Section 8 | Religion and History of Ideas | Session 5
Agnieszka Kozyra , Warsaw University
Nishida Kitarô (1870-1945) is regarded as the most famous Japanese modern philosopher and the founder of the so-called Kyoto school. He was practicing Zen for about twelve years, and that is why the influence of Zen on his philosophy is significant. Zen is often called religion of jiriki (self-power) and confronted with tariki (Other Power) of Pure Land Buddhism. However according to Nishida there is no contradiction between Zen teaching and Pure Land Buddhism teaching, because in both cases religious experience is connected with the act of self-negation. That is why Nishida often quoted Shinran’s Tannishô (Deploration of non-orthodox teaching) and referred to the Other Power of Buddha Amida. The problem of Other Power became very personal to him after the death of his daughter, Yûko. Nishida’s mother, a devout Pure Land Buddhist, consoled him and sustained with her faith in Amida Buddha. Nishida at that time started to write about tariki experience, which for him meant a discovery of the power of the absolute grace. He claimed that compassion should be regarded as the center of religious awareness. In November 1907 he wrote: “When, in misfortune, we come to terms with our powerlessness and take refuge in God (Absolute) by abandoning ourselves, the sense of remorse turns into repentance. The burden of guilt is lifted from us, and the mind, freed of our self-conceit, comes to our rescue. For our shortcomings we are ask of the dead. We may even have a glimmer of that profound faith described in the Tannishô : “Chanting the name of Buddha Amida may be the seed of our rebirth into the Pure Land or our descent into hell. We have no way of knowing which way it will turn up. In this kind of realization, we touch life eternal.” In his late essay Zettaimujunteki jikodôitsu (Absolute contradictory self-identity) Nishida quoted Shinran defending his statement that religious conversion is not the result of struggle to keep moral precepts. He wrote about the essence of religious conversion, in which self-negation leads to the discovery of the true self. A man discovers his inner self-contradiction responding to the voice of Absolute within his heart. He cannot self-negate by jiriki (self-power). The purpose of Zen practice is also self-negation, so in this sense Zen is also a religion of tariki (Other Power). The opposition of jiriki and tariki should be viewed as two opposite aspect of the same, according to the Buddhist logic of sokuhi and Nishida’s logic of absolute contradictory self-identity.
Maximiliane Demmel, University of Munich
The automatic, instinctive articulation of Namu Amida Butsu which is not an act carried out by the individual, but provoked by Amida Buddha himself, ensures rebirth in the Pure Land. In the belief of the common folk, it means the belief to be reborn after death in the paradise-like Pure Land. After the influence of Western philosophical thinking, however, several scholars within Amida-Buddhism began to doubt the posthumous concept of the Pure Land. Meiji-period thinkers like
e.g. Kiyosawa Manshi did not approve of the Pure Land as a concrete paradise where the soul goes after death, but considered it to be a sphere of the spiritual realm which cannot be objectified. When a believer has reached the shinjin (the believing heart), he or she is reborn spiritually in the Pure Land. In order to support the view that already Shinran located the Pure Land in the spiritual realm, one can refer to a text passage by Shinran where he claims that there was still the fault of passion attached to his life but that his heart resided already in the Pure Land.Suzuki Daisetsu claims that the Pure Land is only an image of the spiritual renewal of the soul, like the enlightenment satori in Zen-Buddhism. Though it may seem similar to the interpretation of the scholars mentioned above, it is regarded as too much of a symbolic view of the Pure Land by Amida-Buddhist intellectuals. According to Suzuki, Amida is our own inner self which we have found in the moment of nenbutsu and here with we are born in the Pure Land though we are physically still here in this world. Suzuki maintains that philosophically we could call the hongan (primal vow) the transindividual “will” (which could be compared to Schopenhauer’s transindividual will). However, for scholars adhering to Amida-Buddhism this view sounds too much like a Zen-Buddhist way of thinking and probably even too philosophically idealistic (in the sense of German idealism) which could be an influence of Nishida Kitarô on Suzuki. For Amida-Buddhists, the dichotomy of human beings and Amida remains even when the heart has reached the state of shinjin and will be reborn in the Pure Land. Different from the religious experience of Zen-Buddhism, the satori, it is not an experience of intuition (in German idealism it would be called “Anschauungserfahrung”) because the ontological concepts are different. Satori is an experience of unification of the self with reality respecting the realisation that the self is not separate from the always changing reality, whereas the articulation of Namu Amida Butsu is an experience of mutual relation of the believer and Amida. To illuminate this mutual relation, one could use an arrow in both directions like but not two parallel arrows like which would be suitable to illuminate the relation between a Christian believer and the Christian God. So the mutual relation between believer and Amida is at the same time a unification and a dichotomy or one could say it is a non-dualism but not a monism. (Monism: the relative being and the absolute are one, dualism = the relative being and the absolute are two, non-dualism as it is understood in Amida-Buddhism = the relative being and the absoluteresp. Amida cannot become ontologically one but the nenbutsu and believing heart is initiated by Amida.) Relative beings cannot become Buddhas in Pure-Land-Buddhism but Amida and human beings are inseparably linked. Thus Amida and human beings are not one in the monistic sense but neither are they two in the purely dualistic sense . In my paper, I would like to focus on Suzuki’s Pure-Land interpretation and mention the contrasting interpretation of Amida-Buddhist scholars like Kiyosawa Manshi. In this way I would like to give an impression of the controversy within the Meiji-scholars who wanted to interpret the rebirth of the Pure Land in the “enlightened” Western way.
