The formation of the discipline of intercultural philosophy reveals its “karmic aspects,” in which dynamic encounters of scholars and students lay its future courses and clear unexpected paths. What was it like for a Japanese female Junior Year Abroad Exchange student to be in the American academic environment in the early 1970s, and her subsequent experience at the University of California Santa Barbara? A slice of her early memories, as well as her observations regarding the present and future of Japanese (...) philosophy and intercultural philosophy in Japan and in the global context are presented in this essay, in which, while Raimon Panikkar and Ninian Smart figure largely, Nishida Kitarō is also significantly in the picture. The essay is a “conversation” with an invisible interlocutor. (shrink)

Although it seems natural to consider the last fifty years the contemporary period, because this year (1995) punctuates a historical period celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, this essay will limit the term “contemporary” roughly to the last twenty‐five years. The reason for this demarcation is that at the beginning of the 1970s, we witnessed a new philosophical mood emerging in Japan. Prior to that period, the Japanese philosophical scene was dominated by the study of (...) European thinkers, such as Husserl, Heiddeger, Sartre, and Merleau Ponty. The end of the students' movement in the early 1970s also marked the end of the ideological disputes launched by Marxism since the early 1930s. Instead, it appears that the Japanese intelligentsia in the early 1970s began to acutely sense problems inherent in the Eurocentric philosophy which had served as a foundation for Western science and technology. This occurred largely through a recognition that scientific technology had yielded, as its unexpected byproduct, a “mind/heartless” society, pollution, and global ecological crises, which had permeated almost all parts of the Japanese archipelago to threaten the psyche of the Japanese people and their mode of living. In this essay, I should like to briefly introduce three representative contemporary Japanese thinkers who have addressed some aspects of these problems in their writings. They are Nakamura Yujiro, Sakabe Megumi, and Yuasa Yasuo. (Because of the limitations of space, this article will restrict itself to these three thinkers, but this should not suggest that there are no other representative thinkers in Japan. Consider particularly those belonging to the neo Kyoto school, such as Nishitani Keiji, Kosaka Masaki, Koyama Iwao, Umehara Takeshi and Ueda Shizuteru. Nishitani's works are well known in the English speaking world, along with those of Abe Masao. Out side of the Kyoto school, we can also mention other thinkers, such as Matsumoto Masao, Hiromatsu Wataru and Ichikawa Hiroshi.). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Zen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida KitarōThomas P. KasulisZen and Philosophy: An Intellectual Biography of Nishida Kitarō. By Michiko Yusa. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002. 482 pp.Readers of this journal know that much Buddhist-Christian dialogue over the past three decades has featured Kyōto School philosophy for the Buddhist side of the conversations. The major figures in that school known to the West are Nishida Kitarō, (...) Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji, Takeuchi Yoshinori, and Ueda Shizuteru. Other philosophers not formally connected to the school but in some ways kindred spirits with it include Watsuji Tetsurō, Hisamatsu Shin'ichi, and Abe Masao. Both individually and collectively these philosophers represent a formidable intellectual tradition, simultaneously challenging and inspiring their Western theological and philosophical counterparts. In surveying the Western responses to the Kyōto School, however, I often find an odd lacuna: the philosophers behind the thought are often absent or, at best, caricatured.The mischief here comes from two directions. On one hand, there are the Western theologians and philosophers who read in translation the works by Nishitani or Tanabe and are astounded by the sophistication of the thought and the way familiar Western philosophical thinkers such as Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, and Plato are interwoven in the arguments. Not being Asian specialists, these readers quite naturally focus on parts of the texts most familiar and intelligible—the interplay with Western ideas and values. This approach has helped Western thinkers discover hidden cultural assumptions in their own philosophizing and religious thinking. Missing, however, is the culturally Japanese character of the Kyōto School philosophers. At least until very recently, these philosophers did not write for a Western audience, but [End Page 268] for their Japanese compatriots. Thus, however much their philosophies might be Western in style and content, it is likely that at least some of their questions (and therefore their answers) were responses to Japanese, rather than Western, concerns. Given the upheaval that Japanese culture and society underwent in the first half of the twentieth century, it is especially important to factor into the equation such contemporaneous cultural concerns.Partly in response to this situation, there has more recently been a response from some Western intellectual historians of Japan who seek to debunk the Kyōto School as a whole, finding in it nothing more than disguised ethnocentrism, jingoism, and imperialism. In making their case, they often ignore the full philosophical systems developed by the Kyōto School thinkers and focus instead on comments from public forums or lectures. Sometimes no more than a few isolated quotations are used to support the case. What is wrong here is not necessarily the claim that Kyōto School philosophy was implicated in the political thought of the wartime years, but rather the cavalier scholarship used to support that claim. A whole school of philosophers tends to be lumped together with little concern for sorting out individual differences. For intellectual historians of this ilk, it is as if books are written by ideologies rather than individuals (or even individual ideologues). Such caricatures of the Kyōto School may even minimize the significance of the fact that some philosophers associated with the