Buddhism and American Thinkers

·期刊原文

Buddhism and American Thinkers

Edited by Kenneth K. Inada and Nolan P. Jacobson

Reviewed by Kusumita P. Pedersen

Philosophy East & West
V. 35 (October 1985), pp. 447-450

Copyright 1985 by University of Hawaii Press

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This collection of essays is intended by the editors to present some of the recent developments in the dialogue between American process thought and Buddhism. Inada and

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Jacobson hold that Buddhist doctrine can be fruitfully construed by using categories of Whiteheadian process metaphysics, that Whitehead may have a special role to play in interpreting East and West to each other, and that there are certain "ideas that constitute a common core of Buddhist and American philosophy" (p. vii). Contributions have been invited which refer to these themes. One's response to the book will thus depend to a significant extent on one's evaluation of Whitehead's thought, since nowhere is the viability of process metaphysics called seriously into question.

The essays vary widely in approach and subject, so that it is difficult in this space to give any general account of their contents. Taken together, their diversity prevents them from adding up to a demonstration of the editors' theses; they must be read for their individual interest and contributions to the discussion. The authors share a commitment to crosscultural inquiry which one can only applaud, but which needs no arguments in its favor for readers of this journal. Three of the essays are by Asians: Kenneth Inada, Richard S. Y. Chi, and Hajime Nakamura. (It is not clear from what they have written here how. if at all, each of them might identify himself as a 'Buddhist'.) Two other pieces are by leading exponents of process thought, Charles Hartshorne and Robert C. Neville. Hartshorne's reflections are of special interest as a personal narrative by a major figure, tracing the development of his sympathy with Buddhist ideas or, to be more precise, ideas which, as things turned out, seemed to coincide with Buddhist ideas. His sense that substance-views of the self imply a deficient moral consciousness leads him, he tells us, to an appreciation of the anaatman doctrine. He believes his own construction of "the asymmetrical view of cumulative becoming" to be superior to Naagaarjuna's account of pratiityasamutpaada or dependent origination, but finds an affinity with both Naagaarjuna and the Hua-yen patriarch Fa-tsang.

Inada, conjoining his own extended interpretation of `suunyataa as ontological plenum and ground with observations about American life, finds prospects to be "excellent" for "the American involvement with `suunyataa,'' chiefly because of the open and "creative" nature of American experience. Nolan P. Jacobson and David Lee Miller also see "creativity" as a central value with the capability of linking Buddhist and Western orientations. David L. Hall insists that Angle-European philosophers of culture take Asia with full seriousness or fail to loose the constraints of characteristically Western attitudes to science and morality. He commends Whitehead's ideas as a resource in East- West interchange partly because Whitehead's lack of direct knowledge of Asian philosophy means that his thought "lacks any of the artificiality which afflicts any studied attempt to build a bridge between East and West" (p. 22). Jay McDaniel's closely written "Mahaayaana Enlightenment in Process Perspective" is ambitious and remarkably convincing if one is familiar with Zen materials.

Richard Chi briefly notes, to illustrate the urgency of Western need to learn more about Asian thought, that the Buddhist logician Dignaaga (fifth century A.D.) wrote a treatment of 'truth factors' some sixteen hundred years before Russell and others, in the discussion assessing the Principia Mathematica, acknowledged their importance. Like Chi's article, Nakamura's essay stands somewhat apart from the others in the book. Brief, unannotated, and, I think, deeply personal, his statement on "Interrelation Existence" expresses both an East Asian vision of communal reality and an understanding of pratiityasamutpaada as universal interdependence informed by erudition in Buddhist textual tradition and Western philosophers.

