- TRUTH AND ZEN
- By T. P. Kasulis
Truth and Zen Buddhism it is difficult to
imagine a pair of more abstruse. yet fascinating, topics, Rather than discuss either one
of the two, I will consider them both simultaneously in hopes that, like some schoolboy
magician in a chemistry laboratory, I might mix together two murky, colored concoctions
and thereby effect-abracadabra-a transparent, clear solution.
To begin our analysis of truth, we need
the same general framework. Aristotle points us in a classical, though still relevant,
direction. In an argument for the validity of the principle of the excluded middle.
Aristotle makes the well-known definition: To say of what is that it is not, or of what is
not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it
is not, is true Metaphysics, (1011(b)).
This definition sets down the general
principle of correspondence and captures quite well the man on the street view of truth.
Aristotle, however, is not the man on the street (he may be peripatetic, but he is hardly
pedestrian); if we wish a clearer picture of Aristotle's view of truth, we must look more
closely at what he says in other parts of his writings. In this regard, it is helpful to
see how Aristotle defines "false" in the lexiconical section of the Metaphysics
(1024(b)). For Aristotle, there are three kinds of falseness: false as a thing, false as
an account, and false as a person. The second of this triad obviously relates directly to
the preceding definition, but what of the other two? A thing (pragma) may be false in
either of two ways. First, a false thing is a state of affairs that does not always
pertain, for example, the commensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides
(which never pertains) and my sitting down (which is not always the case). Aristotle's
point is not very clear here. Perhaps for a state of affairs to be "true" in his
proposed sense, it must be true in itself without reference to any particular
configuration of reality at a given time. That is, Aristotle may have in mind states of
affairs that can be known to be true on a priori grounds. Fortunately, for our purposes,
the other sense of the falsehood of things is more important so we will not dwell on this
point any further. The second way for a thing to be false is for it to appear to us to be
other than what it is really. Thus, Aristotle gives the examples of dreams and sketches,
things which actually exist (as dreams and sketches) but which lead us to believe they
have an existence of a different sort. Thus, dreams are confused with sense perceptions
and our perception of the sketch is confused with a perception of the thing the sketch
portrays. The important point here is that the confusion is based in the thing's
appearance, not in our evaluation. Hence, we are here speaking of false things, not false
judgments, according to Aristotle. What of falsehood insofar as it applies to persons? A
false person is one who likes to give false accounts for their own sake and who is skilled
in convincing others of their truth Persons. Aristotle comments, are false in one of the
ways that things are false, namely, they "produce a false appearance." In one
sense, the truth of persons amounts to truth-telling or honesty, but again we would do
well to view this in the larger Aristotelian context. For Aristotle, a person who knows
true accounts. But delights in misleading others, is one who corrupts his own character.
That is false persons present not only accounts, but also themselves, falsely. Behind this
standpoint is the classical position that what one knows cannot be separated from what one
is: to distort willfully the truth of one's own knowledge is to distort the truth of one's
own personhood.
In short, even though it may be correct
that Aristotle is a straightforward correspondence theorist in his formal definition of
truth, it is equally clear that Aristotle wants to say more about truth than can be
encompassed by that definition. Why? Why is Aristotle not satisfied with just the truth of
accounts? Is there some intimate and profound relationship among the three truths? I
believe there is. Aristotle is not only interested in the definition of truth; he is also
interested in the acquisition of truth. In contemporary philosophy as well, we are
familiar with the distinction between theories of the meaning of truth and theories of the
means to acquiring truth, so Aristotle's concerns are not really foreign to us. We should
not be too hasty with this comparison, however. In our framework, we may say the question
of the meaning of truth is a metaphysical one, but the issue of the means to truth falls
in the domain of epistemology. Aristotle differs in that his concern for the acquisition
of truth is, at least in part, metaphysical as well as epistemological. That is to say, as
a metaphysicia... Aristotle feels compelled not only to define truth, but also to explain
metaphysically how it is that the acquisition of truth is possible. In this respect, for
true accounts to be possible, there must be true things and true persons a well. If things
did not generally appear as they are and if persons were not generally honest with
themselves and with others, there would be no touchstone for us in making judgments about
what is. In other words, a stipulation for the correspondence between what-is-said and
what-is is that what-is show itself as what-it-is and that what-is-said be a genuine
expression of what-one-experiences. This nis the fundamentally metaphysical connection
among Aristotle's three truths.
