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Title: Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism by Dale S. Wright, John Clayton, Steven Collins, Nicholas de Lange, William Graham ISBN: 0-521-78984-2 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 August, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Ground Breaking Book
Comment: Dale Wright has engaged with the Zen Buddhist tradition with a powerful and sophisticated hermanuetic analysis. Based on Blofield's influential translation of Huang Po's Transmission of Mind he delivers a masterful exploration of Zen thinking. Zen's traditional claims to transcending words and concepts is closely scrutinized. Wright cleverly uses the Buddhist concept of dependent origination to add a further explanatory dimension to the role of language and its context in reading and understanding Zen. He rightly points out that Zen Buddhism is deeply intwined with language and that whilst Zen Koans are presentations of extra-ordinary human experience, their oddness is not meaningless cryptic, but instrumental in communicating insight gained through meditative practice using ordinary language in non-ordinary ways. The book challenges romantic and historicist conceptions of Zen which hold to something like a universial "spirit" or experience which transcends historic time and location. And it challenges the disembodied "objective" analysis of scientific approaches which set upon "facts" and "historical data" as though they can be simply "read" without reflection on the frames of interpretation of the observer. Instead Wright exposes the reader to an important dimension of reflexivity which comes with a post-modern sensibility. Zen emerges the wiser, without a romantic and naive sense of transcendence and a firmer understanding of importance of understanding the historical context of Zen writing. We are also reminded of how our own modern context colours how we make sense of Zen as well as nonsense of it.
My sense is that this book it is a major landmark in the meeting between Western Philosophy and Buddhism. The complexity of the hermanuetic circle of understanding something like Zen, I suspect, means we have many more rounds to go. My sense is that, like Zen, this complexity trangresses the boundaries of language in ways we are yet to grasp. Zen's lack of reflexivity and historic resistence to critical reflection are great limitations, and yet western linguistics too does not fully appreciate how words themselves can be brimming with emptiness. There is work to be done on both sides and hopefully this book will serve as the basis for a mutually beneficial dialogue.
Overall, Dale Wright has written an important piece in understanding the rich vein of knowledge that Zen inquiry uncovers. It links into to new developments in the cognitive sciences which, as the late Francisco Varela suggests, opens up a door to a new mode of human experience that has hardly been explored in the West. Wright explains how our language, not only needs to develop in radical ways to meet this marvelousness Zen experience, but even just to begin the inquiry. It is essential reading for anyone taking eastern philosophy seriously.
Rating: 5
Summary: Good News For Modern Zennists
Comment: If you have wondered WHY you are "reading Zen" sutras or koans, your spirits will be lifted with optimism by the first 40 pages of this book. You are doing more good than you realized. This book is a freight train full of provocative and attractive ideas about the relationship of study to practice. If you have been practicing Zen for more than a year, get this book and re-read once a year. Even if you disagree with it, it can agitate your point of view beneficially.
The text is marvelously well structured, building up to the argument of the final chapter and Conclusion. Good clear writing. No academic gobbledegook here.
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Title: Tsung-Mi and the Sinification of Buddhism (Studies in East Asian Buddhism, 16) by Peter N. Gregory ISBN: 082482623X Publisher: University of Hawaii Press Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes by David Rothenberg, Yuanwu Pi Yen Lu, Sam Hamill ISBN: 1930337035 Publisher: Codhill Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Seeing through Zen : Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism by John R. McRae ISBN: 0520237986 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: January, 2004 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Koan Practice (Nanzan Library of Asian Religion and Culture) by Victor Sogen Hori ISBN: 0824822846 Publisher: University of Hawaii Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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