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Robert Neville's "Buddhism and Process Philosophy" is the most analytically and constructively thorough piece in the book, and in its sustained juxtaposition of Naagaarjuna and Whitehead. comes the closest to being truly comparative. Neville contends that "For thinkers who are not concerned to 'represent' positions, East or West, the encounter of Buddhism with process philosophy has already made a creative advance beyond what each originally brought to the encounter" (p. 142). Here Neville must mean by 'represent' to represent the positions of historical figures or traditions rather than one's own new constructions; a thinker such as Neville, long engaged in constructive work, is "representing" at least his own position. The new positions must then be the locus of the "creative advances" made by process philosophy. Neville's critique of Naagaarjuna and comparison of him with Whitehead issue in the judgment that "Naagaarjuna's refutation of causation and change fails with respect to the contributions of process philosophy" (p. 132). Neville recognizes that Naagaarjuna is seen by many as commenting on the character of all theory-making and conceptualizing (for this philosophical posture Neville uses the phrase "the transcendental turn") (p. 122). He notes, referring to an article by David Dilworth, that there is a fundamental ambivalence in Naagaarjuna's position of no-position, in that one cannot without some sort of contradiction admit a standard of sense, necessary for the dialectic, and then later refuse to admit this same standard, declaring all positions alike to be nonsensical, and saying, "I have no counter-position." Neville moves swiftly from perception of the fact that Naagaarjuna seems to use a criterion of philosophical success to the apparent assumption that he is, after all, interested in metaphysical construction. We then asks, "Why would Naagaarjuna or Bradley believe that all relations must be symmetrically internal? Either they could not think of a logical alternative, such as the asymmetrical view of Whitehead's, or they thought the symmetrically internal relations view better interprets the phenomena" (p. 132). But Naagaarjuna's arguments depend on "criticizing positions unlike the process cosmology" (p. 131), (this Neville discusses in detail). If I understand him correctly, Neville is saying that Naagaarjuna failed because he did not think of what Whitehead thought of, or, if he did think of it, he did not see its cogency. Neville says that "If Naagaarjuna objected to speculative thinking. it should not have been on intrinsic grounds, as his apparently logical arguments allege. The objection would have to be based on other, perhaps soteriological, grounds" (p. 132). But as he has just remarked that "The transcendental interpretation of Naagaarjuna is not as interesting as the ontological interpretation" (ibid.), he seems not to be concerned in any case with the "soteriological grounds," and to have dismissed the possible view that Naagaarjuna might not have been interested in cosmology, at least in the way Neville is, and/ or at least not in the Madhyamakakaarikaas.

As a person trained in historical method, I am convinced that what is most important is not what is the most "interesting" interpretation of Naagaarjuna, but what is the hermeneutically most correct one. The question of what Naagaarjuna intended is not yet closed. And if one is not concerned with what Naagaarjuna may actually have had in mind, then there is no real "encounter" with Buddhism. Naagaarjuna is, of course, in a way unable to participate in the encounter, since he is in India of the second century .A.D. We should not be anachronistically faulted because Whitehead's ideas did not occur to him. Especially if his concerns were polemical (as well as soteriological), he would have been most attentive to the theories already propounded by his partners in debate in his own 　

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time, both Buddhist and non-Buddhist. In the present discussion, he needs to be "represented," pace Neville, by a thinker with a solid knowledge of Maadhyamika sources and their contexts, and equipped for late-twentieth-century philosophical dialogue. For an illumining treatment of some of the key issues, I would like to draw attention to Malcolm D. Eckel's lucid study, A Question of' Nihilism: Bhaavaviveka's Response to the Fundamental Problems of Maadhyamika Philosophy.

This objection to Neville's method instantiates my chief dissatisfaction with the book as a whole. The "encounter" between process thought and Buddhism can become more genuinely an encounter if interpretations such as those offered here come more explicitly to terms with Buddhism as a historical tradition. For example, in this collection Western philosophers are mentioned throughout, but apart from several modern Japanese thinkers, no great Buddhist writer is mentioned by name except Naagaarjuna and Fa-tsang. There is an imbalance here. "Buddhism" is often referred to--but what is "Buddhism"? Which "Buddhism" is it, and whose? The profound differences between Indian and East Asian Buddhism are little dealt with, though they are important to any self-reflective appropriation of the doctrine of `suunyataa by a contemporary philosopher. There is an overall tendency to cite secondary sources rather than texts, though several of the authors are able, even distinguished, textual scholars. Perhaps the editors have purposely adopted the practice of avoiding technical terminology, historical investigations, and explanations of hermeneutical presuppositions, with the aim of reaching a wider readership than might otherwise be accessible. One can appreciate this aim, the economy of the presentation, and that the stress here is on constructive statement and not on Buddhist studies. Yet the rigor and substance of inquiries like these can be increased by a fuller account of the whole task of cross-cultural understanding, which must include historical understanding, and of the self-identifications of the participants in the encounter. This criticism, then, is really a proposal for a way of continuing an important undertaking, to which this book makes a notable contribution.

NOTES

1. "Whitehead's Process Realism, the Abhidharma Theory, and the Mahaayaana Critique," International Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (June 1978).

2. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1980