Lori Meeks, assistant professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Culture at the University of Southern California, presented her talk on "Changing Views of Women's Salvation: Tracing the Transformation of Gender Discourse in Premodern Japan" on March 29th, 2010 as part of the Columbia University Buddhist Studies Seminar. Meeks is the author of Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan, coming out later this year and published by the University of Hawai'i Press.
Eye to Eye:'Transcendence & Immanence in
Kūkai's Vision of Shingon'
Kūkai's Vision of Shingon'
Philosophy in a New Key, according to at least one source, was a "bestseller" in 1942. And yet it is unlikely that you've ever heard of the philosopher Susanne Langer (1885-1985). Dwarfed by philosophical giants like Ludwig Wittgenstein, her unique ideas about the symbolic nature of art have received little attention. However, in a recent lecture to the Buddhist Studies Seminar at Columbia University (March 6, 2007), David Gardiner (Professor of Religion, Colorado College) made use of Langer's ideas to shed new light on our understanding of the Japanese Buddhist thinker Kūkai (774-835 C.E.). (Audio podcast below.)
In his explication of Kūkai, Professor Gardiner highlighted his polemical use of the term ri 離 "separate, apart, transcendent" in his presentation of the Nikyōron. Abandoning the more popular theory that Kūkai was simply being "antagonistic" in his derision of Yogacara, Madhyamaka, T'ien-t'ai, and Hua-yen as "ontologically challenged by an unsophisticated dualism," Gardiner opted for more a nuanced hermeneutic. According to Gardiner, Kūkai's critique of these "Exoteric" schools may in fact be a strategic response to a growing tendency to reify non-dual ontology (shades of the Tibetan gzhan stong pa school). Kūkai's rhetoric, explained Gardiner, "seems intent upon highlighting a purported exoteric obsession with the transcendent character of ultimate reality... " Though Gardiner admits that his theory is perhaps impossible to prove, what is clear—at least to Gardiner—is that Kūkai's literary strategy is to bring the reader's attention to the "immanental" orientation of Shingon ("Esoteric") practice. For Kūkai, the path to Buddhahood relies on a realization of the immanent "mandalic" nature of one's material body, and a turning away from conceptual interpretations of the transcendent.
Enter Susanne Langer.
As with the earlier works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Langer sees the impossibility of language to convey subjective states. The reader will recall the following from Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour, “When we’re asked ‘What do 'red', 'blue', 'black', 'white' mean?' we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours,—but that’s all we can do: our ability to explain their meaning goes no further” (v.102). Or the oft quoted seventh proposition, "What we cannot speak of we must pass over in silence" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).
For Langer, an artist and lover of the arts, there is a "genuine semantic beyond the limits of discursive language." Langer believes art (i.e. music, painting, drama, etc...), is a symbolic form of human feeling that is semantic and rational. Kūkai, also a lover of the arts and an artist, might have seen eye to eye with Langer. Gardiner clearly thinks so, and juxtaposes the following passages from Langer's book and Kūkai's Shōraimokuroku to make the point.
From Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art:
Visual forms — lines, colors, proportions, etc. — are just as capable of articulation, i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision. Their complexity, consequently, is not limited, as the complexity of discourse is limited, by what the mind can retain from the beginning of an apperceptive act to the end of it. Of course such a restriction on discourse sets bounds to the complexity of speakable ideas. An idea that contains too many minute yet closely related parts, too many relations within relations, cannot be “projected” into discursive form; it is too subtle for speech. A language-bound theory of mind, therefore, rules it out of the domain of understanding and the sphere of knowledge (93).
(Ironically, Langer's description of simultaneity calls to mind Bhartrihari's "sphota theory" of language.) Turning to Kūkai's Shōraimokuroku:
The Dharma is originally without words, and yet it cannot be expressed apart from words. Suchness is beyond form, and yet it is by attending to forms that it is realized… The esoteric teachings are very profound and it is difficult to convey them in writing. Thus they are provisionally revealed to the unenlightened via paintings. The myriad forms of sacred deportment and the myriad gestures have their origin in great compassion. With a single look [at them one may] realize Buddhahood. [The meanings of] the sutras and commentaries are secretly and intricately depicted in the images. The heart of the esoteric teachings is verily contained therein. What master or student could dispense with them? The root source of the Ocean-like assembly [of enlightened ones] corresponds to just this (1:31).
