4 Heidegger&Zen

[Guest guest]

Maybe my problem with speaking paradoxically

('the two as one in close embrace)

can be clarified by another section from

Robert Carter's essay entitled

"Zen and Ontotheology via Heidegger."

 

He is speaking now of Zen philosopher Nishida,

but still with the later Heidegger in mind:

 

"Nishida's philosophic task was to speak precisely

of the unspeakable, or to hint, through language forms,

at the formless.

In doing so, he adopted a logic of paradox,

of the simultaneous assertion and denial

of "is" and "is not."

This logic is Buddhist logic, and it reaches

all the way back to the second century display

of logical analysis by the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna.

Nagarjuna's formula for complete saying (logically speaking)

was fourfold:

that something "is," and yet "is not,"

and yet "both is and is not,"

and yet "neither is nor is not."

What the paradox comes to in religious terms,

is that God, the Buddha, or Nothingness

is absolutely self-contradictory.

The absolute is one, and yet 'returns to itself

in the form of the infinite many.'

The "and yet" formulation requires self-negation,

which Nishida refers to as God's emptying himself.

Thus, if the absolute is thought of as a unity,

then the absolute as unity must empty itself

and ("and yet") be thought of as a plurality.

The plurality must also empty itself in return,

and so is a many of a unity,

i.e., a self-contradictory identity.

God is immanent, and yet transcendent;

transendent, and therefore immanent.

The emptying must continue exactly as long

as we persist in attending to the dualism

of polar opposition,

which is the stuff of thinking and languaging.

The direction of a solution is not to fixate

on dualistic conceptualization

beyond recognizing its inescapability

in the conceptual mode,

but to switch one's attention enough

to include the 'identity' that consists

of this antinomial flow.

This is the second and all-embracive

aperure of awareness,

and as wisdom, or intuition,

or as Nishida's 'active intuition,'

it is echoed ubiquitously throughout the East.

One now realizes that one participates

in the fundamental unity of the cosmos,

of the totality,

for at the base or bottom of all things

there is the indeterminate, unspeakable,

nothingness of ultimate reality.

It is not seen, or heard, or touched

except insofar as we look through things

in the everydau world which we can see,

hear, or touch. Indeed, it is precisely

because there are touchable, visible and

audible things that we can come to know

that of which they are determinate expressions.

The double aperture consists in the ability

to read the nature of the lining of the kimono

from the shape or hang of the kimono-surface;

one reads the nature of the formless

from the formed.

To sense both the foreground and the background lining

is to have penetrated to the 'identity' of the lining

(of all that exists)

as it is manifested

in the uniquely individualized

manifold of being."

 

 

 

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