Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (禅道の千路) by Bret W. Davis (review) Steve G. Lofts Bret W. Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (禅道の千路) There is no shortage of books on Zen from almost every imaginable angle. And so, what makes Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism (禅道の千路) by Bret W. Davis unique enough to take up and read, and even re-read? And who should read it? The answers to these questions depend on who you are and what you are looking for. If you are simply curious about what Zen philosophy and practice is or is not, a student, a professor looking for a textbook on Zen Buddhism for your course, or a practitioner seeking to deepen your understanding of what it is that you are practicing, then you will almost certainly enjoy and profit greatly from this book. Davis brings to the page over thirty years of active engagement with Zen Buddhism as a practitioner, teacher of philosophy and Zen Buddhism, and scholar. Davis provides his reader with an accessible, comprehensive, and well-documented introduction to the teachings and practices of Zen Buddhism. What makes this introduction stand out and be particularly effective is that Davis provides us with a scholarly and philosophical account of Zen Buddhism that is animated by his personal experience as a long-term practitioner in Japan at the Rinzai Zen monastery of Shōkokuji and as a teacher and director of the Heart of Zen Meditation Group at Loyola University Maryland. However, as the Japanese subtitle of this work, 禅道の千路, makes clear, there are “a thousand paths of the way of Zen,” and Davis is careful to show us the paths he has traveled while leaving it to the reader to find their own paths along the way. In the course of the book’s twenty-four chapters, Davis provides his reader with a clear account and philosophical interpretation of [End Page 159] the core teachings of Buddhism (the four noble truths, impermanence, the no-self doctrine, co-origination and interconnection of the one and the many, nirvana and samsara, the great death, and so on), always relating his theoretical explanations to the concrete perspective of the practice of Zen Buddhism. His account of Zen Buddhism situates it in the historical tradition of Buddhism as it was transplanted from India to China, from China to Japan, and today from Japan to other places in the world. Davis connects these teachings to the practice of Zen, providing readers with a concrete and firsthand introduction to such Zen practices as zazen (seated meditation), kinhin (walking meditation), sanzen (interviews with a teacher), koān work, and samu (meditative work), and to the Zen practice of cultivating naturalness (jinen) in and through such art forms as karate and flower arrangement (ikebana), the Japanese aesthetics of “cut-continuance” and wabi-sabi, as well as Zen-inspired gardens, painting, and music. The book also explores a number of classical and contemporary philosophical issues from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism: the problem of the one and the many, the ethical relation to the other, the problem of evil, the nature of love, freedom and determinacy, what is God, our relation to nature, and so on. Finally, the presentation of the core teachings of Zen Buddhism and the discussion of philosophical issues is undertaken in and through an intercultural and interreligious dialogue in which the similarities and dissimilarities between different cultural and faith traditions are explored and used to help illustrate the unique standpoint of Zen Buddhism. One can mention here Chapter 12 titled “Dying to Live: Zen, Pure Land Buddhism, and Christianity.” This synoptic view of Zen Buddhism is presented in an elegant, personal style that is clear, concise, and expresses a genuine passion and spirit of openness. In copious endnotes, Davis has also provided the reader with a wealth of material for further study that has been judiciously selected from good English translations of readings in the classical works as well as contemporary scholarship. Finally, with an eye to the use of this text in a classroom or in study groups, Davis has...
Guest Editor’s Introduction Nakajima Takahiro 「東京学派」とは聞きなれない名称であろう。日本研究において「京都学派」は大変よく知られている。たとえ「京都学派」が、「無の論理は論理ではない」と述べた上で、戸坂潤が発明した批判的な概念であったとしても、現在ではそれは西田幾多郎や田辺元を中心とした一大哲学運動として世界的に認知されている。ところが、西田にしても田辺にしてももともとは東京帝国大学で学んだ学生であった。また、戦前においては、井上哲次郎から桑木厳翼へと続く東京帝国大学哲学科の流れは、当時の社会状況と相互に影響しあって、一定の意義を示していたのである。また、大森荘蔵、廣松渉、坂部恵といった戦後の東京大学の哲学者たちは、「京都学派」の問題系を乗り越えることを重視していた。 この特別号では、発見的概念として「東京学派」を用いて、戦前・戦後におけるその意義と広がりを探究することにした。それは東京大学もしくは東京帝国大学に限定されたものではなく、それ以外の東京圏の大学との相互交流も含まれるものである。「京都学派」に対しては、政治との距離をどう測るかがしばしば議論されてきたが、「東京学派」は政治により密着したものである。日本の近代の哲学の有している政治性そして倫理性を考えるのであれば、やはり「東京学派」の議論は避けて通る ことのできないものである。 無論、「学派」というほどのまとまりを「東京学派」が有しているわけではないことも確かである。西田幾多郎が「京都学派」で果たした中心性は、「東京学派」にはない。そこで、トマス・カスリスが示唆するように、「学派」の代わりに「サークル」や「スタイル」という言葉を使った方がより正確かもしれない。それでも、あえて「東京学派」と呼ぶのは、「京都学派」に比べて関心を持たれることの少ない、しかし当時は圧倒的な影響力を有し、戦後決定的に忘却されていった東京の哲学者たちに光をあて、近代日本の哲学の総体を明らかにしたいからである。 「東京学派」の研究は緒についたばかりである。今後、国際的な研究の高まりを期待しながら擱筆する。 