Being Time: Zen, Modernity, the Contemporary

Abstract

AbstractThis paper integrates concepts from philosophy and Zen Buddhism in order to define the implications of an American Zen Master’s sermon about the 2009 financial crisis. It interprets three aspects of his sermon: his critique of modernity, his reflection on the experience of Zen meditation (shikan-taza), and his version of Buddhist ontology (tathāgata-garbha). The paper shows that his sermon is an innovative problematization of what it is to be a modern subject or, still more generally, what it is to exist historically. Each of its three aspects indicates a different, perhaps even opposed, response to this problem. Yet they all suggest new configurations of temporality, historicity, and Being. The paper argues that it is precisely this mobile adjacency to the dominant modernist perspective which makes the Zen Master’s sermon both ethically and intellectually effective. Recruiting him into a Nietzschean lineage, it concludes with a programmatic statement of how work in the human sciences could develop his insights.