1. “Dead Words, Living Words, and Healing Words: The Disseminations of Eckhart and Dōgen,” in David Loy, ed., Healing Deconstruction: Postmodern Thought in Buddhism and Christianity (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996), 33–51.
2. Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page, The Great Books vol. 17 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 359–60.
3. Asaṅga, Mahāyānasaṃgraha II, 6; quoted in Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 253.
4. W. T. Stace, Time and Eternity (Princeton University Press, 1952), 136.
5. Sebastian Samay, Reason Revisited: The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 213.
6. The Awakening of Faith, attributed to Aśvaghoṣa, trans. Yoshito S. Hakeda (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 72. Hakeda’s commentary on this passage emphasizes its importance: “The nonduality of mind and matter, spirit and body is the basic concept of this text and a common presupposition of Mahāyāna Buddhism.”
7. Michael E. Zimmerman, “Towards a Heideggerian Ethos for Radical Environmentalism,” Environmental Ethics 5, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 112.
8. “Selections from the Chuang-tzu,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1, ed. Theodore deBary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964); as quoted by Francis H. Cook in Hua-Yen Buddhism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 27, with slight alterations by Cook. See also Tao Tê Ching, chap. 2.
9. Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamikakārikā (hereafter MMK) XXIII 10–11. Unless otherwise noted all MMK quotations are from Candrakīrti’s Lucid Exposition of the Middle Way, trans. Mervyn Sprung (Boulder, Co.: Prajñā Press, 1979).
10. The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination, trans. and ed. John Blofeld (London: Rider, 1969), 52, 49–50.
11. Selected Sayings from the Perfection of Wisdom, trans. and ed. Edward Conze (Boulder, CO: Prajñā Press, 1978), 78.
12. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Hui Hai, 81.
13. The Vajracchedikā-Prajñā-Pāramitā Sūtra, trans. from Chinese by Lu Ku’an-Yu (Hong Kong: Buddhist Book Distributor, 1976), 18–19.
14. Nāgārjuna, MMK, XIII 8.
15. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, trans. and ed. John Blofeld (London: Buddhist Society, 1958), 64–65, with my alterations.
16. The Three Pillars of Zen, ed. Philip Kapleau (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1966), 77, 79–80. Yasutani is not giving advice on how to lead everyday life; this admonition was presented during a sesshin (intensive meditation retreat) in which distractions are minimized and participants are expected to concentrate on their Zen practice full-time.
17. Kaṭha Upaniṣad II.i.10–11, in The Upanishads, trans. and ed. Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 78. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Upaniṣads are from Nikhilananda.
18. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, 29.
19. My translation of chap. 25.
20. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad I.iv.7. The bracketed additions are Nikhilananda’s.
21. “The Yoga of Knowing the Mind,” attributed to Padma-Saṁbhava, in The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, trans. and ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz (Oxford University Press, 1959), 231–32.
22. Chuang-tzu, with commentary by Kuo Hsiang, trans. Fung Yu-lan (New York: Gordon Press, 1975), 53.
23. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad IV.iv.22.
24. Chang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 38. From Chang’s translation of chap. 14.
25. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad I.iv.7. Nikhilananda’s bracketed additions.
26. Kaṭha Upaniṣad II.ii.9.
27. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 205.
28. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad II.iv.14 and IV.iii.23. Nikhilananda’s bracketed additions.
29. Īśā Upaniṣad 7.
30. Taittirīya Upaniṣad III.x.6; my bracketed additions. In a footnote to this passage Nikhilananda explains the exclamations: “An expression of extreme wonder. The cause of this wonder is that though the Seer is the non-dual Ātman, yet he himself is the food and the eater, that is to say, that he is both the object and the subject.”
31. Chāndogya Upaniṣad VI.ix.4.
32. Ātmabodha 41, as quoted in Swāmī Satprakāshānanda, Methods of Knowledge According to Advaita Vedānta (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), 276.
33. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, with commentary of Śaṅkarācārya, trans. Swāmī Mādhavānanda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1975), 474–75.
34. The Teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi in His Own Words, ed. Arthur Osborne (Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 1977), 251, 13–14.
35. T. R. V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 217.
36. Candrakīrti, Lucid Exposition, 35. Candrakīrti (6th C. A.D.?) was Nāgārjuna’s main commentator within the prāsaṅgika tradition.
37. Vasubandhu, Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, 36–37; quoted in Sangharakshita, A Survey of Buddhism (Boulder: Shambhala, 1980), 365. Sangharakshita’s bracketed additions.
38. Vasubandhu, Triṃśikāvijñaptikārikā; quoted in Edward Conze, ed., Buddhist Texts Through the Ages (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 210.
39. S. B. Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tantric Buddhism (University of Calcutta, 1974), 4, 113.
40. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation, 206, 232.
41. Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, ed. and trans. W. Y. Evans-Wentz (Oxford University Press, 1958), 145–49.
42. Giuseppe Tucci, The Religions of Tibet, trans. Geoffrey Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 47–48.
43. D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series (London: Rider, 1927), 125, 230. Suzuki’s description of prajñā is discussed in chap. 4.
44. In D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), 207, 209.
45. Ibid., 160.
46. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 107, 137.
47. Philipp Karl Eidmann, quoted in Sangharakshita, Survey of Buddhism, 340.
48. Ibid., 341.
49. Fung, Chuang-tzu, 34, 46.
50. Ibid., 119–20.
51. Taoist Teachings: From the Book of Lieh Tzu, trans. Lionel Giles (New York: Dutton, 1912); quoted in Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way (Pelican, 1979), 92.
52. Fung, Chuang-tzu, 141, 116.
53. Ibid., 15, 16–17.
54. Chang Chung-yuan, Creativity and Taoism (New York: Julian Press, 1963), 20, 41. Nonduality remains an important element of some important contemporary Asian philosophical systems, including what has probably been the most influential Japanese philosophical work of this century, Nishida’s A Study of Good: “What kind of thing is direct reality before we have as yet added the complexities of thought? That is, what kind of thing is an event of pure experience? At this time there is not as yet the opposition of subject and object, there is not the separation into intellect, emotion, and will, there is only independent, self-contained, pure activity.” Nishida Kitaro, A Study of Good, trans. V. H. Viglielmo (Japanese Government Printing Bureau, 1960), 48–49. Many others (e.g. Krishnamurti) could also be cited.