Steffen Döll, University of Munich, Germany
Ueda Shizuteru (born 1926) occupies a special position in the Japanese intellectual landscape of today: as the successor of Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990) at Kyôto University’s Institute for Religious Studies he belongs to the core of the Kyôto School of Philosophy founded by Nishida Kitarô (1870-1945), while at the same time being its last representative in the strict sense of the term. Furthermore, he has made himself known in the field of religious studies with his analyses of medieval german mysticism during the last decades – especially Meister Eckhart – as well as with thoroughly instructive interpretations on the history and thought of Zen Buddhism. In spite of the great variety of his works and his regular publication of books and articles – a great amount of his writings and speeches are published in German and English – Ueda has up to this day hardly been noticed by his European colleagues. I will therefore attempt an introduction into the profundity and interconnectedness of Ueda’s philosophy. His religio-philosophical anthropology, the “problem of the self”, which he addresses in a great number of his analyses, thereby serves as constant basis of interpretation. A problem providing an easy approach to Ueda’s considerations is the picture text of the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures (first published in English translation in Suzuki Daisetsu’s Essays in Zen BuddhismFirst Series 1949). This series originated from the Zen Buddhism of 12 th century China, where it served as a kind of meditation manual for both monks and the laity, and is in itself equipped with commentary and poems. Even more than in China the pictures gained popularity among the Japanese laity – in the Edo period (1600-1868) they may well have been the most commonly read Zen text. Ueda takes up these ox-herding pictures and conducts by exact pictorial analyses and texual interpretations – while also referring to the complete body of the Zen tradition – a careful study of Buddhist practice. He comes to the conclusion that the advancing progress of meditation and practice, in which the practitioner distances himself from his mistaken state of being and approaches his essential existence, opens up into the “trinity of the true self,” as depicted in the last three pictures. This true self is an existence which has utterly deserted the plane of ignorant distinctions and dualities in the Buddhist sense and participates unhindered in reality, in fact is congruent with reality such as it is. That is, practice itself is rendered meaningless with the negation of conceptualized dichotomies in total: the last obstacle of one’s own enlightenment is broken through into an area which can only be grasped as the nothingness depicted in picture eight. But the series does not deteriorate into nihilism; the radically consequent negation of attachment gives birth to confirmation, the “position” of reality as such (picture nine), out of the negation of negation itself. In the process of practice, negation of practice and negation of negation the self comes into the state of being in which nothingness and being and self are inseparably interconnected. Ueda’s precise formula is the “self as not-self,” whose dynamic and playful action can be seen in picture ten - the encounter of self and other as the socially effective reality of the true self. Ueda finds a counterpart for his religio-theoretical speculation in Nishida’s philosophy of pure experience and the theory of place (bashô). With these, he brings the experience of the Zen practitioner into an understandable and above all discursive form. At the same time theoretically conceptualized philosophy is made clear in its meaningfulness in the living, lived world. Ueda’s phenomenology of self is shown to be structured as a twofold „being-in-the-world“: the self is existing and taking place in its actual, concrete environs, while at the same time and always being surrounded and permeated by the equally actual absolute nothingness. In Ueda’s thought, the interconnection between the existentially performed process of Zen experience and the philosophy of place is mutually beneficent: thinking as such is concretized and unfolds its practical significance nowhere more clearly than in the last ox-herding picture, while Zen Buddhism is shown to be an also philosophically suggestive complex, which provides a vantage point from which East Asian religiosity can be considered in a new light . In conclusion, Ueda’s philosophy of religion can be said to derive from the concrete, existential experience and to find a valid formulation in the critical application of philosophical terminology. Insofar as Ueda is attempting to express and transmit this experience rather than trying to explain it systematically, his is a phenomenology in the basic sense of the term.