The “Tokyo School” may be an unfamiliar term to readers. The Kyoto School is very well known in Japanese studies. Even if the Kyoto School is a critical concept invented by Tosaka Jun, who stated [End Page 2] that “the logic of nothingness is not logic,” it is now recognized worldwide as a major philosophical movement led by Nishida Kitarō and Tanabe Hajime. However, both Nishida and Tanabe were originally students at Tokyo Imperial University. In addition, before the war, the output of the Department of Philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, from Inoue Tetsujirō to Kuwaki Gen’yoku, had a certain significance because it interacted with the social conditions of the time. In addition, postwar philosophers at the University of Tokyo, such as Ōmori Shōzō, Hiromatsu Wataru, and Sakabe Megumi emphasized overcoming the problematics of the Kyoto School. In this special issue, we use the Tokyo School as a heuristic concept to explore its significance and spread in the prewar and postwar periods. It is not limited to the University of Tokyo or Tokyo Imperial University but includes interactions with other universities in the Tokyo area. While the Kyoto School has often been discussed in terms of how to measure its distance from politics, the Tokyo School is more closely connected to politics. If we consider the political and ethical dimensions of modern Japanese philosophy, we cannot avoid discussing the Tokyo School. Of course, it is true that the Tokyo School is not as coherent as a “school.” The central role that Nishida fulfilled in the Kyoto School is perhaps lacking in the Tokyo School. Therefore, as Thomas P. Kasulis suggests, it might be more accurate to use the term “circle” or “style” instead of “school.” Nevertheless, I dare to call it the Tokyo School because I would like to shed light on the Tokyo philosophers who were less popular than those of the Kyoto School but whose influence was overwhelming at the time and who were definitively forgotten after the war, so as to clarify the totality of philosophy in modern Japan. Research on the Tokyo School has only just begun. I am writing this introductory note in anticipation of further international research on the Tokyo School. [End Page 3] Copyright © 2023 State University of New York Press
Ōmori Shōzō and Kotodama Theory: How Can We Overcome the Need for Bodily Encounters? Maki Sato Introduction Ōmori Shōzō is known for his theory of tachi-araware monism. Tachiaraware monism is his attempted counter-argument to the Cartesian dualism of the object–subject divide, or in his words, a divide between physical (butsuri, mono, science, object) and non-physical consciousness (ishiki, koto, perception, incident), perception (chikaku, 知覚) and conception (shikō, 思考). His concept of Kasane-egaki is also often cited as a core concept of his theory of time.1 The main aim of this paper is to first overview the works of Ōmori since there is only a limited amount of his translated work so far.2 Consecutively, the paper focuses on Ōmori’s theory of kotodama and its related arguments with an intention to expand his concept of Kowaburi into the ethics of online encounters during the pandemic. The world in 2020 was suddenly forced to face the pandemic caused by COVID-19. What COVID-19 alerted us to is tremendous, and there are countless problems that the invisible virus has revealed. Among those are the hidden problems of contemporary society, not limited to the discrimination among races, gender, and jobs (white-collars versus essential workers), the problem of zoonosis, and the related environmental problems (climate change and intrusion into wild nature) caused by over-exploitation of nature. In developed countries, most students and those serving as intellectual workers face their daily lives being overly occupied with online lectures and meetings. COVID-19 worked to normalize remote work, which further normalized and forced our everyday life to shift to cyberspace. [End Page 101] In introducing and overviewing Ōmori’s philosophy, this paper attempts to see the current situation through Ōmori’s philosophy to draw out some ethical implications related to non-physical online encounters and how we can perceive human interactions and relationships under such conditions. Under the constraints caused by COVID-19, humans’ limitless desires to interact with others are expanding more so to the sphere of cyberspace, leading to technological development, such as VR. In short, first, the paper overviews Ōmori’s philosophy. Second, through the overview of Ōmori’s philosophy, the paper seeks adaptable philosophy of his that may work as soft binding grounding ethics for cyberspace encounters where substantial bodily encounters are void. In doing so, the paper intends to draw out weak binding ethics implied in Ōmori’s philosophy that may work to empathetically engage with others in cyberspace where embodied encounters with others are dissolved. Ōmori Shōzō and His Philosophy: A Short Introduction and Overview In his short essay introducing the Japanese philosophy of the 1970s, Yasuo Kobayashi coined the term “Komaba quartet” by selecting four active eminent philosophers based on the Komaba campus at the University of Tokyo.3 Among them is Ōmori Shōzō (1921–97), aligning with Hiromatsu Wataru (1933–94), Sakabe Megumi (1936–2009), and Inoue Tadashi (1926–2014). Ōmori is the oldest of the Komaba quartet and received higher education before World War II. He served at the Naval Technology Institute Mitaka Laboratory during the war with his physics degree from the Tokyo Imperial University.4 After the war, he studied philosophy at the University of Tokyo with an interest in phenomenology, leading him to study at Harvard and Stanford in the United States. During his professorship at the University of Tokyo, he inspired countless students who are now leading the philosophy academy in Japan, such as Noe Keiichi (1949–) and Noya Shigeki (1954–). In the round-table discussion titled “Explanatory Round-Table on the Charm of Ōmori’s Philosophy,” four of his former students—Iida Takashi and Tanji Nobuharu, in addition to Noe and Noya—worked on selecting his works. It is impressive to read that all four [End Page 102] of them recall how exciting and inspiring it was to take his classes.5 Iida recalls that Ōmori’s classes were exceptional since philosophy courses were all about reading, with might and main, the texts written in a language other than Japanese at the University of Tokyo. However, Ōmori, with his postwar American education, welcomed discussion with the students and was keen on questioning...
