Why Chinese Buddhist Philosophy?

Abstract

Why Chinese Buddhist Philosophy? Brook Ziporyn In a certain particularly reckless intellectual mood one sometimes gets the urge to make (and even possibly defend) the seemingly outrageous claim that, taking a truly global perspective, the history of the earth has seen the development of only two fully developed, long-lived, self-sustaining written traditions of speculation concerning the nature of the world and humanity's place within it: the Indo-European and the Sinitic.1 When in this mood, it seems that however disparate may be the interests and methods of European Continental and analytic philosophy, or rationalism and empiricism, or nominalism and realism, or theology and natural science, and however incongruent this entire tradition may seem with the various Indian religious and philosophical traditions in their many facets, the contrast to the indigenous Sinitic philosophical, sociopolitical, and religious traditions reveals certain points of commonality in all these different aspects of Indo-European speculation that set it starkly apart from the Chinese. When modern critics inclined to think in this way try to come up with a list of Indo-European commonalities, one thing they usually notice is the interest in some form of absolutist ontology found in these traditions, that is, the strong interest in locating an eternal, unconditional, transcendent, and determinate truth, which is univocal, synordinate, and valid in all contexts and free from the vagaries of subjective opinion and impermanence—standing as the reason behind a unidirectional derivation of all other realities. This interest seems closely connected to the deployment of the assumption of an irreversible ontological division between appearance and reality, usually manifesting as a distrust of change and [End Page 4] of finite particular sensory appearances in favor of universal unchanging realities either beyond or within these changing appearances—as their unchanging transcendent sources or as their unchanging immanent laws, or even as an unchanging reality that is neither source nor law but relates to the world of changing appearances only as its ideal negation and refuge, providing a possible escape from that world of impermanent appearances.2 This same reckless eye would see these as standing out in sharp contrast to what are then perceived as deeply ingrained situationalism, axiocentrism, and this-worldliness in pre-Buddhist indigenous Chinese thought, which, although it is not indifferent to persistent and global principles of a kind, necessarily conceives these in a very different type of relation to the particulars of transient experience—typically, not as prior ground nor as universal principle but as balancing supplement, as an encompassing whole or infinite field giving place to those particulars, or as meaning-giving context constituted not by another dimension of being but by the relations, contrasts, and resonances with other particulars qua other, where neither term in the mutually grounding relation is fully determinate or fully indeterminate. At least some of this intuition does pan out upon closer and more sober examination. The early Chinese tradition is, in any case, certainly devoid of any doctrine of universals and particulars in either the Platonic or Aristotelian sense, of form and matter, of atomism, or of strict transcendence in the Indo-European manner. While there are relations of one thing enabling or grounding the presence of another thing, and discussions of presences and absences, there seems no clear conceptual ground/grounded dichotomy and no being/nonbeing dichotomy; while there are hierarchies of importance and range of applicability and decisiveness of the diverse elements in a given situation, there seems to be no clear conceptual appearance/reality dichotomy and no active/passive dichotomy. The earliest strata of the literate tradition have, in spite of their rich and diverse musings on both man and nature, no creation myth, indeed showing no interest in developing any real speculation about the origin of the world until quite late in the record. Even then, the record never seems to propose a concept of a determinate arche or first principle. When some possible (though loose) equivalent of such a principle emerges in philosophical discourse, it is precisely its indeterminacy, even its paradoxicality, that qualifies it for this exalted role. When a creation myth is finally recorded, it is about dividing a preexisting totality into the polarity...