On the Way to Salvation: A Reading of Shinran's Tariki in the Light of Heidegger's Gelassenheit

Abstract

On the Way to Salvation:A Reading of Shinran's Tariki in the Light of Heidegger's Gelassenheit Tony See (bio) The relationship between Heidegger's thought and East Asian philosophies has been the subject of much discussion in recent years. While these discussions are diverse and varied, they may be classified into three approaches (Ma and van Brakel 2006). The first approach is characterized by the study of how Heidegger's philosophy may have influenced East Asian philosophers, or how Heidegger's philosophy may have been influenced by East Asian philosophers. Reinhard May's work on Heidegger's "hidden sources" is a good example of the latter approach (May 1996). The second approach is characterized by scholarly observations that there are congruences between Heidegger's philosophy and East Asian thought. This is usually done by drawing analogies between the two. A good example of this is Joan Stambaugh's "Heidegger, Taoism, and the Question of Metaphysics" (1987). The third approach addresses the relevance and critical importance of Heidegger's philosophy in initiating intercultural dialogue (Ma 2005). It is sometimes characterized by a sense of pessimism with regard to whether such projects can be meaningful at all, for the linguistic and philosophical distances that have to be bridged is great. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, for instance, argue that while Heidegger was genuinely interested in East–West dialogue, he questioned whether such dialogues can be meaningful, since the philosophical barriers between the two seem to be insurmountable. I believe that a more significant reason why such dialogues seem to be impossible is that we are already engulfed in an age of planetary Ge-stell, or enframing. Scholars in East Asia are likely to have been trained in Western-style academies and to possess modern subjectivities, and hence their access to East Asian thought is likely to be enframed by Western categories. To be sure, this does not mean that it is impossible to have a dialogue, but rather that any meaningful dialogue demands a high degree of self-reflexivity so that we may avoid imposing our prejudices and presuppositions on the Other. This paper adopts the second approach and is interested in the resonances between Heidegger's philosophy and the philosophy of Shinran. [End Page 169] The choice of engaging in a comparative study of Heidegger and Shin-ran may seem odd, given that the two thinkers come from vastly different philosophical backgrounds. However, a closer examination of their ideas reveals something in common, namely, what constitutes the right mode of comportment and what sort of experience we can expect. While there are scholarly studies in this area, such comparative East–West studies, which have become more and more important in recent years given the rise of intolerance, they remain a small minority in the field of Heidegger studies. This is why Dennis Hirota's "Shinran and Heidegger on Dwelling: Reading Shinran as a Phenomenology of Shinjin" (2014) is a welcome contribution to this area and deserves more scholarly attention. In this paper we will examine Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit and temporality and their relationship with Shinran's idea of tariki and its relation to salvation. Gelassenheit is usually translated as "letting be" in modern scholarship. This refers to a comportment of no longer trying to overcome but to be in a relationship of "letting be" with Western metaphysics. This comportment of "letting be" resonates with Shinran's well-known recommendation to give up on "self-power" (jiriki) and to turn toward "other-power" (tariki) for salvation. For Heidegger, when we turn away from "overcoming" to "letting be" we begin to enter a different dimension of time, which he calls "temporality." In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1988), Heidegger already analyzed this experience of temporality in terms of an intensive awareness of one's present existence which encompasses the past and the future. Shinran likewise describes a new temporal experience when we place our faith in the saving power of Amida Buddha. To be sure, Shinran did not use the same terminology as Heidegger, nor should we presume that he referred to the same phenomenon, but he does describe this new dimension of time as being fundamentally distinct...