, is one of the most influential Buddhist thinkers in Korean Buddhism. WOnhyo joined a monastery during his teens. Without specific teachers to guide him, he read widely and wrote

commentaries on major Mahāyāna texts, making a significant contribution to the commentarial tradition in East Asian Buddhism. WOnhyo made two attempts to travel to China, neither of which was completed. A life-changing experience during his second unsuccessful journey to China is cited frequently as the moment of his awakening to the truth that the mind is the source of one's understanding of the external world. (p. 374) Wónhyo left behind him a voluminous corpus, the themes of which include HwaOm Buddhist thought, Mind-Only (Cittamātra/Yogācāra) philosophy, the Lotus Teaching, and bodhisattva precepts, among others.

Pojo Chinul was a major figure in establishing the SOn Buddhist tradition in twelfth-century Korea and is considered one of the most important figures in Korean SOn Buddhism. Chinul joined a monastery at the age of eight (1165). Like Wónhyo, Chinul mainly trained himself without specific mentors until the age of twenty-five (1182), when he passed the governmental examination for monks. Instead of taking a governmental post, Chinul continued his own practice, traveling to different monasteries, and finally settled down at the Songgwang monastery in 1200, where he trained disciples, gave dharma talks, and wrote on Buddhism until his death. Chinul's Buddhism developed around the core SOn doctrine that the mind is the Buddha. In later days, Chinul adopted Kanhwa SOn and promoted it as the most effective way to attain awakening. The Kanhwa SOn tradition has remained the most prominent SOn tradition in Korea since Chinul's time, demonstrating his lasting impact on Korean Buddhism.

T'oe'ong SOngh'Ol is one of the most important figures in the second half of the twentieth century in Korean Buddhism; he represents a SOn absolutist and subitist position. POpsOng might not be as well recognized as the other three thinkers introduced here; however, POpsOng's Buddhist thought represents engaged Buddhism in contemporary Korea, one of the important and emerging fields in Buddhist philosophy today. We will discuss POpsOng's engaged Buddhism together with WOnhyo's discussion of bodhisattva precepts. This will offer a response to the question of Buddhism's position in social philosophy and ethical theories, as has been raised in recent years among western Buddhist thinkers.

The Universal and the Particular in the Hwaöm Thought of Ŭisang

Ŭisang discusses the ultimate vision of HwaOm Buddhism in his “Verse on the Dharma Nature” (POpsOng ke), which is included in the Diagram of the Reality Realm of the One Vehicle of Hwaöm Buddhism (HwaOm ilsuing pópkye to). The verse consists of 210 Chinese characters deployed in a diagram that demonstrates the interpenetration of all beings in the phenomenal world, the core theme of HwaOm Buddhism. In the HwaOm Buddhist tradition, the original nature of a being, frequently referred to as “the dharma nature,” is characterized by its nonsubstantiality. The basic Buddhist doctrine postulates the identity of a being as conditional. A being in Buddhism is not an owner of independent and permanent substance but exists in the milieu of conditioned causality. Buddhism identifies its causal theory as dependent-arising. The traditional definition of the concept appears in early (p. 375) Buddhist texts as follows: “Because this happens, that happens; because this ceases, that ceases.” A being's identity is possible only as a differential notion in Buddhism, which challenges the identity principle in substantialist philosophy.

As one of the major East Asian Buddhist schools, HwaOm Buddhism emphasizes the reality of the conditioned

causality at the entire level of the phenomenal world and discusses it especially through the relationship between

the noumenal and the phenomenal. The ultimate teaching of the school is expressed frequently through the symbol of the jewel net of Indra. Imagine the universe as a net that stretches infinitely. Further envision that a glittering jewel sits in each knot of the net. The jewel itself is transparent and has no identity of its own. The identity of each jewel is constantly constructed through what it reflects. In the world of Hwaöm Buddhism, each entity in the cosmos is like a jewel in the net. All beings exist within the net of dependent-arising. In this interrelated world, the identity of the subject is not defined by the independent and permanent essence of the subject but already includes its other. Ŭisang defines a being's identity in this nature as interfusion and nondual. The nature of what is reflected in each jewel cannot be analyzed systematically because of its quantitative immensity and its fluctuating quality. In the “Verse,” Ŭisang describes the logic of Indra's net as follows: “Within the one is encompassed the

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all, and within the many is the one. / The one is the all and the many are the one.” The idea of mutual penetration reaches culmination in the signature Hwaöm statement, as Ŭisang states: “In one particle of dust is contained the ten directions [the entire world]. / All other particles of dust are the same” (HPC 2.1a). In the logic of Hwaöm Buddhism, any being, however infinitesimal it might be, is identified with the entirety of the world. Since all beings already exist within the net of conditioned causality, the one and the many are not separate. Ŭisang explains this relationship between the one and the many by using the example of the number “one” and the number “ten”:

In the teaching of the great dependent-arising, if there is no “one,” the “many” cannot be established. [Practitioners] should be well aware of this nature. What is called the “one” is not the “one” by its self-nature. [By the same token], what is known as the “ten” is not the “ten” by its self-nature; the “ten” comes to be known as the “ten” by its relation to others [or by dependent-arising]. All of the beings produced out of dependent-arising do not have definite marks or a definite nature. Since there is no self-nature, beings do not exist independently, which suggests that birth actually means no-birth. No-birth means no need to abide, and no abiding means the middle path. (HPC 2.6b)

There exists no eternal, unchanging one-ness or ten-ness that grounds the nature of either the one or the ten. Both the “one” and the “ten” (and in that sense, any being (p. 376) in the world) earn their identities through the ever-changing causal transformation.2 The logic of conditioned causality, however, does not negate the existence of individual beings on the phenomenal level: that is, the one and the ten are different. Despite the individuality that is recognized on the phenomenal level, Hwaöm thought also consistently emphasizes the noumenal aspect of the phenomenally separated existence: hence, the one is the ten. Two issues deserve our attention here: first, the paradigm of one particle-qua-the world does not indicate that a specific one is the entire world all the time on every occasion. The one is the ten when we focus on the “one” at a given moment in a given situation, and the same can be said about any other entity in the world, which is represented in Ŭisang's “Verse” as “a particle of dust.” When the notion of the one in “the one is the all” is interpreted as referring to exclusively a specific one— such as the emperor (the one) as opposed to the people (the all)—the Hwaöm vision risks supporting a totalitarian vision. Second, the phenomenal (the one) and the noumenal (the all) are nondual, and so is the particular and the universal. The phenomenal and the noumenal are hermeneutically constructed concepts, not ontologically separated realities. These two issues should be the ground to respond to the criticism that Hwaöm Buddhism is a form of a philosophy of idealism.

Ŭisang further elaborates the identity of the “one” and the “all” by using the concept of the six marks. The six marks consist of three pairs: universality/particularity (K. ch'ongsang/pyólsang), sameness/difference (K. tongsang/yisang), and integrity/fragmentation (K. sóngsang/koesang). As in the case of the one and the ten, these seeming binary opposites coexist in the identity of an entity. The first in the pairs—universality, the sameness, and

integrity—characterize the totality of the world as understood from the noumenal level. The second sets of each pair—particularity, difference, and fragmentation—characterize the individual entities at the phenomenal level like each jewel in Indra's net. The six marks making up the three pairs demonstrate the contradictory identity through which Hwaöm Buddhism understands an entity. An individual entity is characterized by the marks of particularity, difference, and fragmentation, whereas the nature of its individual identity is constructed through its relationship with others, and its identity is inseparable from the marks of universality, sameness, and integrity.

In Chinese Huayan Buddhism, the mutual interpenetration of the noumenal and the phenomenal is explained through a theory known as the fourfold worldview. The fourfold worldview consists of (1) the world of the phenomenon (C. shifajie; (p. 377) K. sabópkye), (2) the world of the noumenon (C. lifajie; K. yibópkye), (3) the world of the unobstructed interpenetration of the noumenon and the phenomenon (C. lishi wuai fajie: K. yisa muae pópkye), and (4) the world of the unobstructed interpenetration among phenomena (C. shishi wuai fajie; K. sasa muae pópkye). The first of the Huayan fourfold worldview represents the world that consists of individual existences; it is the world of the many, where diversity exists seemingly without a coherent system. The second stage of the fourfold worldview postulates a world that is understood from the perspective of the principle. However diverse existence in the phenomenal world might be, no being exists outside of conditioned causality, which is the structure of the world from the Buddhist perspective. Hence, the third layer of the fourfold worldview declares that there is no conflict between the world of diversity and the world of one principle. Considering the phenomenal diversity in light of the first three stages, Huayan envisions at its fourth level that all entities in the world are mutually influential and interconnected without conflicts.

Ŭisang explains the relationship between the noumenon (the universal) and the phenomenon (the particular) as follows: there is a mutual identity of the noumena (the universal) and the phenomena (the particular); there is a mutual identity of the noumenon and the noumenon, and there is a mutual identity of the phenomenon and the

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phenomenon (HPC 2.6a). This is the world in which the universal and the particular, and the particular and the particular, are mutually interpenetrating due to their dependently arising nature. Ŭisang identifies the nature of things arising in the law of the dependent-arising as the “middle path.” The Buddhist middle path does not indicate the meridian point of the two participating elements. Instead, it indicates that “all polarities are interfused” (HPC 2.5b). The one and the many, the noumenon and the phenomenon, the universal and the particular are interfused in the sense that neither has self-nature and that both exist in the midst of conditioned causal movements.

Language and Subjectivity in Chinul's Sŏn Buddhism

Zen Buddhism shares with Hwaöm Buddhism the idea of the mutual interfusion of beings but develops its own paradigm that addresses the main concerns of the school. The basic premise of the Zen school claims that the sentient being is the Buddha. The premise is an oxymoron: if the sentient being is the Buddha, why are (p. 378) sentient beings still not enlightened? If the sentient being is the Buddha, what is the meaning of enlightenment? Zen Buddhism challenges the traditional logic of philosophy by answering these questions with the following statement: the sentient being is the Buddha, and yet the sentient being is the sentient being.

In approaching the paradoxical nature of the existential reality of a being, Pojo Chinul underlines the importance of understanding the nature of one's mind. In his Encouragement to Practice: The Compact of the Samādhi and

Prajñā Community (Kwönsu chönghye kyölsa mun 1190), Chinul states, “When one is deluded about the mind and gives rise to endless defilements, such a person is a sentient being. When one is awakened to the mind and gives rise to endless marvelous functions, such a person is the Buddha. Delusion and awakening are two different states, but both are caused by the mind. If one tries to find the Buddha away from this mind, one will never find him” (HPC 4.698a). In this passage, one notices that the commonly held binary opposites, for example delusion and awakening, or the sentient being and the Buddha, are acknowledged but at the same time negated by attributing the ground of the existence of such dualism to the mind of a being. For Chinul, delusion arises not through a certain quality of an entity external or internal to the subject but through the subject's failure to see the nonsubstantial nature of one's ontological reality. Here one notes the fundamental difference of the focus between HwaOm and SOn Buddhism. Whereas Ŭisang's HwaOm Buddhism primarily concerns itself with the phenomenal world and understands each being within that structure, Chinul's SOn Buddhism gives priority to an individual's awakening to his own existential and ontological reality.