55. Eliot Deutsch defines subration as “a mental process whereby one disvalues some previously appraised object or content of consciousness because of its being contradicted by a new experience. . . . it is impossible . . . to affirm . . . both the previous judgement and what is learned or acquired in the new experience.” Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1969), 15.
56. Śaṅkara, Vivekacūḍāmani 521, trans. Mādhavānanda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1974), 194.
57. Quoted in Nānananda, Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1971), 28.
58. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1792).
59. Chandradhar Sharma, A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1976), 194, 195.
60. It is possible to see the distinction between nirvikalpa and savikalpa as implied in the doctrine of the five skandhas (lit. heaps), the components of the sense-of-self. Although the skandhas are usually interpreted only ontologically, the nature and order of the five strongly suggest an epistemological approach: they “correspond obviously to the five phases which occur in every complete process of consciousness” (Lama Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism [New York: Samuel Weiser, 1971], 71). The third, samjñā, clearly refers to savikalpa perception, since it includes such mental processes as identification and recognition; and it could be argued that the first, rūpa, refers to the bare nirvikalpa percept.
61. Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, 62–63, 65; emphasis is Conze’s. Conze quotes from his own Buddhist Meditation.
62. From Searle’s conversation with Magee in Men of Ideas, ed. Bryan Magee (New York: Viking Press, 1978), 184.
63. Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, 65.
64. From the translation in Philip Kapleau, Zen: Dawn in the West (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980), 185, 187.
65. For example, the Anattālakkhaṇa-sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya III 66) supports sense-rejection, and the Indriyabhāvanā-sutta (Majjhima-Nīkaya III 298–99) recommends equanimity.
66. As quoted in Ñānananda, Concept and Reality, 28.
67. There is a significant parallel in the etymology of Brahman, which is generally agreed to come from the root bṛh (to burst forth, to grow). “To us, it is clear, Brahman means reality, which grows, breathes or swells.” Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, 2d. ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), 1:164n. But few post-Śaṅkara Advaitins would accept the contention that Brahman grows!
68. The three passages are quoted in Conze, Buddhist Texts through the Ages. The first is from the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra; the second from Śāntideva’s Śikṣāsamuccaya, 202–03; the third from Aṣṭasāhasrikā VII 177.
69. Quoted in Survey of Buddhism, 58; Sangharakshita’s addition (in parentheses).
70. Nāgārjuna, MMK, XXV 24. For śiva I have substituted “serenity” in place of Sprung’s “beatitude.”
71. Ñānananda, Concept and Reality, 3–4.
72. Buddhaghosa relates prapañca to pamattạ (intoxication or delay) and Dhammapala equates it with kileśa (taints or defilements). See ibid., 108–13.
73. See Mahānidāna Sūtra, in Dīgha-Nikāya II 62–63; also Ñānananda, Concept and Reality, 69–71. “Papañca is thus equivalent to Nāmarūpa, to end which is to reach the highest attainment.” G. C. Pande, Studies in the Origins of Buddhism, 2d ed. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974), 474n.
74. Candrakīrti in Lucid Exposition, 273, 183. I am indebted to Dr. Peter Della Santina for his comments on the relation between vikalpa and prapañca (pers. comm.).
75. Murti, The Central Philosophy, 232.
76. Nāgārjuna, MMK, XVIII 9.
77. Vasubandhu, Trimsatikā, in Conze, Buddhist Texts, 209–10. My addition in brackets.
78. See Dharmakīrti, “A Short Treatise of Logic: Nyāya-Bindu,” with commentary by Dharmottara, and “Vācaspati Miśra on the Buddhist Theory of Perception,” in Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, vol. 2 (New York: Dover, 1962).
79. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 2:73, 149.
80. “Jinendrabuddhi’s Commentary on Dignāga’s Pramāṇa-samuccaya,” ibid., 2:396.
81. Ibid., 1:151.
82. Quoted in John C. H. Wu, The Golden Age of Zen (Taipei: United Publishing Center, 1975), 233.
83. Blofeld, Zen Teaching of Huang Po, 32–33.
84. Ibid., 49–50, 31, 42; my brackets and my emphasis.
85. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 304.
86. Ibid., 310. Kapleau’s brackets.
87. For example, Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 1:197–98. Needless to say, many Advaitins are unhappy with this claim.
88. D. M. Datta, “Epistemological Methods in Indian Philosophy,” in Charles A. Moore, ed., Essays in East-West Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), 78. For a more detailed discussion see Purusottama Bilimoria, “Perception in Advaita Vedānta,” Philosophy East and West 30, no. 1 (June 1980).
89. See, for example, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.ii.1–32.
90. Commentary on Gītā II 69.
91. Upadeśasāhasrī XVIII 159; quoted in Satprakāshānanda, Methods of Knowledge, 278.
92. Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1975), 474.
93. Tucci, Religions of Tibet, 66.
94. “Relation” must be put in scare quotes because according to Śaṅkara they are not really distinct but “nondifferent,” ananyatva: from the transcendental standpoint there is only Brahman and from the empirical standpoint there appears to be only phenomena, so to discuss a “relation” between them is to confuse different perspectives. Notice, however, that the same could be said about the “relation” between nondual and dualistic perception. The definition of adhyāsa is in the preamble to the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya.
95. Sharma, Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy, 274.
96. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy, 2:565, 572.
97. Satprakāshānanda, Methods of Knowledge, 77.
98. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 107, 153. Compare the favorite koan of the Japanese Zen master Bassui: “Who is the master of [i.e., who is hearing] that sound?”
99. Simone Weil, Waiting on God, trans. Emma Cranford (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951), letter 4, 38.
100. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York: 1966), 135–36, 147; as quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 1:110–12.
101. See George Berkeley’s Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), sec. 45.
102. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 4, pt. 1.
103. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 4, sec. 7.
104. The first passage is from Kaṭha Upaniṣad II.ii.15, repeated in Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad, II.ii.10 and Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad VI.14. See also Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, IV.iii.7. The second is Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad II.ii.9 and the third is Chāndogya Upaniṣad III.xvii.7. Cf. William Blake: “What is Above is Within, for every-thing in Eternity is translucent” (Jerusalem).
105. Tucci, Religions of Tibet, 63–64.
106. Aṅguttara Nikāya I 10, Horner’s trans.; quoted in Sangharakshita, Survey of Buddhism, 70–71.
107. Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West, trans. Bertha L. Lacey and Richenda C. Payne (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 110, 115.
108. Dasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy, 1:493.
109. In the first of Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.
110. Heidegger, Being and Time, div. 1, pt. 5, chap. 34.
111. R. J. Hirst, “Perception,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan), 6:86. My emphasis.
112. Richard Gregory, “Visual Illusions,” Scientific American 219, no. 5 (1968): 66.
113. Karl Popper, “Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report,” in British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed. C. A. Mace, 172.
114. R. J. Hirst, “Phenomenalism,” in Edwards, Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 6:131.
115. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 57, no. 5.633.
116. Nāgārjuna, MMK, III 2.
117. Vasubandhu, Madhyāntavibhagabhāsya, commentary to v. 26, in Seven Works of Vasubandhu, trans. Stefan Anacker (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 269.
118. That is the direction in which the argument of this chapter might be developed further, to deny finally any dualism between thoughts and percepts. When the nondual percept is fully distinguished from all thought-superimpositions, maybe it is realized to be just as much a creation of “my” mind as dreams and fantasies. Then the essence of delusion is the sharp distinction we draw between the materialized objective world and the powers of our “Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more” (William Blake, Jerusalem).
119. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
120. Blake, frontispiece to The Gates of Paradise.
121. Plotinus, Enneads I.6.9.
122. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 205. This double-aspect approach is rich in other implications too. It is consistent with the claims of “body-work” therapies (for example, Rolfing) popular in contemporary psychology. It even casts a different light on phrenology, that discredited “science” which may yet contain a grain of truth. To infer character from the shape of the head is certainly too mechanistic, but isn’t there some causal interaction between personality and body — especially with regard to the face, where the sense-organs cluster? Why does the development of a face, over the years, reveal so much?
123. These Tao Tê Ching passages are from the translation in Chang’s Tao, with modifications by me.
124. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 32, I.67ff.
125. Roger T. Ames, “Wu-Wei in ‘The Art of Rulership’ chapter of Huai Nan Tzu,” Philosophy East and West 31, no. 2 (April 1981): 196.
126. See ibid, 196–98, and Herlee G. Creel, What Is Taoism? (University of Chicago Press, 1970), 44–47.
127. I have borrowed Ames’s translation, “Wu-wei,” 194.
128. Quoted in Creel, What Is Taoism?, 54.
129. Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 225.
130. Arthur Waley’s translation in The Way and Its Power (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968).
131. For example, see Wing-tsit Chan’s translation in A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 1963), chaps. 36, 40, 52, 76, 78.
132. Creel, What Is Taoism?, 54, quoting Wang Pi on Lao-Tzu, Duyvendak’s Tao Tê Ching, 10, 11 and Fung’s Short History of Chinese Philosophy, 100–01.
133. “The important phrase, wu-wei, thus means ‘not-having willful action.’” Sung-peng Hsu, “Lao Tzu’s Conception of Evil,” Philosophy East and West 26, no. 3 (July 1976): 303.
134. “It is important to note that ‘spontaneity’ is really the positive name for the negative expression of wu-wei.” Ibid., 304.
135. Creel, What Is Taoism?, 74, 45–46. Creel first argued for this view in “On Two Aspects in Early Taoism” (1954) and repeated his position in “On the Origin of Wu-Wei” (1965). Both are reprinted in What Is Taoism?
136. Fung’s Chuang Tzu, 40, 117, 124, 119–20.
137. Burton Watson, trans., The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 83.
138. See Chang, Creativity and Taoism, 10.
139. Chao Lun IV 6:14a, as quoted in Chang’s Tao, 122.
140. From the translation in Kapleau, Zen: Dawn in the West, 188, 187.
141. Chang Chung-yuan, trans. and ed., Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism (New York: Vintage, 1971), 22.
142. Conze, Perfection of Wisdom, 76, 101, 104, 116; Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, 236–37.
143. Tibetan Yoga, 134, 136. The interpolated brackets in the first quote are by the translator. Evans-Wentz. There and in his notes he explains that this describes the nonduality of thinker and thought (and this interpretation will be discussed in Chapter 4), but nothing in the text itself excludes an interpretation in terms of nondual physical action.
144. Bhagavad-gītā IV 18, 20; Radhakrishnan, in Sourcebook of Indian Philosophy, ed. Radhakrishnan and Moore (Princeton University Press, 1957), 117.
145. Conze, Perfection of Wisdom, 76. The “triple world” refers to the three levels of saṁsāra, the worlds of desire, form, and the formless.
146. Masao Abe, Zen and Western Thought (London: Macmillan, 1985), 145.
147. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1970), 125. This page, which describes the I–Thou relationship as “at once . . . passive and active”, shows the ambivalence in Buber’s approach. In order to maintain that “I–Thou” is a relationship, he must keep the relata distinct from each other and deny nonduality; but this passage, like many others, suggests nonduality.
148. Conze, Perfection of Wisdom, 66–7.
149. Mumonkan, case 20, trans. in Kyozo Yamada, Gateless Gate (Los Angeles: Center Publications, 1977), my emphasis and addition.
150. From The Blue Cliff Record, case 89, trans. Thomas Cleary and J. C. Cleary (Boulder: Shambhala, 1977), 571.
151. From Yasutani’s “Commentary on Mu,” in Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 46–47.
152. Quoted in Chang, Original Teachings of Ch’an, 130.
153. Yamada, Gateless Gate, 86, 88.
154. From Cleary and Cleary, Blue Cliff Record, case 92, with modifications by me.
155. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 82.
156. Howard H. Brinton, The Mystic Will (New York: Macmillan, 1930), 218.
157. R. B. Blakney, trans., Meister Eckhart (New York: Harper and Row, 1941), 127, 241. See also Eckhart’s sermon “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit” and Defense IX, 31.
158. According to Wing-tsit Chan, 350 Chinese commentaries on the Tao Tê Ching are extant, and some 350 more have been lost or survive only in fragments. (Source Book of Chinese Philosophy, 137).
159. Wing-tsit Chan, The Way of Lao Tzu (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 99. “This chapter both introduces and summarizes the entire Tao Tê Ching. The ‘five thousand’ words of the text are all based on this chapter.” See also Chang’s Tao 1.
160. Chan, Way of Lao Tzu, 99.
161. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 178.
