Enlightenmenr and Social Virtuosity in Chan Buddhism

·期刊原文

Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenmenr and Social Virtuosity in Chan Buddhism

By peter D. Hershock.

Albany:State University of New York Press, 1996. Pp.236

Brook Ziporyn

Philosophy East & West Volume 48, Number 3

July 1998 P. 366~368

Copyright University of Hawai'i Press

P. 366

This is a work of great originality and surpassing
philosophical interest, as well as a subtle and penetrating
improvisation on themes suggested by the canonical works of
Chinese Ch'an Buddhism. Taking seriously both the canonical
Ch'an rhetoric and recent refinements in Western scholarly
apprehensions concerning the distinctive features of the
Chinese cultural and philosophical world in which it
emerged  especially the concept of the relational and
social self as primary and the priority of

p.367

axiology to ontology  Hershock develops the thesis that
Ch'an enlightenment is best understood not as the attainment
of an individual state of interior or subjective perfection,
but rather as an intersubjective virtuosity and
improvisational precedent-less responsiveness, enacted not in
any one putative being but in the communicative interstices
between all social persons.
This paradigm shift for understanding Ch'an Buddhism does
for that tradition something like what Hall and Ames have
done for/to Confucius, and bears some of the same risks and
glories. On the one hand, it is undeniably and exceptionally
fruitful in promoting the sort of gestalt-shift (a metaphor
Hershock is fond of) that will allow us to take these texts
seriously at all. Indeed, recent trends have all but
abandoned any attempt to take Ch'an bigmouths at their word,
and have had to start treating them as an especially slippery
and cunning form of ideological smoke screen. Hershock's
alternative seems to be the only one so far available, and
one that many of us will find far preferable  it has at
least the virtue of being philosophically interesting.
Moreover, it cannot be denied that the themes Hershock
identifies are indeed staples of Chinese thinking, and
certainly form a part of the deep structure that helps us to
understand the often strange-sounding pronouncements of
this most weirdness-mongering of all Chinese schools. In
particular, the primacy of intersubjectivity, as irreducible,
ultimate, and constitutive of all experience, has proved to
be of indispensable usefulness also in the treatment of some
of the stranger formulations of Tiantai Buddhism, and
Hershock's work suggests that one of the founding
distinctions between Indian and Chinese Buddhism must be
located in precisely this issue, with roots digging deep into
the respective traditions. This insight is invaluable and,
to this reviewer at least, incontestable.
However, like all such radical rereadings of an old set
of texts into a modern idiom for a modern audience,
Hershock's interpretation, like that of Hall and Ames before
him, runs the risk of shameless gerrymandering and fanciful
looseness. To his credit, Hershock is well aware of this
danger and, even more to his credit, realizes that the
Buddhist vision of universal ambiguity to which he presents
himself as committed already makes any other conception of
scholarship quite untenable. Indeed, to the extent that
Buddhist scholars with no more than a passing historical
interest in their topic remain something of an exception, it
is surely strange that this issue has not become the central
methodological point of discussion in the field, inasmuch as
certain readings of the doctrine of emptiness and its
relation to worldly truth would unquestionably undermine and
indeed demolish any attempt at historical researches, into
Buddhism or anything else, that assume a foundational
objectivist epistemology. It is time for Buddhists to ask
what kind of history, if any,

p.368

can be done in the context of a renunciation of the very
possibility of nonambiguous meaning. Hershock's book may mark
a catalyst in bringing this discussion to a new and fruitful
level of crisis.

Be that as it may, it is hard to avoid the impression
that some of Hershock's renderings are more persuasive and
attractive than others; the gloss of the Chinese conception
of kong ('suunyataa) as "relinquishing all horizons for
relevance" is profoundly insightful and useful, for example,
and maps very tightly onto many applications of the term in
Chinese Buddhism, while the translation of wu-wei as a form
of conduct free of reference to conventional precedent seems
a bit harder to swallow, especially since the term is often
used, it would seem, in precisely the opposite sense, as
unthinking accord with conventional precedent. Occasionally
there are fanciful analyses of Chinese terms and characters
that will certainly make more consevative sinologists wince.
The prevalence of (often excellent) metaphors drawn from
improvisational music and dancing and sex will, one likes to
think, be pointed to by thirtieth-century Buddhologists in
the same way that their twentieth-century counterparts regard
tropes relating to filial piety in early Chinese Buddhism as
a telltale mark of a text dating from acertain phase in the
process of the Americanization of Buddhism  which of course
is certainly not to the detriment of the work in any way,
nor indeed does it at all undermine the appropriateness and
usefulness of these metaphors. Buddhism, as Hershock well
knows, has no need to deny the legitimacy of such
developments, nor to dismiss them as distorions of an
original, unambiguous set of doctrines or modes of
discourse, and can indeed point to their proliferation as
unqualfiedly legitimate exfoliations of the Dharma.

A more serious shortcoming, perhaps, is Hershock's
insistence on interpreting intersubjectivity and sociality in
what may be a manner too literal to accord with his own
insistence on their constitutive status; why, one wonders
(thinking of the Tiantai case again, as well as Hui-neng's
explicit statement to this effect in the Platform Sutra), are
not apparently private and interanl states of mind
experienced in the seclusion of a meditator`s cell just as
thoroughly and irreducibly intersubjective as literal social
interaction ? The constitutive nature of such a duality,
which would make " private " experience also profoundly
intersubjective, and " intersubjective " experience also
profoundly private.

However, none of that should detract from the obvious
conclusion that this book is a treasure trove of finely
wrought insights and ideas, a work of relentless originality
and possibly epoch-making importance, especially noteworthy
for its thoroughgoing pursuit of all the implications of its
founding insights, yielding new and fruitful ways of looking
at our experience, in a way that is all too rare.