Ideal for students and scholars alike, this edition of _Zhuangzi _ includes the complete Inner Chapters, extensive selections from the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters, and judicious selections from two thousand years of traditional Chinese commentaries, which provide the reader access to the text as well as to its reception and interpretation. A glossary, brief biographies of the commentators, a bibliography, and an index are also included.

Tiantai Buddhism emerged from an idiosyncratic and innovative interpretation of the Lotus Sutra to become one of the most complete, systematic, and influential schools of philosophical thought developed in East Asia. Brook A. Ziporyn puts Tiantai into dialogue with modern philosophical concerns to draw out its implications for ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Ziporyn explains Tiantai’s unlikely roots, its positions of extreme affirmation and rejection, its religious skepticism and embrace of religious myth, and its view of human consciousness. (...) class='Hi'>Ziporyn reveals the profound insights of Tiantai Buddhism while stimulating philosophical reflection on its unexpected effects. (shrink)

Explores the work of Guo Xiang, a Neo-Taoist thinker who developed a radical philosophy of freedom and spontaneity.

_Continues the author’s inquiry into the development of the Chinese philosophical concept Li, concluding in Song and Ming dynasty Neo-Confucianism._.

This article provides an overview of controversies in the history of Chinese philosophy concerning the diversity of meanings of the term Li , as well as the comparative issues raised in various attempts by modern Chinese and Western interpreters to come to terms with this diversity of meanings. Revisiting the earliest pre-philosophical uses of the term, an attempt is then made to synthesize the insights of previous interpreters and open up a new path for investigating its distinctive implications in classical (...) Chinese thought, Chinese Buddhism, and Neo-Confucianism. (shrink)

A new approach to the theism-scientism divide rooted in a deeper form of atheism. -/- Western philosophy is stuck in an irresolvable conflict between two approaches to the spiritual malaise of our times: either we need more God (the “turn to religion”) or less religion (the New Atheism). In this book, Brook Ziporyn proposes an alternative that avoids both totalizing theomania and atomizing reductionism. What we need, he argues, is a deeper, more thoroughgoing, even religious rejection of God: an (...) affirmative atheism without either a creator to provide meaning or finite creatures in need of it—a mystical atheism. -/- In the legacies of Daoism and Buddhism as well as Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille, Ziporyn discovers a critique of theism that develops into a new, positive sensibility—at once deeply atheist and richly religious. Experiments in Mystical Atheism argues that these “godless epiphanies” hold the key to renewing philosophy today. (shrink)

Explores the development of Chinese thought, highlighting its concern with questions of coherence. Providing a bracing expansion of horizons, this book displays the unsuspected range of human thinking on the most basic categories of experience. The way in which early Chinese thinkers approached concepts such as one and many, sameness and difference, self and other, and internal and external stand in stark contrast to the way parallel concepts entrenched in much of modern thinking developed in Greek and European thought. Brook (...) Ziporyn traces the distinctive and surprising philosophical journeys found in the works of the formative Confucian and Daoist thinkers back to a prevailing set of assumptions that tends to see questions of identity, value, and knowledge—the subject matter of ontology, ethics, and epistemology in other traditions—as all ultimately relating to questions about coherence in one form or another. Mere awareness of how many different ways human beings can think and have thought about these categories is itself a game changer for our own attitudes toward what is thinkable for us. The actual inhabitation and mastery of these alternative modes of thinking is an even greater adventure in intellectual and experiential expansion. Brook Ziporyn is Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Religion, and Comparative Thought at the University of Chicago Divinity School and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. His books include The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

All Mahayana schools adopt some version of the Two Truths theory, with one exception: the Tiantai school, which alone among all Buddhist schools moves from the Two Truths epistemology to a Three Truths model of truth. The Three Truths are actually three different ways of looking at any object or state. Each implies the other two, and each is one way to describe the whole of that object, including its other two aspects. This cup is a cup: that is provisional (...) truth, conventional truth, local coherence. This cup is not a cup: that is ultimate truth, its emptiness, its global incoherence. To be a cup is not to be a cup: that is its Centrality, its Non‐duality, its Absoluteness. This cup is all things, all possible ways of being, all universes, as this cup. (shrink)

Ideas adapted from the tradition of Chinese Tiantai Buddhism, in particular the notions of the "Three Truths" and "opening the provisional to reveal the real," are applied to the traditional mind-body problem as framed in Western philosophical discourse. An attempt is made to offer an account of the mind-body relation that explicates both the identity and the opposition between these two terms, thereby avoiding the traditional positions of dualism, monism, and parallelism while also accounting for the features of the relation (...) that have made these positions attractive in the past. (shrink)

