Zen's Nonegocentric Perspectivism

123 FS 7 O Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism O Bret W. Davis D PR True life is beyond all meaning, and yet all meaning is constituted in relation to it. —Nishitani1 EC TE Insofar as the word “knowledge” has any meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.—“Perspectivism.” —Nietzsche2 O R R Precisely because letting‐be always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole. Letting‐be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing. —Heidegger3 When one side is illuminated, the other side is darkened. —Dōgen4 U N C Ways of seeing mountains and water differ according to the type of being [that sees them]. … Do not stupidly assume that every kind of being uses as water what we view as water. —Dōgen5 To study the Buddha Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by the myriad things [of the world]. —Dōgen6 From the pine tree, learn of the pine tree. —Bashō7 Buddhist Philosophy: A Comparative Approach, First Edition. Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. c07.indd 123 01/27/2017 8:19:45 PM 124 Bret W. Davis EC TE D PR O O FS This chapter approaches Zen, in part, from the perspective of Western dis­ courses on perspectivism. It begins by examining the ambivalently egocentric character of Nietzsche’s perspectivism, and later contrasts the egocentric perspectivism employed by Renaissance Western artists with the “floating perspective” developed by Song Chinese landscape painters. It also investigates the relevant Buddhist background of Zen, especially the perspectivism of the Avataṃ saka Sūtra and the Huayan school, which it compares and contrasts with that of Leibniz’s monadology. Passing through some reflections on Cusanus, it ultimately looks to classical Zen masters such as Linji and Dōgen and to the Kyoto School Zen philosopher Nishitani Keiji in order to make its case. At issue throughout is the question of what Zen can contribute to a cross‐ cultural dialogue on the nature of knowledge. The thesis is that the episte­ mology implied in Zen is a kind of perspectivism, and yet it differs significantly from the egocentric varieties of perspectivism that are prevalent in the Western tradition. The epistemology of Zen, it is argued, is a nonegocentric perspectivism. More precisely, the point is this: Rather than seeing things only from one’s own habitually egocentric point of view, Zen cultivates one’s ability to play the role of either “host” or “guest,” as appropriate to the situation, and in general to empathetically and compassionately participate in the myriad perspectival openings onto the world that take place in singular events of interconnection. The Ambivalence of Nietzsche’s Perspectivism O R R The idea of perspectivism is often, and with good reason, associated with Nietzsche. So let us begin with him. Nietzsche reveals how perspectival delimi­ tations are what make life livable and knowledge possible. Alexander Nehamas’ elucidation is helpful here: U N C To engage in any activity, and in particular in any inquiry, we must ulti­ mately be selective. We must bring some things into the foreground and distance others into the background. We must assign a greater relative importance to some things than we do to others, and still others we must completely ignore. We do not, and cannot, begin (or end) with “all the data.” This is an incoherent desire and an impossible goal. “To grasp everything” would be to do away with all perspectival relations, it would mean to grasp nothing, to misapprehend the nature of knowledge.8 After all, what would it be like to see a thing, or a person, all at once from everywhere? In this blinding cubist plenum, there would be no back and hence no real front, no inside and hence no real outside, no shadow and hence no real light. Nehamas illustrates this point with the example of painting: c07.indd 124 01/27/2017 8:19:45 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 125 R EC TE D PR O O FS “There is no sense in which painters…can ever paint ‘everything’ that they see. … [The] understanding of everything would be like a painting that incorporates all styles or that is painted in no style at all – a true chimera, both impossible and monstrous.”9 Taking a perspective on something not only limits what we can see, it also enables us to see in any meaningful sense in the first place. In thought as in perception, perspectival limitations are what allow us to have meaningful knowledge of anything. A perspective enables by delimiting knowledge. Nietzsche does not just write about perspectivism; the polyvocal character of Nietzsche’s texts themselves enact his “perspectivism.” His texts are often a provocative amalgamation of aphoristic forces, forces which play off against one another to produce a dynamically ambiguous and often even ambivalent combination of perspectives. Yet there is nevertheless a particularly dominant and dominating voice in Nietzsche’s polylogue which speaks of the “will to power” as a drive to impose order on the chaos of perspectival multiplicity by submitting it to the com­ mand of a ruling perspective. Life itself, writes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, is “essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one’s own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildness, exploitation…life simply is will to power.”10 To be sure, we also find in Nietzsche’s texts a very different voice, one which calls for a nonwillful openness to perspectival plurality. Passages such as the following have allowed Nietzsche to be called a champion in the tradition of Keats’ “negative capability”11 and even “an unsung precursor of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit.”12 U N C O R Learning to see – habituating the eye to repose, patience, to letting things come to it; postponing judgment, learning to go around and grasp each individual case from all sides…the essence of which is precisely not to “will.” … One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one’s hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one’s stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things.13 c07.indd 125 This passage resonates well with the nonwillful and nonegocentric perspectiv­ ism found in Zen. And yet, in the same book Nietzsche contradicts this restraint of willing and this openness to perspectival multiplicity when he writes: “I want, once and for all, not to know many things. Wisdom sets limits to knowledge too.”14 He even affirms a kind of “will to ignorance.”15 Why does Nietzsche want not only to recognize the limitations of knowledge, but also to limit knowledge? The following notebook entry is revealing here: “Not ‘to know’ but to schematize – to impose upon chaos as much regularity 01/27/2017 8:19:45 PM 126 Bret W. Davis U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS and form as our practical needs require.”16 Faced with the world’s overwhelming and bewildering complexity, the practical desire to assert control by imposing a schematic order on its chaotic flow constricts Nietzsche’s pluralistic openness. The will to ignorance for the sake of keeping things manageable counteracts