Truth, Paradox, and Silence: Hakuin and Kierkegaard

Abstract

It is all too easy to dramatize the shortcomings of Kierkegaard in comparison with the Zen master as William Barrett does in ‘Zen for the West’,1 where he tells us that Kierkegaard never attained enlightenment in the Zen sense. Barrett does not offer much in the way of evidence for his case, and even if he did, it is unlikely to generate anything more than a rather tenuous conclusion, given the highly subjective nature of the issue. It is like saying Kierkegaard knew very well how to describe a banana and explain its origins, but he never tasted it. This line of enquiry distracts us from what would seem to be a far more promising pursuit, exploring the remarkable parallels between the language of articulated insights of Kierkegaard and those of one Zen master in particular, Ekaku Hakuin (1685–1768). In this way we can discover not only how radical Kierkegaard was and still is in his divergence from his own religious and cultural tradition, but how both he and Hakuin, in remarkably coincidental ways, point us in the direction of an alternative, rigorous kind of questioning and thinking, an aporetic or paradoxical discourse that deliberately tests the limits of what can be said. In both cases, the aim is not to abandon thinking in the over-simplified and unqualified sense that all too many followers of existentialism, on the one hand, and practitioners of Zen on the other, romantically imagine.