162. My version of this chapter, constructed from a transliteration after consulting other translations.
163. For a discussion of what ineffability in the Tao Tê Ching does not mean, see Arthur C. Danto, “Language and the Tao: Some Reflections on Ineffability,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1973): 45–55. For an argument that the Tao Tê Ching is not ineffable, see Dennis M. Ahern, “Ineffability in the Lao Tzu: The Taming of a Dragon,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 4, no. 4 (1977): 357–82.
164. See Shigenori Nagatomo, “An Epistemic Turn in the Tao Tê Ching,” International Philosophical Quarterly 23, no. 2 (June 1983: 174ff). Nagatomo also sees the first chapter as referring to two different modes of experience, but, in my opinion, the subjectivism of his phenomenological categories does not allow him to illuminate the difference between them.
165. See Mumonkan, case 37.
166. The latter interpretation is usually described only as “ontological,” but the epistemological and ontological issues here cannot be separated; it is a difference in experience that changes our understanding of what is. An account of these interpretations would encompass the whole history of Taoism. Fung Yu-lan, author of the monumental History of Chinese Philosophy, gave an ontological interpretation in A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (1948), but later (probably under pressure from the authorities) changed to a cosmological view in 1964. For a discussion of Fung’s interpretations, see David C. Yu, “The Creation Myth and Its Symbolism in Classical Taoism,” Philosophy East and West 31, no. 4 (1981): 487, 497. According to Charles Wei-hsun Fu, chap. 2 of Chuang Tzu refutes the cosmological interpretation. Fu has used Wang Pi’s distinction between origin and function to interpret the first chapter of the Tao Tê Ching as distinguishing Tao-as-Origin from Tao-as-Function. “Creative Hermeneutics: Taoist Metaphysics and Heidegger,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1976): 125ff.
167. Chan, Way of Lao Tzu, 99.
168. Chang’s Tao, 3–4.
169. However, Lao Tzu’s Non-Being should not be taken either in a Parmenidean sense or (what is more likely) as equivalent to the Mahāyāna śūnyatā. Nāgārjuna takes pains to distinguish śūnyatā from both being and nonbeing, which as relative to each other are both denied. A more fruitful interpretation of Lao Tzu’s Non-Being is to see it as one way of making what Heidegger calls “the ontological difference” between beings and Being.
170. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations I.31. For a more general discussion of the parallels between Wittgenstein and Taoism, see Russell Goodman, “Style, Dialectic, and the Aim of Philosophy in Wittgenstein and the Taoists,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1976): 145–47.
171. See Heidegger, Being and Time, div. 1, pt. 3, secs. 15–16. In contrast to my use of the distinction, Heidegger views vorhanden objects, just “lying there,” as derivative from zuhanden; he saw his project in Being and Time as an attempt to overcome the error (prevalent since Parmenides) of basing a metaphysics upon vorhanden. Whether his later work after the Kehre is consistent with this is unclear to me.
172. Wittgenstein reserved the term “seeing . . . as” for more ambiguous types of seeing (e.g., the duck-rabbit). See Philosophical Investigations II.x.I.
173. P. H. Nowell-Smith, from an article “On Causation or Causality.” I am acquainted with a cyclostyled copy of this article, but have not been able to trace its source.
174. Nāgārjuna, MMK, XXV 19–20. Yet XXV 9 distinguishes them: “That which, taken as causal or dependent, is the process of being born and passing on, is, taken non-causally and beyond all dependence, declared to be nirvāṇa.” This issue is discussed in chap. 6.
175. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), 126, 119.
176. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 7, pt. 1.
177. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 295–99, nos. 551–2.
178. “The greatest difficulty faced by every discussion of the Will is the simple fact that there is no other capacity of the mind whose very existence has been so consistently doubted and refuted by so eminent a series of philosophers” (Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:4). William Blake: “There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is perniciousness to others or suffering.”
179. Hobbes, Leviathan II, 21.
180. This has important implications for our understanding of such completely deterministic systems as Spinoza’s.
181. See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 1174a 14; also Metaphysics, IX. 6, 1048b 18ff.
182. Herbert A. Giles, trans., Chuang Tzu (New York: AMS Press, 1972), 240–41.
183. Phaedo 65c.
184. In Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 306.
185. Ibid., 205.
186. D. T. Suzuki, “Reason and Intuition in Buddhist Philosophy,” in Moore, Essays in East-West Philosophy, 17.
187. Ibid., 29.
188. Ibid., 35.
189. Oxford English Dictionary.
190. Suzuki, “Reason and Intuition,” 34, 17.
191. “Mahāmudrā,” 136. Krishnamurti makes a similar claim: “Revolution, this psychological, creative revolution in which the ‘me’ is not, comes only when the thinker and thought are one, when there is no duality such as the thinker controlling thought; and I suggest it is this experience alone that releases the creative energy which in turn brings about a fundamental revolution, the breaking up of the psychological ‘me.’” The First and Last Freedom (London: Gollanz, 1956), 140.
192. Śikṣāsamuccaya 233–34, in Conze, 163; my emphasis.
193. Rene Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane and Ross (Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1: 151–52.
194. Ibid., 153.
195. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. 4, sec. 6, “Of Personal Identity.”
196. John Levy, The Nature of Man According to the Vedanta (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 66–67.
197. Ibid., 69. This invites comparison with Sartre’s view of self-consciousness as developed in The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness.
198. Quoted in Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 205.
199. Blake’s critique of rationality also relates it to memory: “The Spectre is the Reasoning Power in Man, & when separated / From Imagination and closing itself as in steel in a Ratio / Of the Things of Memory, It thence frames Laws & Moralities / To destroy Imagination, the Divine Body, by Martyrdoms & Wars.” (Jerusalem, pl. 74)
There is another parallel in Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, n.d.), 154–55: “Just as, when a word is formed or spoken, the original unity of the ‘inner’ word is polarized into a duality of outer and inner, that is, of sound and meaning; so, when man himself was ‘uttered’, that is, created, the cosmic wisdom became polarized in and through him, into the duality of appearance and intelligence, representation and consciousness. But when creation has been polarized into consciousness on the one side and phenomena, or appearances, on the other, memory is made possible, and begins to play an all-important part in the process of evolution. For by means of his memory man makes the outward appearances an inward experience. He acquires his self-consciousness from them. When I experience the phenomena in memory, I make them ‘mine’, not now by virtue of any original participation [c. ‘nondual experience’], but by my own inner activity.” Barfield’s book is one of those insightful and curious works which, blithely ignorant of Asian thought, attempt to interpret Christianity into something that is more naturally compatible with Buddhism and Vedānta.
200. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 264, 265.
201. Sutra Spoken by the Sixth Patriarch on the High Seat of “The Treasure of the Law,” trans. Wong Mou-lam (Hong Kong: Buddhist Book Distributor, n.d.), 35.
202. Ibid., 49. My emphasis.
203. My version of this line see ibid., 19.
204. Conze, Perfection of Wisdom, 90.
205. Quoted in Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (London: 1962), 102n. Compare: “The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member [i.e., no thought] is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose.” From Hegel’s Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), 27, no. 47.
206. Chang, Original Teachings of Ch’an, 203.
207. Śaṅkara’s Laghu-vākya-vṛtti 9; quoted in Satprakāshānanda, Methods of Knowledge, 238.
208. Ramana Maharshi, Erase the Ego (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1978), 28.
209. Suzuki, “Reason and Intuition,” 18, 24, 41.
210. Blofeld, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, 54.
211. From case 19 of the Mumonkan. Case 34 consists of Nan-ch’üan’s simple statement: “Mind is not the Buddha. Knowing is not the Way.” There are significant Christian parallels. Johannes Scotus (Erigen): “God does not know Himself, what He is, because He is not a what; in a certain respect He is imcomprehensible to Himself and to every intellect.”
212. Lu K’uan Yu, Ch’an and Zen Teaching, Third Series (London: Rider, 1962), 116.
213. The Zen Teaching of Hui Hai, trans. John Blofeld (London: Rider, 1969), 56. There is a remarkable parallel in Hegel’s analysis of the “bad infinite” (or “false endlessness”: schlechte unendlichkeit) in the Encyclopedia Logic (1817). There he defines “determination” as the quality of a something set off by that quality from other somethings. When it is realized that the quality of each entity depends on others because in a sense it has these others within itself as the conditions of its own determinateness (cf. the Hua Yen metaphor of Indra’s Net), this becomes alienation because the nature of each quality varies as the others do. This is a “bad infinite” because insofar as I (for example) try to go beyond determination, I end up merely exchanging one finite determination for another. The solution involves a reversal of perspective: true infinity is that of the “free-ranging variable” which always has some finite value but is not bound to any particular one. This is “being-for-self.”
214. The concept of symbolic immortality projects is well discussed by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973) and Escape from Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1978). This raises important questions about the nature of academic research: Is it a collective immortality project? If we understand our work as scientific, is it an attempt at the very objectivity which is challenged by the subject we study?
215. The Zen Teaching of Huang Po, 41.
216. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 7, pt. 1.
217. Chang, Creativity and Taoism; D. T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton University Press, 1959).
218. Quoted in P. E. Vernon, ed., Creativity (Penguin Books, 1970), 55. This letter may not be genuine.
219. Ibid., 57–58.
220. Arthur M. Abell, Gesprache mit beruhmten Komponisten (Garmisch-Parten-Kirchen, Germany: Schroeder-Verlag, 1964), 145, 156. The authenticity of these conversations is controversial.
221. Ibid., 20–21.
222. Quoted in Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Natural History of the Mind (London: Secker and Warburg, 1979), 225.
223. Abell, Gesprache, 187.
224. Quoted in Brian Inglis, “The Woman Who Saw What Others Could Not,” in The Sunday Times Magazine (London), 2 May 1982: 51.
225. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 300–01.
226. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago: Henery Regnery, 1955), 231.
227. Quoted in Peter McKellar, Imagination and Thinking (London: Cohen and West, 1957), 131–32.
228. Quoted. in E. Harding and E. M. Rosamond, An Anatomy of Inspiration (Cambridge: Heffer, 1942); reproduced in Taylor, Natural History of the Mind, 224.
229. Milton, Paradise Lost 9:21–24.
230. Taylor, Natural History of the Mind, 224. Jerusalem had a divine origin: “I see the Saviour over me / spreading his beams of love & dictating the words of this mild song.” (I, 4–5).
231. Goethe, Dickens, and Eliot all quoted in Taylor, Natural History of the Mind, 224.
232. Quoted in Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 166–67.
233. Quoted in Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After (Cambridge; Harvard University Press, 1978), 102–03.
234. Ibid., 103.
235. Jaynes, “The Origin of Consciousness,” in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 376.
236. Thackeray and Blyton in Taylor, Natural History of the Mind, 224.
237. Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 14.
238. Quoted in Koestler, Act of Creation, 115–16.
239. Ibid., 117.
240. Ibid.
241. Ibid., 116–17.
242. All in Inglis, “The Woman Who Saw What Others Could Not.”
243. Koestler, Janus, 149.
244. Lloyd Morgan, quoted in Koestler, Act of Creation, 145.
245. Ibid., 213.
246. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B367. For a discussion of this distinction, see Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:57.
247. Brinton, The Mystic Will, 100–2.
248. Ibid., 124, 113, 103.
249. Eckhart, quoted ibid., 125.
250. See J. L. Mehta, The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger (Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University Press, 1967), 1.
251. Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” trans. Peter D. Hertz, in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 12.
252. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row), 215.
253. Heidegger, What Calls for Thinking?, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ibid., 358.
254. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:171.
255. The German title can be translated either “What calls for thinking?” or “What is called thinking?”
256. What Is Called Thinking?, 159, 168–69.
257. Mehta, Philosophy of Heidegger, 374. A good discussion of the Kehre is on pp. 369–389.
258. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 199.
259. Ibid., 194.
260. Ibid., 236, 194.
261. Heidegger, What Calls for Thinking?, 353.
262. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 222.
263. Ibid., 223.
264. Ibid., 204, 210, 210–11, 212, 211 (my emphasis in the last).
265. Ibid., 229.
266. Ibid., 242. My emphasis.
267. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, in Basic Writings, 140–41. Unless otherwise indicated, my emphasis in all the quotations in this section.
268. Ibid., 123.
269. Ibid., 125 (Heidegger’s emphasis), 134, 135.
270. Heidegger, “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
271. Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writings, 374.
272. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 44, 98.
273. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 384–87.
274. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, 98, 103, 105, 106.