One way to interpret Chinul's SOn Buddhism is to understand it as an attempt to address the problem of subjectivity in the process of the individual's awareness of ontological reality, and the problem of subjectivity is closely linked to the subject's relation to language. As is well known, SOn Buddhism has been keen to the function of language in the subject's mode of thinking. However, Chinul points out that the emphasis on the limits of language and thought is not a SOn-specific feature but is found in most Buddhist schools. In explaining the meaning of SOn Buddhism, Chinul is especially aware of Fazang's fivefold taxonomy, in which Fazang placed Chan Buddhism (which he calls the Sudden school) at the fourth level, one step below the Huayan school. Fazang also characterized the teaching of the Sudden school as simply focusing on forgetting language and thoughts in an effort to create the undisturbed state of the mind. Responding to such characterizations of Chan Buddhism by Fazang, Chinul explains in his Treatise on Resolving Doubts about Huatou Meditation (Kanhwa kyOrüi ron) that all five stages of Buddhism in Fazang's fivefold doctrinal classification in their own way deal with the problem of language and of the thinking process. Chinul repeatedly emphasizes that the idea of cutting off language does not belong exclusively to the SOn school, nor is the nature of the achieved goal through SOn practice different from that described by other Buddhist schools, especially by HwaOm Buddhism. If we follow Chinul's logic here, we come to a rather interesting point. That is, the SOn school does not offer any doctrinal renovation of Buddhism; Chinul might even seem to say that the main concern of (p. 379) SOn Buddhism is not Buddhist doctrine itself, since Buddhist doctrines are all already spelled out by existing Buddhist schools. At the same time, the Buddhist teaching SOn represents is not and cannot be different from the teachings expounded by other schools. Chinul's ready admission of the identity between SOn Buddhism and other Buddhist schools at the ultimate level leads one to ask the question: if there is no difference between the two, what is the identity of SOn Buddhism? For Chinul, SOn teachings, especially SOn hwadu meditation, facilitate a state through which the subject makes a radical change in his or her mode of thinking; the doctrinal schools offer a description of the Buddhist worldview and the SOn school teaches how to activate in the mind of the practitioner what has been stated in the doctrinal schools.

Chinul does not consider the linguistic rendering as found in Buddhist scriptures deficient as it is. However, Chinul points out that the linguistically rendered reality of the objective world is not always reflected in the existential reality of the subject. What, then, are the causes of the gap between the linguistically rendered reality and the reality of the subject? In this context, Chinul cites Chinese Chan Master Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163) to point out the structural problem in one's thinking process as a major cause that is responsible for such a gap: “The influence of established thought being so strong, the mind in search of enlightenment itself becomes a barrier and thus the correct knowledge of one's mind has rarely obtained a chance to manifest itself. However, this barrier

does not come from outside nor is it something that should be regarded as an exception” (HPC 4.732c). The problems of the situation at this point become internalized and subjectivized.

At the beginning of the Treatise, Chinul juxtaposes SOn with HwaOm, equating them in terms of their vision of the ultimate reality and at the same time distinguishing them in terms of how to approach this reality. For Chinul, the investigation of one's mind is critical in this sense. The mind is allegedly the locus in which the gap between the existential reality of the subject and the hermeneutical reality represented in linguistic rendering of Buddhist teaching takes place. Hence, Chinul repeatedly emphasizes that “the mind is the Buddha,” and SOn practice toward enlightenment, for Chinul, is to be awakened to the very nature of one's mind. In the later stage of his life, Chinul was firm in proposing that hwadu meditation can facilitate the environment in which the practitioner can attain this goal, and the capacity of hwadu in achieving this goal is closely related to the way in which language functions in hwadu meditation.

Chinul argues that language in Buddhist teachings other than SOn hwadu meditation functions simply as a tool to impart meaning. The hwadu meditation employs language not to communicate meaning but to facilitate an environment in which the subject makes a transition from being a mere receptor of the described meaning to an active participator in the reality described in language—that is, hwadu as it is does not present truth, nor does it offer a way to correct the problem that individuals might have. Chinul writes, “The moment one tends toward the slightest idea that the hwadu must be the presentation of the ultimate truth or that it enables one to treat one's defects, one is already under the power of the limitations (p. 380) set by linguistic expression” (HPC 4.733b). The hwadu is like a catalyst: as it is, it is not pertinent to what is happening to the subject; it simply facilitates a transformation in the subject without itself being involved or changed by the transformation. The transforming function of the hwadu is for Chinul what distinguishes SOn Buddhism from all other Buddhist schools.

In explaining the functioning of hwadu language, Chinul employs the distinction between the “live word” (K. hwalgu) and the “dead word” (K. sagu) and “the involvement with the word” (K. ch'amgu) and “involvement with meaning” (K. ch'amüi), borrowing the concepts from Dahui. These distinctions are characterized by the language's relation to the subject rather than the specific nature of linguistic expressions themselves. Chinul criticizes passages like “In this endless world, between me and others, there is no gap even as infinitesimal as the thinness of a hair” (HPC 4.733a) as examples of dead words because “they create in the practitioner's mind barriers derived from understanding” (HPC 4.733a). As opposed to dead words, live words generate “no taste”; they create a dead-end situation to the practitioner in which the practitioner loses all of the resources to exercise his or her thinking process.

When SOn Buddhists criticize language and theorizing, it is because they are the very tools for the subject to carry out the process of domesticating the external world and tailoring it according to the mode of thinking most familiar to the subject. The hwadu meditation, especially the “live word” and the “direct involvement with word,” are tools that put a break in the familiar world created by the subject. Dead words subjugate themselves to a sign-system and habituated mode of thinking. As opposed to dead words, live words become the mediator among the practitioner, language, and the world by disrupting the preexisting order and meaning structure of these three elements established in the subject's mind. The promise of hwadu meditation, for Chinul, is that this experience by the subject of the unfamiliar territory will lead the subject to the realization of her ontological reality, which from the Buddhist perspective is existence in the milieu of the conditionally arising process.

Nondualism and Mahāyāna Buddhist Ethics

Despite the differences in their emphasis, both Ŭisang's HwaOm Buddhism and Chinul's SOn Buddhism find their basis in the fundamental Buddhist vision of nondualism. In Ŭisang's HwaOm Buddhist thought, the particular and the universal, the phenomena and the noumena, are understood as being in a state of interpenetration; in Chinul's SOn Buddhism, the mind of the subject is the source of all delusions, and delusion in this context signifies understanding a phenomenon—be it an individual being, an event, or any abstract concept—as an independent occurrence instead of the result of a multilayered, causal process. If things are by nature void of independent essence and polar opposites are to be understood according to their mutual penetration, how does one construct an ethical system from such a nondual (p. 381) philosophy? In Ŭisang's HwaOm vision of the mutual interpenetration of entities, both good and bad, right and wrong, purity and impurity are understood as being empty. In this nondual world, as Ŭisang states, “saiisāra and nirvāṇa are always harmonized together” (HPC 2.1a). The same applies to Chinul's SOn Buddhist world, as he says, “there being no purity or impurity, there is no right or wrong” (HPC 4.710c). Where do ethics stand in this antinomian world of HwaOm and SOn Buddhism? Given that Buddhism involves not only philosophical but also religious tradition, and that one of the fundamental functions of the latter is to provide practitioners with guidelines to follow in the process of Buddhist practice, the issue of Buddhism's position in ethical and moral systems makes us pause and wonder what kind of ethical paradigm it might offer.

The Mahāyāna Buddhist approach to ethics is well grounded in the fundamental Mahāyāna Buddhist position on the reality of existence. A being does not have an unchanging essence, nor do moral and ethical categories. The fact that a being exists only in the milieu of conditionally arising causal processes does not negate the individual's existence on the phenomenal level, and the same applies to moral and ethical categories. In other words, Mahāyāna Buddhism does not negate the necessity of moral values or ethical categories; however, it also underlines that precepts, moral rules, and ethical definitions exist and are acknowledged always in the context of their provisional nature. WOnhyo makes clear the double-edgedness of the Mahāyāna Buddhist position toward ethics in his discussion of bodhisattva precepts. The precepts by definition indicate rules that Buddhist practitioners are obliged to observe. When one observes a rule, what is the ground for this observation? Are moral rules and ethical categories given by the absolute power and thus to be respected in all circumstances, or are they abided by because of the beneficial consequences they promise to produce?

WOnhyo discusses bodhisattva precepts focusing on the provisional nature of the value category. Precepts are rules that Buddhist practitioners are required to abide by. However, even precepts cannot escape the dependently arising nature of the world, which means that no precepts, and in that sense, no moral or ethical categories, are to be accepted as having absolute independent values of their own. In Essentials of Observation and Violation of Bodhisattva Precepts (Posal kyebon chibOm yogi), Wónhyo discusses the three categories of observing and transgressing the foundations of bodhisattva precepts. First, he discusses major and minor offenses; second, he shows the profound and shallow understandings of observing and transgressing precepts; and third, he presents the ultimate way of observing and transgressing precepts. In the first two sections, WOnhyo offers basic concepts of precepts and how the same precepts can be interpreted differently based on the subject's intention involved in a certain action. In these two sections, as in the case of most moral teachings, Wónhyo promotes the importance of respecting the existing rules. In the third section, titled “Ultimate Observation and Violation of Precepts,” Wónhyo changes the direction of his discussion and revisits the very concepts of precepts and of observing and

violating them. The result is to underline the fundamentally provisional nature of moral rules and ethical categories. Wónhyo writes:

(p. 382) That precepts exist only based on multilevel conditional causes [and thus are empty] does not negate their existence in reality. Violating precepts is also like this; so is personal identity. In dealing with precepts, if one sees only their nonexistent aspect and says that they do not exist, such a person might not violate precepts but will forever lose them, because s/he denies their existence. Also, if someone relies on the idea that precepts do exist and thinks only on the existent side of precepts, even though s/he might be able to observe the precepts, observation in this case is the same as violation, because such a person negates the ultimate reality of precepts [which is emptiness]. (HPC 1.585a, emphasis mine)

When existence is understood through a differential notion instead of being anchored on substantial essence and the particular and the universal are intersubsuming, any attempt to create a closed value system faces a problem of appropriation. Appropriation requires an appropriator, and this logic cannot but question the validity of the created system. As Wónhyo states, the ambiguity of categorized values does not completely negate the necessity of a value system itself. Instead, the awareness of the multilayered contexts out of which a value system is constructed demands a constant readjustment of the existing system. Wónhyo's thought on bodhisattva precepts in its outlook proposes an ethical theory that challenges normative forms of ethics. It was, however, not until recent years that Korean Buddhist traditions began to seriously consider the position of Buddhism as an ethical theory. In contemporary Korean Buddhism, the issue of individual practice and awakening on the one hand and the social engagement and ethical dimension of Buddhism on the other has generated a polemic that makes the issue of Buddhist ethics more visible. Two Buddhist monk-thinkers took opposite positions: T'oe'ong Söngch'öl defined Buddhism as fundamentally based on the perfection of individual cultivation, whereas Pöpsöng claimed that individual cultivation cannot be achieved without being accompanied by social engagement. Söngch'ol's Buddhism kindled a debate known as the Sudden-Gradual debate, and Pöpsöng's Buddhism offers a philosophical paradigm for a form of engaged Buddhism known as Minjung Buddhism (Buddhism for the masses).