Nietzsche’s willingness to open “more eyes, different eyes,” to “employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.”17 In the end there is a profound ambivalence to Nietzsche’s perspectivism. On the one hand, it expresses an awareness of the always finite limitations of one’s stand­ point, and thus implies an openness to other points of view. Nietzsche, in fact, explicitly derides “the ridiculous immodesty that would be involved in decreeing from our corner that perspectives are permitted only from this corner.” Rather, he claims, “the world has become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.”18 On the other hand, we are told that “interpretation is itself a means of becoming master of something.”19 It is our needs and drives that interpret the world, and since “every drive is a kind of lust to rule…each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other drives to accept as a norm.”20 The “ego” for Nietzsche is not a given substance; it is a composite of compet­ ing and cooperating wills to power. It is thus composed, when it is successfully composed, by what Nietzsche calls “the great egoism of our dominating will.”21 Nietzsche’s critique of the idea of the ego as an independent subject and sub­ stance, and his account of the construction of the composite ego, shares much with Buddhist doctrines of no‐self (Skt anātman) and the five aggregates (Skt skandhas). Yet Nietzsche’s frequent affirmations of egoism are at odds with the main thrust of Buddhism. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “I propose: egoism belongs to the nature of the noble soul – I mean that unshak­ able faith that to a being such as ‘we are’ other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves.”22 Elsewhere I have examined in detail the deep ambivalences in Nietzsche’s thought as they reveal themselves with remarkable clarity from the perspective of Zen.23 Suffice it to say here that my sympathies with Nietzsche’s radical openness to perspectival plurality are tempered by a dissatisfaction with his tendency to construe perspectival delimitation as necessarily an imposition of order on chaos by an egocentric force of will to power. In Zen I find a way of both appreciating perspectival plurality and engaging in perspectival delimitation in a manner that is neither willful nor egocentric. Does a Buddha have (Perspectival) Omniscience? In order to develop an understanding of Zen’s perspectivism, we need to first consider the contradictory fact that there is a long tradition of attributing “omniscience” (Skt sarvajñana or sarvākārajñatā) to buddhas and bodhisattvas, c07.indd 126 01/27/2017 8:19:45 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 127 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS which seems to suggest that enlightenment transcends the perspectival limits of human knowledge. At several places in the Pāli Canon, the Buddha is asked whether he has omniscience (Pāli sabbaññutā). He generally responds by saying that he does have “the threefold true knowledge,” namely, “knowledge of the recollection of past lives,” “knowledge of the passing away and reappearing of beings…according to their actions,” and the liberating “knowl­ edge of the destruction of the taints” that had bound him to samsara.24 Yet he denies that he has omniscience in the strong sense of actual simultaneous knowledge of every fact in the past, present, and future. Bhikkhu Bodhi writes: “According to the exegetical Theravāda tradition the Buddha is omniscient in the sense that all knowable things are potentially accessible to him. He cannot, however, know everything simultaneously and must advert to what he wishes to know.” 25 Perhaps this implies that a Buddha has what we might call perspectival omniscience, in the sense that he or she could potentially, albeit consecutively, see anything from any perspective. In any case, the already strong Theravāda claim that a Buddha potentially and consecutively knows anything later gets inflated by some Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions into the claim that a Buddha actually and simultaneously knows everything. According to the Avataṃ saka Sūtra (which I single out here because it became the basis for the Chinese Huayan school, which in turn exerted a significant influence on Zen), in the last of the ten stages of develop­ ment, a Bodhisattva attains “omniscient superknowledge…illuminating all worlds in the ten directions.”26 The “penetrating knowledge of enlightening beings [i.e., bodhisattvas] in this stage is infinite”;27 they “attain boundless knowledge comprehending all,”28 and their “superknowledge of the celestial eye” enables them to witness the unfolding karmic processes of “sentient beings in worlds as many as atoms in untold buddha lands” in the entire past, present, and future.29 Perhaps such teachings of omniscience can be understood as pedagogical hyperbole meant to inspire and to intimate the unfathomable depths of both our present ignorance and potential enlightenment. More critically, they can be seen as part of what Paul Griffiths calls “the buddhalogical enterprise as an example of thinking motivated by the desire to limn maximal greatness.”30 The thought process would be: If knowledge is a virtue, then Buddha, the greatest of all beings, must possess the maximal degree of knowledge imaginable, which is omniscience. Griffiths points out that some of the digests of Mahāyāna doc­ trines of buddhahood (his focus is on Sanskrit and Tibetan texts stemming from the fourth through eighth centuries in India) argued for more modest interpretations of the Buddha’s omniscience, either saying (as we have seen in the Pāli Canon) that the universality of the Buddha’s knowledge is potential, rather than actual, or saying that he knew “everything important” rather than literally everything. Yet the dominant view in these digests is reported to be that “the scope of Buddha’s awareness is universal in a very strong sense,” c07.indd 127 01/27/2017 8:19:45 PM 128 Bret W. Davis EC TE D PR O O FS including such claims as that the Buddha’s universal awareness has always existed and that it involves “the simultaneous apprehension of everything in a single moment.”31 Griffiths argues that such claims derive from a questionable attempt to attribute maximal greatness to the Buddha, as the Christian theological tradi­ tion has tended to do with God. He argues that the result is doctrinal incoher­ ence or at least incongruity with core tenets of the Buddhist tradition. When pushed to the extreme, the doctrine of omniscience ends up “denying that Buddhas have conscious mental states, since having such states is just what it means for there to be something that it is like to be a particular being” with cognitive and perceptual limitations.32 As we have seen, meaningful conscious­ ness as we know it involves perspectival delimitation; it is indeed such delimi­ tation that gives form and shape to anything that can be perceived or thought. Perhaps a Buddha is liberated from only seeing the interconnections of the cosmos from his or her perspective, but would still see things, at any given time, from a perspective. In the Pāli Canon the