Gardiner concludes that, like Langer, Kūkai is "eminently anti-mystical." So while there may be subjectivities that are best realized through the body, that does not necessarily entail an absence of rational semantics. In short, "transcendence," albeit transcendental, should not be reified as some nebulous mystical state.
‘Whither Buddhist Studies?’ A Blue-Green Perspective on
Trends in the Field
Trends in the Field
By Wendi Adamek (Green Tara reporter-at-large)
This year Easter fell on the same day as the traditional date for the Buddha’s birthday -- the eighth day of the fourth month. It seemed somehow appropriate that I had spent the previous day at a workshop at the University of Toronto pondering the future of the field of Buddhist studies. Entitled ‘Whither Buddhist Studies,’ the workshop was designed to give representatives from various programs a chance to get together and talk about such perennial concerns as graduate student funding, program planning, and getting the attention of Deans.
The workshop opened with a rousing presentation by José Cabezón, who celebrated the expansion of the scope of the field from a traditional focus on canonical texts, eminent monks, and elite concerns to include practices, social contexts, women, Buddhism in the contemporary world, and increasingly sophisticated uses of information technology. The opening discussion also featured an exchange between a speaker who stressed the importance of awareness and possible engagement in political and social issues, and a speaker who claimed that it was hubristic to think that this was part of our role as scholars. The first speaker retorted that, on the contrary, it was hubristic to assume that we could separate ourselves from such issues, that it behooved us to consider who and what funds the universities that pay our salaries. For me this brief exchange represented a polarity that persisted throughout the conference. Beneath the dominant conversations about funding and institutional strategies there was a largely unacknowledged sub-topic; namely, that our professional activities are dependent on political, economic, and environmental issues that some of us might feel moved to try to address in our work.
After this promising start, workshop conversations turned to the nitty-gritty of fundraising and establishing institutional support for Buddhist studies. There was repeated lamentation over the shrinking resources available to graduate students and increasingly draconian time-to-degree requirements. Many worried about the demise of traditional in-depth exegetical studies, as fewer students could marshall the resources to pursue the requisite language skills for years on end.
As part of the panel on graduate programs, your Green Tara representative helpfully pointed out that our generation of scholars was created by the conditions of Peak Oil and accompanying globalization and that we were therefore unsustainable. I proposed that several ephemeral factors favored Buddhist studies in the seventies-through-nineties era. During these decades the differential between Euro-American and Asian economies gradually decreased, but for quite some time it was possible for students to spend extended periods of time in Asia supporting themselves on a few English teaching jobs. Moreover, in the U.S. there was a brief kindling of the spirit of generosity and then its fading afterglow -- during the Cold War it was necessary to spend on social programs and education in order to prove that capitalism was better at providing social services. Finally, the coincidence of “Peak Oil” (google it!) and the boom years of the IT revolution infused even peripheral fields like Buddhist Studies with a bubbly sense of expansion. Perhaps, I surmised, long-term study and transmission of the exegetical traditions may once again become the prerogative of Asian elites and monastics.
However, I hoped that there might still be roles for those of us who must make a living as academics. Besides the flourishing field of Buddhist cultural studies (!), opening the field a bit further would create scope for new areas. I endorsed four areas outlined by Anne Klein (I hope I’m remembering them correctly!) -- 1) contemporary Buddhist communities, 2) contemplative studies, 3) socially engaged Buddhism, and 4) interfaith or interface dialogue with other traditions or disciplines (such as psychology). To this I added a special plea for development in the area of Buddhist studies and ecology or environmental studies. I acknowledged the difficulty of engaging in such areas responsibly and the problems involved in inviting dialogue yet resisting naïve misrepresentation of Buddhist traditions, but I argued that if we did not try to do it responsibly others would do it irresponsibly.