The term Dao originally means a Way or Course or Guide, something very close to purposive action as such – a prescribed course to attain a prescribed goal. It is precisely something that is selected out, valued, desired, kept to rather than discarded. The Daoist usage of the term “Dao” is thus an ironic usage: it is used deliberately in the opposite of its literal sense to make a point – the real way to attain value is through what we (...) do not value, the real way is an anti-way, the real fulfilment of purpose lies in letting go of purpose. Purpose by definition excludes the purposeless. But this relationship is not symmetrical; purposelessness does not exclude purpose. On the contrary, it includes, allows, and even generates purpose. Not one purpose, however, but infinite purposes, all of which remain embedded in a larger purposelessness, but not contradicted or undermined by it. The structure of purpose is such as to either exclude or to subordinate the purposeless. But even if merely subordinated rather than excluded, purposelessness ceases tobe genuinely purposeless. It becomes instead instrumental to purpose, pervaded completely by purpose. So a monotheist cosmos is one that ultimately forecloses entirely purposelessness, and thereby also undermines all forms of inclusiveness, non-duality, and the non-personal. The relation of purpose to purposelessness is more tricky than it appears. This essay attempts a direct reconfiguring of this relation through the concept of wu-wei as effortless and purposeless action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Tiantai Doctrine of Evil as the Good:A Response to David R. LoyBrook ZiporynIn a recent issue of this journal (vol. 54 [1]:99-103), David Loy has done me the honor of publishing his sympathetic and thoughtful review of my book Evil and/or/ as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). Loy has done an excellent (...) job of bringing to the forefront some of the most troubling and distinctive aspects of the Tiantai Buddhist position on evil, as expressed in particular in the works of Siming Zhili, the focus of my book. Inevitably, with the nit-picky vanity that perhaps assails every reviewee, I feel some points have been imperfectly understood or represented, but in general I want before anything else to express my gratitude to Loy for the insight and acuity with which he has handled this material, the care he has taken in reading and responding to the book, and the candor, lucidity, and forcefulness with which he has expressed a very reasonable, non-Tiantai Mahāyāna response to some of the more radical and counterintuitive Tiantai ideas.But one particularly great service Loy has done is to present a very important and necessary challenge: what would these Tiantai writers, with their bizarre ideas about the interpenetration, nay, identity, of good and evil have to say about Hitler and the Holocaust? Putting this particular topic up as a casual example to be employed in an academic discussion, in effect "making use of" the mountains of corpses in the context of an ivory-tower discussion of subtle logical and ontological hairsplitting, perhaps will strike some as being in more than questionable taste. But there are points to be made here, and it is a valid question, one that needs to be addressed—indeed, that we cannot help addressing—even when it is played as a card all the meanings of which have already been determined. Loy is quite right: these mountains of corpses are always already in play in the background of our discussions of moral doctrines, perhaps even in the interstices of our casual entertainments, and we let ourselves off too easily if we leave them in the background, as unexamined, prepackaged moral tokens, or stock bugaboos whose "use-value" in the culture has already been nonnegotiably and comfortably mapped out. This is the extreme test case that anyone who wants to talk seriously about values and ethics must face head-on. For these reasons I want to take this opportunity to extend the thought experiment and respond to this challenge, speaking for the sake of argument in the name of the Tiantai doctrine, in the hopes that this will perhaps initiate a dialogue with specialists in other systems of moral theory, who might attempt a similar experiment.To do this, however, it will be necessary to take up a few of the more general theoretical questions raised in Loy's review. The first of these concerns the relation between ultimate truth and provisional truth. Loy acknowledges that, as argued in [End Page 329] the book, the Tiantai position gives a higher status to provisional or conventional truth than most Mahāyāna Two Truths doctrines, accurately paraphrasing the conclusion that "for Tiantai, however, the provisional ends up being equal to the ultimate truth." But, on the other hand, he wishes to point out as a potential shortcoming of the Tiantai position that it seems to overstress the "highest point of view." This assertion comes in the context of a grudging attempt to make sense of the Tiantai affirmation of evil from the point of view of the general Mahāyāna Two Truths theory, thereby, in my opinion, fatally distorting the point. Loy is willing to admit "the fact that from the highest point of view every possible apprehension—including evil ones—is neither a distortion of reality nor subject to invalidation by some other more privileged perspective." This strikes Loy as problematic, and he offers his own solution: it lies in "realizing that this 'ultimate' point of view is insufficient by itself—that it always needs... (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a work that bears comparison to Mahāyāna Buddhist literature in more ways than one. Nietzsche was turning against the Schopenhauerian doctrine of the denial of the will, which he read as symptomatic of a larger nihilistic trend swallowing up almost all existing spiritual culture, while the Mahāyāna was turning against the world-denying implications of the doctrine of Nirvana as the ending of desire and samsara that was so central to early Buddhism. In this article, (...) I explore one move made in both of these cases: the move from total negation to total affirmation seen as a convergence of these two apparently opposed extremes. Of central interest here is the “identity of indiscernibles” that applies structurally to these two opposite extremes, “willing nothing” and “willing everything,” with the latter effected only through “willing one thing intensely,” at once excluding and including all other things, and its liberative potential. (shrink)