Buddha explicitly acknowl­ edges: “There is no recluse or brahmin who knows all, who sees all, simultane­ ously; that is not possible.”33 I will argue that the Zen tradition stays true to this early teaching. In fact, in the Zen tradition I find no interest whatsoever in omniscience, perspectival or otherwise. Although it developed under the influence of the Huayan school and thus the Avataṃ saka Sūtra, the lesson Zen takes from the latter is not that of omniscience, but rather mutual perspectival interrelation.34 O R R Huayan’s Jewel Net of Indra and Leibniz’s Monadology U N C One of the most famous teachings that derives from the Avataṃ saka Sūtra,35 and that is developed into a central teaching of the Huayan school, is the Jewel Net of Indra. The universe is envisioned as a huge net, each knot of which contains a jewel that reflects, and is reflected in, all the others. The first patri­ arch of Huayan, Dushun (557–640), writes: “This imperial net is made all of jewels: because the jewels are clear, they reflect each other’s images, appearing in each other’s reflections upon reflections, ad infinitum.”36 This may remind one of Leibniz’s Monadology, in which he writes that “each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and that, conse­ quently, is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.”37 Yet, there is a basic onto­ logical difference between Huayan’s and Leibniz’s conceptions in that the latter thinks of monads as independent substances that cannot affect one another. In paragraph 7 of the Monadology, Leibniz claims: “There is…no way of explain­ ing how a monad can be altered or changed in its inner being by any other creature, for nothing can be transposed within it… The monads have no c07.indd 128 01/27/2017 8:19:45 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 129 EC TE D PR O O FS windows through which anything can enter or depart.” He goes on to say in paragraph 51 that it is only through the “intervention of God” that one monad could affect another; one monad only seems to cause changes in another due to the divine providence of the “pre‐established harmony between all substances” (paragraph 78). The need for divine intervention to orchestrate merely apparent interactions between independent substances (monads) is unnecessary in the case of the Huayan Buddhist teaching. Indeed the image of the Jewel Net of Indra, like other images such as the Tower of Maitreya, is meant to symbolize that “all beings, being interdependent, therefore imply in their individual being the simultaneous being of all other things.”38 In other words, such images are meant to portray the universe, or multiverse, as it is constituted by processes of “interdependent origination” (Skt pratītya‐samutpāda; Ch. yuanqi; Jp. engi 縁起), the basic ontological tenet of Buddhism, which rejects precisely an ontology of independent substances such as that of Leibniz. In fact, in the end Dushun admits that the simile of the Jewel Net of Indra is merely an imperfect analogy; it is imperfect precisely insofar as it may be mistaken to suggest that beings are independent substances: “These jewels only have their reflected images con­ taining and entering each other – their substances are [misleadingly portrayed as] separate. Things are not like this, because their whole substance merges completely.”39 What would be a merit of the image for Leibniz – the independent substantiality of the jewels – is a crucial demerit for Dushun. Despite this fundamental ontological disagreement, Dushun nevertheless might have appreciated Leibniz’s epistemological perspectivism. Leibniz writes: C O R R And as the same city looked at from different sides appears entirely different, is as if multiplied perspectively; so it also happens that, as a result of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are as it were so many different universes, which are nevertheless only the perspec­ tives of a single one, according to the different points of view of each monad.40 U N This helps us draw out an important implication of the Jewel Net of Indra, namely that each jewel reflects the whole from its own unique perspective. This is why the Huayan thinkers stress that the One harmoniously co‐exists with the Many; the “oneness” of all things does not cancel out their “manyness,” for the universe is at the same time a multiverse. The Avataṃ saka Sūtra says of Sudhana’s experience of the Tower of Maitreya that “inside the great tower he saw hundreds of other towers similarly arrayed; he saw those towers as infinitely vast as space, evenly arrayed in all directions, yet these towers were not mixed up with one another, being each mutually distinct, while appearing reflected in each and every object of all the other towers.”41 Each tower houses all the others, each jewel reflects all the others, from its own unique perspective. c07.indd 129 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM 130 Bret W. Davis Fazang’s Principal and Satellites, Linji’s Host and Guests O O FS Still, there is another limitation to images such as the Jewel Net of Indra, inso­ far as it might be taken to suggest that each jewel is locked in its own perspec­ tive. Such a perspectivism would, after all, remain egocentric. In fact, the perspectivism developed by the Huayan and Zen patriarchs affirms an ability to shift the focal point of experience, such that different points in the web of interconnections that make up the world can, in turn, take center stage. This is evident in the manner in which the third Huayan patriarch, Fazang, introduces the Jewel Net of Indra. He presents it as a teaching of how “principal and satellites reflect one another.” TE D PR This means that with self as principal, one looks to others as satellites or companions; or else one thing or principle is taken as principal and all things or principles become satellites or companions; or one body is taken as principal and all bodies become satellites. Whatever single thing is brought up, immediately principal and satellite are equally contained, multiplying infinitely.42 U N C O R R EC And so, while the self can and should at times become the focal point of a situ­ ation, such as when one raises one’s hand to speak in a classroom, the focus will shift when another person or thing takes center stage. In such cases it is possible to experience oneself as no longer occupying the center of attention. The capacity for genuine empathy, after all, is also that of ek‐stasis (literally “stand­ ing outside oneself ”). Yet this capacity for ecstatic empathy, or kenotic (i.e., self‐emptying) compassion, or in general the ability to play the role of guest, to listen, to be a catalyst and conduit for another’s moment in the sun, requires a profound level of self‐confidence. The Huayan language of “host” (Ch. zhu 主) and “guest” (Ch. bin 賓 or ke 客) is taken up by the ninth‐century Zen master Linji and, as we shall see later, by the twentieth‐century Zen philosopher Nishitani Keiji. Linji, to be sure, in a certain sense privileges the role of “host” or “master” (zhu 主) over that of “guest.” He associates the roles of host and guest with those of teacher and student, although he sees these