The Chan Mind: Transmission or mission-of-translation? Reading Wright’sPhilosophical Meditations

Abstract

Wright maintains that tradition (including language) plays a fundamental role in the origins and shaping of the monastic world that made a unique “Chan mind” possible. Through a creative application of the Buddhist idea of “dependent origination,” Wright has broadened the hermeneutic concept of historicity in that it is more than a linear and causal relationship of contextuality (that is, the person is always a person-in-community, and the text is always a text-in-context). Instead, contextuality refers to a (w)holistic network of associations and re-associations. The word “tradition” thus becomes an open tradition that is constantly shaped and reshaped, formed and transformed. The meaning of tradition as such is always a “trace” of that other which is forever absent. In this sense, Wright is quite Derridean. Like Derrida’s deconstruction, Wright’s interpretative endeavor, as part of the tradition of “linguistic turn,” seems to become separated from the real world of flux and takes on an independent status, that is, the realm of reading, explaining, and understanding (perhaps mis-understanding, sometimes). Wright’s project fits the need of those who have a passion for “doing things with words,” and those who prefer meditative reading to meditative practice (in a Buddhist sense). Though Wright keeps reminding us that the effort to play language in relation to Chan experience does not imply that Chan enlightenment/mind is in any sense reducible to language; it still remains a question whether his critical “philosophical meditations” are fully out of the “spell of conceptuality” of the hermeneutical circle. Wright might say that there is no need to be out of the circle, or there is no such circle in the first place.