This Aristotelian account of the
metaphysics of truth will be a useful Guide in our discussion of the Ch'an and Zen
tradition. Let us begin with the Platform Suutra of the Sixth Patriarch, one of the first
major works to be distinctively Ch'an in orientation. Its author, Hui-neng, lived in the
seventh and eighth centuries and supposedly founded the eventually dominant southern
school of Ch'an Buddhism. If we take "truth" to correspond roughly to the
Chinese character chen(3), Hui-neng speaks of truth most often in terms of the
"truly-so" (chen-ju(b)). the sinification of the Sanskrit term tathataa. In the
Platform Suutra this tathataa is understood to be the essence or substance of thought;
thoughts are taken to be the functioning of tathataa (ch. 17). In this way, tathataa
becomes equivalent to the primal or original nature. that to which one awakens when one
sees into one's own mind (ch. 31). In short, Hui-neng's language is reminiscent of the
basic Fa-hsiang(c) or Yogaacaara position. there is an original nature (pen-hsing(d) )
that, when left unpolluted in no-thinking (wu-nien(e)), becomes the functioning truly so.
Thus. it seems that Hui-neng is saying that at the base of the mind, we find the basis of
truth. We must be cautious with this interpretation, however. Various Yogaacaara texts,
especially the La^nkaavataara Suutra, were very influential in the early development of
Ch'an Buddhism and Hui-neng's choice of words reflects this connection. Therefore, even
though Hui-neng may use terminology that correlates. In some ways, with Yogaacaara's
idealistic view of reality, this may be more a matter of historical accident than deep
philosophical commitment.
The question that now arises is whether
Hui-neng's view is in any way similar to any aspect of Aristotle's threefold view of
truth. In certain respects. Hui-neng's truly-so and Aristotle's truth of things serve a
similar metaphysical function. That is, in both cases, the nature of reality appears as it
is. In fact, Hui-neng is more radical in this regard in that Aristotle recognizes the
existence of at least some false things, but the Platform Suutra's truly so is apparently
all inclusive. Despite this difference, Aristotle and Hui-neng agree on one crucial issue:
the major cause of falsehood is our mistaken interpretations of what appears. The world is
not fundamentally illusory: it is our own delusions that prevent us from seeing the way
things are.
But what of Hui-neng's idealistic strain?
After all, the Platform Suutra implies that we come to know the truth when we see into our
own minds. Certainly, this seems to be a direct violation of the Aristotelian notion of
correspondence. But does it have to be? Let us consider Thomas version of Aristotelian
correspondence (Summa Theologica, Part I, Q. 21, Art. 2): Truth consists in the equation
of mind and thing.... Now the mind. that is the cause of the thing, is related to it as
its rule and measure: where as the converse is the case with the mind, that receives its
knowledge from things. When therefore things are the measure and rule of mind, truth
consists in the equation of the mind to the thing.... But when the mind is the rule or
measure of things, truth consists in the equation of the thing to the mind: just as the
work of the artist is said to to true, when it is in accordance with his art.
Thomas explicitly states here that the
correspondence between the mind and what-is can occur in either of two ways: either the
what is can be the standard to which the mind conforms or vice versa. We will have the
opportunity to discuss the second alternative at a later point. For now, let us focus on
the first, the one we have been discussing thus far: the mind is the receptor of percepts
and adjusts itself to what the senses report. In light of our concern about Hui-neng's
idealism, we should take note of the fact that Thomas sees this correspondence as an
internal relationship within consciousness, that is the correspondence is really between
thoughts and sense experiences, not thoughts and things. This leads Thomas to the striking
statement: "Truth resides only in the intellect" (S. T. part I, Q. 16, Art. 1) .
Later (in Art. 3). Thomas quotes Aristotle's De Anima (431(b)) for support: "The soul
is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either sensible or
thinkable...." There is a potential equivocation here: when Aristotle and Thomas
consider the definition of truth, they speak of the correspondence between mind and
things; but when they consider the practical test for truth, the correspondence seems to
be between two mental constituents: interpretation and phenomena. Here, though,
Aristotle's three truths resolve the difficulty. Because of the metaphysical stipulation
that most things are true, what-is is generally what appears. Thus, we need worry about
the discrepancy between phenomena and things only in those rare cases wherein a false
thing appears. Here previous experience and habit play an important role: we learn not to
trust dreams and sketches, for example, on face value. In the case of Hui-neng, as we have
seen, the theory does not admit the possibility of false things; everything is essentially
tathataa. Therefore, in practice, things and phenomena coalesce. In this restricted sense,
then, Hui-neng's theory, as a theory about the acquisition of truth, is not necessarily
any more idealistic than Aristotle's or Thomas'.
