Discourse
and Ideology in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. Edited
by Richard K. Payne and Taigen Dan Leighton. London and New York: Routledge,
2006.
Did
Dôgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It. By Steven Heine. Oxford University Press, 2006. .
These
two books show that the study of medieval Japanese Buddhism, at least among US-based
scholars, is a field where steady and valuable progress continues to be made.
The progress lies not only in the study of little-known texts, such as the
obscure corners of Dôgen’s oeuvre explored by Steven Heine, or the Buddhist-Shinto
Reikiki and the Tendai Kankô ruijû, dealt with by Fabio
Rambelli and Jacqueline Stone respectively, in the Payne and Leighton volume.
Nor is it due only to the examination of disciplines and rituals, pursued in
acute analyses by James L. Ford and Mark Unno. Rather, as in a predecessor
volume, Re-Visioning “Kamakura” Buddhism,
edited by Payne (University of Hawaii Press, 1998), what is most innovative
is the setting of Buddhist matters in a broad social and literary context,
along with the construction of intelligent and imaginative problematizations
that bring the material into a revealing perspective. The authors are well
versed in the topics of ‘discourse’ and ‘ideology,’ as discussed by postmodern
theorists such as Foucault and Zizek, but they draw on the theoretical
reservoir discreetly and adroitly, and always in a way that sheds light on the
medieval Japanese material.
The
less convincing essays are those that go straight for the theoretical jugular.
Dale Wright surely builds too much on the Nietzschean image of truth as a
‘mobile army of metaphors’ when he says: ‘Since language runs through all
cultural domains, none more so than religious, linguistic and discursive change
is the most telling condition for larger cultural transformation. Metaphor, I
claim, is the primary instrument for this kind of social transformation’ (p.
26). Richard Payne’s quest for the theoretical foundations of medieval Japanese
Buddhist handling of language in ancient India is foredoomed by the complexity
of Indian tradition and of the relation of Indian to Japanese thought, as Payne
himself seems to sense. It is best to confine oneself to clear lines of
influence, as in Kûkai’s reception of Indian tantric texts
or the influence of Madhyamaka, already heavily filtered by the Chinese
tradition. Kûkai’s teaching that Buddha Mahâvairocana actively preaches the
dharma, for instance, is grounded in specific Indian sources, but to say that
it is ‘based on a history of religious and philosophic ideas about the relation
between language and awakening that reaches back to India’ (p. 80) is to open
the door to sweeping simplification. Vague debates about the oscillation between
the views that language can express the highest religious truth and that it
cannot, counterposed to an alleged stereotype of Buddhism as a religion of
utter ineffability and silence, do not advance real insight. ‘The range of
conceptions regarding the efficacy of extraordinary language that were the
intellectual milieu from which the Shingon tradition formulated its praxis’ (p.
82) are not likely to be illuminated by reaching after pan-Indian axioms, such
as the somewhat tentative and
speculative thesis of Johannes Bronkhorst that in India ‘words and the things
they denote constitute a single unity’ (p. 83). When the West is brought in as
well, the discussion collapses under its own weight: ‘The foundational
character of this view for the formation of Indic thought, including Buddhism –
together with the neo-Platonic and Romantic presumptions regarding the barrier
language and conceptual thought establish to direct perception of reality
implicit within Western religious thought – suggests that a careful re-evaluation
of our understanding of Buddhist views of language is called for’ (pp. 83-4).
Surely all Buddhist scholars know that Buddhism has a plurality of complex
views of language, which we struggle to understand.
Ryûichi
Abé does a stylish exegesis of Myoe’s cutting off of his ear as a semantically
saturated gesture, uniting the Jâtaka ideal of self-offering; the ascetic ideal
of utter dedication; identification with outcast criminals who were marked in
the same way; and becoming a salvific figure as one ‘simultaneously tainted and
immune from pollutions’ (p. 156). Here is a ‘discourse’ written on the body,
which both engages subversively with ‘ideology’ and is enabled by it.
The
second half of the book focuses on the power of words in the hermeneutics of
Tendai, Dôgen, Nichiren and Shinran. Jacqueline Stone reveals a deep-rooted
belief in magical properties of words, but also an effort to introduce order
and rationality into the magical system. Thus Nichiren gives to the idea of sômoku jôbutsu (the buddhahood of
grasses and trees) the magical sense of empowering icons, ‘opening their eyes’
(kaigen). Only the words of the Lotus Sûtra can achieve this; sûtras of
lower status in the kyôhan system of
doctrinal classification have less potency. Nichiren thinks that in the past
there were wooden images that walked and talked, but this efficacy has declined
since the introduction of Shingon mantras to open their eyes; indeed such
evocations can make the images demonic! Not content to assert the supreme
effect of the Lotus Sûtra, he seeks
to give a rationale for it, arguing from ‘the nonduality of physical and mental
dharmas’ (p. 181), and ‘the interchangeability of the Buddha and the Lotus Sûtra text’ (p. 182), and the idea
that the Lotus Sûtra is ‘the source
of Buddhas’ (p. 183). This logic has tradition behind it as well, for Stone
traces it to the little-known Tendai texts she examines, noting disagreements
between the various texts as to the ontological status of the words of the
sûtra. As so often in theological language, cumulative ingenuities seem to
float on a foundation of thin air.
