Pub Date : 2018-11-07DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199945726.013.34
Bret W. Davis
Many of us today can neither swallow the metaphysical dogma that would separate our souls from the natural world nor bite the deterministic bullet and renounce our longing for—and inner sense of—freedom. The question, then, is: Can we find a path that leads beyond these apparent conflicts between freedom and nature? One thing seems clear: if there is such a path of reconciliation, it must entail along the way a radical rethinking of the very concepts of “nature” and “freedom.” This essay demonstrates that Zen Buddhism and related strands of Japanese thought have much to contribute to precisely such a rethinking of nature and freedom—a rethinking that sees them as nondually interrelated in their origins and as ultimately reconcilable through practice. By drawing on a number of traditional and modern thinkers, it explores the philosophical sources in Japan for recognizing and realizing the possibility of a natural freedom.
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Pub Date : 2014-09-02DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199945726.013.12
Bret W. Davis
Dōgen Kigen (1200–1253) was the founder of the Sōtō school of Japanese Zen Buddhism, and he is widely held to be the most significant philosopher in the Zen tradition. The kernel of his thought is expressed in his most famous text, Genjōkōan, rendered here as “The Presencing of Truth.” This chapter explicates the key ideas of this text, offering in particular an interpretation of its epistemological implications. It argues that Dōgen’s view of enlightenment as an ongoing practice of enlightening, as an unending path of discovery, implies an egoless perspectivism. It is a perspectivism insofar as reality is understood to only ever show itself one aspect at a time. In delusion, this perspective gets narrowly determined by the will of the ego. In the practice of enlightenment or enlightening, however, the self “forgets itself” in the “total exertion” of a participatory engagement in the world, and truth presences in and through such nondual events of interconnectivity.
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Pub Date : 2014-09-02DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199945726.013.30
R. Kersten
When examining political thought in post-1945 Japan, we must acknowledge that the postwar philosophical landscape was fundamentally a trans-war one. Narratives that sought to rationalize the past war laid the foundations for a divided consciousness after the war that entrenched antagonistic opposites as the parameters for postwar discourse. State versus self, politics versus ethics, theory versus value, ideas versus action and intellectuals versus “ordinary” people were all manifestations of the desire in the postwar era to establish ethical legitimacy through the dynamic of normative distancing. Paramount in this endeavor was an insistence by Japan’s postwar thinkers on creating and maintaining a hostile separation between civil society and the state as the proof of a rehabilitated ethos for postwar democracy. This conceptual framing had consequences for postwar thought and how it was articulated. In effect, the retrospective fragmentation of subjective responsibility led to the alienation of politics and value in the postwar era, preventing the coherence of subjectivity and responsibility upon which the integrity of the trans-war narrative depended.
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Pub Date : 2014-09-02DOI: 10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780199945726.013.18
C. Goto-Jones
This chapter explores the philosophical and ideological landscape of the so-called bushidō (way of the warrior) tradition in Japan. It contends that bushidō has often been misunderstood or misrepresented as only a simple code of conduct tied to the historical samurai. Instead, this chapter seeks to reveal the richness of bushidō as a sophisticated and complex field of philosophical inquiry into questions of ethics, justice, being, violence, conflict, and death. Drawing on intellectual and cultural traditions as diverse as Buddhism, Shintō, Confucianism, the Kyoto School, and currents of Western philosophy, bushidō’s full philosophical importance emerges only in the twentieth century. While the political and ideological dangers of aspects of bushidō were clearly manifest in this period, its philosophical potential was only just beginning to be understood.
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