Still, philosophically speaking,
Hui-neng's view of truth is not as sophisticated as that of Aristotle and Thomas. Most
importantly, Hui-neng does not develop any explicit idea of the truth of persons. This is
an important omission in the following respect: if things are intrinsically true, how is
it that delusions arise? Obviously, this must be the result of some deficiency in the
person, but the Platform Suutra does not develop this idea in any detail. This is not to
say that Hui-neng did not recognize the importance of the person in his training methods;
the interpersonal encounter between master and disciple was as much a part of Ch'an or Zen
training then as it is now. The point, however, is that the written account in the
Platform Suutra is more mechanistic than personalistic. It is understandable that the
following famous koan would be attributed to Hui-neng: "Without any consideration of
good or evil, right now. What is your original face before your parents were born?"
It is consistent with Hui-neng's position to emphasize such a fundamental amoral reality
which (pon enlightenment) comes to function as the mind of the person. Still, an emphasis
on the truth of the person, rather than on the ontology of the truly-so, would seem to be
a more useful account for Ch'an practice. Lin-chi apparently agrees. About one and a half
centuries after Hui-neng, Lin-chi founded the southern Ch'an line of transmission named
after him. In the Lin-chi Records the treatment of truth is headed in the direction we
have already anticipated. Rather than the truly-so, Lin-chi emphasizes the "true
person" (chen-jen(t)); rather than Hui-neng's no-thinking, Lin-chi speaks of "no
position" (wu-wei(u) ) . Putting these together, we find in the third chapter
Lin-chi's famous reference to the "true person of no position." This term played
a central role in Lin-chi's training techniques, and he often demanded of his disciples
that they make manifest this true nature of the personality. In a sense, Lin-chi sees a
fundamental connection between Hui-neng's "original nature" and "original
face;" that is, Lin-chi makes it explicit that the truly-so is manifested in the
activity of the true person. The truth is based as much in theperson as it is in the
tathataa. The roots of Lin-chi's idea may be in chapter 6 of the Chuang-tzu: "There
must first be a true person before there can be true knowledge." The "true
person" is one of Chuang-tzu's common designations for the sage who acts
spontaneously, responsively, and without contrivance. In this respect, we can understand
Hui-neng's "no-thinking" as a state of responsive awareness in which one is not
self-consciously putting one's experience into static con-ceptual frameworks. In any case,
Lin-chi expressly states that the true person represents the spontaneous functioning at
the basis of all human activity (3; ch. 3) and the mode in which intention and act are
inseparable (yao-hsing-chi-hsing; yao-tso-chi-tso(h), 11d, ch. 10).
In short, Lin-chi recognizes that for
correspondence to take place, there must be not only the world and the mind, but also the
activity of corresponding itself; this activity is the functioning of the true person.
"Moreover, make yourself master of your situation; wherever you stand is truth"
(13a; ch. 12). What is Lin-chi's position on idealism? Although he does say that there is
no dharma external to the person, he points out (27; ch. 18) that this should not be taken
to mean that the dharma is accessible through inactive, introspective contemplation. The
dharma is not located in any single place; it is not something toward which one takes a
stand. The true person has no status or position; wherever that person stands is truth. I
take this to be a response to the idealistic reading of Hui-neng. Lin-chi wants it to be
clear that the ideal is not to transcend the external world and withdraw into the mind;
rather, the ideal is to find the truly-so, to discover the true person, in one's
spontaneous and responsive activity within the world.
This discussion of the activity of the
true person returns us to a fore-mentioned, but as yet unanalyzed, point in Thomas' view
of truth. We noted above that Thomas discussed two ways in which the correspondence
between mind and things can occur: either the mind can conform to things or things can
conform to the mind. it is this latter possibility that concerns us now. Thomas' example
of the artwork is a fruitful one. Here we have the case that the mind becomes the rule for
the term of the thing and if the artwork fulfills the intent of the mind, we can say there
is a correspondence between the intellect and what-is. Hence, Thomas maintains that it is
appropriate to speak of truth in artistic creativity. (incidentally, this medieval view of
truth in art has had its impact even on contemporary theories of aesthetics; see, for
example, Albert Hofstadter's discussion of the "truth of things" in his Truth
and Art.) The question that now faces us is this: Lin-chi has maintained that the truth of
things can be manifested in the activity of the true person, but would he also say that
the truth of things can be created by some activity of the true person? No, to make truth
even partially dependent for its existence on the person would be to deny that all things
in themselves are tathataa. Here we have an important divergence between the Ch'an
Buddhists and part of the Western tradition. We will return to this point later.