275. William Barrett discusses this in his introduction to the Anchor paperback anthology of Suzuki’s writings, Zen Buddhism (New York: Doubleday, 1956), xi.
276. Mumonkan, case 7, in Yamada, Gateless Gate.
277. See Mumonkan, case 46, ibid.
278. Chang, Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism, 231.
279. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 373.
280. The subject–object dualism with which these three systems are concerned can be expressed either as a consciousness–object dualism or a self–nonself dualism. Although these dualisms are not identical, they are obviously closely related, and for our purposes they will be treated as equivalent.
281. See also the Book of the Ones VI. 51–52 in the Aṅguttara Nikāya, where the Buddha describes mind (citta) as luminous (pabhassara):
Luminous, bhikkhus, is this mind, but it is defiled by adventitious defilements. The uninstructed worldling does not understand this as it really is; therefore I say that for the uninstructed worldling there is no development of the mind.
Luminous, bhikkhus, is this mind, and it is freed from adventitious defilements. The instructed noble disciple understands this as it really is; therefore I say that for the instructed noble disciple there is development of the mind. (Bhikkhu Bodhi trans.)
282. Edward J. Thomas, The Life of Buddha (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), 201.
283. For example, see Stcherbatsky, The Central Conception of Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974), esp. 3, 73.
284. Guiseppe Tucci, On Some Aspects of the Doctrines of Maitreya and Asanga (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1930), 2–4; quoted in Sangharakshita, Survey of Buddhism, 345.
285. Conze, Buddhist Thought in India, 251.
286. E. J. Thomas, The History of Buddhist Thought (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1933), 230, quoted in Survey of Buddhism, 346; Sangharakshita’s addition.
287. For a brief summary of the issues in this debate, see Lalmani Joshi, Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977), 178–80.
288. Chāndogya Upaniṣad VI.viii.7; Śaṅkara’s Vivekacūḍāmani 226, 339; Īśā Upaniṣad 7; Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad IV.iv.13.
289. The same point is made in the Zen Oxherding Pictures: the Ninth Picture is “Return to the Source,” but in so doing one realizes that one never left it.
290. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad II.iv.12–15, in Radhakrishnan and Moore, Sourcebook of Indian Philosophy, 82. My emphasis. Other Upaniṣadic verses sometimes cited as Buddhist in essence are Chāndogya VI.ii.1, Kaṭha I.xxvi.28 and II.v.7, Aitareya III.3.
291. Naiṣkarmya Siddhi, III 58, trans. A. J. Alston, as quoted in Deutsch’s Advaita Vedānta, 55.
292. Sharma, Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy, 318.
293. Dasgupta, History of Indian Philosophy, 1:493–94. My emphasis.
294. Joshi, Buddhistic Culture, 340–41.
295. Ibid., 338.
296. For further discussion of this topic, see ibid., chaps. 9, 13; and Sharma, Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy, chp. 18.
297. Murti, Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 10–11.
298. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961).
299. “Yasutani’s Commentary on Mu,” in Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 79–80.
300. Dōgen-Zenji, Shōbōgenzō, trans. Kosen Nishiyama and John Stevens (Sendai: Daihokkaikaku, 1975), 1:1.
301. Po-shan, as quoted in Garma C. C. Chang, The Practice of Zen (New York: Harper and Row), 103.
302. Hakuin, quoted in Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 148.
303. Po-shan, quoted in Chang, Practice of Zen, 103.
304. Hakuin, quoted in Suzuki, Zen Buddhism, 148.
305. Yoga Sūtra I.41.
306. Taittirīya, I.viii.1 and Śvetāśvatara I.14.
307. Satprakāshānanada, Methods of Knowledge, 276.
308. Mysticism East and West, 275, 278.
309. From a teisho (sermon) by Yamada Kōun given during a Zen sesshin. My emphasis.
310. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad III.vii.23 and II.iv.14. Compare also III.iv.2: “You cannot think of the thinker of thinking; you cannot know the Knower of Knowing.” Kena Upaniṣad II.3: “It is known to him who does not know It, and it is unknown to him who knows It.”
311. Ātmajñānōpadeśavidhi IV.10, quoted in Satprakāshānanda, Methods of Knowledge, 239.
312. See also Plato’s Republic, VIII.518. After this initial experience of “returning home,” would the state of ‘nirvana/mokṣa’ be blissful or not? This is an important controversy. In Sāṅkhya-Yoga, the liberated puruṣa is indifferent to both pain and bliss; apparently no emotional characteristics are applicable. Yet the true self is by no means emotionally neutral in Vedānta: Brahman is sacchidānanda, Existence-Consciousness-Bliss; all our phenomenal happiness is but a pale reflection of this ultimate joy.
Without attempting to resolve this issue, let me point out two passages that suggest these positions might not be irreconcilable. Chāndogya Upaniṣad IV.x.4–5: “Then they said to him: ‘Brahman is life (prana). Brahman is joy. Brahman is void.’ Then he said: ‘I understand that Brahman is life. But joy and void I do not understand.’ They said: ‘Joy (ka) — truly, that is the same as the Void (kha). The Void — truly, that is the same as joy.’” In one of the Pāli sutras the arhat Śāriputra, in answer to a similar question, says “that there is no sensation, is itself bliss.”
313. Gauḍapāda, Āgamaśāstra IV.60. Previously Guaḍapāda demonstrates that all things are unborn (ajāti).
314. Such, at least, is the traditional interpretation of their views, which has been questioned — notably by Heidegger, who claims that there is no such disagreement between them. This section could be used to support such a reinterpretation, for it could be argued that its conclusions are compatible with the fragments that remain of both Heraclitus and Parmenides.
315. For the same reason, Cratylus also concluded that language can never describe reality, since words are an attempt to fix that which never stops changing. So at the end of his life he no longer spoke but just “wagged his finger.” A Greek Zen master?
316. Aristotle’s description of Parmenides is as accurate a summary of Nāgārjuna: “Some earlier philosophers, e.g., Melissus and Parmenides, flatly denied generation and destruction, maintaining that nothing which is either comes into being or perishes; it only seems to us as if this happens” (De Caelo 298 B14). “They say that no existing thing either comes into being or perishes because what comes into being must originate either from what exists or from what does not, and both are impossible: what is does not become (for it already is) and nothing could come to be from what is not” (Physics 191 A27).