The idea of Buddhism for the masses first appeared in Korean Buddhism at the beginning of the twentieth century, when reform-minded Buddhist intellectuals proposed changing Buddhism to be more relevant to the life of the general public, especially those marginalized in society. As a movement, however, Minjung Buddhism began together with prodemocratic and antigovernmental movements in Korean society during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical of the subjectivist and solipsistic attitudes that appear in some forms of Buddhist practice, Minjung Buddhists emphasize the social dimension of Buddhist philosophy and contend that Buddhist liberation includes liberation from all forms of suppression. In doing so, Minjung Buddhists make appeals to the bodhisattva ideal and to compassion.

The Sudden-Gradual debate was ignited by Söngch'öl along with the publication of his book, The Correct Path of the Sŏn School (Sönmun chöngno 1981), in which he criticizes the “sudden enlightenment with gradual cultivation” as a (p. 383) heretical teaching in the Sön school and defines “sudden enlightenment with sudden cultivation” as the authentic form of the Sön practice. The idea of sudden enlightenment is based on the fundamental Sön claim that sentient beings are already Buddha the way they are. On the surface, Minjung Buddhism and the Sudden-Gradual debate fall into two exclusively different categories of Buddhist thought: the former focuses on the social aspects of Buddhist philosophy, whereas the latter centers on the nature of individual cultivation. At a deep level, they cannot but reflect each other because, without a clear understanding of the nature

of individual cultivation and awakening as explored in the Sudden-Gradual debate, Buddhist philosophy cannot maintain itself. However, if the subjective world of an individual cannot be linked to the public and objective domain of the social ethical realm, as Minjung Buddhism emphasizes, such a cultivation or awakening contradicts the basic Buddhist doctrines of dependent-arising and no-self. The Sudden-Gradual debate and Minjung Buddhism, then, represent the perennial core issues of Buddhism: that is, how to relate wisdom (realization of one's ontological reality) and compassion (sharing life with others).

Questions have been raised about whether attainment of wisdom (enlightenment) will naturally facilitate compassionate actions for others. Pópsóng's discussion of sudden and gradual aptly applies to this issue. Instead of understanding sudden and gradual as a process from the former to the latter within the subject, Pópsóng relates them to the subject's realization and the social and historical manifestation of that realization, that is, noumenal wisdom and its exercise through compassion in the phenomenal world. In doing so, he incorporates HwaOm Buddhist thought into his emphasis on the social and ethical dimensions of Buddhist enlightenment. Pópsóng was not the first Korean Buddhist to resort to HwaOm Buddhism to underscore the relevance of SOn Buddhism to the social and ethical realities of the practitioner's life. From Chinul in the twelfth century to S'Ongch'Ol in the twentieth century, Korean SOn masters have frequently resorted to HwaOm Buddhist philosophy in an effort to clarify the relationship between the subject and the object in the SOn Buddhist worldview and between an individual's ontological awakening (wisdom) and its social dimension (compassion) in SOn practice.

Reminiscent of the HwaOm vision of the interpenetration of the phenomena and the noumena, Pópsóng claims that the diversities characterizing the phenomenal world require endless engagement in bodhisattva activities in daily life, which Pópsóng identifies as “history.” History of Buddhism, as expressed through his term “historicization,” is contrasted with a metaphysical or transcendental understanding of Buddhism. SOn Buddhist enlightenment, from POpsOng's perspective, cannot be related solely to individual spiritual awakening, nor can it be an asocial event, as has been argued previously. Pópsóng contends that the hwadu of SOn Buddhism are not “dead words intuiting the inner spiritual mysticism. Hwadu meditation is epistemological activity that constantly negates the reification of ideas and self-absolutization of any entity; it is historical movement that actively accepts and

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refreshes the (p. 384) nature of dependent co-arising in one's existence.” Chinul prioritized hwadu meditation in SOn practice, emphasizing the capacity of hwadu to facilitate a fundamental change in one's mode of thinking. POpsOng took this possibility of SOn Buddhism further toward the social dimension and linked the change in an individual as a path toward a social change. POpsOng thus states, “Buddhist enlightenment is not a return to absolute reality; instead, it is a sudden liberation of all the essentialist views regarding one's consciousness and existence, self and the world.” 5 This awakening or liberation of self-closure of an individual needs to take place constantly and continuously as life unfolds. This is a vision of the world in which human desire for a teleological completion needs to give way to the awakening to the openness of the world and of beings.

WOnhyo's bodhisattva precepts suggest an ethical theory that acknowledges rules but only to the degree that the moral rules and ethical categories are understood as provisional and do not have an essence of their own; POpsOng's engaged Buddhism explains the social dimension of SOn and HwaOm Buddhism, emphasizing the indissoluble nature of individual and society, or self and others in the Buddhist world. In both cases, the conventional rule-bounded moral theories are accepted only as a preliminary stage of social theory; in its place, the Mahāyāna Buddhism of Wónhyo and POpsOng proposes a context-bound ethical theory that requires a constant reawakening to one's existential and social reality as one lives in the milieu of the ever-changing causal processes of the Buddhist world.

Bibliography and Suggested Reading

BUSWELL, ROBERT E., JR. (trans.). (1983) The Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press.

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——— (trans.). (2007) Cultivating Original Enlightenment: Wónhyo's Exposition of the Vajrasamadhi-Sūtra (Kümgang Sammaegyóng Non). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

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JORGENSEN, JOHN. (2010) “Minjung Buddhism: A Buddhist Critique of the Status Quo-its History, Philosophy, and Critique.” In Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism, edited by Jin Y. Park. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 275–313.

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ODIN, STEVEN. (1982) Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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(p. 385) PARK, JIN Y. (2005) “Zen Language in Our Time: The Case of Pojo Chinul's Huatou Meditation.” Philosophy East and West 55/1, 80–98.

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——— . (2008) Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Buddhist-Postmodern Ethics. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

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YUN, WONCHEOL. (2010) “Zen Master T'oe'ong Söngch'öl's Doctrine of Zen Enlightenment and Practice.” In Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism, edited by Jin Y. Park. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 199–226. (p. 386)

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Notes:

(1) Hwaöm ilsüng pöpkye to (Diagram of the Reality Realm of the One Vehicle of Hwaöm Buddhism), Han'guk Pulgyo chönsö (Collected Works of Korean Buddhism, hereafter HPC), vol. 2, pp. 1–8, p. 2.1a. For a complete English translation of this work, see Odin 1982. Throughout this essay, English translations from Classical Chinese and Korean are mine.

(2) Fazang, the alleged Third Patriarch of Chinese Huayan Buddhism, explains the relationship of the one and the ten by employing the concepts of “the same body” (C. tongti; K. tongch'e) and “the different body” (C. yiti; K. yich'e). The one and the ten in the numerals one through ten are different entities (bodies) because the one is not the ten and the ten is not the one. However, they are the same body in the sense that the one cannot obtain its meaning without the rest of the number in the series of one through ten; the same is the case with the number ten. That the one is the same body and at the same time a different body with the number ten can be further explained through the Buddhist concept of identity known as the two levels of truth.

(3) The terms “nounema” and “phenomena” are translations of the Chinese character li (K. yi) and shi (K. sa), respectively. These terms are also translated here as the principle and the particular. Noumena and phenomena in this case are not related to Kantian philosophy or phenomenology in Continental philosophy, even though Huayan Buddhism can be understood as Buddhist phenomenology as I have discussed elsewhere. See Park 2008, especially ch. 8 and 9.

(4) Pópsóng, “Minjung Pulgyo undong ǔi silch'önjök ipchang” (The Practical Standpoint of the Minjung Buddhist Movement), in Chonggyo yön'gu (Religious Studies) 6 (1990): 223–228, p. 223.

(5) Pöpsöng, “Kkadarüm üi ilsangsöng kwa hyöngmyöngsöng” (Commonality and Revolutionality of Enlightenment.” Ch'angjak kwa pip'yöng 82 (Winter 1993): 329–340.

Jin Y. Park

Jin Y. Park is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University. Park's research focuses on Zen and Huayan Buddhism, Buddhist-postmodern comparative philosophy, Buddhist encounters with modernity in Korea, and Buddhist ethics. Her publications include Buddhisms and Deconstructions (2006), Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Buddhist-Postmodern Ethics (2008), and Makers of Modern Korean Buddhism (2010).

Oxford Handbooks Online

Nishida Kitarō: Self, World, and the Nothingness Underlying Distinctions - The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy

 Nishida Kitarō: Self, World, and the Nothingness Underlying Distinctions

John C. Maraldo

The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy

Edited by William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield

Print Publication Date: May 2011 Subject: Philosophy, Non-Western Philosophy Online Publication Date: Sep 2011 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328998.003.0031

Abstract and Keywords

This article provides an introduction to the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō. Nishida, widely recognized as the most important Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century and the founder of the Kyoto School, authored some twenty volumes of essays influenced by Buddhist thought and deeply informed by the Anglo-European philosophy that was just beginning to be introduced to his country. Nishida began his work with the notion of “pure experience,” the moment prior to any distinction between experiencing self and experienced object, as it founds the systematic development of our thinking about the world. After lengthy diversions into German and French dialectical thinking and Neo-Kantian philosophy to explain the nature of self-awareness, he returned to early Greek philosophy and Buddhist thinking and developed a novel alternative to the ways that philosophers have distinguished self and world and sought ultimate grounds for them.

Keywords: Japanese philosopher, Japanese philosophers, Nishida Kitarō, Kyoto School, Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy

The Significance of Nishida Kitarō

Is there an ultimate context that encompasses not only the terms in which we conceptualize the world but also everything, every being, even the world itself? That question was a central concern of Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) in the mature stage of his philosophy. Nishida, widely recognized as the most important Japanese philosopher of the twentieth century and the founder of the Kyoto School, authored some twenty volumes of essays influenced by Buddhist thought and deeply informed by the Anglo-European philosophy that was just beginning to be introduced to his country. Nishida began his work with the notion of “pure experience,” the moment prior to any distinction between experiencing self and experienced object, as it founds the systematic development of our thinking about the world. After lengthy diversions into German and French dialectical thinking and Neo-Kantian philosophy to explain the nature of self-awareness, he returned to early Greek philosophy and Buddhist thinking and developed a novel alternative (p. 362) to the ways that philosophers have

distinguished self and world and sought ultimate grounds for them. 1

Nishida's alternative notion of “the place of absolute nothingness” that underlies all distinctions and contextualizes all grounds has profound significance for debates concerning the questions gathered under the labels of internalism and externalism, both cognitive and semantic. Once we see through his often forbidding language, his notion suggests a way to uncover the assumptions that both sides of the debate have in common. It points to the positive role that an obscure context plays in making distinctions. The “dazzling obscurity” that he called “the place of absolute nothingness” can be understood as the ultimate context of contexts, the common ground that makes distinctions possible—although it requires a modification in our usual conception of a ground. Just as Nishida's language is clarified by an analysis of distinction making, his own account of absolute nothingness, informed by Daoist and Zen Buddhist reflections, clarifies the relation between self and world.