A second point of divergence is that
Aristotle and Thomas hold that the truth of persons is of concern to ethics as well as to
metaphysics and epistemology. That is, truth insofar as it applies to persons is a virtue.
In the Nicomachean Ethics (1127(a)), for example, Aristotle says that truth is the mean
between boastfulness and false modesty.
Thomas adds to the list of vices opposing
truth two more: lying and dissimulation or hypocrisy (S. T. Part II-II, Q. 110-113). The
Ch'an tradition does not discuss truth as a virtue. There are various reasons for this:
Ch'an Buddhism wanted to distinguish itself from the Confucianist emphasis on virtues and
the Hiinayaanist orientation toward the precepts, for example. The true person for Lin-chi
(and for Chuang-tzu, in fact) acts naturally and is not consciously trying to live up to
some ideal.
Hence, explicit reference to ethics is
avoided. In fairness, however, it should be noted that there is some common ground beneath
the divergence just noted. One could easily argue that for the classical philosopher, to
display virtue (virtus) is really just actualizing one's inherent potential to be a man
(vir). Taking this tack, it is much more difficult to distinguish sharply the Zen project
of manifesting one's original face (Buddha-nature, true personhood) from this classical
sense of virtue. Thus, the distinction between the two traditions may not be as hard and
fast as the prima facie evidence would indicate.
The discussion of truth as virtue does
raise another important point, however. In Aristotle and Thomas, truth-telling is
primarily posed in terms of presenting oneself to others. That is, the true person (one
possessing the virtue, truth) does not mislead others. In Lin-chi, however, the emphasis
is on self-awareness, that is, one who is a true person does not lie to oneself. Of
course, these two orientations are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, they are
ultimately interdependent. Nevertheless, the difference in emphasis is striking. As we
shall see, the Ch'an and Zen emphasis approaches more the existentialist sense of
authenticity than truth-telling in the ordinary sense.
For a more holistic account of the Zen
position, we will turn now to the writings of Dogen, a thirteenth-century Japanese Zen
master. Dogen is
probably the most systematic and
philosophically inclined of all Zen or Ch'an writers. Thus, although he does not
explicitly say much about "truth," he does address himself to many of the same
issues that have concerned us here. Even though Dogen is traditionally associated with the
Soto rather than the Rinzai (Lin-chi) branon of Zen. Dogen did not so identify himself.
For the purposes of this article, he can be seen as a legitimate heir of Hui-neng and
Lin-chi, at least regarding their view of truth.
Even though Dogen makes scattered
references to tathataa, he has his own term for the truth of things, namely, genjokoan(l),
"things' being present as they are." Hence, like most of his Ch'an predecessors,
Dogen, in effect, denies that there is illusion; there are only the delusions we inflict
on ourselves. From this standpoint, even a dream as dream is tathataa; if someone should
take it to be other than it is (as sense experience, for example), the interpretation, not
the thing, is the locus of falsehood. Thus, if we analyze Dogen's view of interpretation,
we will reach the heart of his view on truth and falsehood.
In referring to enlightenment, it is
significant that Dogen generally prefers to use the term "authentication"
(sho(j)) rather than "realization" satori(k)). While the word
"realization" often has the connotation of being a single incidence of
recognition, the term "authentication" may convey the nuance of a continual
verification of the genuineness of one's interpretation. Dogen does not reject the
importance of sudden insight (he himself had such a peak experience while in China), but
it is the process of continual authentication that best characterizes the unique character
of enlightenment. But how does the enlightened person test his or her interpretation? Like
Thomas, Dogen would maintain that there is no extraexperiential touchstone, no
thing-in-itself that can serve as the standard for evaluation. As Thomas says, "truth
resides only in the intellect," that is, consciousness must reflect on itself (either
intuitively or conceptually) so as to maintain the correspondence between its
interpretative structures and its sense experiences. Dogen's major work, The Treasury of
the Correct Dharma-eye (Shobogenzo(l) ), is filled with exhortatives that urge his
disciples to examine their own experiences and to authenticate their understanding of what
is. Still, Dogen differs from Thomas in maintaining that a special mode of reflexive
consciousness is needed for this authenticating process. In his fascicle, "A Talk
about Undertaking the Way" (Bendowa(m)), Dogen writes (p.729):
The Buddhas and Tathaagatas have the
wondrous art wu-wei(n): they directly transmit to each other the wondrous dharma and
authenticate perfect enlightenment. Being passed on directly from Buddha to Buddha, this
(transmission) is without distortion, i.e., jijuyuu sammai(o) itself is the touchstone.