roles as flexible and even reversible in the dynamic encounter of what came to be known as “Dharma combat,” in which masters and students challenge one another to express their holistic under­ standing of the Dharma.43 At one point Linji even associates the role of “guest” with that of a “servant” (Ch. nu 奴) who slavishly follows others,44 and he repeatedly says that “lack of faith in oneself ” or “lack of self‐confidence” (Ch. zixin‐buji 自信不及) is the main problem that ails us.45 One of Linji’s most famous teachings is: “Just make yourself master of every situation, and wherever you stand is the true [place].”46 It is important to point out, however, c07.indd 130 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 131 that Linji is by no means counseling a self‐assertion of one’s own relative ego over others. It is by no means a matter of what Nietzsche calls a “sick selfishness” that says, “Everything for me.”47 A recent Zen master, Ōmori Sōgen, writes that Linji’s notion of “becoming master wherever you are” is O FS not a matter of selfishly asserting “me, me” all the time, but rather quite the opposite. It is a matter of negating the self in the ground of the self, of transcending the self and returning to the absolute, that is, of discov­ ering the true self in something absolute, and of acting on the basis of its affirmation. If each of our actions is rooted in this kind of standpoint, it arises naturally from an absolute freedom.48 O R R EC TE D PR O A true master is born only by way of undergoing what Zen calls “the great death” (Jp. daishi 大死) of the egocentric ego and returning to the empty ground of freedom and responsibility. Such a true master is self‐confident enough to play the role of guest or even servant when and where appropriate. Indeed, the eighteenth‐century Zen master Hakuin tells us in effect that, in the deepest sense, the true master is a servant to all beings: “You must resolve to withdraw yourself this very day, to reduce yourself to the level of a footman or a lackey, and yet bring your mind‐master to firm and sure resolution.”49 The true “master” of a situation thus need not always play the role of “host.” He or she can also play the role of consummate guest. He or she can lead as well as follow, listen as well as speak. The Zen ideal of a relationship among equals is in fact a mutual exchange, a harmonious circulation, of the roles of guest and host (Jp. hinju gokan 賓主互換). The contemporary Zen philosopher Ueda Shizuteru writes, for example, that “the free exchange of the role of host is the very core of dialogue.”50 C Alberti’s Egocentric and Guo Xi’s Floating Perspectivism U N In order to appreciate the fluidly pluralistic and nonegocentric nature of Zen’s perspectivism, some further comparisons with elements of the Western tradition will be helpful. It is instructive to contrast the kind of perspectivism found in Daoist landscape paintings from the Song period in China with the kind of perspectivism established in the Renaissance by artists and authors such as Leon Battista Alberti. Alberti understands per­ spectival delimitation in an exclusively egocentric manner. Perspective in Western art in general is understood as the manner in which I see the world from my vantage point. This is readily apparent in the manner in which a landscape is enframed by a painter following Alberti’s technique of linear c07.indd 131 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM 132 Bret W. Davis EC TE D PR O O FS perspective: The painter stands still, shuts one eye, and observes a landscape through a window fitted with a mathematical grid, which Alberti himself refers to as a “veil” constructed of intersecting lines of thread.51 It is not difficult to relate Alberti’s vision of painting to what Heidegger calls “the age of the world‐picture.” “The fundamental event of the modern age,” writes Heidegger, “is the conquest of the world as picture.”52 “Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such.”53 To be sure, the modern age may not be as metaphysically monolithic as Heidegger suggests. “That [Alberti’s] repre­ sentation of space does violence to the way we actually experience things was noted already by Leonardo da Vinci,” who complained that Alberti’s tech­ nique “reduces the viewing subject to a kind of cyclops, and obliges the eye to remain at one fixed, indivisible point.”54 As Merleau‐Ponty more recently asks, “What would vision be without eye movement?”55 Indeed we “normally see with two, constantly shifting eyes”56 and with a “body” which is not only “an intertwining of vision and movement,” but an intertwining of seeing and seen, self and world.57 Given his critique of the egocentric and avowedly Protagorian58 world‐ picture of Alberti’s “visual pyramid,” viewed by an immobile cyclops through a mathematical grid, Merleau‐Ponty would likely have been deeply sympathetic with what the Chinese artist and theorist Guo Xi called the “floating perspective” (Ch. bao you yu kan飽游飫看) of Song landscape or “mountains and waters” (Ch. shanshui山水) paintings (see Guo Xi’s own masterpiece, “Early Spring”). Quoting Guo Xi, Francois Jullien writes: O R R To paint the mountain will be to paint it as a “total” (hun [渾]) image, in its plentitude and compossibility… To paint is not to apprehend the mountain “in one locale” and from a “single corner.” … “The form of the mountain is to be seen on each of its faces.” To paint the great image of the mountain is to deploy all of these many [perspectival aspects or] “so’s,” without any excluding any other.59 U N C Shanshui painting is a spiritual exercise that requires a “fasting of the heart‐ mind” (Zhuangzi) in order to get back in touch with the flow of qi (氣), the psycho‐physical breath‐energy that circulates between and indeed mutually produces self and world. As Jullien puts it, the shanshui painter demonstrates the process through which, “by moving back inside us to the more primordial, more unappropriated, nonrigid state of breath‐energy, we relate to external realities in an ‘empty,’ available way and enter into a relationship, not of know­ ledge, but of complicity with them.”60 How different is this fluid communion or respirational exchange with nature expressed in shanshui paintings61 from the detached, rigid, and avowedly egocentric aims of painting by means of a mathematical window‐grid of linear perspective! c07.indd 132 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 133 Cusanus’ Infinite Sphere Whose Center is Everywhere O FS To be sure, there is another side to the story of perspectivism in the West. In his illuminating study of the genesis of modernity, Infinity and Perspective, Karsten Harries points out how, since the Renaissance, and even especially in the Renaissance, “reflection on perspective leads quite naturally to the vision of an infinite universe that knows neither center nor circumference.”62 The semi­ nal figure in Harries’ account is Cusanus (Nicholas of Cusa), who developed the idea that “God is an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere [and] whose circumference [is] nowhere.”63 Cusanus is said to have also advanced the concomitant claim that D PR O our experience of the