317. Thomas McEvilley makes a case for Plato as a Mādhyamika in “Early Greek Philosophy and Mādhyamika,” Philosophy East and West 31 no. 2 (April 1981): 149–52.
318. Arendt, Life of the Mind, 1:45. Arendt is describing Plotinus and Hegel, but the quotation also fits the nondualist Eastern traditions.
319. Heidegger finds the same duality at the origin of Greek philosophy: “even the very relation between presencing and what is present remains unthought. From early on it seems as though presencing and what is present were each something for itself. Presencing itself unnoticeably becomes something present. . . . The essence of presencing, and with it the distinction between presencing and what is present, remains forgotten. The oblivion of Being is the oblivion of the distinction between Being and beings.” “The Anaximander Fragment” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. Krell and Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 50–51. Although Heidegger sees the interdependence of presencing and what-is-present, he does not further deconstruct the duality because, like Advaita Vedānta, he wants to maintain an “ontological distinction” between Being and beings.
320. A possible objection here, that this confuses “psychological” with “objective” (e.g., Newtonian) time, presupposes the very duality that this work is challenging.
321. Masunaga Reiho, The Soto Approach to Zen (Tokyo: Layman Buddhist Society Press, 1958), 68.
322. Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, I:68–69.
323. Nāgārjuna, MMK XIII.5.
324. Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō, I:2.
325. And perhaps not. The source is Sextus Empiricus (Outlines of Pyrrhonism III 230): “Heraclitus says that both life and death are in both our living and dying; for when we live our souls are dead and buried in us, but when we die our souls revive and live.” The gloss makes the first statement rather pedestrian, but it may not be Heraclitus’ own. What Heraclitus says in frags. 67 and 65 could also be used to explain śūnyatā: “God is . . . fullness/emptiness”; “fullness and emptiness are the same thing.”
326. In the “Shōji” (Birth and Death) fascicle of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō.
327. Ibid., 1:69, 70.
328. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 75e, dated 8.7.16.
329. This suggests a “solution” to Zeno’s paradoxes, which presuppose a realist (objectified) conception of time. Quantification into a succession of finitely (atomism) or infinitely (continuum) divisible moments is inevitable if time is a “thing” and thus obviously composed of parts, but no collection of such units can ever add up to the flux of an event. As Nāgārjuna also pointed out, the basic problem is that continuity can never be established between such discrete moments, regardless of their duration. The error is to presuppose that the “now” is merely a unit of time, one of a sequence of moments successively falling away. Of course, this does not refute Zeno. His paradoxes prove just what he wanted: as his teacher Parmenides argued, time as something objective, that things are “in,” is unreal.
330. This is probably no coincidence, since there is little doubt that the dialectic of Gauḍapāda (believed to be Śaṅkara’s teacher’s teacher) was influenced by Mādhyamika. See Gauḍapāda’s Āgamaśāstra IV.3–41 for an Advaitic discussion of causality obviously influenced by Nāgārjuna’s.
331. MMK XXIV.18.
332. Ibid., 32–33.
333. MMK VII.34, as quoted in Murti, Central Philosophy of Buddhism, 177.
334. Candrakīrti, Lucid Exposition, 230, 236.
335. It may be better to say that by perceiving them as objects we give them the stability that we then attribute to them.
336. See Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, sec. 4, pts. 1–2.
337. Richard Robinson, “Did Nāgārjuna Really Refute All Philosophical Views?” Philosophy East and West 22 (1972): 325. Cheng Hsueh-Ii, “Motion and Rest in the Middle Treatise,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 7 (1980): 235ff.
338. This version of the story, from the Transmission of the Lamp, is given in Chang, Original Teachings of Ch’an, 116–17.
339. Tung-shan told his students to walk “in the bird’s track,” which is of course trackless, showing no deliberative traces before and leaving none after.
340. The Pūrva-Mīmāṁsā-Sūtras of Jaimini, trans. Ganganatha Jha (Varanasi: Bharatiya Publishing House, 1979), I.i.2, p. 3.
341. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad I.iv.7.
342. The Brahma-Sūtra-Bhaṣya of Śaṅkarācārya, I.i.4.
343. Ibid.
344. Ibid.; see also Kaṭha Upanṣad l.ii.22.
345. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy II 616. Radhakrishnan cites Brahma-Sūtra-Bhaṣya III.iv.27.
346. Brahma-Sūtra-Bhaṣya IV.l.4.
347. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad I.iv.7.
348. There is a striking parallel in Plato’s Republic, from the Cave parable: “our view of these matters must be this, that education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes. . . . But our present argument indicates . . . that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends it that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. . . . Of this thing, then, there might be an art, an art of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversion of the soul, not an art of producing vision in it, but on the assumption that it possesses vision but does not rightly direct it and does not look where it should, an art of bringing this about.” Republic VII 51 8b–d, trans. Paul Shorey, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1961).
349. Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad IV.30.
350. Ibid. IV.98.
351. Brahma-Sūtra-Bhaṣya IV.iii.14.
352. “Dōgen’s Bendōwa,” trans. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, The Eastern Buddhist 4 no. 1 (1971): 144.
353. My appreciation of Dōgen has been enriched by many secondary sources, notably Hee-Jin Kim, Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004); Francis Cook, “Enlightenment in Dōgen’s Zen,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 6 no. 1 (1983); Stephen Heine, “Temporality of Hermeneutics in Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō,” Philosophy East and West 33 no. 2 (April 1983). The Sesshin Sesshō quote is in Cook, p. 18. The Busshō quotes are from Heine, p. 140.
354. “Dōgen’s Bendōwa,” 145–46.
355. Dōgen, “Shōbōgenzō Buddha-Nature, Part II,” trans. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, The Eastern Buddhist 9 no. 1 (May 1976): 88.
356. Dōgen, “Shōbōgenzō Genjōkōan,” trans. Norman Waddell and Abe Masao, The Eastern Buddhist 5 no. 2 (October 1972): 139–40.
357. Ibid., 140n.
358. Kim’s translation in Eihei Dogen, op. cit.
359. Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (Purdue University Press, 1984), 48.
360. This is from Candrakīrti’s gloss to MMK XXV.24.
361. Quoted in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 128.
362. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 26.
363. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 31–67.