What does Dogen mean by this jijuyuu
sammai? "Sammai" is the Japanese equivalent to the Sanskrit
"samaadhi," a high-level meditative state. "Jijuyuu" is a difficult
term to translate; basically it is the sense of spiritual well-being derived from Zen
practice and utilized in one's personal affairs. Hence, it is a saintly serenity and joy
that one brings to one's daily life. To understand the relevance of this to
authentication, we must be clear about Dogen's view of Zen practice, especially zazen(p),
"seated meditation."
In two fascicles, "The Principles of
Zazen" (Zazengi(q)) and Admonitions about Zazen" (Zazenshin(r) ) . Dogen
utilizes a distinction among three terms: thinking (shiryo(s)), not-thinking (fushiryo(t))
and without-thinking (hishiryo(u)). For our purposes here, the crucial point to notice is
that both thinking (any sort of conceptual categorization, whether explicit or implicit)
and not-thinking (the denial or the lack of all such conceptualizations) are inappropriate
characterizations of the zazen state. Rather, the true mode of zazen is without-thinking,
a responsive state of awareness which is neither thinking nor not-thinking, but which
underlies the two. In fact, Dogen implies that without-thinking takes the form of either
thinking or not-thinking. The importance of this point is that, by Dogen's principle of
the oneness of practice and enlightenment (shushoichinyo(v)), without-thinking must
somehow be authentication itself. Thus, if we can understand without-thinking, we will
also understand Dogen's view of enlightened interpretation.
There are two ways in which the
self-reflexive test of corresponding within consciousness can take place. For our example,
we can refer to Dogen's discussion of the interpretation of time in his fascicle
"Being-time" (Uji(w) ). First, an interpretation may be evaluated reflectively.
This is, in effect, a test for consistency in the concepts that constitute one's
interpretation of time. Dogen considers the characterization of time as "flying
away" (p. 191). In such a case, Dogen urges us to "investigate" (kaie
suru(x) or gaku suru(y)) the matter. If time flies away, Dogen points out, then there is a
separation between oneself and time, between things and time. That is, time itself is
being considered a temporal thing.
Since this is nonsensical, the
interpretation cannot be definitive, Here we have the authenticating response
(without-thinking) assuming the form of thinking. The self-reflexive evaluation may also
be no reflective and no conceptual, however. Thus, Dogen refers to the fact that people
often interpret temporal experiences as something they have, rather than as what people
are. To someone who has the wrong interpretation here, Dogen merely calls on him or her to
"Look! Look!" (p. 191). It is significatn, by the way, that Lin-chi uses the
same exhortation in urging his disciples to see the true person within themselves. Here, I
argue the without-thinking authentication takes the form of not-thinking, that is, the
test takes the form of a prereflective, nonconceptual "just looking."
From our account of the Ch'an and Zen
tradition, we can sec the rationale behind this twofold process of authentication. Since
things are present to us as they really are, falsehood resides in our interpretive
processes. Dogen is correct in seeing two ways in which these may lead us astray. First,
we may develop inconsistent interpretations which obviously cannot describe reality
without equivocation and ambiguity. Second, we may lose contact with what we directly
experience, that is, we may develop a nest of interconnected concepts that are consistent
among themselves, but simply do not correspond to things (or, what is the same in the Zen
view, to things as directly experienced). The dual testing process, therefore, attacks
falsehood from both sides. A few clarifications are needed. First of all, we are not
always aware of our interpretations; in fact, they need not even be verbalized to play a
constitutive role in our actions, feelings, and lines of thinking. Expressing this
phenomenologically, any positing attitude of an act of consciousness involves
interpretation. How then are we to become aware of such tacit orientations? "Jijuyuu
sammai itself is the touchstone," that is, in the meditative state of zazen one is in
direct contact with things as they are. Therefore, any implicit assumption that is not a
direct reflection of this immediate experience will become manifest through Zen practice.