Taigen Dan Leighton
notes that ‘the Lotus Sûtra has a
strong tendency to be self-referential – so much so that it may be considered a
prime example of an empty signifier,’ hence ‘an open text, one that can be
inclusive and pluralistic’ (p. 15). Dôgen imitated this method, affirming that
he was now preaching the eternal dharma, without specifying its content. This
performance ties up with a nondual outlook: just as the vehicle of discourse is
itself its tenor, so the phenomenal world is itself the ultimate.
Japanese
Buddhism in the Kamakura period saw a triumph of a hermeneutics of ‘personal
insight’ (kanjin) over ‘fidelity to
texts’ (kyôsô). The kanjin approach involved a certain
amount of hermeneutical violence, in Dôgen’s many techniques for inventing new
reading of Chinese kôans, canvassed here by Steven Heine. These revisionist
interventions are textual shocks that parallel the sudden gestures of slapping
or shouting that punctuate kôans. The liberties Dôgen takes with the received
stories is connected again with nonduality and ‘the equalization of all views
based on emptiness’ (p. 229). Some of Heine’s commentary is opaque (p. 224 for
example) and I did not grasp the sense of ‘he then rationalizes demythology’
(p. 232). Surprisingly, Shinran’s revisioning of Pure Land textual tradition to
make it signify that ‘the subject of the directing of virtue (Jpn. ekô) does not originate in the nenbutsu practitioner but is directed from
Amida Buddha’ (Eisho Nasu, p. 249) has recourse to equally violent readings,
applied to Confucius as well. It seems that kanjin
was as prevalent in medieval Japan as the comparably reckless methods of
allegorical exegesis were in medieval Europe.
Heine’s
book on Dôgen has an odd title – he does not seriously call in question Dôgen’s
stay in China, though he delights in pointing out how little we really know
about it. His summary of Dôgen’s encounters and activities during the packed four
and a half years he spent in China (pp. 107-13) vividly brings home the
momentousness of this exposure to the older culture. Heine makes much of a
‘fundamental historical gap between the early trip to China and the evocation
of its meaning in later stages’ (p. 8), but from a master of kanjin such varied reinterpretation of
his own past is exactly what one would expect. I do not see the necessity of
making so much of the fact that little mention is made of Ju-ching in the ten
years after the China trip. The ‘delayed reaction and retrospective quality’
(p. 35) shown in later references, which sometimes vary from the recorded
sayings of his Chinese master, may suggest that Ju-ching became a convenient
emblem of Chinese Chan wisdom. People often use their teachers in this way. Heine
becomes quite self-conscious as he defends his title by odd postmodern
strategies: ‘The title of this book mocks those who would take historical
deconstruction to its extreme by denying just about any religious truth claim’
(p. 43).
In
reality, it is Heine’s subtitle that indicates why his book is an indispensable vademecum to the work of the Sôtô Zen
master. For the first time in English we have here a comprehensive account of
what Dôgen wrote, and a detailed chronology of his life and writings, helpfully
divided into seven periods, from Early Early 1223-1227 to Late Late 1248-1253.
Heine shows great sensitivity to the variety of genres in which Dôgen wrote and
to their concrete communal contexts. He uses well the most recent Japanese
scholarship and engages in challenging argument both with those who see Dôgen
as falling in his later years into a narrow sectarianism – the Decline Theory
upheld by Bielefeldt and Dumoulin – and with those, such as the Critical
Buddhists, who see him as returning to a purer Buddhism. Heine’s attention to
chronology reveals that both theories are fatally simplistic. ‘The Decline
Theory often cannot make up its mind about when the late period began, and it
refers to fascicles written prior to Echizen as either “early” or “late”
depending on whether or not they reflect a partisan outlook that substantiates
the theory of a reversal in Dôgen’s outlook’ (p. 151).
The
brilliant 75-fascicle Shôbôgenzô has
exerted great fascination and has won Dôgen the reputation of a deep philosopher.
Heine shows that it essentially belongs to one phase in the master’s career,
centered on the transitional period 1234-1244. I balk, however, at his
description of the later 12-fascicle Shôbôgenzô
as ‘an independent version of Dôgen’s magnum opus’ (p. 57). This dreary set
of disciplinary tracts would have no claim to our attention were it not
appended to the larger work. Apparently Dôgen thought of revising the
75-fascicle work to bring it into line with the orthodoxy of the 12-fascicle
one (p. 58). We may be grateful that he didn’t.
A short review cannot do
justice to Heine’s intricate argument, which will keep the specialists busy for
years to come. Suffice it to say that he brings us face to face with the
flesh-and-blood Dôgen and his multifarious
creative activities, and thus provides an anchorage and a perspective for which
puzzled readers of the Shôbôgenzô
will be profoundly grateful.
Monumenta Nipponica 62 (2007):389-92
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