364. Magliola’s trans., in Derrida on the Mend, 32–33. My emphasis.
365. This section discusses Being and Time, div. 2, VI, no. 81, incl. n. xiii.
366. “Both the destruction and deconstruction of the history of philosophy have the effect of leading, not to a forgetting or an overcoming of it, but to an increased preoccupation with it”: David Couzens Hoy, “Forgetting the Text,” in The Question of Textuality, ed. Spanos, Bove, and O’Hara (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 234. It is a way to recuperate the tradition without believing in it; for what else are philosophers today to do?
367. David B. Allison, “Destruction/Deconstruction in the Text of Nietzsche,” ibid., 215.
368. From Derrida’s Spurs, quoted ibid., 211.
369. Derrida, Positions, 86.
370. “The task confronting a post-structuralist . . . theory of reading is to explain misreadings without generating ontological commitments of the same sort that caused previous distortions” (Hoy, “Forgetting the Text,” 223.)
371. Given Derrida’s fondness for Nietzsche, a Nietzschean evaluation is appropriate here. For Nietzsche, nihilism is a hope for the future, because it provides the possibility for a necessary “revaluation of all values.” But more immediately it is a grave danger: “God (Being, the transcendental signified, value, reference, meaning) is dead; now everything is permitted.” In textual terms, what form would such nihilism take? Do we find an equivalent in the loss of the original source of meaning, experienced as a vertiginous freedom to proliferate and disseminate in any way that we want? Is it then that “I have lost my umbrella” becomes as meaningful as any other statement.
372. See, for example, Vasubandhu’s Madhyāntavibhāgabhāṣya 21, and Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya I.i.22, I.iii.41.
373. Shin-ichi Hisamatsu, “The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness,” in Philosophical Studies of Japan, vol. 2, trans. Richard DeMartino (Tokyo: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1960).
374. See, for example, Muṇḍakopaniṣadbhāṣya III.ii.5, Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya II.i.14.
375. Kapleau, Three Pillars of Zen, 310. Kapleau’s brackets.
376. Chang, Original Teachings of Ch’an, 46. Some Christian mystics have made the same point, such as Jakob Boehme, according to whom “a good act thus begins with the evil particular, passes through the empty universal and ends in a life which endows the limited particular with a universal value. . . . Like the negative mystics he [Boehme] asks us to flee the evil world and retreat to the Absolute, but unlike them he asks us to return to the same world with the Absolute in tow. The other-world ethics is discovered in an act which transcends nature but which is applied to nature.” Brinton, Mystic Will, 213, 221.
377. Dasgupta, Introduction to Tantric Buddhism, 3–4.
378. For further discussion of this difference see Hajime Nakamura’s encyclopedic Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Books, 1964).
379. The distinction often made between jñāna and dhyāna (or yoga or raja) seems illegitimate to me, unless one confuses knowledge with scholarship — as the development of the metaphysical systems may have encouraged. But the attitude of the Gītā is the same as that expressed in Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad III.ii.9: “He who knows the Supreme Brahman verily becomes Brahman.”
380. All Gītā quotation and citations in this chapter are from the translation by S. Radhakrishnan in The Bhagavadgītā (New York: Harper and Bros., 1948).
381. In relation to Advaita, I mean that māyā is not granted any reality apart from Brahman.
382. This makes possible a more sympathetic interpretation of Vedic orthopraxy. The complexity of detailed rituals requires great concentration, so, as in Japanese tea ceremony one could look upon the goal not as “doing it exactly right” but as developing that sustained attention.
383. Robert A. McDermott, “Indian Spirituality in the West: A Bibliographic Mapping,” Philosophy East and West 25, no. 2 (April 1975): 214.
384. Ibid.
385. The emotional fixation on the sense of self may also be broken by worshiping an object such as an idol or one’s guru. The concreteness of such objects means that making them into emotional mantras is both easier and more dangerous.
386. “For truly, beings here are born from bliss, when born; they live by bliss; and into bliss, when departing, they enter” (Taittirīya Upaniṣad III.vi .1).
387. See, for example, Troy Wilson Organ, The Hindu Quest for the Perfection of Man (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 69–70, 171–75, 336–37.
388. For example, see ibid., 255.
389. “O Lord, even after realizing that there is no real difference between the individual soul and Brahman I beg to state that I am yours and not that you are mine. The wave belongs to the ocean and not the ocean to the wave.” “Nowhere exists in all the world another sinner equal to me; nowhere a Power like Thyself for overcoming sinfulness. O Goddess, keeping this in mind, do Thou as it pleases Thee.” Quoted ibid., 254. However the attribution to Śaṅkara has been questioned.
390. Three attributes often given to God — all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful — seem to be incompatible with human suffering.
391. In Divine Love and Wisdom, Swedenborg claimed that people misunderstand the nature of God’s love: God’s love is always active, but we are not always receptive to it. Although his writings are firmly Christian, there is much in them of great interest to the nondualist. For another example, Heaven and Hell claims that after death God does not consign spirits to heaven or hell, but they choose their own habitation by how they react to him; the virtuous are attracted to His presence, the bad flee from it to the region of hell that corresponds to their own nature. This karmic interpretation suggests comparisons with the Tibetan Bardo Thodol.
392. For example, in XII 2–5 and XIV 27 Krishna declares his superiority over the impersonal Absolute.
393. Vidyaranya, Pañca-pādikā VI.285.
394. Arthur Shopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), vol. 3, 286.
395. Ibid., vol. 3, 145.
396. Ibid., vol. 1, 231.
397. In F. C. Copleston, Arthur Schopenhauer: Philosopher of Pessimism (London, 1946), 10.
398. Quoted in Gardiner’s Shopenhauer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 192.
399. Eliot Deutsch, Studies in Comparative Aesthetics (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1975), 32.
400. Ibid., 46–47.
401. Ibid., 2.
402. Ibid.
403. Ibid., 17.
404. Ibid., 88.
405. Ibid., 18–19.
406. Heinrich Zimmer, The Art of Indian Asia (New York: Pantheon, 1955), I. 318.
407. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Why Exhibit Works of Art? (Luzac), as quotes in Bernard Blackstone, English Blake (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969), 429. Blackstone’s book is an excellent study of Blake’s mystical philosophy.
408. Quoted in Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (New York: Dover, 1956), 81.
409. Deutsch, Studies in Comparative Aesthetics, 19.
410. Zimmerman, “Towards a Heideggerian Ethos for Radical Environmentalism.”