Tokyo School of Philosophy? A Preliminary Reflection Thomas P. Kasulis Introduction Philosophical circles worldwide have recognized the so-called Kyoto School for decades. Can we also speak of a modern Tokyo School and, if so, of its distinguishing nature? That question drives most articles in this journal’s special issue. Before beginning my inquiry, however, I have two preliminary questions. First, why is it important to ask whether there is, was, or even ever will be something legitimately considered a Tokyo School? Second, how do the Japanese think in terms of schools, and what words might specifically designate a school of philosophy? I will try to answer these questions, not in an abstract or general way, but one that uses the Japanese cultural context for its point of departure. Japanese Regionalism and Japanese Philosophy Let us start with the first issue: why ask whether there is a Tokyo School? One possibility, of course, is regional bragging rights between Kansai and Kantō as we find in, for example, sumō rivalries. That may seem like a joke, but we need to go back only a couple of centuries for concrete evidence of just such a competitive spirit. Examine this broadside published in Japan during the height of the Edo period.1 [End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2.1. Gakusha kakuryoku shōbu tsuki hyōban (学者角力勝負附評判) (Standings Assigned to a Sumō Match of Scholars). As a sumō program, this banzuke divides the philosophical competitors between those from East Japan (Edo, today’s Tokyo) and West Japan (Kyoto-Osaka).2 Along the top are the typical sumō hierarchies of ranks (ōzeki, sekiwake, komusubi, etc.),3 but here they correspond not to wrestlers but philosophers. In this version, for example, Kumazawa Banzan 熊沢蕃山 is the ōzeki and Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 the sekiwake of the East, while the equivalents in the West are Arai Hakuseki 新井白石 and Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎. Such artifacts confirm a long history of East–West philosophical rivalries within Japan, but that hardly justifies our quest for a Tokyo School. Still, let us not too quickly dismiss the banzuke as simply an idiosyncratic curiosity; it has something more to teach us. If nothing else, it shows that at least in the Edo period, some intellectuals assumed a correlation between geographical location and philosophical perspective. That brings to light two common [End Page 6] present-day misconceptions, one about Japanese culture and one about philosophy. The first misconception is that Japanese culture is monolithic, or if it is not, that the Japanese like to think of their identity in that way. That mistaken view overlooks a potent force shaping Japanese identity: regionalism. The Japanese delight in celebrating the distinctive foods, crafts, scenery, dialects, festivals, and social customs of the different locales within the country. Even today, weeklong regional themes play out on morning TV shows as they broadcast on site from different locales throughout Japan. Undoubtedly a marketing ploy to encourage tourism, the shows also reinforce the Japanese sense of regional differences within their country. Grocery or department stores join in with weeklong “matsuri” campaigns dedicated to particular Japanese regions, highlighting sales of specialties in foods and crafts. If you go on a trip within Japan, your family and coworkers expect you to bring back omiyage as gifts—souvenirs or edibles distinctive to the place you visited. As a convenience for the harried traveler, train stations sell the omiyage associated with the specific locale. The recognition of regional differences within a single national identity traces back at least to the Nara period when the newly established central government began regularly compiling Fudoki 風土記 for each of the provinces. Those almanacs or gazetteers included details about the local demography, climate, agriculture, topography, dialects, local customs, festivals, folklore, and so forth. The East vs. West, Kantō vs. Kansai, or Tokyo (Edo) vs. Kyoto-Osaka contrast that interests us here became most prominent in the Edo period as Tokyo vied with Kyoto for prominence as the cultural center of Japan.4 Centuries before anyone identified a “Kyoto School” of philosophy, the banzuke suggests that at least some intellectuals assumed that philosophizing in Kyoto-Osaka differed in some respects from philosophizing in Edo. This does not imply...