world is limited by what happens to be our point of view and that we should not think that such a point of view gives us access to the way things really are: there are infinitely many other possible points of view, and to each corresponds a possible experience that would take itself to be the center.64 U N C O R R EC TE It is not surprising that Cusanus’ idea of God as an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere has been taken up by Nishida Kitarō and Nishitani of the Kyoto School,65 since it resonates well with Huayan and Zen conceptions of the universe as a multiverse of (potentially harmoniously) interactive and inter­ expressive monads. Yet this East Asian Buddhist perspectivism would question whether it is necessarily the case that egocentrism is “founded in the nature of experience itself, which inevitably places the experiencing subject at what it does indeed experience as the center” of the universe.66 For Zen, this egocentrism well describes unenlightened experience, but not enlightened experience. Harries notes that “the fundamental thought of De Docta Ignorantia came to Cusanus…while he was ‘at sea in route back from Greece’…where he had worked toward the reunification of the Roman and Greek churches, toward a reconciliation of their different perspectives.”67 In De Docta Ignorantia Cusanus wrote that “it would always seem to each person…that he was at the ‘immovable’ center…and that all the other things were moved.”68 Having made a voyage to China and back across the Sea of Japan, Dōgen also refers to the experience of being on a boat. In Genjōkōan (The Presencing of Truth) he writes: “A person riding in a boat looks around at the shore, and mistak­ enly thinks that the shore is drifting along. When one fixes one’s eyes closely on the boat, one realizes that it is the boat that is moving forward.”69 In other words, by “studying the self ” one realizes that one is not the fixed center of the universe, and thus one becomes open to other provisional centers of the multiverse. c07.indd 133 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM 134 Bret W. Davis TE D PR O O FS Harries himself says that what he calls “the principle of perspective” implies that “to think a perspective as a perspective is to be in some sense already beyond it, is to have become learned about its limitations.”70 Hence, Cusanus’ Docta Ignorantia teaches us that “To become learned about one’s ignorance is to become learned about the extent to which what we took to be knowledge is subject to the distorting power of perspective.”71 As Cusanus puts it, to have become aware of the manner in which each person places themselves at the center of the universe is to become aware that “the world‐machine will have its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere, so to speak; for God, who is everywhere and nowhere, is its circumference and center.”72 Harries understands the positive implications of “the principle of perspec­ tive” as indicating the manner in which we humans do have some ability to transcend our place and time through rational abstraction and through mystical experience.73 I would add that we not only have some capacity for self‐transcendence in these vertical senses, we also have the capacity for self‐transcendence in a horizontal sense; that is to say, we are also able to escape from perspectival egocentricity through ecstatic empathy with other perspectives and the perspectives of others. Ecstatic Empathy, Kenotic Compassion U N C O R R EC Nietzsche asserts: “Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings.”74 Elsewhere he writes that “the kernel of the perspective view” implies that “a living creature is ‘egoistic’ through and through.”75 Yet what about such feelings as the cardinal Buddhist virtues of loving‐kindness and compassion (Skt maitrī‐karunā; Jp. jihi 慈悲)? Is perspectival knowledge always delimited by an egocentric will to power? Zen offers us an alternative Way of perspectival delimitation, one motivated more by ecstatic empathy, or kenotic compassion, rather than by egocentric willfulness. The capacity for ecstatic empathy would not involve an analogizing projection of the content of one’s own mind onto others (as Theodore Lipps’ theory of Einfühlung would have it), but rather an emptying of the heart‐mind that allows it to be filled with an experiential content that is no longer determined merely by the way things appear to, and are emotionally reacted to from, one’s own egocentric perspective. Something similar is the other side of the openness of Keats’ “negative capa­ bility.” By not grasping after a single unifying perspective of “fact or reason,” one is free to project oneself into various perspectives. With regard to Keats’ idea of the “chameleon poet,” Richard Woodhouse writes: “he will be able to throw his own soul into any object he sees or imagines.”76 Keats was reportedly influenced by William Hazlitt’s theory of “sympathetic identification,” which is claimed to be an essential function of the human mind. This ability to sympathetically identify (i.e., empathize) with other perspectives is said to be c07.indd 134 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 135 particularly pronounced in poets such as Shakespeare, of whom Hazlitt remarked: “He had only to think of anything in order to become that thing.”77 In a similar vein, the haiku poet Bashō wrote: FS From the pine tree learn of the pine tree, And from the bamboo of the bamboo O Commenting on these lines, Nishitani writes: PR O Our “knowing” rational order, or logos, always begins from and ends in the place where things speak of themselves… Its point of departure is where things are on their own home‐ground, just as they are, manifest in their suchness.78 U N C O R R EC TE D Heidegger said something similar when he defined “phenomenology” as “apophainesthai ta phainomena – to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself.”79 Yet what would it mean to know things just as they are? How could the subject completely jump out of its skin to become one with the object? In accord with Heidegger, Nishitani would reply: “we do not presuppose a sepa­ ration of subject and object and then work toward their unification.”80 If we begin by hypostatizing a subject/object split, there is no way back out of this dichotomy. The problem with realism as well as with idealism, according to Nishitani, is the self‐enclosure of willful subjectivity. He claims that even a dualistic realism ultimately lapses into a closet subjective idealism, insofar as it falls prey to what he calls the “paradox of representation” – for “even the very idea of something independent of representation can only come about as a representation.”81 If we begin as a self‐enclosed subject attempting to know objects as indepen­ dently subsisting things‐in‐themselves, we begin too late, that is to say, we don’t begin at the beginning, at the originary interrelational experience of being‐in‐the‐world. The unique “suchness” of a thing is not the fixed essence of an independent substance that is isolated from us and from other things, but rather what I would call a singular event of interconnection. Such nondual events can