Distinctions and the Opposition between Self and World

Making distinctions is at the heart of teaching and doing philosophy. Think of the importance of the distinctions—and often of the challenge to the distinctions—between what is and what ought to be, or between what something is and that it is, between synthetic and analytic, passive and active, empirical and transcendental, and so forth. More specifically, recall the distinctions that underlie disputes about the relation between self and world and between mind and world. Not only are the terms of the relation (self and world or mind and world) distinguished, but so too are the types of relationship in question: is mind self-contained and solely internal to the individual experiencing subject or are its contents dependent upon the environment and the world in general?

A primary interest shared by both sides in this dispute is to resist an overbearing imposition of our fallible minds and mental contents on the world, that is, to allow for resistance from the world as a corrective to our ideas. A second shared concern is to strictly preserve the features of experience that differentiate one individual from another. These concerns in turn imply two underlying distinctions, again shared by both sides of the dispute, namely, some distinction between mind and world, however disputed the bounds of the mind may be, and some distinction between individual minds. No matter how external or internal to the individual subject the content of her (p. 363) mind and the meaning of her words may be, the mind is not thought to be wholly internal to the world; its fundamental distinction from world is maintained by both sides. These shared features conceal another, perhaps deeper, unsettled matter for both sides: the nature of the self in the background of this dispute. Is the self “self-contained” within the individual bodily subject, within one's skin so to speak, or does its extension reach beyond the body, at least the body as an object in the world? Is self rather a body-subject that reaches beyond the objective confines of the physical body? Is the “skin” of the self a perceptive organ that interacts with the environment and is not measurable by dimensions given by tape measures? Settling the dispute about the bounds of mind and its cognitions would require determining with much more precision the bounds of self and its transactions with the world. Yet again, whatever the position regarding the unsettled bounds of the self, the disputes presuppose its distinction from world. The talk of a “transaction” between perceptions, cognitions, or self on the one hand and world on the other implies this distinction. Even the most expansive notions of bodily self interacting with the world and with others, as we find in Merleau-Ponty, for example, assume a distinction between self and world. Heidegger's attempt to undermine commonplace assumptions by reformulating the terms and speaking of Being-in-the-World still differentiates between oneself and environment and between oneself and world as the ultimate context of meanings.

This chapter does not attempt to resolve these tangled issues or even describe them with more precision. Nor does it intend to question the fundamental distinction between self and world. Rather, it will present an alternative way, modeled after Nishida, to contextualize the distinctions and to understand the grounds of various levels of distinctions—both the grounds of distinctions like those mentioned above and the grounds of their various levels. It will present the ultimate “ground” as a nothingness with respect to all distinguished terms, and will thus call for a modification of the notion of ground. At the same time it will present a way to understand the meaning and function of nothingness in the philosophy of Nishida KitarO and his East Asian sources.

Self and World in Nishida's Philosophy

Nishida developed a layered set of distinctions he took to be increasingly concrete, that is, inclusive of the terms abstracted out of their underlying context, and eventually he proposed “absolute nothingness” as the ultimate context.2 Using his terms, we can begin with language and the logic of judgments and note the distinction (p. 364) between the subjects and predicates of our judgments—without deciding whether or to what degree those predicates are internal or external to the judging individual. In judgments like “John is jealous of Mary” and “Eartheans mean H O to be water,” 3 we ascribe to a particular (grammatical) subject certain qualities or attributes, an emotion

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and a belief in these examples. The qualities or attributes “belong to” the grammatical subject. At the same time predicates name universals or at least general items not restricted to any particular subject. Judgments then are articulated states of affairs that form the context out of which grammatical subjects and predicates are distinguished. In other words, we can apprehend and then articulate a state of affairs that includes the subject and the predicate and that grounds the distinction between them—again without deciding the necessity or the degree of factors external to the individual who is judging.

Taken as the context that encompasses things and their characteristics or relations, the level of judgments leaves out the acts of mind or consciousness that formulate the judgments. Mind in the act of judging may be said to take the judgment, the articulated state of affairs (John is jealous of Mary, Eartheans think water is H O) as its proposed object for consideration—for confirmation or disconfirmation, for

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example. For Nishida, we must move to a more concrete context that includes both judgments and the mind as judging agent that is considering them. In Nishida's view, however, the acting mind is not simply one side of the distinction; rather, it includes both the act's object, the judgment, and the mind itself. This is because mind or consciousness in act is self-reflexive; however fallibly, it is aware of itself as well as of things in the world, and can thus distinguish between itself and things in the world.4 Self-reflexive mind or

consciousness forms the context out of which mind and things with their attributes are distinguished. The move to include judgments, with their grammatical subjects and predicates, within the context of self-aware mind might seem to imply some form of internalism and suggest that the content articulated in judgments is contained within an individual mind and thus independent of external factors in the world. Nishida's move as such, however, only acknowledges that judgments are the sorts of matters that are held, entertained, or proposed by minds. To use the previous example, Eartheans' belief that water is H O may or may not depend on factors outside Eartheans' minds,

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but the judgment about what Eartheans believe is proposed by someone and, for Nishida, belongs to the context of the self-aware mind considering the judgment. The appeal to a more inclusive context is not meant to settle the issue between internalism and externalism, but to show what both sides presuppose. We have seen how both assume a (p. 365) distinction between mind and world and between one mind and another. If self-consciousness names a demarcation between self and others and self and world, then what is the context out of which these distinctions arise? We must proceed to the next level in Nishida's scheme to see their common ground.

The next level of concreteness is that of the world—not in the sense of some extramental reality, nor of a preexistent, nonhuman universe, nor of some projection or construction of mind, but rather world that creates knowing, embodied selves and is created by them. Nishida came to call this “the historical world” to emphasize the concrete and everyday space in which we live as embodied, enculturated selves

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immersed in the histories that we make and that make us. The philosophical notions of minds as relatively isolated or self-contained units and of the world as a physical, nonhuman realm are abstracted from the historical world, as is any evidence supporting such notions. Here, too, we might ask whether the self-aware, judging mind is properly understood as a sole individual subject. To take the individual mind acting alone as the self-aware judging mind would be to abstract it from its context in a world of shared language, culture, and history—all factors that make judgments possible. Insofar as internalism and exernalism both recognize that meanings and beliefs are tied to language, culture, and history, they both can agree on this point. This is not to deny that there are individuals with their own mental features. But even to posit such individuating features requires a context of comparison that cannot be derived from any single such mind. Individual agents living in the historical world differentiate themselves from others and reciprocally are subject to differentiation; they create and are created by the historical world. The historical world thus is the context out of which actual, knowing selves are differentiated. This world displays a self-reflexive structure similar to that of self-aware minds, in that it refers to itself as including knowing, embodied selves.

If one were to understand the self-reflexive, historical world as a mind of a higher order, however, Nishida's scheme would amount to a form of panpsychism. This view either extends mind beyond individual subjects to some kind of universal mind or finds mind as a

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constitutive part of the universe. Mind in some sense is taken to be everywhere. Panpsychism would collapse the distinction between mind and world that internalism and externalism hold in common. Nishida does not take that course, but instead maintains a distinction between individual selves as self-aware minds and the world that differentiates and contextualizes them. The world is “self-aware” in the sense that whatever is “in the world” is a reflection or mirroring of the world. In Nishida's parlance, the world “mirrors itself” in all that is

(p. 366) in it, but the individual, self-aware self is a “focal point” of the world. There is no outside to this world. In this respect Nishida's conception shares the assumption common to both internalism and externalism that, whatever the bounds of mind or sources of the mind's content, “world” represents the outermost boundary. Yet if world is the broadest existing context for differentiations, if there is no further existing context out of which terms can be distinguished, then what is the basis of the distinction between world and mind, or of the very conception of world?

Nishida's answer is: nothing that exists; indeed, nothingness. This obscure and difficult topic need not conjure up metaphysical specters that would be anathema to those who debate about self and world, however. We can clarify nothingness in terms of making distinctions, and making distinctions in terms of nothingness. Nishida's implicit account of distinctions casts light not only on his own philosophy but on the working of philosophical distinctions in general, and in particular their role in debates about the relation between self and world.

An Analysis of Distinctions

We can preface Nishida's particular account with Robert Sokolowski's illuminating analysis of distinctions in general. Sokolowski notes that making distinctions is not merely a matter of opposing one thing to another. We make distinctions when some obscurity stands in the way of clarifying an issue, and to understand them we must keep in mind the particular obscurity behind them. The obscurity “lets the

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distinction occur” even when it is meant to hold everywhere and always. Making distinctions requires not merely that we separate or exclude terms, but that we first bring them together “so there is the activity of bringing together along with the annulment of their belonging together.” The nondistinction does not come before the distinction; rather, the “ability to hold two as one comes along with the ability to hold two together as distinguished” from one another. Let us take these two “holds” one at a time. “Holding two together as one is holding them precisely as not distinguishable.” Holding them together as one involves both “the possibility of their being distinguished

and the denial [or perhaps the deferral] of that possibility.” We might add that holding two together as distinguished reaffirms that possibility. Before the possibility of distinction, we have what Sokolowski calls mere assimilation, and we don't see the one as one. He

calls distinction-making the “emergence of thinking and reasoning.” 8

With some appropriate shifts, to which we will return later, we can employ a similar analysis to understand Nishida's talk of nothingness. The stage of assimilation is what early Nishida called pure experience. This is not yet thinking and reasoning in (p. 367) that it is prior to the crucial epistemological distinction between subject experiencing and object experienced. Later, Nishida abandoned the talk of pure experience but retained the same priority of a unity in at least three notions: “knowing by becoming,” where self and things in the world are seen as one; self-awareness as “a seeing without a seer”; and nothingness as a universal notion in which “there is no distinction between that which expresses and that which is expressed.” 9 In his first works, Nishida was pressed to explain how distinctions and reflective thought could arise out of a state of unity; thus, we see him struggling with the themes of “intuition and reflection in self-awareness” (the title of one of his early books; Nishida 1917). He eventually gave up the logical and temporal priority of the assimilated state and moved to a kind of interdependence of unity and plurality, or identity and difference—the one comes along with the other. Nishida tried to express this sort of holding together in the enigmatic phrase “absolute contradictory self-identity,” an identity that holds many together as one both as belonging together and as not belonging together, as bringing them together and negating the ability to keep them together.

This is part of what goes on in making distinctions: when we distinguish one thing from another, we first hold them together as being distinguishable but do not distinguish them. Then in distinguishing them we annul their belonging together. This annulment occurs in what Nishida calls the self-negation of nothingness, a negation of its nonduality. To elaborate, nothingness is not simply the initial oneness of the two, or the many, held together. And what holds them together cannot be any one thing; it cannot even be called what all things have in common, that is, “being” as the most universal concept. Nor can it be a second principle, different from being, like becoming, which would still need a third principle holding together these two, being and becoming, and differentiating them. Nothingness for Nishida is not so much a third principle (as in Hegel) as the obscurity that lets the (or any) distinction occur. Nishida calls this nothingness absolute. Literally, the Sino-Japanese term for absolute, zettai, means breaking through opposition, so absolute nothingness is not opposed to anything; it is the place where all things are held together as one, along with the negation of that oneness. As a universal, it is an attempt to name all things without opposing them. Individual things and persons emerge as the “self-determinations of nothingness” (to use Nishida's terms) just as items emerge into clarity and distinctness from the obscurity behind their distinction.