The article, a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur,” analyzes the metaphysical assumptions behind the valorization of “clear and distinct ideas,” apodictic knowledge, and definitiveness, and it suggests alternatives derived from Daoist sources, where a different model of knowing prevails. That model undermines the idea of purposive willing in the service of goals known in advance, and undermines as well the bases for any human or divine activity designed to achieve definite ends. If (...) purpose is not privileged either metaphysically or ethically, the concomitant notion of unambiguous fact is also shaken. In the absence, even in principle, of any form of knowing, human or divine, that is unambiguous and apodictic, there is no reason to grant ontological privilege to the paradigm of “unambiguous potential objects of knowledge.” This article concludes by asking and in part answering what the world looks like, what sort of human cognition and activity is most appropriate, in the absence of clear purposes, definite knowledge, and unambiguous facts. (shrink)

Spinoza, as a monist and a rationalist, seems unlikely to have occasion to confront any form of the solipsism problem. However, a close examination of his epistemology reveals that he does in fact confront a very radical form of this problem, and offers an equally radical solution to it, derived from the very epistemological premises that make it a potential problem for him. In particular, we find that the conception of the mind as the “idea of the body,” premised on (...) the strict identity of mental modes (“ideas”) and extended modes (“bodies”) forecloses any possibility of awareness extending “beyond” the confines of the finite body, or of any idea being able to be about anything other than its own bodily mode: ideas can only be ideas “of” the body of which they are the idea, and hence the mind, as the idea of the body, cannot have any ideas “of” anything outside of the body. The solution comes from the “Common Notions” which establish the existence of the world outside the body not by “reaching” that world, but merely by establishing immanently the nature of the finite body qua finite body. This manner of instantiating an infinite externality of the body within the body itself, though highly exceptional in European intellectual history, bears interesting similarities to the solutions to distinct but parallel problems concerning the relation of the finite to the infinite found in Chinese thought, in particular in the Zhuangzi and in the Huayan and Tiantai schools of Buddhism. (shrink)

This essay explores one of the first distinctively Sinitic reappropriations of Madhyamaka epistemology: Seng Zhao’s essay “Prajñā is Without Knowledge.” Seng Zhao’s work is here read as a deliberate collapse of the traditional Madhyamaka Two Truths into two simultaneous aspects of sagely wisdom, rather than a diachronic means-end relation, arriving at a crypto-Zhuangzian “trivialist” conclusion aimed at undermining epistemological bivalence at its roots. For Seng Zhao, because nothing can be established as true, nothing can be excluded as false. Here the (...) understanding of Emptiness has become not the exclusion of all views, but the inclusion of all views. This is rooted in Seng Zhao’s view that, to use Jan Westerhoff’s terms, the denial of substance-svabhāva is always also implicitly the denial of essence-svabhāva. Seng Zhao move from Emptiness as exclusion to Emptiness as inclusion, and from denial of ontological substance to denial of mutually exclusive determinateness, sets the agenda for the distinctive developments of classical Chinese Buddhist philosophy to come. (shrink)

The idea of a nous as arche, of a single purposive rational mind that creates the world or otherwise accounts for the world being as it is, has dominated most Western thought in one form or another since it was proposed by Plato, quoting Socrates, quoting Anaxagoras, in the Phaedo, particularly in the form given it in monotheist religions and theologies and, less explicitly but still powerfully, in their secular aftermaths. Each of the dominant traditions in pre-modern China is however (...) “God-less” in the sense of lacking just this conception. This article takes a look at the forms of God-less religiousness developed in these traditions, as a way of recovering some of the ethical and epistemological alternatives obscured by the idea of God idea in monotheistic cultures. (shrink)

