My deepest debt of gratitude is to my Zen teachers, Yamada Kōun-rōshi, director of the Sanbo Kyodan in Kamakura, Japan, and Robert Aitken Gyōun-rōshi, director of the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii. Without their personal examples and Zen guidance, this work would never have come to be written. Yet neither is a philosopher: these ideas have not been discussed with them, nor have they read the manuscript. So they cannot be held responsible for the conceptual proliferations that follow.
An earlier draft of this book was my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the National University of Singapore in 1984, while I was teaching in its department of philosophy. I am grateful to S. Gopalan and Goh Swee Tiang for their comments on the first draft. Robert Stecker also offered helpful suggestions on some of the early chapters. I am particularly grateful to Peter Della Santina and other members of the informal Mādhyamika Study Group that met in 1983–84, where many of these ideas were first discussed. The publication of this book owes much to the efforts of two people: Jeanne Ferris, editor at Yale University Press, who encouraged and nurtured the project, and John Koller, professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whose criticisms were both supportive and extremely helpful.
Parts of this book were first published in various journals. Passages from chapters 2 and 3 were in “The Difference between Saṁsāra and Nirvāṇa,” Philosophy East and West 33, no. 4 (October 1983): 355–65, published by the University of Hawaii Press. An earlier version of the first section of chapter 3 appeared as “Wei-wu-wei: Nondual Action” in Philosophy East and West 35, no. 1 (January 1985): 73–86, and an earlier version of the second section as “Chapter One of the Tao Tê Ching: A ‘New’ Interpretation” in Religious Studies 21, no. 3 (September 1985), published by Cambridge University Press. Parts of chapter 4 appeared as “Nondual Thinking” in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy 13, no. 3 (September 1986). Some of the material in chapter 5 and the first two sections of chapter 6 was first presented as “Enlightenment in Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta: Are Nirvana and Moksha the Same?” in International Philosophical Quarterly 22, no. 1 (March 1982). An earlier version of the third section of chapter 6 appeared as “The Mahāyāna Deconstruction of Time” in Philosophy East and West 36, no. 1 (January 1986): 13–23; much of the fourth section as “The Paradox of Causality in Mādhyamika” in International Philosophical Quarterly 25, no. 1 (March 1985); and an expanded version of the sixth section as “The Clôture of Deconstruction: A Mahāyāna Critique of Derrida” in International Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 1 (March 1987). Some of the ideas discussed in chapter 8 were first published as “How Many Nondualities Are There?” (the title now given to chapter 1) in the Journal of Indian Philosophy 11, no. 4 (December 1983). A few pages from chapter 6 and from the conclusion were presented to the third Kyoto Zen Symposium and appeared in “Mu and Its Implications,” Zen Buddhism Today 3 (1985), published by the Institute for Zen Studies, Kyoto, Japan.
I also thank Goh Boon Tay and Arlene Ho for their painstaking efforts in retyping various drafts, parts of which were barely legible, and Susan Hunston and Stephanie Jones for all their help with the manuscript.
Finally, deep and continuing gratitude to Linda Goodhew for taking care of me and putting up with me during this book’s long gestation.