Abstract
Understanding Zen views on language and experience from a philosophical hermeneutical point of view means conceiving such an understanding as a merging of horizons. We have to explicate both the modern Western secular horizon and the medieval Japanese Zen horizon. This article first describes how Charles Taylor’s notion of the immanent frame has shaped Western modernist understanding of Zen language and experience in the twentieth century. Zen language was approached as an instrumental tool, and Zen enlightenment experience was imagined as an ineffable “pure experience.” More recent postmodernist approaches to Zen language and experience have stressed the interrelatedness of language and experience, and the importance of embodied approaches to experience. Such new understandings of language and experience offer not only new perspectives on Dōgen’s “Zen within words and letters” and his embodied approach to enlightened experience, but also an expanded view on what it means to understand Dōgen.
Highlights
The linguistic turn in philosophy has led to an alternative interpretation of Zen practice and enlightenment that focuses on the various ways in which “the Zen experience” is shaped and made possible by language games, and by various linguistically articulated social practices
In terms of our present discussion, it can provide a means to go beyond the immanent frame that hinders our understanding of Zen language and experience
Whereas the Zen traditions that were initially transmitted to the West in the twentieth century, the Japanese Rinzai tradition and the Sanbōkyōdan reform movement, presented an iconoclastic attitude toward language and thought and considered Zen “a special transmission outside the scriptures,” Dōgen advocates continuing hermeneutical reflection on scripture
Summary
In the philosophical reception of Zen in the West over the past century, various imaginings of the complex relationship between the use of language and the experience of enlightenment have been put forward. In this article I want to reflect on how to make sense of Zen views on language and experience, and apply these reflections to understanding the work of Dōgen. Japanese Zen horizon with my own modern secular Western horizon. In order to understand Dōgens philosophical and religious views on language and experience, I will first, in Section 2, elucidate the modern Western secular horizon: what do we, contemporary Western philosophers, mean by “philosophy,” “religion,” “language,”.
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