Communications to the Editor

Abstract

To THE EDITOR: At the outset of his brief review of Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch'an Buddhism, John R. McRae states that although the book offers an intriguing new look at some extremely interesting material, ultimately [it] is rendered useless by methodological shortcomings (Journal of Asian Studies 56.2:475). Granted that in academic circles, it is much worse to be called useless than wrong, Professor McRae must be commended for the candor of his opening remarks. Far more interesting, however, are the implications his criticisms have for the relationship between Buddhist scholarship and Buddhist practice. McRae's critique of the book can be summarized as follows: (1) it is not referenced to any ongoing, scholarly discussion of Ch'an Buddhism and focuses on a relatively few primary sources; (2) while its translations are generally reliable, they are entirely devoid of annotation and seem to evidence the translator's tendency to read his own ideas into the original; (3) no distinction is made between Ch'an masters and the texts attributed to them, evidencing a grave naivete about the historical processes by means of which the few cited works of early Ch'an actually came about; and (4) while appears to be a pivotal philosophical term in the book's treatment of enlightenment, it remains at best tenuously related to the early Ch'an sources with which the book is apparently concerned. I'd first like to address McRae's concerns about the uniquely broad uses to which narration is put in the book. In the preface to Liberating Intimacy, I admit that there is very little direct precedent for the vocabulary I advance in arguing for the of Ch'an enlightenment. Terms like narration, sociality, societality, virtuosity, indirection, partnership, and intimacy are not central to any lexicon of the Buddhist Canon. Nor are there any clear precedents for the uses to which I put these terms in the mainstream of either Western philosophy or contemporary Buddhist scholarship. In fact, it is a vocabulary improvised at the confluence of traditional Ch'an and our contemporary world-indigenous to neither and yet curiously at home in both (p. xv). As used in Liberating Intimacy, terms like narration and sociality are not supposed to capture the literal content of any given teachings or texts, but to facilitate conversation about their meaning for us as practically engaged Buddhists. Thus, the formulation of the book's novel terminology continues a diverse process that began when Indian and Central Asian forms of Buddhism entered into lively interaction with China's indigenous cultural, philosophical, and religious systems. And in this sense, it is not substantially different from the unique teaching vocabularies being developed by contemporary Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Ch'an masters as they respond to the practical needs of their Western students. Of course, it may be that the vocabulary forwarded in Liberating Intimacy fails to open up the meaning of Ch'an for its intended audience. To that possibility, one can only respond that time will tell. But as it happens, McRae's concerns lie at a rather different and more methodological level-one that presumes a schism between Buddhist practice and Buddhist scholarship. According to McRae, the book's