movement, Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun for example, died in prison for their leftist ideas and practices. The Kyōto School is not nearly as hegemonic as some of its critics like to claim.In short, these two commonWestern approaches to reading the Kyōto School philosophers tend either to overlook their Japaneseness or to deny their individuality. Either way, the philosopher disappears from the philosophizing. Here Yusa's book is a vital corrective. Her intellectual biography both Japanizes and humanizes Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945), the founder of the Kyōto School and the inspiration for most of Japan's modern philosophy. Her narrative gives us insight after insight into the concrete contexts in which Nishida's thought developed. Her discussion of each progression in Nishida's thought over his lifetime is framed by relevant events in his family life, his professional career, his interaction with colleagues, and the readings that were inspiring him at the time. Japanese editions of modern writers' collected works commonly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 244-248 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism. By Steve Odin. SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought. Albany: SUNY, 1996. xvi + 482 pp. Better late than never! As one of the few volumes—only two to date, actually—in the SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought to address a perennial philosophical (...) problem by drawing seriously upon both the Eastern (Zen Buddhism) and Western (American pragmatism) philosophical traditions, this book should have been reviewed in the pages of this journal a long time ago. Odin's thesis is that both traditions evidence a paradigm shift during the twentieth century from a monological and subjectivistic concept of an individualized self toward a dialogical and intersubjective concept of social self. He explores this hypothesis in the three parts of the book devoted to the social self in modern Japanese philosophy, the social self in Mead and American pragmatism, and a comparative analysis.Part 1 consists of three chapters focused on the philosophical thought of Watsuji Tetsuro (1885-1962) and Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), and on the psychological investigations of Doi Takeo (dates not given, but whose primary works were published in the 1970s and 1980s). Watsuji's central idea is a Zen and Confucian ningenmodel of personhood whereby the self emerges in "the betweenness of person and person" as the individual (nin), understood primarily in temporal categories, and society (gen), understood primarily in the spatial categories of nature, community and family, mutually empty themselves into the other. (In a later chapter, Odin draws parallels between the yi-li—spontaneous, novel reaction-ritual action—dialectic of Confucianism and the I-me dialectic of George Herbert Mead.) This notion of self as ningen subsequently served, at least in part, the development of nihonjinron scholarship—"studies of Japanese identity"—as advanced by thinkers like Kimura Bin, Hamaguchi Eshun, and Kumon Shumpei. The goal has been to steer the middle way between individualistic (Western) and collectivistic (Confucian) conceptions of the self toward what Hamaguchi and Kumon call a contextualist (kanjin), and thereby truly Japanese, understanding.Odin's exposition of Nishida focuses on his idea of the true self—the perennial quest of the Zen tradition—as a "social self" (shakaiteki jiko) that emerges from the I-thou, self-other, and individual-environment dialectics that take "place" in the absolutely empty spatial "field" of basho.(Here, Odin suggests that rather than drawing from Martin Buber's philosophy, both Nishida and Buber drew common inspiration from Ludwig Feuerbach's Principles of the Philosophy of the Future [Grundsatze der Philosophie der Zukunft, 1843]). The true self is therefore the no-self in the locus of absolute Nothingness. As such, the true self is also the empty self. This leads Nishida to draw analogies in his last few essays between the Buddhist idea of sunyata, or "emptiness," with the Christian notion of kenosis, or "self-emptiness." In [End Page 244] keeping with the Zen insistence against reifying emptiness, however, the true self is that which overcomes nihilism but yet resists eternalism. Buddhist sunyatais now symbolized by the bodhisattva's self-negating vow of compassion for all sentient beings, even as Christian kenosis is symbolized by Christ's self-emptying love for the world. This leads to the true self conceptualized as the intersubjective self. Odin suggests that this insight of Nishida is latent in the Chan/Zen tradition as captured in the famous Ten Oxherding Pictures. He also briefly portrays how later Kyoto school thinkers like Ueda Shizuteru, Nishitani Keiji, Abe Masao, Tanabe Hajime, and MutoKazuo have extended Nishida's insights and contributed to the Buddhist-Christian dialogue.Meanwhile, Doi Takeo, a distinguished Japanese psychiatrist, has suggested that human intrapsychic drives are not limited to sexual and aggressive instincts as hypothesized by Freud. Rather, there is an amae or dependency drive that explains the human need for love, intimacy, warmth, protection, nurturing, and so forth. This other-reliance and relational aspect of the human being explains, at least from a psychoanalytical perspective, the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT “Meister Eckhart’s Mysticism in Comparison with Zen Buddhism” originally appeared as the concluding section of Ueda Shizuteru’s first book, Die Gottesgeburt in der Seele und der Durchbruch zur Gottheit: Die mystische Anthropologie Meister Eckharts und ihre Konfrontation mit der Mystik des Zen-Buddhismus. It was first published in 1965 as an expanded version of Ueda’s doctoral dissertation, which was written under the supervision of Ernst Benz at the University of Marburg. Ueda’s careful analysis not only illuminates important (...) points of affinity between Eckhart and Zen, but also explains why Eckhart’s mysticism cannot be simply interchanged with Zen Buddhism. To allow the reader to read for themselves, I kept all interpretative notes to a minimum. The text is translated from the most recent edition of the German text, published in 2018 by Verlag Karl Alber, and edited by Wolf Burbat. The German pagination is interpolated in bold throughout the text. (shrink)