This dissertation may be viewed as an exposition of the philosophical implications of a single eight-character sentence from the works of the Tiantai Buddhist monk Siming Zhili , the literal meaning of which may be rendered: "Other than the devil there is no Buddha, other than the Buddha there is no devil." A context in which to effectively interpret the significance of this claim is provided by examining the Chinese philosophical tradition with an eye for three closely related themes: notions (...) that do not share the arguably common-sense assumption that "good" and "bad" are mutually exclusive categories; concepts of holism ; and the conception of intersubjectivity as a primary, constitutive and ultimate component of experience. The work begins with introductory chapters laying out the nature of the problem, its parameters and implications, and the methodological limitations bearing on the investigation to follow. The next portion consists of an examination of ideas of value paradox, holism and intersubjectivity as they are developed by pre-Qin thinkers, including Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi Mozi, Laozi and Zhuangzi. The study culminates in an examination of the disputes over the Tiantai doctrine of "the evil inherent in the Buddha-nature" , beginning with its background in Indian and earlier Chinese Buddhism, and reaching its zenith in Zhili's notion of "the ultimacy of the dung beetle," as predicated on an assertion of an uncompromising identity between value and anti-value , a thoroughgoing omnicentric holism, and an insistence on the all-pervasiveness and ultimacy of constitutive intersubjectivity. By rendering these initially counterintuitive notions coherent, it is hoped that an alternative view of human experience, premised on omnicentric holism rather than atomism or unicentrism, on intersubjectivity rather than objectivity or subjectivity, and on value paradox rather than value dichotomy, will come into focus, thereby providing an additional resource to our arsenal of possible approaches to the world. (shrink)

This article is concerned with social and interactional processes that simplify pragmatic acts of intention attribution. The empirical focus is a series of interactions among DeafBlind people in Seattle, Washington, where pointing signs are used to individuate objects of reference in the im-mediate environment. Most members of this community are born deaf and slowly become blind. They come to Seattle using Visual American Sign Language, which has emerged and developed in a field organized around visual modes of access. However, as (...) vision deteriorates, links be-tween deictic signs and the present, remembered, or imagined environment erode in idiosyncratic ways across the community of language-users, and it becomes increasingly difficult for partici-pants to converge on objects of reference. In the past, DeafBlind people have addressed this problem by relying on sighted interpreters. Under the influence of the recent “pro-tactile” movement, they have turned instead to one another to find new solutions to their referential prob-lems. Drawing on analyses of 120 hours of videorecorded interaction and language-use, detailed fieldnotes collected during twelve months of sustained anthropological fieldwork, and more than 15 years of involvement in this community in a range of capacities, I show how DeafBlind peo-ple are generating new and reciprocal modes of access to their environment, and how this pro-cess is aligning language with context in novel ways. I propose two mechanisms that can account for this process: deictic integration and embedding in the social field. I argue that together, these interactional and social mechanisms yield a deictic system set to retrieve a restricted range of values from the extra-linguistic context, thereby attenuating the cognitive demands of intention-attribution and narrowing the gap between DeafBlind minds. (shrink)

Neste artigo, pretendemos explorar a teoria que Tomás de Aquino desenvolve para explicar o funcionamento da percepção humana. São introduzidas, nessa teoria, as operações realizadas pelo sentido comum, dentre elas, a função de unificação das múltiplas informações que são recebidas a partir dos sentidos externos. Será abordado, precisamente, o seguinte problema: que tipo de critério é mobilizado pelo sentido comum no processo de unificação dessas múltiplas informações? A fim de identificar a resposta a esse problema, tomamos como ponto de partida (...) a investigação sobre os tipos de informações que são apreendidas pelos sentidos externos. Pretendemos mostrar que essas informações se reduzem a dois tipos básicos: informações a respeito das qualidades e da quantidade das coisas ao nosso redor. Na sequência, investigaremos como Tomás de Aquino caracteriza a operação de unificação, principalmente através da capacidade de percepção simultânea das múltiplas informações. Por fim, procuraremos reconstruir o critério da operação de unificação através da tese tomística de que as informações relativas à quantidade das coisas são apreendidas como sujeitos das qualidades. Nessa medida, a unificação das qualidades percebidas pode ser feita em função da identificação do sujeito comum a todas essas qualidades. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the grammatical incorporation of demonstratives in a tactile language, emerging in communities of DeafBlind signers in the US who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels—a practice known as “protactile.” In the first part of the paper, we report on a synchronic analysis of recent data, identifying four types of “taps,” which have taken on different functions in protacitle language and communication. In the second part of the paper, we report on a diachronic analysis of data collected (...) over the past 8 years. This analysis reveals the emergence of a new kind of “propriotactic” tap, which has been co-opted by the emerging phonological system of protactile language. We link the emergence of this unit to both demonstrative taps, and backchanneling taps, both of which emerged earlier. We show how these forms are all undergirded by an attention-modulation function, more or less backgrounded, and operating across different semiotic systems. In doing so, we contribute not only to what is known about demonstratives in tactile languages, but also to what is known about the role of demonstratives in the emergence of new languages. (shrink)