Nishida's talk of a self-determining context recognizes the impetus to clarify, which Sokolowski thinks precedes distinction and occurs within the obscurity that calls for it. But Nishida does not separately name this impetus or identify it as occurring within the obscurity. Rather, the obscurity (i.e., nothingness) is of itself infinitely determinable. In the term absolute nothingness Nishida combines the background obscurity and the cognitive impetus that give rise to distinctions. His talk of absolute nothingness brings to light the

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fundamental obscurity precisely as obscurity, not clarifying it away, but letting it work to generate clarity and (p. 368) distinctness. Or, as he would probably rather say, absolute nothingness brings itself to light in the activity of self-awareness.

Two shifts are required to follow Nishida's moves. First, we must shift from a cognitive to an ontological account or, more precisely, a “me-ontological” account (from the Greek to meon, nonbeing). This shift is from describing how thinking itself works (by making distinctions, etc.) to how reality or the “world” works. Nishida does call his mature philosophy a “logic of place” or of “topos” (basho in Japanese), but he articulates this “logic” as a kind of ontology (or me-ontology), not as a cognitive description of how mind or reason should operate. The introduction of me-ontology into debates in the philosophy of mind and language may seem a load that such debates are not meant to bear, but Nishida's logic is relevant insofar as it questions the assumptions of those debates regarding the means by which we distinguish self and world, for example. His logic of place undermines all anthropomorphic assumptions about the locus of awareness in the individual subject's mind. Making distinctions describes logically (if not causally) the emergence of the world out of nothingness as the place of nondistinction. The second shift we must make is from thinking of obscurity as something we must by all means eliminate to considering obscurity as something we can appreciate—even if it cannot be the last word. The positive role of obscurity and negativity are familiar to us through Daoism and its echoes in Zen sayings that speak of the darkness that harbors no discriminations, the darkness that lets light appear.

Let us delve a bit further into each of these shifts. The first involves the rather strange talk of absolute nothingness bringing itself to light and evincing self-awareness, rather than reflective human minds bringing things to light through the mental activity of making distinctions. Examples may help explain this shift further. Some distinctions imply a third term (Graham 1992, 211). Binary distinctions like above/below and before/after imply a hidden term that is a point of reference and indirectly leads to the one making the distinction. Some binary distinctions, like up/down and left/right, directly imply the maker of the distinction as the point of reference. Other binary

distinctions such as between I and you or I and it do not allow for this hidden third term, “because the maker of the distinction is part of the

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distinction” (Hori 2000, 289). These types of distinctions hinge directly or indirectly on a self as the point of reference. In the right/left kind of distinction, the point of reference is an embodied self that can be moved, so that what was right becomes left, for example—or even removed and not mentioned, so that we speak simply of right/left. But in the second type of distinction, between I and it, for example, the self-reference stays put. 12 Nishida wants to move this self-reference as it is located in the individual (p. 369) to the logical space out of which it too emerges, along with its oppositions. The ultimate locus of these distinctions between self and other and between subject and object is his “absolute nothingness.” This self-negating name points to the obscurity that gives rise to and by contrast makes evident all possible distinctions.

The steps through which Nishida tried to accomplish his shift were summarized earlier as the development of his logic of place, from the context of judgments through the context of self-awareness to that of the historical world and, ultimately, to absolute nothingness. This clarifies an element of making distinctions that is taken for granted by everyone who would clarify philosophizing by starting with the self as a cognizing agent.

For example, Sokolowski notes the difference between the thinking, reasoning person who begins to make distinctions and the unthinking person. He states that making distinctions is the emergence, the beginning, of thinking and reasoning, but he also implies that it is an achievement of reasoning. We can place the obscurity behind this emergence/achievement in the properly human self, which for

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Sokolowski (in another essay) means reason naturally ordered toward truth. Such a self reaches for clarity and truth out of an inner impetus, the second element that Sokolowski must add to the obscurity in general to account for the activity of making distinctions. Although Sokolowski says this impetus is not to be differentiated from distinction in the way that identification is, so a deeper obscurity would not underlie both of them, nevertheless, we can ask what does hold the impetus and obscurity together. One might think that the impetus indicates a subjective or noetic side, whereas obscurity in general describes the noematic side or matter thought about. Both, then, are found “in” consciousness; that is, they are found as moments or nonindependent parts of consciousness.

If we recognize that obscurity is not merely a matter of the mind, not merely found in a consciousness striving for clarity and articulate speech, then we move in Nishida's direction. In his early attempts to formulate a logic of place, Nishida in fact did consider consciousness as the place or locus of the articulating subject/predicate distinction, and even called it “nothingness” (mu in Japanese) in the sense that it

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establishes the being or nonbeing of things. Nishida noted, however, that one's very act of consciousness at any one time always eludes one's own objectifying consciousness. Eventually he tried to formulate something more basic, a deeper level as it were than the consciousness within which obscurities and distinctions are placed. Nishida's absolute nothingness deliberately conflates the self's urge to clarify and the rational agent—all into a greater, perhaps darker, background. And what is (p. 370) this background without foreground or opposite? There is simply no way to say—that is, no what to indicate. Nishida's talk of nothingness gainsays the notion that the thinking self is the ultimate reference point in making distinctions.

The Light Side of Obscurity

Nishida's shift to go beyond the thinking self requires a positive assessment of obscurity. We do not understand obscurity adequately when we treat it solely as an undesirable vagueness of expression. It is precisely the absence of articulation that Nishida appreciates in his talk of nothingness. We find precedents in classical Daoist texts and Zen dialogues. The writings ascribed to the Daoist Zhuangzi are full of examples, although there is no direct evidence that Nishida drew from them. Zhuangzi dares to speak of the Way, the Dao, that “has never known boundaries” and speech that “has no constancy.” Boundaries come about when there is recognition of a “this” and a “that.” Consider this passage, undoubtedly meant to humor the logicians and the normative philosophers of his day:

Now I am going to make a statement here. I don't know whether it fits into the category of other people's statements or not. But whether it fits into their category or whether it doesn't, it obviously fits into some category [it is distinguishable]. So in that respect it is no different from their statements [it is behind such distinctions]. However, let me try making my statement.

There is a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. Suddenly there is being and nonbeing. But between this being and nonbeing, I don't really know which is being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don't know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn't said something. (Zhuangzi 1964, 38–39)

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In this passage Zhuangzi playfully intimates the “dissolution of boundaries,” as he calls it, that still preserves the possibility of distinctions. He also uses the metaphor of a hinge in its socket to express the “state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites.” “When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly” (Zhuangzi 1964, 35). Although interpretations of such

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passages in Zhuangzi differ greatly, we can think of these passages as a precedent to the positive appreciation (p. 371) of the obscurity that underlies distinctions. A good hinge turns freely and takes one appropriately in this direction rather than that; it articulates the sides.

Zhuangzi actually enjoins us to swing the door and use illumination or clarity:

When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness. So I say, the best thing to use is clarity. (Zhuangzi 1964, 35)

Surely, it seems, we would want to distinguish clarity from obscurity. And out of what obscurity would that distinction arise? We are thrown back to the primordial obscurity, from which emerges the kind of clarity we ordinarily praise. Zhuangzi does an admirable job in clarifying obscurity without eliminating it.

Many Zen dialogues, which were influenced by Daoist texts and in turn inspired some of Nishida's thoughts, also show an appreciation of obscurity, often in the guise of darkness. The dark refers to a standpoint beyond or behind discriminations. Black and dark are words often used to describe the Buddhist notion of emptiness as the undifferentiated that comes to be manifest only in articulated forms. 17 Again we are reminded of making distinctions as a way of manifesting, presenting, or making present—but also of the positive role of the obscurity that underlies distinction-making. That appreciation of obscurity and the negative is what is gained from Nishida's talk of nothingness. And —to end with a distinction—what is gainsaid is the notion that clarity always takes precedence over obscurity in the practice of philosophy.

Distinctions that are crucial to discussions about the relation between self and world and mind and world refer at least implicitly to a common ground underlying the distinctions. In the philosophy of mind and of language, the intricate and often nuanced distinctions made in the debates between internalism and externalism likewise imply a common ground, usually left in the dark, that makes a debate intelligible to both sides. Nishida reflects on the role that such common ground plays in the specific distinctions at stake and in making distinctions in general, in an attempt to clarify the role that obscurity plays as a ground for making distinctions.

Bibliography and Suggested Readings

Davis, Bret W. “The Kyoto School.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL=(http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/kyoto-school/).

Graham, A. C. (1981) Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters. London and Boston: Unwin Publishers. Find this resource:

——— . (1992) Unreason Within Reason: Essays on the Outskirts of Rationality. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Find this resource:

Heisig, James W. (2001) Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:

Hori, Victor Sōgen. (2000) “Kōan and Kenshō in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum.” In The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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——— . (2003) Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases For Kōan Practice. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:

Maraldo, John C. (2010) “Nishida Kitarô.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. url: (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/nishida-kitaro/).

——— . (2006) “Self-Mirroring and Self-Awareness: Dedekind, Royce and Nishida.” In Frontiers of Japanese Philosophy, edited by James W. Heisig. Nagoya: Nanzan Institute of Religion and Culture, 143–163.

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Nishida Kitarō. (1911) Zen no kenkyū, translated as An Inquiry into the Good by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

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——— . (1917) Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, translated by Valdo H. Viglielmo with Takeuchi Yoshinori and Joseph S. O'Leary. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Find this resource:

——— . (1927) Hataraku mono kara miru mono e [From That Which Acts to That Which Sees]. Volume 4 of Nishida KitarO Zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1987. Partial translation by James W. Heisig, “The Logic of Place,” in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook, edited by James W. Heisig, Thomas P. Kasulis, & John C. Maraldo. Honolulu HI: The University of Hawaii Press, 2011, 647–657.

Find this resource:

——— . (1943) “Sekaishinchitsujo no genri” [“The Principles of the New World Order”]. In Volume 12 of Nishida KitarO Zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1987. Translated by Yoko Arisaka in “The Nishida Enigma: ‘The Principle of the New World Order,’ ” Monumenta Npponica 51/1 (1996), 81–106.

Find this resource:

Nishitani Keiji. (1999) “Emptiness and Sameness.” In Modern Japanese Aesthetics: A Reader, edited by Michele Marra. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. This is Marra's translation of “Kū to soku,” in Volume 13 of Nishitani Keiji Chosakushū. Tokyo: Sōbunsha, 1987, 111–118.

Find this resource:

Wargo, Robert. (2005) The Logic of Nothingness. Honolulu, HI: The University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:

Yusa, Michiko. (2002) Zen & Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida KitarO. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Find this resource:

Zhuangzi. (1964) Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press. Find this resource:

Notes:

(1) Pure experience is developed in Nishida's first major work, Zen no kenkyū (Nishida 1911). I give a synopsis of the themes and development of Nishida's philosophy in Maraldo 2010. Davis 2010 places Nishida's work in the context of the Kyoto school.

(2) My variation here of Nishida's famous “logic of place” is geared toward an explication of a theory of distinctions and represents one among many interpretations. Nishida himself offered different versions during his career; one of the first is in essays in Nishida 1927. For other accounts see Maraldo 2010 and Wargo 2005, especially 121–178.