Okay, so I am not nearly so articulate in person and that might explain why the vernacular version of these points went over like a lead balloon. However, conversations during the coffee breaks did bring forth a lone but enthusiastic undergraduate who said she’d been longing to combine Buddhist studies and environmental studies but couldn’t find a way to do it, a colleague (David Germano) who is helping organize a huge project to map cultural and environmental resources in Tibet, and several colleagues who said that they felt some combination of women’s studies and Buddhist studies should be added to the agenda. (After José Cabezón’s initial remarks concerning the increasing importance of the study of women and Buddhism, there was almost no mention of this topic.) Also during one of the breaks, a colleague suggested that rather than viewing the combination of critical scholarly approaches, Buddhist practice and devotion, and socially engaged activity as antithetical or schizophrenic (during the workshop discussion, too-near association with practitioners had been characterized as “stained” and “soft” as opposed to pure hard scholarship), we might do well to take emerging Buddhist notions of the multidimensional personality as a model.
At the end of the day, what could a Green Tara devotee do but savor the splendid Indian feast provided by our hosts and enjoy the company of witty colleagues flown in on fuel-guzzling jets from all over the North American continent? Were my intentionally provocative and largely ignored comments on the conditions of our field too pessimistic -- too blue, too glibly “green”? Some would argue that it is extremely optimistic, or clueless, to imagine that the academic study of Buddhism, or anything else, will survive in a university system resembling the one in which we function. On the other hand, Buddhism’s oft-cited adaptability is a testament to both the opportunism and the idealism of our species. Trying for a middle way, I would simply argue that in times of crisis, conventional truth is challenged to become less conventional.
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Wendi Adamek is chair of the Buddhist Studies Seminar and this blog's Green Tara Reporter-at-large. Wendi joined the Barnard Religion Department as Assistant Professor of Chinese Religions in the fall of 2001. She completed her doctorate at Stanford University in 1998, and specializes in medieval Chinese Buddhism. She is the author of The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan Text and its Contexts (Columbia University Press, 2007).
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Image credit: Francesca Galeazzi
Watchful Twins
Hundreds of years before Sigmund Freud diagnosed the human predicament as a tug-of-war between one's id and superego, popular theology in medieval Japan conceived of a similar notion in the form of the deity named kōjin ("Raging Deity").
In his lecture "The Watchful Twins: Gods and Destiny in East Asian Buddhism," Kao Professor in Japanese Religion Bernard Faure (Columbia University) put forth a challenge to the classic expression of Buddhas and Kami and proposed a "latent" pantheon in which kōjin plays a central role. Faure argued that kōjin "undermines the neat distinction and hierarchy established by the Honji Suijaku theory between these two types of sacred beings. It is a Janus-faced deity, whose nature encompasses both good and evil . . . " Among the deity's various features, the one Faure highlighted is the control kōjin wields over human destiny throughout all rebirths until nirvana.
Faure examined several instances of kōjin, and explained that one in particular, ena kōjin ("placenta god"), has the "embryological function" of nurturing and protecting a baby in utero. In this form it represents a protective twin which, at birth, becomes a gushōjin ("guardian spirit"). As gushōjin, Faure added, they are "silent witnesses of all our acts, and are thus 'closer to ourselves' than we ourselves are — even though they remain invisible and alien to us." However, they can also be harmful, "either through ill intent, or merely through their eagerness in reporting our misdeeds." Kōjin, according to Faure, appears as a peaceful buddha to those who are virtuous and as a wrathful one to those who are not. Iconographically the gushōjin are portrayed as a pair — one to record good deeds and one bad.
The duality, Faure remarked, "becomes a ternary structure, in which the central figure (the individual, or the Buddha on the mythological plane) is flanked by two morally opposite figures . . . The two images tend to overlap, so that the Kōjin himself, who was initially the doppelganger of the individual, becomes identical with him, becoming as it were his the inner truth, the true nature of the individual, his buddha-nature." Thus the two — good and evil — reflect temporal dualities on the path to enlightenment.
Listen to a podcast (mp3 29.3 MB) >>
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(coming soon)