The topic of this article is the self-less self (selbst-lose Selbst) and more particularly this self in its connection with the problem of language. There exists a movement of the self-less self from itself toward itself. This movement also occurs as the liberation from language toward language; language reaches into the core of being self because our understanding of self and of the world is linguistically constituted. Similarly the fundamental conversion - as the occurence of the breakthrough (by means of (...) the I-am-myself) to the truth of the self - is nothing else than an original word event. The self-less, the true self says at this moment: “I am myself by not being myself (Ich bin, indem ich nicht ich bin, ich).” In order to gain a better understanding we now start from the problem of language. (shrink)

This volume concludes the two-volume sequel to Masao Abe's Zen and Western Thought. Like its companion, Buddhism and Interfaith Dialogue, this work contains many previously published essays and papers by Abe. Here he clarifies the true meaning of Buddhist emptiness in comparison with the Aristotelian notion of substance and the Whiteheadean notion of process.

Wenn auch das Postulat vollständiger Autarkie in der Gegenwart an Bedeutung verloren hat, so ist doch die Forderung nach einer begrenzten Autarkie der Staaten wenigstens in bestimmten Wirtschaftsbereichen grundsätzlich unentbehrlich für ihr friedliches Nebeneinanderbestehen. Das damit angesprochene Problem läßt sich am negativ zu bewertenden Beispiel Japans sehr deutlich aufzeigen, einem Land, das einerseits seinen ungewöhnlichen Reichtum der Ausbeutung anderer nicht industrieller Staaten verdankt, das andererseits jedoch im Bereich der Agrarwirtschaft vom Ausland abhängig ist. In einer solchen unbalancierten wechselseitigen Abhängigkeit liegen (...) prinzipielle Gefahren für eine friedliche Koexistenz. (shrink)

Written by one of Japan's foremost contemporary thinkers and scholars, Zen and Modern Society is the third in a series of essay collections on Zen Buddhism as seen in the context of Western thought. Throughout his career, Masao Abe has articulated the meaning of Zen thought in a uniquely compelling way - at once, true to the original tradition and appropriately relevant to a variety of comparative standpoints, ranging from Biblical Judeo-Christianity to modern existentialism, phenomenology, and postmodernism. As a (...) leading representative of the Kyoto School, which has sought a critical, comparative linking of Eastern and Western thought, Abe has based his approach on constructive, mutually respectful yet critical intellectual interaction and dialogue with some of the leading figures in the West (including Paul Tillich, Hans Kung, and Eugene Borowitz) as well as dozens of colleagues, students, and disciples. Together with the previous volumes, this work examines and exemplifies some key features of Kyoto School thought. While the essays presented here should be read in light of the socio-political criticism that has since been lodged against the Kyoto School and, more particularly, i. (shrink)

In April of 2006, the prominent cultural anthropologist Noriyuki Ueda sat down with the Dalai Lama for a two day conversation. This book is based on that long and lively conversation in Dharamsala.

Samuel Lytler Metcalfe was an American chemist and physician who wrote a voluminous work, Caloric Its Mechanical Chemical and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature ; attempting to account for all natural phenomena in terms of caloric. The book came out at the time when the concept of caloric was being gradually discarded and the law of conservation of energy was about to appear. Metcalfe was convinced that caloric would be the key to unlock the secrets of nature; in (...) order to develop the practical implications of his views he made research trips twice to England , and there he completed Caloric. (shrink)

Autonomous sensory meridian response is a complex sensory-emotional experience characterized by pleasant tingling sensations initiating at the scalp. ASMR is triggered in some people by stimuli including whispering, personal attention, and crisp sounds. Since its inception, ASMR has been likened to synesthesia, but convincing empirical data directly linking ASMR with synesthesia is lacking. In this study, we examined whether the prevalence of synesthesia is indeed significantly higher in ASMR-responders than non-responders. A sample of working adults and students were surveyed about (...) their experience with ASMR and common types of synesthesia. The proportion of synesthetes who were classified as ASMR-responders was 52%, whereas 22% of ASMR-responders were also synesthetes. These results suggest that: over half of those identifying as synesthetes also experience ASMR, and that synesthesia is up to four times as common among ASMR-responders as among non-responders. Findings also suggest a prevalence rate for ASMR of approximately 20%. Overall, the co-occurrence of ASMR and synesthesia lends empirical support to the idea that ASMR may be driven by synesthetic mechanisms, but future research would benefit from examining how ASMR and synesthesia are different, as well as similar. (shrink)

本书对西方思想结构和思维方式作了相当深的探讨,力图澄清西方对禅的种种误解,同时对禅学和佛教,作了严密的逻辑论证。.