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Zen and Pragmatism(6)

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   Feeling, as Dewey does, that the bane of life is the bifurcation of means and ends, Suzuki also wants to overcome such dubious doubleness; but he does not see how this can be done unless Zen transcends time. He quotes the Dhammapada for support, forgetting perhaps, his Zen point that the scriptures ate only commentaries on the "Ah, this" of the present moment. For the pragmatist, too, the moment is the center of reality, but for him the present moment is experienced as in and of time. Dewey and Mead have followed James, who said: "the practically cognized present is no knife-


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38. Ibid., p. 6.

39. Ibid., p. 6, 7.

40. Ibid., p. 8.

41. In Charles A. Moore, ed., Essays in East-West Philosophy: An Attempt at World Philosophical Synthesis (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), p. 24.

42. Ibid., p. 25.

43. Ibid., p. 34.

 

 

p. 29

edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own, on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time." [44] Then Suzuki insists that it is a mistake to "interpret Zen as annihilating time and putting in its place eternity." After seeming to put time and eternity over against each other as belonging in different worlds, he would have us remember that for Zen "time and eternity are one." [45] But, unless this oneness is taken to mean that time is unreal, eternity itself must be temporal, which is scarcely the idea one gets of it in any writing, unless Zen is the exception, before time was "taken seriously" in a world of events. In the world of Einstein, Whitehead, and Mead, or of any philosophy in keeping with the assumptions of modern science, process and becoming are ultimate. Suzuki himself says: "... there is no eternity outside this time-conditionedness. Eternity is possible only in the midst of... time-process." [46] And if this seems contradictory, the teaching of Zen is "to experience the dissolution of contradictions." [47] We are assured that if we can get back to the pre-analytical suchness of tathataa, the difficulties of logical thought vanish.

   It is helpful here that Suzuki relates tathataa to aesthetic appreciation. Yet, his illustration is puzzling: the haiku poem contrasting the beautiful morning glory with the bucket, which he speaks of as ugly because utilitarian. Why should he think of the beauty of the flower as "not of this earth"? What is of the earth if not a flower? Such squeamishness in a Zen adept is disconcerting to one who has responded to the naturalism of Zen in its celebration of "things as they are," to its teaching that even the supernatural is natural, that the most ordinary life is wonderful, because "then sitteth the old man in all his homeliness"; [48] and that the Buddha is "the dried-up dirtcleaner." [49] Americans singing about "the old oaken bucket" seem truer to Zen than Suzuki when he puts the bucket in a "world of defilements," meaning the world of "the practical affairs of daily life where utilitarianism rules." [50] He speaks of the poetess who wrote about the morning-glory and the bucket as not wanting "to pollute things celestial with anything savoring of workaday business." [51] He goes on to say, "We cannot remain forever in a state of undifferentiation." We come out of it to utter, "Oh, the morning-


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44. William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, p. 608.

45. D. T. Suzuki, "The Philosophy of Zen," p. 8.

46. Ibid., p. 9.

47. Ibid., p. 10.

48. Chao-pien, quoted in Alan W. Watts, The Spirit of Zen (London: John Murray, 1936), p. 81.

49. Yun-men, in Suzuki Essays in Zen Buddhism, Second Series, p 93. Hu accuses Suzuki of euphemizing here instead of translating the "profanely iconoclottic" phrase actually used [Hu Shih, "Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism in China," p. 22]. According to Hu, the reference is to Wen-yen, founder of the Yun-men School.

50. D. T. Suzuki, "The Philosophy of Zen," p. 12.

51. Ibid., p. 13.

 

 

p. 30

glory!" But why should not a Zen man be ready to say "Oh" or "Ah" to the bucket, too? The Taoist idea that nothing is better than hewing wood and drawing water sounds more like Zen. If we follow Suzuki in repudiating the bucket as utilitarian we cannot follow him when he says that "everyday thought" is the ultimate Tao, and quotes the master who said that what he meant by everyday thought was: "I sleep when I am tired, I eat when I am hungry." It would belong to the same thought to say, "I drink when I am thirsty" and "I fill the bucket when it is empty," and "I unwind the vine from the bucket" especially when this can be "done readily without hurting the plant". [52] If, for praj~naa-intuition, 'The One is the all without going out of itself, and each one of the infinitely varied and variable objects surrounding us embodies the One, while retaining each its individuality," [53] how can the bucket be left out? To represent the Zen's tathataa why choose a poem which repudiates a bucket as not belonging to the one reality?