Reply to Kenneth K. Inada

·期刊原文
Reply to Kenneth K. Inada

By Richard Pilgrim
Philosophy East and West
Volume 39, no. 4(October 1989)
P 457

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P457

Professor Inada offers a useful rejoinder to my
review of Matsuo's Logic of Unity both by providing
further evidence and explanation for some of my
points (paragraphs 1 and 4), and by helping me
sharpen the issues that create the most
"obfuscation" (paragraphs 2 and 3). Since the latter
are most crucial to this discussion, let me simply
pursue them briefly here.

My relief upon reading the chapter on the Heart
Suutra was finally to hear Buddhism being expressed
from within its own language world. What Matsuo had
been attempting to say previously in other language
worlds (geometric diagrams, mathematics, descriptive
metaphysics) suddenly became clearer. My central
problem with the book, therefore, is that Buddha
Dharma, in its truest sense, is obfuscated by these
other language worlds since Matsuo does not make
clear, from the very beginning, that this "empty
('suunya) ground of existence" is, in fact, no
ground. As Naagaarjuna has said, emptiness is itself
empty; Matsuo is not careful to empty his namings
and thereby risks the very dualistic metaphysics
that Professor Inada rightfully decries. In short,
it may be true that I "lack the insight," but I
truly do not "catch the rare glimpses of (the)
reality that Buddhism is dangling before (our) very
eyes" in this book and its mode of expression.

This is, indeed, serious, and I appreciate
Inada's clarification of a nondualistic middle which
"must be grasped nonconventionally" (exactly my
point, by the way, in stressing between). However, I
find Matsuo's "new epistemological framework" and
his manner of expression relatively conventional and
not transparent to "reality as such" (emphasis
added). Perhaps, as Inada inadvertently suggests,
these things are better left to poetry.