be reduced to “objectivity” no more than they can be reduced to “subjectivity.” They are rather originary events of interconnection from which both subjects and objects are but a posteriori abstractions. To know a thing just as it is, to let things show themselves from themselves, is to ecstatically participate in the perspectival opening of a singular event of interconnection. Nishida advanced the epistemic ideal of “seeing a thing by becoming it” (Jp. mono to natte miru 物となって見る).82 Yet, according to Nishida, this is c07.indd 135 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM 136 Bret W. Davis EC TE D PR O O FS not simply a matter of passive receptivity; it is not a matter of a “passive intellect” (Gk nous pathetikos)83 that knows forms by receiving their impressions on its tabula rasa. Rather, it entails a dynamic process of what Nishida calls “acting‐ intuition” (Jp. kōi‐teki chokkan行為的直観).84 The paradigm for Nishida here is neither detached observation nor mechanical production, but rather artistic creation or poiesis. Intuition takes place only in the process of this creative activity. Nevertheless, the return to a nonwillful participation in this poietic event of delimitation does require on the part of the self a radical self‐emptying, an ability to stand outside the ego and let things, as events of interconnection, speak for themselves. The human self is, on the one hand, persistently tempted to close in on itself as an ego‐subject of will; and yet, on the other hand, it is also capable of open­ ing itself up to other perspectives by way of a self‐emptying. We are capable not only of willful appropriation but also of nonwillful letting‐be. The latter stance of kenotic openness, which Nishitani calls the Zen “standpoint of emptiness (Skt śūnyatā; Jp. kū 空),” is said to be a “standpoint of radical deliverance from self‐centeredness” that “implies an orientation directly opposed to that of will.”85 Only when the fundamental craving of the ego‐self is radically negated can one become a “self that is not a self,” that is to say, a self that discovers itself only in its openness to and ecstatic interrelation with others. Only when “the self is a self absolutely made into a nothingness” does one attain to “a standpoint where one sees one’s own self in all things, in living things, in hills and rivers, towns and hamlets, tiles and stones, and loves all these things ‘as oneself ’.”86 O R R The Multiverse of Perspectival Events of Interconnection U N C Insofar as we can empty ourselves and empathize with other perspectives, we cease to “know” them as “objects.” Rather, as we enter into and participate as guests in their middle‐voiced occurrence, perhaps all we can say, borrowing Heidegger’s language, is that a thing “things” in its own way, gathering the world and serving as its temporary focal point. As Dōgen says, “a bird flies, just like a bird.”87 Of an intimate kind of “knowing of non‐knowing” that would abandon egocentric objectification to empathize with the middle‐voiced occurrence of things on their own “home‐ground” (Jp. moto もと), Nishitani writes: The thing in itself becomes manifest at bottom in its own “middle,” which can in no way ever be objectified. Non‐objective knowledge of it, the knowing of non‐knowing, means that we revert to the “middle” of the thing itself. It means that we straighten ourselves out by turning to c07.indd 136 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 137 what does not respond to our turning, orienting ourselves to what negates our every orientation. Even a single stone or blade of grass demands as much from us.88 O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Yet what is meant by a “single stone or blade of grass”? Nishitani draws on the same radicalization of the Buddhist ontology of “interdependent origination” that was expressed in the simile of the Jewel Net of Indra when he writes: “even the very tiniest thing…displays in its act of being the whole web of mutual interpenetration that links all things together.”89 Each and every “thing” is, as what I am calling a singular event of interconnection, a focal point that gathers the whole world. To know such a singular thing as it is, to let it show itself from itself, does not mean to see it as a substance subsisting on its own, unrelated to us and to other things. Rather, it means to see it as the host that invites us and all other things to be its guests; it means to see it as the focal around which is gathered the entire interrelational universe. While, on the one hand, the Huayan and Zen vision of “one in all and all in one” does deny independent or isolated individuality, on the other hand it stresses, as a crucial correlate of the interdependent unity of the world, the uniqueness of each and every thing as a singular event of interconnection that opens onto the world from its own unique perspective. In Nishitani’s words, “It is not possible for there to be two things that are exactly the same. For there to be two such identical things, there would have to be two worlds that were entirely the same.”90 Everything is unique insofar as it is an opening onto eve­ rything else from its own perspective. Each thing, we might say, as a singular event of interconnection, swallows up the whole universe in its perspectivally constituted world. The universe is thus made up of infinitely many mutually interpenetrating worlds. In other words, the universe is a unity of multiverses and the multiverse is a multitude of universes. Dōgen writes: U N C 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].91 c07.indd 137 William Blake unknowingly echoes this last thought when he beckons us “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.”92 The Avataṃ saka Sūtra multiplies the point to reach its logical conclusion: “The lands on a point the size of a hairtip/ Are measureless, unspeakable;/So are the lands on every single point/ Throughout the whole of space.”93 Each thing, as a singular event of intercon­ nection, is a perspectival opening onto every other such thing in the universe qua multiverse. 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM 138 Bret W. Davis Nishitani on the Mutual Circulation of Host and Guest U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Nishitani elaborates on the Huayan and Zen ideas of “mutually circulating interpenetration” (Jp. ego‐teki sōnyū回互的相入) and the dynamic interchange between roles of “host” and “guest,” or “master” and “attendant,” as follows.94 On the one hand, since each nodal point in the web of interconnectedness can be seen as the center from whose perspective the whole is reflected, each point has the potential to be seen as the “host” or “master” of all others. On the other hand, any given thing can be seen in a position of “guest” or “attendant” to another thing, insofar as it is seen from that thing’s perspective as a constitu­ tive element supporting its existence. In the perspectival interchange of this dynamic “circuminsession” or “mutually circulating interpenetration,” “all things are in a process of becoming master and attendant to one another.”95 The existential question is how to participate in this cosmic process