(3) The reference of water is to Hilary Putnam's famous “twin earth” thought experiment that generated much of the externalism-internalism debate: if water played exactly the same role in the thinking of two different societies but one usage referred to H O and the

2

other to some other chemical compound, would the meaning of water be the same or not? See Hilary Putnam, “The meaning of ‘meaning,’” in Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

(3) For a more detailed analysis of Nishida's self-reflexive structure of consciousness and world, see Maraldo 2006.

(4) Nishida expanded this notion to the political realm when he spoke of a globally realized world, the world of worlds that are oriented to the entire world, which is possible in the present age as a place of unity-in-diversity. See, for example, Nishida 1943, 427.

(5) Advocates of panpsychism are found on the side of materialism as well as idealism; for an example of the former see Galen Strawson et al., Consciousness and its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2006). For a survey of different positions see William Seager and Sean Allen-Hermanson, “Panpsychism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/panpsychism/

(6) Robert Sokolowski, “Making Distinctions,” in Pictures, Quotations and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), p. 56.

(7) Sokolowski, pp. 62, 65.

(7.) The quotation about the universal of nothingness is the formulation of Heisig 2001, 83.

(10) In his seminal essay “Basho” [Place] in 1926, Nishida mentions the “dazzling obscurity” (in English) of Pseudo Dionysius Areopagita (Nishida 1927, 229).

(11) The difference between the direct and indirect point of reference is my addition to Graham's and Hori's analyses.

(12) Hori's point (2000, 289) is that the second type does not allow for an “identification of opposites” that can be understood intellectually; rather, “the nonduality of I/it, of subject/object ... must be experienced.”

(13) Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 206.

Husserl, whom Sokolowski is interpreting here, would call transcendental subjectivity (or the transcendental ego) the ultimate place of distinction-making; but this name would involve a similar problem, for it alone would not account for the obscurities it encounters.

(11) See Michiko Yusa's account of the first formulations of “The Logic of the Topos (1924–1926)” in Yusa 2002, 202–204.

(12) The dissolution of boundaries is also the theme of the famous butterfly passage: Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly, and then wakes up, but no longer knows that he isn't perhaps the butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi. “Between Zhuangzi and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things” (Zhuangzi 1964, 45).

(13) Does the Zhuangzi teach a radical relativism or perspectivism that replaces the notion of “the Dao” with multiple daos, none of which is preferable? Does it advance an asymmetrical relativism that does not reduce Zhuangzi's own speaking to just another equally dismissible dao? Does it express a dialectical synthesis of opposites? Here I would not try to adjudicate the various interpretations, but rather point out what they have in common: the positive appreciation of the obscurity behind distinctions. This is not to equate Nishida's absolute nothingness with Zhuangzi's Dao. A. C. Graham notes that Zhuangzi's sequence of statements and of beginnings and nonbeginnings “are no doubt intended to lead to an infinite regress” (Graham 1981, 56). Nishida, on the other hand, ends (and begins) with absolute nothingness. Both Zhuangzi and Nishida, however, point to the inevitable remainder that gets left out of any distinction and analysis, as Graham mentions in the case of Zhuangzi (1964, 55).

(14) According to the famous formula in the Heart Stitra, “emptiness is nothing but form, form nothing but emptiness.” The emphasis in the interpretation above is that form is necessary to manifest emptiness, just as emptiness is necessary for the existence of forms. The Indian Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna stressed the latter point (in chapter 24 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikāi); Nishida's disciple, Nishitani Keiji, stressed the former point (Nishitani 1999, 180).

John C. Maraldo

John C. Maraldo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Florida. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Der hermeneutische Zirkel: Untersuchungen zu Schleiermacher, Dilthey und Heidegger (1974 and 1984); The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin Heidegger with Commentary (with James G. Hart, 1976); and Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism(with James Heisig, 1995). He has published numerous articles in Japanese and English on Japanese thought. His current concern is to foster dialogue between Japanese and Anglo-European philosophy and provide alternatives in contemporary philosophical issues.

Oxford Handbooks Online

The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless Perspectivism - The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy

 The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless Perspectivism

Bret W. Davis

The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy

Edited by William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield

Print Publication Date: May 2011 Subject: Philosophy, Non-Western Philosophy Online Publication Date: Sep 2011 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195328998.003.0030

Abstract and Keywords

DOgen Kigen (1200–1253), founder of the SOtO school of Zen Buddhism, is undoubtedly one of the most original and profound thinkers in Japanese history. This article focuses on DOgen's GenjOkOan, which can be translated as “The Presencing of Truth.” This key text for understanding DOgen's thought is the core fascicle of his major work, ShObOgenzO (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye). It is the “treasury of the true Dharma eye” that Śākyamuni Buddha (ca. 500 BCE) is said to have transmitted to his successor, Mahākāshyapa, by silently holding up a flower. This event is held to mark the beginning of the Zen tradition, which is characterized by Bodhidharma (ca. 500 CE) as “a special transmission outside the scriptures; not depending on words and letters; directly pointing to the human mind; seeing into one's nature and becoming a Buddha”.

Keywords: Japanese philosophy, DOgen Kigen, Bodhidharma, Zen Buddhism, GenjOkOan

Carrying the self forward to verify-in-practice the myriad things is delusion; for the myriad things to come forth and verify-in-practice the self is enlightenment.

...[When] a person verifies-in-practice the Buddha Way, attaining one thing he or she becomes thoroughly familiar with that one thing; encountering one activity he or she [sincerely] practices that one activity. Since this is where the place [of the presencing of truth] is and the Way achieves its circulation, the reason that the limits of what is knowable are not known is that this knowing arises and proceeds together with the exhaustive fathoming of the Buddha Dharma. 1

DOgen Kigen (1200–1253), founder of the SOtO school of Zen Buddhism, is undoubtedly one of the most original and profound thinkers in Japanese history. The focus of this chapter will be on DOgen's GenjOkOan, which can be

2

translated as “The Presencing of Truth.” This key text for understanding DOgen's thought is the core fascicle of his major work, ShObOgenzO (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye). It (p. 349) is the “treasury of the true Dharma eye” that Śākyamuni Buddha (ca. 500 BCE) is said to have transmitted to his successor, Mahākāshyapa, by silently holding up a flower. This event is held to mark the beginning of the Zen tradition, which is characterized by Bodhidharma (ca. 500 CE) as “a special transmission outside the scriptures; not depending on words and letters; directly pointing to the human mind; seeing into one's nature and becoming a Buddha.” Like

Bodhidharma, who is said to have sat in meditation for nine years after bringing Zen (Ch. Chan) from India to China, DOgen too placed great emphasis on the silent practice of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

Yet DOgen's writings are not just expedient means to practice and enlightenment, fingers pointing at the moon; they are also literary and philosophical masterpieces in their own right. Indeed, DOgen is considered by many to be the greatest “philosopher” in the tradition of Zen Buddhism. 3 Rather than merely insist on the limits of language and reason, he poetically and philosophically manifests their expressive potential. The “entangled vines” (kattO) of language are not treated simply as impediments to be cut through with the sword of silent meditation and ineffable insight. Instead, they are understood to have the potential to become “expressive attainments of the Way” (dOtoku) that manifest perspectival aspects of the dynamic Buddha-nature of reality. 4

DOgen accepts the delimited and delimiting nature of language and of thought in general. And yet, he does not think that the perspectival limits of all perception, feeling, and understanding are as such antithetical to enlightenment. Rather than an overcoming of perspectivism, enlightenment for DOgen entails a radical reorientation and qualitative transformation of the process of perspectival delimitation. Nietzsche once wrote, “Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings.” 5 DOgen would say that “egoistic perspectivism” well describes a state of delusion. Enlightenment, on the other hand, is precisely a matter of shedding the egoistic will to posit oneself as the fixed center of the world. Nevertheless, according to DOgen, enlightenment does not supplant perspectival knowing with an omniscient “view from nowhere.” Rather, it involves an ongoing nondual engagement in a process of (p. 350) letting the innumerable perspectival aspects of reality illuminate themselves. Enlightenment thus entails an egoless and nondual perspectivism.

DOgen would agree with Heidegger that any manifestation of truth always involves both a revealing and a concealing. 6 As DOgen puts it, “When one side is illuminated, the other side is darkened.” 7 This epistemological principle is one of the central themes of his thought, and it can be found at work already in the famous opening section of the GenjOkOan. Since these programmatic yet laconic first four sentences of the text are often thought to contain the kernel of DOgen's philosophy of Zen, let us begin by quoting and explicating them. As we shall see, these few lines can be read as a compact history of the unfolding of Buddhist thought from its foundational teachings through Mahāyāna philosophies to DOgen's Zen.

Through Buddhism to Zen

When the various things [dharmas] are [seen according to] the Buddha's teaching [Buddha Dharma], there are delusion and enlightenment; there is (transformative) practice; there is birth/life; there is death; there are ordinary sentient beings; and there are Buddhas.

When the myriad things are each [seen as] without self [i.e., as without independent substantiality],

there is neither delusion nor enlightenment; there are neither Buddhas nor ordinary sentient beings; and there is neither birth/life nor death.

Since the Buddha Way originally leaps beyond both plentitude and poverty, there are arising and perishing; there are delusion and enlightenment; and there are ordinary sentient beings and Buddhas.

And yet, although this is how we can say that it is, it is just that flowers fall amid our attachment and regret, and weeds flourish amid our rejecting and loathing.

While the first sentence speaks from the temporal perspective of “when the various things are [seen according to] the Buddha's teaching...,” the second sentence speaks from that of “when the myriad things are each [seen as] without self....” What is affirmed in the first sentence is strikingly negated in the second. What is DOgen doing here in this overturning alteration of perspective? While the first sentence sets forth several fundamental distinctions that constitute the basic teachings of Buddhism—such as that between ordinary sentient beings and their delusion on the one hand and Buddhas and their enlightenment on the other—the second sentence, by focusing now on the central teaching of no-self (anātman), goes on to (p. 351) negate the reification of these oppositional designations. For readers familiar with Mahāyāna Buddhism's Perfection of Wisdom literature, such self-deconstructive negations in a Buddhist text do not come as too much of a surprise. The Heart Sutra, for example, radicalizes the early Buddhist doctrine of no-self into that of the emptiness (śūnyatā; i.e., the lack of independent substantiality) of all phenomenal elements of existence (dharmas) and linguistic conventions, even to the point of a systematic negation of (a reified misunderstanding of) traditional Buddhist teachings themselves, including the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. The Heart Sutra also speaks of no-birth, no-death, and

no-attainment, rather than of nirvāna as the attainment of a release from samsāra as the cycle of birth and death. 9

Furthermore, readers familiar with Mādhyamaka philosopher Nāgārjuna's notion of the “emptiness of emptiness” (i.e., the idea that emptiness itself is not an independently substantial entity, but rather is the nature of events of

10

interdependent origination [pratītya-samutpāda]), and with Tiantai (Jap. Tendai) philosopher Zhiyi's development of the Two Truths (i.e., the conventional truth of provisional designations and the ultimate truth of emptiness) into the Three Truths of “the provisional, the empty, and the middle,” 11 will be prepared for the third sentence of the GenjOkOan. No longer qualified by a “when...,” the “middle” perspective expressed here resolves the tension between the first two perspectives so as to make possible the reaffirmation of distinctions, but now without reification. In fact, in its teaching of the ontological middle way of interdependent origination, Buddhism has always rejected nihilism and annihilationism along with substantialism and eternalism. The Buddhist account of the interdependent and dynamic nature of reality and the self is not subject to the “all or nothing” dilemma that plagues an ontology of independent and eternal substances. As DOgen says here, “the Buddha Way originally leaps beyond both plentitude [i.e., substantial being] and poverty [i.e., nihilistic void].” Affirmatively thought, using the language of the Three Truths, the Buddhist middle way embraces the nondual polarity of the provisional “plentitude” of differentiated being and the “poverty” or substantial emptiness of ubiquitous interdependent origination.