This does not mean that every such interpretation is false; rather, they merely require
further authentication. Consider, for example, a stick's appearing bent when it is
half-submerged in water. The Zen stipulation is that the raw appearance is itself
truly-so; the bent stick's appearance is not itself false. Yet, insofar as we do not
expect the stick to be bent when we take it out of the water, there must be a tacit
assumption here that requires authentication. In this case, the authentication process
takes the form of thinking, not just looking. We might, for instance, recall previous
experiences wherein being straight in the air is succeeded by being bent in the water and
vice versa. Therefore, by induction one expects the same situation to prevail here. In
other words, in this example thinking relates the present, direct experience to previous
direct experiences such that we see the consistency in the interpretation. It is
significant that (unlike most of the Western tradition) the Zen view does not require a
scientific explanation of why straight things appear bent when partially submerged, of
what causes the "same" really straight stick to appear bent. In the Zen
framework, interpretation must meet the requirements of accurate description not adequate
explanation. In this case, the interpretation accurately describes what is now directly
experienced in light of what will be directly experienced (using what has been directly
experienced as the basis for the expectation). Thus, even though the interpretation is not
a simple reflection of the present experience, it is still a reflection of a set of direct
experiences. Hence, the interpretation is authenticated.
A further clarification concerns the term
"correspondence." As noted earlier, for their definition of the meaning of
truth, Aristotle and Thomas speak of the correspondence between mind and things, but for
the test of truth, the correspondence takes place within the intellect (which is capable
of both discursive and intuitive insights, incidentally). Since the Zen tradition rejects
the notion of false things, the distinction between the two correspondences tends to
collapse. In this sense, the Zen view is that correspondence takes place between
experiential components.
Accordingly, when there is correspondence,
there is a unified consciousness without dualism. When interpretations are authenticated,
there is no gap between the understanding and the experience. In Zen terminology, one
knows directly just as one knows that the water is cold when one drinks it. This lack of
opposition, this oneness of mind, is the basis of the jijuyuu in jijuyuu sammai.
A third clarification concerns the
interrelationships among thinking, not-thinking, and without-thinking. We might, for
example, ask the following question: how do we know when we should authenticate through
thinking and when we should do so through not-thinking? It is important to bear in mind
that this question again overlooks the centrality of zazen (or jijuyuu sammai): we do not
decide; without-thinking spontaneously takes on the form of the appropriate response. As
Dogen puts it, the jijuyuu sammai itself is the touchstone. In other words. to
authenticate one need only be authentic to oneself and to be authentic to oneself, one
lets oneself show itself without thinking about it. But how does one authenticate whether
one is being authentic? In the beginning, at least, one cannot do this for oneself. A Zen
master is necessary for guidance. Through the encounter with the master, any traces of
inauthenticity are made manifest to the disciple until the disciple learns the serenity of
jijuyuu sammai. From that point onward, the presence of the serenity is itself the
authentication of the authenticity. In this respect, zazen is the alpha and omega of Zen
practice. This leads Dogen to advocate shikantaza(z) , the performance of zazen alone.
There is one corollary to Dogen's position that deserves our attention here, namely, the
notion that truth (in its acquisition) is context dependent.
Thus, in his fascicle "Things' Being
Present as They Are" (Genjokoan, p. 9), Dogen follows the Yogaacaara view that the
fish is correct in his belief that the ocean is an emerald-like palace and the deva in
heaven is correct in his belief that the ocean is a glittering string of lights, and the
person far out at sea is correct in his belief that the ocean is a great circle. The fish,
the person, and the deva are each authenticating what is actually experienced, given their
respective contexts. This, of course, violates the spirit of the views of both Aristotle
and Thomas. To see the implications of the difference, let us refer back to Thomas'
discussion of truth in art. Thomas maintained that artworks are true insofar as they
adequately take on the form of the artists' intentions. From Dogen's standpoint, we can
develop a different theory of truth in art. That is, Dogen would presumably say that the
situation (the presence of tathataa) takes form through the artist. Consider, for example,
the creation of Michelangelo's "David." According to historical accounts.
