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Zen and Pragmatism(4)

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23. Ibid., p. 7.

24. Ibid., p. 6.

25. Ibid., p. 7.

 

 

p. 25

ence is that Dewey is unambiguous in affirming that the coalescence of means and ends is to be achieved in "things as they are," whereas Suzuki, instead of abiding there, talks of arriving at another world of "divine" life. Either this is metaphorical language for what Dewey says plainly, or Suzuki would seem to be indulging now in a dualism alien to his own Taoist-like down-to-earth-while-cloud-high interpretation of Zen. If it weren't for his "Reply to Hu Shih" one might suppose this fracture in his view was apparent only and owing to a manner of speaking and feeling, in sympathy with religious people who express themselves that way. Similarly, James, after working out a biological and functional account of consciousness, spoke of religion as putting us in touch with the "divine" or "ultimate" reality. He said: "The further limits of out being... plunge into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' world" [26] And again: "I suppose that my belief that in communion with the ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it seems to me, too easily to naturalism." But is not James saying practically what Dewey says without giving in to supernaturalism or to a naturalism devoid of ideals? "It is this active relation between ideal and actual to which I would give the name 'God,'" [27] Dewey says, finding it natural to make new departures through communion with possibilities and guidance by goals all within experience. Ralph Barton Perry has pointed out that for James "the field of immediately apprehended particularity becomes a continuum which is qualified to stand as the metaphysical reality. Of this continuum James says that "though one part of our experience may lean upon another part to make it what it is in any one of its several aspects in which it may be considered, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on nothing." [28]

   While Dewey largely identifies thinking with problem-solving for the sake of restoring the flow of immediate experience, he, too, finds this flow to include all that is worth while in life: effort and thought as well as sensations, impulses, reflexes, and habits. Dewey follows James in recognizing not only that relations belong to the perceptual flux but also that conception as an act does, too; though it cuts out meanings which can be used abstractly,


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26. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 515.

27. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 51.

28. R. B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston: Little Brown, and Co., 1936), Vol. I, pp. 460-461; quoted from William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912), p.193.

 

 

p. 26

so that "concepts flow out of percepts and into them again." [29] In discussing the immediacy of artistic-aesthetic experience, Dewey brings out its transformation of the given through intellectual as well as volitional factors. The exciting and satisfying transaction that Dewey calls aesthetic is ordinary and normal, except for being completed and clarified in a fresh focus. Suzuki, when he is down to earth, though with much that is puzzling makes the same point with regard to Zen experience. That it is inherently aesthetic is attested by its influence upon art, [30] several examples of which illustrate his Essays. These paintings place Zen figures in a setting of nature and oneness with other beings, and support this statement of his: "... it is one of the most typical traits of Zen life that the masters and disciples work together in all kinds of manual activity." [31] Hung-jen, the fifth Patriarch, is represented as a pine-planter; Hui-neng, the sixth, as a bamboo-cutter. In the accompanying comment we read that what distinguishes the development of Zen in China and Japan from Indian Buddhism is being "extracted from life itself as it is lived by every one of us," and that being a manual worker helps a master to be "thoroughly democratic in his way of thinking and feeling." [32] Incidentally, this comment stands in unexplained contrast to the statement in an earlier volume that "Zen is by no means a democratic religion. It is in essence meant for the elite." [33]

 

IV
   When Suzuki is stressing Zen's immediacy and commonplaceness, as expressed by ancient sages, one wonders whether there is anything different here from what people experience anyway, without special aptitude or training. Does the arduous Zen discipline lead where life leads the ordinary mortal? Yes, except that the path is enhanced by greater awareness. Hu tells how their ordinariness helped Ch'an monks to survive the persecution of Buddhism in the ninth century in China: "Ling-yu simply put on the cap and dress of the layman when he was ordered to return a, secular life. He did not want to be in any way different from the people." [34] Clearly his lack of difference was not a lack but a feat. Intellectual transformation