It is possible to relate these first three sentences of the GenjOkOan not only to the Three Truths of Tiantai (Tendai) philosophy, but also to Chan Master Weixin's famous three stages on the way to enlightenment, according to which a mountain is first seen as a mountain (i.e., as a conceptual reification), then not as a mountain (i.e., as empty of independent substantiality and linguistic reification), and finally really as a mountain (i.e., in the

12

suchness of its interdependent origination). The path of the Buddha Way ultimately leads one back to the here and now.

(p. 352) Be that as it may, and although we should bear in mind that DOgen was first of all trained as a Tendai monk and was intimately familiar with doctrines such as the Three Truths, it is also important to recall that he was from an early age dissatisfied with the then-prevalent doctrine of “original enlightenment” (hongaku). What concerned the young DOgen was that a premature and blanket affirmation of the self and the world of distinctions

8

as they are tends to deny or at least downplay the importance of transformative practices of cultivation (shugyO). This dissatisfaction and concern finally induced him to come down from Tendai's Mt. Hiei on a path that led him to Zen.

The primary and ultimate standpoint of Dōgen's Zen is most directly expressed in the climactic—and, in a sense, intentionally anticlimactic—fourth sentence of the GenjOkOan. Here Dōgen calls for a return from the heights of reason (ri) to the basis of fact (ji), that is, to the nonidealized here and now of concrete experience, where “flowers fall amid our attachment and regret, and weeds flourish amid our rejecting and loathing.” I would suggest that this crucial sentence, like so many in Dōgen's often polysemous texts, can be read in at least two ways. On the one hand, as the expression of the concrete experiences of enlightened existence, it signifies that nirvāna is not somewhere beyond the trials and tribulations of samsāra (the realm of desire and suffering). Rather, it is a matter of “awakening in the midst of the passions” (bonnO soku bodai). Like the Daoist sage's uninhibited weeping at his wife's funeral, Zen enlightenment is not an escapist dying to, but rather a wholehearted dying into a liberated and liberating engagement in the human life of emotional entanglements.

On the other hand, I think that this fourth sentence can also be read—on a less advanced but certainly no less significant level—as an acknowledgement that no amount of rational explanation of the nonduality of samsāra and nirvāna can bring about an actual realization of this truth. In Fukanzazengi Dōgen writes: “From the beginning the Way circulates everywhere; why the need to verify it in practice? ... And yet, if there is the slightest discrepancy,

13

heaven and earth are vastly separated; if the least disorder arises, the heart and mind get lost in confusion.” And he tells us in BendOwa: “Although the truth [Dharma] amply inheres in every person, without practice, it does not

14

presence; if it is not verified, it is not attained.” Religious practice is necessary, which, for Dōgen, involves not just the practice of meditative concentration, but also the practice of thoughtful discrimination. Hence, after the opening section of the GenjOkOan he proceeds to concretely describe—by means of what has been aptly called a “transformative phenomenology” —the

15 conversion from a deluded/deluding to an enlightened/enlightening

comportment to the world.

(p. 353) Verification: The Practice of Enlightenment

A deluding experience of the world, according to Dōgen, occurs when one “carries the self forward to verify-in-practice (shushO) the myriad things.” On the other hand, “for the myriad things to come forth and verify-in-practice the self is enlightenment.” 16 In order to appreciate this explanation of delusion and enlightenment, we need to first discuss Dōgen's peculiar notion of shushO. In this term, Dōgen conjoins two characters to convey the inseparable nonduality of “practice” and “enlightenment (verification).” 17 This key aspect of Dōgen's teaching is poignantly addressed in the concluding section of the GenjOkOan, where the action of the Zen master fanning himself (practice) is demonstrated to be one with the truth that the wind (Buddha-nature) circulates everywhere.

As Chan Master Baoche of Mount Mayu was using his fan, a monk came and asked, “It is the wind's nature to be constantly abiding and there is no place in which it does not circulate. Why then, sir, do you still use a fan?”

The master said, “You only know that it is the nature of the wind to be constantly abiding. You don't yet know the reason [more literally: the principle of the way] that there is no place it does not reach.”

The monk said, “What is the reason for there being no place in which it does not circulate?” At which time the master just used his fan.

The monk bowed reverently.

The verifying experience of the Buddha Dharma and the vital path of its true transmission are like this. To say that if it is constantly abiding one shouldn't use a fan, that even without using a fan one should be able to feel the wind, is to not know [the meaning of] either constantly abiding or the nature of the

wind. 18

Enlightenment, for DOgen, is found not in inactive detachment, nor in a passive acceptance of the way things are, but rather in the midst of a holistic participation—an engaged playing of one's part—in the world.

The character for shô, which is DOgen's favored term for enlightenment, normally means to verify, prove, attest to, confirm, or authenticate something. As a synonym for enlightenment, shô is a matter of verifying (“showing to be true” and literally “making true”) and hence realizing (awakening to and thus actualizing) the fact that one's true self (honbunnin), one's “original part,” is originally part and parcel of the dynamically ubiquitous Buddha-nature. In the Busshô fascicle of the Shôbôgenzô, DOgen famously rereads the Mahāparinirvāna Sūtra's claim that “all

(p. 354) sentient beings have the Buddha-nature” to mean that “Buddha-nature is all that is” (shitsu-u wa busshô nari). 19 Enlightenment is a matter of verifying-in-practice this fundamental fact. It is a matter of authentication, of truly becoming what one in truth is: a unique expression of a universally shared Buddha-nature.

Learning to Forget the Self

The self is a participant in the dynamically interconnected matrix of the world. Delusion occurs when the self egoistically posits itself as the single fixed center—rather than existing as one among infinitely many mutually reflective and expressive focal points—of the whole.20 In delusion the myriad things are seen, not according to the self-expressive aspects through which they show themselves, but rather only as they are forced into the perspectival horizon of the self-fixated and self-assertive ego. To borrow the language of Kant, the deluded and deluding ego willfully projects its own forms of intuition and categories of understanding onto the world. In contrast, through practicing the Buddha Way one comes to realize the empty (i.e., open and interdependent) nature of the true self.

DOgen describes the steps of this process of practice and enlightenment in three of the most frequently cited lines of the Genjôkôan:

To learn the Buddha Way is to learn the self.

To learn the self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be verified by the myriad things [of the world].

The study of Buddhism, according to DOgen's Zen, involves more than a cognitive grasp of the truth of the Buddhist teachings (Buddha Dharma; buppô). It involves a holistic practice of a way of life (Buddha Way; butsudô).22 The central practice of the Buddha Way for DOgen, and for the Zen tradition in general, is seated

23

meditation (zazen), rather than the study of scriptures, the performance of esoteric rituals, or calling on the grace

21

of a transcendent savior. According to Zen, “what comes through the gate [i.e., from outside of oneself] is not the treasure of the house”; the truth (p. 355) must be discovered within. Dōgen thus speaks of meditation as a practice

of taking a radical “step back that turns the light around.” 24

The light of our unenlightened minds is generally directed outward, shining its objectifying gaze on things and on a projected image of the ego itself. Things and other persons become objects of attachment (or aversion), possessions (or enemies) of a reified conception of the self as ego-subject. But things and persons change and otherwise refuse to obey one's will, ever slipping from the grasp of the ego, which is itself constantly subject to mutation and otherwise fails to live up to the self-constructed image of itself. Hence, repeatedly disappointed and frustrated, the ego suffers the resistance of the world and, out of greed, hate, and delusion, inflicts suffering on others. Ironically, the Buddha Dharma itself, as with any teaching, can be turned into just another object of dogmatic and even fanatic attachment, diverting us from the root of the problem, namely, a false conception of ourselves and our relation to the world. Therefore, the Buddha Way first of all requires a penetrating examination of the self.

Yet when one turns the light around to reflect on the deepest recesses of the self, what one ultimately finds is— nothing. There is no substantial ego-subject underlying our thoughts, feelings, and desires. But neither is this nothingness—or emptiness—a nihilistic void. Rather, the ungraspable nothingness of the self is the very source of the open-minded, open-hearted, and creatively free activity of the true self. The true self is an open engagement with others. A thoroughgoing “learning the self” thus paradoxically leads to a “forgetting of the self” as an independent and substantial ego-subject.

Dōgen speaks of this “forgetting” most radically in terms of his own enlightenment experience of “dropping off the body-mind” (shinjin-datsuraku). Note that Dōgen does not speak dualistically of freeing the mind from the body. In fact, he explicitly rejects the mind/body dualism of the so-called Senika heresy, and speaks of the “oneness of body-mind” (shinjin ichinyo) along with the nonduality of the “one mind” with the entire cosmos.

Insofar as we have identified ourselves with a dualistic and reified conception of the mind, however, along with the body this too must be shed. Only through a radical experience of letting go of all reifications of and attachments to the mind as well as the body does one become open to the self-presentation of the myriad things. Yet this openness must be realized, and this realization is neither static nor simply passive. When Dōgen says that “things come forth and verify-in-practice the self” (elsewhere he even claims that “original practice inheres in the original face of each and every thing” ),

26 he is countering the willful self-assertion of unenlightened human subjectivity by calling attention to the “objective side” of the “total dynamism” or “undivided activity” (zenki) of a nondual experience of reality. Elsewhere he speaks of the nonduality of this experience as follows: “When you ride in a boat, body-and-mind, self-and-environs, subjectivity-and-objectivity are all together the (p. 356) undivided activity of the boat. The entire earth as well as the entire sky are the undivided activity of the boat.”

For our part, in order to authentically participate in this nondual event—and hence to verify or realize this or that aspect of reality—we must not only liberate ourselves from a self-assertive fixation on our body-mind by letting it drop off; we must also spontaneously pick up the body-mind again in an energetic yet egoless “total exertion” (gūjin) of “rousing the [whole] body-mind to perceive forms, rousing the [whole] body-mind to listen to

sounds.” 28

Let us pause for a moment to review the pivotal paradoxes involved in Dōgen's path of Zen. (1) Turning to and from ourselves: By way of initially turning the light of the mind away from (a deluded view of) external reality and back toward ourselves, we discover an emptiness at the heart of the self that opens us up to an enlightened

25

27

experience of the myriad things of the world. (2) Utter detachment and total involvement: This process of enlightenment entails a radical “dropping off the body-mind” that leads, not to a state of mindless disembodiment, but rather to a holistic integration of the body-mind and its unattached yet wholehearted employment in nondual events of enlightening perception and understanding.