Michelangelo claimed that he had "seen" the image of David in the slab of marble
discarded by another artist. That is, the marble presented itself to Michelangelo as
"David" and Michelangelo became the vehicle for the thing's self-expression. In
the Ch'an and Zen terminology we have developed the image of David in the marble was a
true thing and Michelangelo, acting as a true person, let the thing show itself through
him. This is why, as we have already seen in the earlier quotation, Dogen associates
jijuyuu sammai with wu-wei. The artist, the Zen master, the Taoist sage are only insofar
as they are responsive to situations in which things present themselves as they are; there
is no self-conscious, calculative "doing."
In fact, Dogen considers language in its
most profound usage, what Dogen calls "expression" (dotoku(aa)), to be a
creative activity like the one just described. That is, language does not here refer to a
preexistent reality, but rather, things express themselves through the transparent medium
of without-thinking. In this way, the entire world of phenomena-including the mountains,
rivers and rocks-express reality. Dogen, therefore, says that such things are themselves
suutras (see, for example, Dogen's fascicle, "The Mountain and Water Suutra,"
Sansuikyo(bb)).
This concludes our discussion of truth and
Zen Buddhism. Our major conclusions are the following. First of all, although the
correspondence theory may give an adequate definition of truth, it needs to be
supplemented if we want to know how it is possible for such a truth to be acquired in
practice. We have investigated here the threefold metaphysical account of truth first
stated by Aristotle and developed by Thomas, but also paralleled in the Ch'an and Zen
traditions. In general, we have found the threef old distinction to be illuminating of the
metaphysical assumptions behind correspondence as a practical theory. Second, despite many
startling similarities, we must conclude that the Western view and the Zen view of truth
are fundamentally different, especially with respect to what the theory of truth should
try to accomplish. Ultimately, Aristotle and Thomas desire a theory of truth that will be
the cornerstone for explanatory interpretation. Thomas adds to this the application of the
theory to events wherein things conform to mind, that is, to events wherein man is in
creative transformation of his world. Both explanation and the governance of the natural
world, we may note, are constitutive of an idea of science. Beyond these goals, Thomas
(and, to a lesser extent, Aristotle) is also interested in establishing truth as a moral
ideal of interpersonal relations, a virtue toward which we should strive if we are to
achieve our basic humanity. The Zen view of truth, on the other hand, has a distinctively
different orientation. Rather than explanatory interpretation, Zen is interested in
descriptive interpretation. Rather than governing the trans-formation of nature, the Zen
Buddhist tries to be the agent of nature. Rather than setting a moral standard to live up
to, the Zen Buddhist achieves his humanity by letting go of external standards of value
and by becoming more spontaneous. In the final analysis, therefore. the Western
philosophers stipulate a tension between man and world: as Thomas put it, the mind must
conform to things and things to the mind. Harmony is achieved through mutual adaptation.
Zen philosophy, on the other hand, stipulates an essential unity: the tension between man
and world is the result of egocentric delusion. If we destroy that delusion, man's
activity his thinking and his doing becomes just an expression of nature itself.
A final lesson of our comparison is this:
the Zen Buddhists do not think differently than the Western philosophers. When it comes to
defining truth and articulating the metaphysical assumptions behind the practieal
application of this theory, the difference between the traditions is slight. The Zen and
Aristotelian/Thomistic traditions diverge only when they consider what the purpose of
thinking is and what the basic relationship between man and world is.
Aristotle/Thomas and
Hui-neng/Lin-chi/Dogen are not sets of writers who think differently; they are groups of
philosophers who disagree about what we should think about.
REFERENCES
Quotations from Aristotle are taken from
Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1969).
Quotations from Thomas are taken from The
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans., Fathers of the English Dominican Province,
3 vols. (Benziger Brothers, 1947) .
Quotations from Lin-chi are translated
from the Chinese original as given in Sasaki, Record of Lin-chi (Kyoto: Institute for Zen
Studies, 1975).
Two references are given for quotations:
the first number is correlated to the Yanagida Rinzairoku edition as given in Schloegl,
The Zen Teaching of Rinzai (Boulder, Colorado: Shambala, 1976), while the second number
refers to the chapters as found in Sasaki.
Quotations from Dogen are translated from
Okubo, ed., Dogenzenji zenshu, vol 1. (Tokyo: Chikume Shobo, 1969).
Transcribed for Buddhism
Today by Thich Nu Lien Hoa