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Biddhist Emptiness in the Ethics and Aesthetics of Watsuji Tetsurō*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William R. Lafleur
William R. Lafleur
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Princeton University
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Extract

During the past few decades a growing interest in what is often called the ‘Kyoto School’ of philosophy has evidenced itself here and there in the West, especially in discussions of comparative religious thought and in the pages of journals which are sensitive, in the post-colonial world, to the value of giving attention to contemporary thought that originates outside the Anglo-American and continental contexts. What has made the so-called Kyoto School especially interesting is the fact that those thinkers identified with it obviously possess a wide acquaintance with Western thought but also have a programme of clarifying points at which they, as Japanese philosophers, find Western philosophy either in sum or in its parts inadequate or objectionable. Moreover, inasmuch as the philosophers of the Kyoto School have deliberately reached back into the Mahayana Buddhist component in Japanese civilization in order to find terms, perspectives, and even foundations for their own analyses and constructions, Western students of comparative religion and comparative thought have in the study of this school a unique aperture for observing how a group of thinkers, while sharing modernity and its problems with us, reates both of these to a religious tradition which is in many ways strikingly different from that of the West.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 237 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 237 note 1 Most notably in the pages of Philosophy East and West. In this journal, Religious Studies, attention to the Kyoto school can be found in Masao Abe, ‘Non-Being and Mu: the Metaphysical Nature of Negativity in the East and the West’, vol. 11, number 2 (June, 1975), pp. 181–92 and in Sontag, Frederick, ‘Freedom and God: the Meeting of East and West’, vol. 11, number 2 (Dec. 1975), pp. 421–31.Google Scholar

page 237 note 1 Piovesana, Gino K., S.J., Recent Japanese Philosophical Thought 1862–1962: a Survey (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1968), p. 86.Google Scholar

page 238 note 1 Dilworth, David, ‘Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960): Cultural phenomenologist and ethician’, Philosophy East and West, vol. 24, number 1 pp. 3–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quotation from p. 17. Another important essay on Watsuji is BeIlah, Robert N., ‘Japan's Cultural Identity: Some Reflections on the Work of Watsuji Tetsurō’, The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 24, number 4 (August 1965), pp. 573–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 238 note 2 Dilworth, ibid.

page 239 note 1 The collected works of Watsuji, Watsuji Tetsurō zenshū, 20 vols., are published in Tokyo by Iwanami shoten, 1963.Google Scholar

page 239 note 2 Dilworth, ibid.

page 239 note 3 Masaaki, Kōsaka, Nishida Kitarō to Watsuji Testsurō, (Nishida Kitarō and Watsuji Tetsurō), Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1964, p. 102.Google Scholar

page 239 note 4 Kōsaka, , op. cit. pp. 109–10. Based on Watsuji, Rinrigaku, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1970 ed.), pp. 559 ff.Google Scholar

page 240 note 1 I owe the notion that Watsuji does not belong to the Kyoto school ‘in the narrow sense’ to Professor Abe Masao.

page 240 note 2 For a more complete intellectual biography of Watsuji see both Dilworth and Bellah essays cited above.

page 241 note 1 Dilworth, , op. cit. pp. 7–11Google Scholar and Bellah, , op. cit. pp. 586–7.Google Scholar

page 241 note 2 Bellah, , op. cit. p. 591.Google Scholar

page 241 note 3 Kōsaka notes this as a point of contrast to Nishida, for whom such balance and aesthetic of expression was much less important.

page 241 note 4 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 11.Google Scholar

page 242 note 1 Fūdo (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1967 ed.), p. 2.Google ScholarEnglish translation of this work is by Bownas, Geoffrey, published by the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO and entitled A Climate: a Philosophical Study (Tokyo: 1961); quotation from pp. v–vi.Google Scholar

page 242 note 2 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 178; original emphasis.Google Scholar

page 242 note 3 ibid.; original emphasis.

page 242 note 4 Dilworth, , op. cit. p. 16.Google Scholar

page 243 note 1 On the importance of philology for Watsuji see Takeshi, Umehara, ‘Kaisetsu’ (Commentary) in Takeshi, Umehara, ed., Watsuji Tetsurō shu (Tokyo: Chikuma shobo, 1974), p. 415.Google Scholar

page 243 note 2 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 16.Google Scholar

page 243 note 3 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 18. It may be that in this term ningen Watsuji saw the retention also of Certain values in the Chinese ethical and philosophical term jen.Google Scholar

page 243 note 4 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 16.Google Scholar

page 243 note 5 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 59; original emphasis.Google Scholar

page 244 note 1 ibid.

page 244 note 2 Mūiamadhyamakakārikās 24: 18 and 19 as translated by Streng, Frederick J., Emptiness: a Study in Religious Meaning (Nashville and New York: Abingdon, 1967), p. 215.Google Scholar

page 245 note 1 Vigrahavyāvartani, part II: 49 and 50 in Streng, op. cit. p. 226.Google Scholar

page 245 note 2 Rinrigaku, vol. 1, p. 107; original emphasis.Google Scholar

page 245 note 3 Abe, op. cit.

page 246 note 1 The other major figure here would be Shin'ichi, Hisamatsu. See his Zen and the Fine Arts (New York: Kodansha, 1971).Google Scholar

page 246 note 2 Watsuji Tetsurō, ‘Japanese Literary Arts and Buddhist Philosophy’, trans. by Umeyo, Hirano, The Eastern Buddhist, n.s., vol. 4, no. 1 (May 1971), pp. 88–115; quotation from p. 111.Google Scholar

page 246 note 3 Fūdo, p. 190; translation mine.Google Scholar

page 247 note 1 For a discussion of this in East Asian Buddhist history see my ‘Saigyō and the Buddhist Value of Nature, Part I’, History of Religions, vol. 13, no. 2 (Nov. 1973), pp. 93–128.Google Scholar

page 247 note 2 Fūdo, pp. 191–2; translation mine.Google Scholar

page 248 note 1 Abe, op. cit. p. 186.Google Scholar

page 248 note 2 ibid.

page 248 note 3 For a different view of asymmetry in Zen arts see Hisamatsu, op. cit. pp. 29–31; Hisamatsu attributes this to the fact that these arts‘… are imperfect and worldly in the sense of going beyond perfection and holiness’.Google Scholar

page 248 note 4 Jin'ichi, Konishi, ’The Art of Renga’, trans. with an Introduction by Brazell, Karen and Cook, Lewis, Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 2, number 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 29–61; quotation p. 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 249 note 1 Watsuji Tetsurō, ‘Nihon no bungei to Bukkyō shisō’, in Takeshi, Umehara, ed., op. cit. pp. 108–131; trans. mine.Google Scholar

page 249 note 2 Op. cit. p. 130.Google Scholar

page 249 note 3 Op. cit. p. 129.Google Scholar