Nondual Perspectivism

The intimately engaged yet egoless perception and understanding that DOgen speaks of are, however, never shadowless illuminations of all aspects of a thing. The epistemology implied in DOgen's understanding of enlightenment is plainly not that of simultaneous omniscience. Enlightenment does not entail the achievement of an instantaneous all-knowing view from nowhere, but rather the realization of being on an endless path of illuminating the innumerable aspects of reality, an ongoing journey of appreciating the “inexhaustible virtues” of things. Enlightenment is not a state of final escape to another world, but rather a never self-satisfied process of enlightening darkness and delusion within this world. Indeed, setting out on this never-ending Way of enlightenment entails awakening to the ineradicable play of knowledge and nescience. And thus, once again paradoxically, DOgen tells us: “When the Dharma does not yet saturate the body-mind, one thinks that it is sufficient. If the Dharma fills the body-mind, one notices an insufficiency.”29 This is DOgen's version of the Socratic wisdom of knowing one's ignorance.

(p. 357) DOgen makes this epistemological point most clearly and forcefully in the section of Genjōkōan where he speaks of the inexhaustible aspects and virtues of the ocean.

For example, if one rides in a boat out into the middle of the ocean where there are no mountains [in sight] and looks in the four directions, one will see only a circle without any other aspects in sight. Nevertheless, the great ocean is not circular, and it is not square; the remaining virtues of the ocean are inexhaustible. It is like a palace [for fish]. It is like a jeweled ornament [to gods]. It is just that, as far as my eyes can see, for a while it looks like a circle. It is also like this with the myriad things. Although things within and beyond this dusty world are replete with a variety of aspects, it is only through a cultivated power of vision that one can [intimately] perceive and apprehend them. In order to hear the household customs of the myriad things, you should know that, besides appearing as round or square, there are unlimited other virtues of the ocean and of the mountains, and there are worlds in all four directions. And you should know that it is not only like this over there, but also right here beneath your feet and even in a single drop [of water].

When DOgen speaks of a human being sitting on a boat in the middle of the ocean, looking out in all four directions and seeing only a vast empty circle, he is perhaps not only speaking literally but also metaphorically of a meditative experience of emptiness. We might refer in this regard to the “empty circle” or “circular shape” (ensō) that appears as the eighth of the Ten Oxherding Pictures,31 which is often interpreted as a symbol for the absolute emptiness of the Dharmakāya (the Truth Body of the Buddha), or the Buddha-nature (Busshō) understood—as DOgen and other Zen masters sometimes do—in terms of mu-Busshō (“no-Buddha-nature” or the “Buddha-nature-of-Nothingness”).

In any case, what is crucial is that neither the Ten Oxherding Pictures nor DOgen's Zen stops here at the empty circle. It may be necessary to pass through an experience of emptiness as a “great negation” of the ego and its

30

reifying attachments, and as the realization of absolute equality and equanimity. But even emptiness must not become a “perspectiveless perspective” to which one becomes attached. In the all-embracing “one taste” of perfect equality, the differences between singular things are concealed. Here, too, “emptiness must empty itself” and allow for distinctions, such that true nonduality is a matter of “not one and not two” ( fuichi funi). The universal truth of emptiness is not an overarching perspective that negates, but rather a pervading principle that enables the interplay between unique yet interconnected beings. In its “suchness,” each thing, person, animal, or event is neither an independent substance nor an indistinct portion of an undifferentiated totality: rather, it is a unique perspectival opening within the dynamically interweaving web of the world.

(p. 358) Hence, even though one may perceive the ocean (or world) as a vast empty circle, Dōgen goes on to write: “Nevertheless, the great ocean is not circular, and it is not square; the remaining virtues [or qualities] of the ocean are inexhaustible. It is like a palace [for fish]. It is like a jeweled ornament [to gods]. It is just that, as far as my eyes can see, for a while it looks like a circle.” Dōgen is drawing here on the traditional Buddhist notion that different sentient beings experience the world in different manners, depending on the conditioning of their karma. He is likely alluding specifically to the following commentary on the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha: “The sea itself basically has no disparities, yet owing to the karmic differences of devas, humans, craving spirits, and fish, devas see it as a treasure trove of jewels, humans see it as water, craving spirits see it as an ocean of pus, and fish see it

32

as a palatial dwelling.” Dōgen writes elsewhere that one “should not be limited to human views” and naively

think that what you view as water is “what dragons and fish see as water and use as water.” 33

The epistemology implied in Dōgen's view of enlightenment as an ongoing practice of enlightening, as an unending path of discovery, is thus what I would call an engaged yet egoless, a pluralistic yet nondual perspectivism. It is a perspectivism insofar as reality only shows itself one aspect and focal point at a time. On the one hand, in a deluded/deluding comportment to the world this aspect and focus get determined by the will of a self-fabricating ego that goes out and posits a horizon that delimits, filters, and schematizes how things can reveal themselves (namely, as objects set in front of a subject who represents and manipulates them). On the other hand, in an enlightened/enlightening comportment to the world, things are allowed to reveal themselves through nondual events in which the self has “forgotten itself” in its pure activity of egoless engagement. This engagement is neither simply passive nor simply active; for, originally, we are not detached ego-subjects who subsequently encounter (either passively or actively) independently subsisting objects. The original force at work in experience is neither “self-power” (jiriki) nor “other-power” (tariki). Rather, writes Dōgen, the “continuous practice” (gyOji) one participates in is “pure action that is forced neither by oneself nor by others.” 34 At every moment of enlightened/enlightening experience there is—for the time being—but a single nondual middle-voiced event of “being-time” (uji) 35 as a self-revelation of a singular aspect of reality. Enlightenment is a matter of realizing that the world is in truth made up of such nondual self-revelatory events. And just as these interconnected yet unique events are infinite, so is the path of their verification-in-practice.

Bibliography and Suggested Readings

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COOK, FRANCIS H. (1977) Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

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——— . (1989) Sounds of Valley Streams: Enlightenment in Dōgen's Zen. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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——— . (1985) Flowers of Emptiness: Selections from Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō, translated by Hee-Jin Kim. Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press.

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Notes:

(1) Dōgen 1990a, 1:54 and 59; compare Dōgen 2002, 40 and 44. Most of my primary references will be to Dōgen 1990a, a reliable and readily available Japanese edition of the ShObOgenzO in four volumes. Although all translations of quoted passages from Dōgen's texts will be my own, for the reader's convenience I will cross-reference available English translations in addition to citing the original Japanese texts.

(2) For a full translation of this text, together with an essay that includes an explanation of the title as well as an earlier version of parts of the present chapter, see Bret W. Davis, “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen's GenjOkOan,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed. William Edelglass and Jay L. Garfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 251–259. Other translations of GenjOkoan include “Manifesting Suchness” (Waddell and Abe 2002), “Manifesting Absolute Reality” (Cook 1989), “The Realized Universe” (Nishijima and Cross 1994), “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” (Tanahashi 1985), and “Offenbarmachen des vollen Erscheinens” (ľhashi and Elberfeld 2006).

(3) Dōgen was first treated as a “philosopher” in Japan in the early twentieth century, most notably by Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) and by Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). Prior to that, the study of his texts had been confined to Sōtō sectarian exegesis, culminating in ShObOgenzO keiteki (Tokyo: Daihōrinkaku, 1965, originally published posthumously in 1930), a detailed and influential commentary by Nishiari Bokusan (1821–1910). For an engaging example of a recent Zen master's commentary, which is frequently sharply critical of Nishiari's interpretations, see

Yasutani 1996. Philosophical studies of DOgen in the West include Abe 1992; Heine 1994; Kasulis 1981; Hee-Jin Kim 2004, 2007; and Kopf 2002.

(4) See DOgen 1999, 163–172, 179–184; Heine 1994, 243–249; and Cook 1989, 101–106.

(5) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 199 (§162); see also Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), p. 340 (§637).

(6) See Martin Heidegger, “The Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

(7) DOgen 1990a, 1:54; compare DOgen 2002, 41.

(8) DOgen 1990a, 1:53; compare DOgen 2002, 40.

(9) See Hanh 1988, and Lopez 1988.

(10) See Garfield 1995.

(11) See Swanson 1995.

(12) However, just as each of Tiantai's Three Truths is affirmed as a view of the truth, many traditional commentators (including Nishiari) stress that each of the first three sentences of the GenjOkOan ultimately has its own unassailable validity as a perspectival expression of the whole truth.

(13) DOgen 1990b, 171; compare DOgen 2002, 2–3.

(14) DOgen 1990a, 1:11; compare DOgen 2002, 8; also see DOgen 1985, 87.

(15) See Elberfeld 2004, 382.

(16) DOgen 1990a, 1:54; compare DOgen 2002, 40.

(17) See DOgen 1990a, 1:28; DOgen 2002, 19.

(18) DOgen 1990a, 1:60; compare DOgen 2002, 44–45.

(19) DOgen 1990a, 1:73; compare DOgen 2002, 61.

(20) As with much of Zen thought, DOgen's perspectivism is heavily influenced by Huayan (Jap. Kegon) philosophy, which in turn draws upon the Avatamsaka Sūtra's image of the “jewel net of Indra” wherein each jewel reflects all the others. See Cook 1977 and Chang 1971.

(21) DOgen 1990a, 1:54; compare DOgen 2002, 41.

(22) Note the terminological shift from “Buddha Dharma” to “Buddha Way” in the first section of the GenjOkOan. In Japan, the terms traditionally used for “Buddhism” (now bukkyO) were buppO (Buddha Dharma or Law, which refers to the Buddhist teachings or the truth indicated by those teachings) and butsudO (Buddha Way, which refers to the practice of the way of the Buddha).

(23) The very word “Zen” derives from the Sanskrit dhyāna, meaning meditation.

(24) DOgen Zenji goroku, 170; compare DOgen 2002, 3.

(23.) See DOgen 2002, 21–23, and DOgen 1994, 41–46. On the notion of “body-mind” in DOgen, see Yuasa 1987, 111–123; Nagatomo 1992, 105–129; and Shaner 1985, 129–155.

DOgen 1990a, 1:18; compare DOgen 2002, 14.

DOgen 1990a, 2:84; compare DOgen 1999, 174.

DOgen 1990a, 1:54; compare DOgen 2002, 41. There are contrasting interpretations of this passage. Along with most scholars, I have interpreted this “rousing the [whole] body-mind to perceive and listen” in terms of enlightenment. Other scholars have read it in terms of delusion. For a noteworthy example of the latter interpretation, see “‘GenjOkOan’ to shizen,” in Ueda Shizuteru shū [Ueda Shizuteru Collection] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2002), 9:286ff.

DOgen 1990a, 1:57; compare DOgen 2002, 43.

DOgen 1990a, 1:57–58; compare DOgen 2002, 43.

See Yamada 2004.

Quoted in DOgen 2002, 43; see also DOgen 1990a, 1:440.

DOgen 1990a, 2:198.

DOgen 1990a, 1:297; compare DOgen 1999, 114.

In the Uji fascicle (DOgen 1990a, 2:46ff.; DOgen 2002, 48ff.), DOgen famously reads the compound uji, not simply as “for the time being,” but as a nondual event of “being-time.” On this important aspect of his thought, see Heine 1985; Stambaugh 1990; and Elberfeld 2004.

Bret W. Davis

Bret W. Davis is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland. In addition to earning a Ph.D. in Western Philosophy, he spent over a decade in Japan working on Buddhist and Japanese philosophy. He is author of Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (2007); translator of Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations (2010); editor of Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (2009); and coeditor of Japanese Philosophy in the World (in Japanese, 2005) and Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School (2010). He has also published numerous articles in English and Japanese, including an article on the Kyoto school for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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