wherein all supports one and one supports all. The answer we get is that one must learn to be both master and attendant, host and guest, of all other things. Nishitani writes: “The gathering together of the being of all things at the home‐ground of the being of the self can only come about in unison with the subordination of the being of the self to the being of all things at their home‐ground.”96 The true master, who can serve as host for all other beings, is also capable of placing himself in the role of guest with regard to all other beings. In contrast to a crude “master morality” of will to power, where an egoistic drive would seek to unilaterally impose its perspective on others, a Zen “mas­ ter”97 would be able to freely assume, as the situation demands, either perspec­ tival role of master or attendant, host or guest. At times, one is called on to clear a path and to lead others; at other times, one should give way to others, following and supporting their lead. At times, one should speak; at other times, listen. Or, in a dialogue, one should practice the art of alternating between speaking and listening, letting the matter itself take center stage. The nonwill­ ful “standpointless standpoint” of Zen is thus fixated neither on activity nor on passivity; it is rather a pivot of flexibility, that is, a responsive ability to shift perspectival roles as the situation itself shifts.98 Motivated by a primal vow to liberate all sentient beings from suffering, the Zen adept would be a master of compassion. Having emptied herself of attach­ ment to any particular perspective, starting with that of her own egocentric will to power, she would release an innate ability to kenotically empathize with the widest variety of perspectives, balancing their claims and emphasizing each in its proper time and place. In tune with a fluid and ungraspable Way rather than a doctrinal system of knowledge, her acts would embody the prac­ tical wisdom Buddhists call “skillful means” (Skt upaya kaushalya; Jp. hōben 方便), a kind of phronēsis of compassion. She would possess neither knowledge of everything nor even dogmatic certainty of anything. Rather, she would intui­ tively know how to follow and further a dynamic Way, a Way that gives way to c07.indd 138 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 139 FS different perspectives in different situations. Her wisdom would reside not only in an awareness of the limits of this or that claim to knowledge; it would also reside in an intuitive ability to effectively and compassionately participate in the perspectival delimitation of events of interconnection, that is, to nonwillfully and nonegocentrically take part in the myriad ways in which the myriad things give themselves to be known. Notes O 1 Nishitani keiji chosakushū [Collected Works of Nishitani Keiji] (Tokyo: 4 U N C 6 7 8 O R R 5 EC 3 TE D 2 PR O Sōbunsha, 1987), vol. 10, p. 204; Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, translated by Jan van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 182. Note that Japanese names are written in the order of family name followed by given name. Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche: Samtliche Werke, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (New York: De Gruyter, 1980), 12:7[60]. Translations of passages from Nietzsche’s notebooks are taken from The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), in this case p. 267 (§481). Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 148. “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” translated by Bret W. Davis, in Buddhist Philosophy, edited by Jay Garfield and William Edelglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 256. Dōgen, “Sansuigyō: The Sutra of Mountains and Water,” translated by Gudo Wafu Nishijima and Chodo Cross, in Shōbōgenzō: The True‐Dharma Eye Treasury (Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 221, 224. “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” 156. As quoted in Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 195. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 49. Ibid., 50–51. Basic Writings of Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 392 (§259). David C. Wood, The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 196 n.6. Keats spoke of a “negative capability” for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (“Letter from John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817,” in Romanticism: An Anthology, 2nd edition, edited by Duncan Wu [Malden: Blackwell, 1998], p. 1019). For Keats, this poetic “humility and capability for submission” to the uncertainties and mysteries of life was more noble and c07.indd 139 9 10 11 01/27/2017 8:19:46 PM 140 Bret W. Davis 18 U FS O N 27 28 29 30 O R 25 26 C 24 R EC 19 20 21 22 23 O 17 PR 14 15 16 D 13 TE 12 valuable than the “philosophic mind” which uses “consequitive [i.e., consecutive, logical] reasoning” to chase after certainty and knowledge. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986), p. 136. On Heidegger’s turn from will to Gelassenheit (releasement or “letting‐be”), see my “Will and Gelassenheit,” in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2014). Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), p. 511. Ibid., 467. Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche, 11:26[294]; Will to Power, 328 (§609). Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche, 13:14[152]; Will to Power, 278 (§515). Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 555 (§3.12). Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 336 (§374). Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche, 12:2[148]; Will to Power, 342 (§643). Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche, 12:7[60]; Will to Power, 267 (§481). Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche, 13:14[27]; Will to Power, 230 (§426). Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 405 (§265). See my “Zen after Zarathustra: The Problem of the Will in the Confrontation between Nietzsche and Buddhism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 28 (2004): 89–138. Also, in response Graham Parkes’ critique of this article, see my “Nietzsche as Zebra: With both Egoistic Antibuddha and Nonegoistic Bodhisattva Stripes,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 46/1 (2015): 62–81. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 2nd edition, translated by Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom, 2001), p. 626; see also ibid., 588, 655. Ibid., 1276, emphasis added. The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, translated by Thomas Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), p. 791. Ibid., 794. Ibid., 817. Ibid., 862–865. Paul Griffiths, On Being Buddha: The Classical Doctrine of Buddhahood (Albany: The State University of New York, 1994), p. 59. Ibid., 169–172. Ibid., 193. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 735. Zen is deeply influenced by early Daoist thought, especially that of the Zhuangzi, in addition to Huayan and other schools of Buddhism. Although Zhuangzi is frequently interpreted as a skeptic, I would argue that it is better 31 32 33 34 c07.indd 140 01/27/2017 8:19:47 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 38 39 49 U N FS O EC C 50 R 44 45 46 47 48 O R 43 TE D 40 41 42 O 37 to characterize him as a perspectival pluralist. See The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), especially ch. 2. The influence of the Zhuangzi presumably helps account for the fact that Zen takes up the idea of mutual perspectival interrelation rather than any doctrine of omniscience from the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. See The Flower Ornament Scripture, 215, 226, 232. Tu Shun, “Cessation and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of the Hua‐yen,” in Thomas Cleary, Entry into the Inconceivable: An Introduction to Hua‐Yen Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), p. 66. Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology, paragraph 56, in Classics of Western Philosophy, edited by Steven M. Cahn (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), p. 471. Cleary, Entry into the Inconceivable, 7. Tu Shun, “Cessation and Contemplation in the Five Teachings of the Hua‐yen,” in Cleary, Entry into the Inconceivable, 68. Leibniz, Monadology, paragraph 57, in Classics of Western Philosophy, 471. The Flower Ornament Scripture, 1490. Fa‐tsang, “Cultivation of Contemplation of the Inner Meaning of the Hua‐yen: The Ending of Delusion and Return to the Source,” in Cleary, Entry into the Inconceivable, 168. See The Record of Linji, translated by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, edited by Thomas Yūhō Kirchner (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), pp. 133–134, 232, 245–246. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 186. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, 187. Ōmori Sōgen, Rinzairoku kōwa [Lectures on The Record of Linji] (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 2005), p. 95. Hakuin, Hebi‐ichigo [Snakes and Wild Strawberries], as quoted in Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 276. Ueda Shizuteru shū [Collected Writings of Ueda Shizuteru] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 2002), vol. 10, p. 281. See my “Conversing in Emptiness: Rethinking Cross‐ Cultural Dialogue with the Kyoto School,” in Philosophical Traditions (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74), edited by Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, translated by Cecil Grayson (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 65–67. See also Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut depictions of artists using Albertian perspective devices: “Man Drawing a Lute” and “Artist Drawing a Nude with Perspective Device.” Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 134. Ibid., 128. PR 35 36 141 51 52 53 c07.indd 141 01/27/2017 8:19:47 PM 142 Bret W. Davis 54 Hubert Damisch commenting on Da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, as quoted in U FS O O PR D TE N 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 EC 62 63 64 65 R 60 61 O R 56 57 58 59 C 55 Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), p. 76. Merleau‐Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, edited by James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 162. Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 77. Merleau‐Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 162–163. See Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 67; and Alberti, On Painting, 8. François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting, translated by Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 55. Ibid., 171–172. Compare this with Merleau‐Ponty’s statement: “There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it become impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted” (“Eye and Mind,” 167). Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 64. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 38. See Nishida Kitarō zenshū [Complete Works of Nishida Kitarō] (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1987), vol. 7, p. 208; ibid., vol. 11, pp. 130, 423; and Nishitani keiji chosakushū, vol. 10, pp. 164, 178, 290; Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 146, 158, 263. Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 38, emphasis added. Ibid., 32. As quoted in ibid. “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” 257. Harries, Infinity and Perspective, 42. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 160–165. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 199 (§162). Kritische Studienausgabe Friedrich Nietzsche, 11:36[20]; Will to Power, 340 (§637). Quoted by Walter Jackson Bate in John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 261. Quoted by Bate in John Keats, 260. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 195. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), p. 32; the Greek phrase has been Romanized. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 107. Ibid., 108. Nishida Kitarō zenshū, 10: 473. 77 78 79 80 81 82 c07.indd 142 01/27/2017 8:19:47 PM Zen’s Nonegocentric Perspectivism 92 FS EC R U N C 98 O R 95 96 97 TE D 93 94 PR O 88 89 90 91 See Aristotle, De Anima, Bk. III, ch. 5 (430a10–25). Nishida Kitarō zenshū, 10: 107–218, 541–571; also ibid., 11: 438. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 250–251. Ibid., 281. Dōgen, “Zazenshin” [The point of zazen], Dōgen Zenji goroku [Recorded Words of Dōgen], edited by Kagamishima Genryū (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1990), p. 184. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 140. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 150. Nishitani Keiji chosakushū, 14: 126. “The Presencing of Truth: Dōgen’s Genjōkōan,” 257. For more on Dōgen’s perspectivism, see my “The Philosophy of Zen Master Dōgen: Egoless Perspectivism,” in The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, edited by Jay Garfield and William Edelglass (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). William Blake, The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by D.E. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 118. The Flower Ornament Scripture, 892. See also my “Kū ni okeru deai: Nishitani Keiji no Zen tetsugaku ni okeru ‘ware to nanji’ no ego‐teki kankei” [Encounter in Emptiness: The Mutually Circulating I‐Thou Relation in the Zen Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji], Risō 689 (2012): 114–131. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, 149. Ibid., 249. Note that the English phrase “Zen master” usually translates rōshi (老師), which literally means “elder teacher.” However, as we have seen, Linji and others adopt the Huayan word for “master” (Ch. zhu 主). Here I am bringing these two senses together. According to Zhuangzi, the Daoist sage dwells at the empty “hinge of the Way” (Ch. daoshu 道樞), and so can harmoniously coordinate the tensions between perspectival contrarieties. “When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly” (Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, 40). O 83 84 85 86 87 143 c07.indd 143 01/27/2017 8:19:47 PM FS O O PR D TE EC R O R C N U c07.indd 144 01/27/2017 8:19:47 PM