The idea of nothingness has been viewed as neither a vital nor a positive element in Western philosophy or theology. With the exception of a handful of mystics, nothingness has been taken to refer to the negation of being, or to some theoretical void. By contrast, the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō gave nothingness a central role in philosophy. The strategy of this essay is to use the German mystic Meister Eckhart as a more familiar thinker who did take nothingness seriously, (...) and then to look closely at Nishida’s philosophy, and at the work of his contemporary Ueda Shizuteru, in exploring the central importance of nothingness in Zen Buddhist thought. Eckhart writes of the nothingness of the godhead, whereas Nishida and Ueda speak of nothingness “pure and simple.” Eckhart remains within the being of the godhead and theology. Nishida moves directly to nothingness. Some have claimed that Nishida is not a mystic, and Nishida himself concurred, yet it is Ueda who explains why Nishida can rightly be read as a mystic and as not a mystic. He argues that Zen includes mysticism, but then goes beyond it to a “non-mysticism.” Mystic or non-mystic, the guidance that Nishida and Ueda offer leads to a compelling outlook on life. (shrink)

Does the Buddhist doctrine of no-self imply, simply put, no-other? Does this doctrine necessarily come into conflict with an ethics premised on the alterity of the other? This article explores these questions by situating Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in the context of contemporary Japanese philosophy. The work of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō provides a starting point from which to consider the ethics of the self-other relation in light of the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The philosophy of thirteenth-century Zen Master Dōgen (...) casts doubt on Watsuji’s commitment to reciprocal self-other relationality, showing that the idea of self-emptiness disrupts any conventional understanding of reciprocity and promotes instead other-oriented compassion. Despite interesting similarities between the ethics of alterity and Buddhist compassion, a Buddhist-influenced understanding of alterity differs from Levinas on important points, by making possible the claim that all others—human, animal, plant, and mineral—are ethical others. (shrink)

This essay offers two novel thinking-modes, “body thinking” and “story thinking,” both intrinsically interrelated, as alternative reasoning to usual analytical logic, and claims that they facilitate understanding “religion” as our ultimate living in the Beyond. Thus body thinking, story thinking, and religion naturally gather into a threefold thinking synonymy. This essay adumbrates in story-thinking way this synonymy in four theme-stages, one, appreciating body thinking primal at our root, to, two, go through story-thinking that expresses body thinking to catalyze religion, to, (...) three, reach religious living in holistic nisus to the Beyond. But then, four, religion is surprisingly harder than expected; we require a strange adult detour to come back home to body thinking in story thinking. These four themes are body-thought through many stories, some of which are argumentative. Thus this essay itself body thinks in story thinking. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJason Wirth's Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis challenges complacency in two significant ways. First, it performs a commitment to philosophy as creative and capacious practice in contrast to orthodoxies or technical provincialisms. Second, it disrupts unreflective usages of “wealth” and “development” as inherently economic in developing a compelling argument about the way that spiritual poverty informs contemporary ecological pathology. In this review, I present six key claims in Wirth's (...) text and offer unfolding thoughts in response. (shrink)

In this paper I lay out the ground for a creative dialogue between Buddhist thought and contemporary nursing. I start from the observation that in tracing an arc from the existential human experience of suffering to finding compassionate responses to suffering in everyday practice Buddhist thought already appears to present significant affinities with nursing as a practice discipline. I discuss some of the complexities of entering into a cross‐cultural dialogue, which is already well under way in the working out of (...) Western forms of Buddhism, and which is beginning to be reflected in nursing literature. I introduce philosophical hermeneutics as a useful framework for elaborating an open and constructive exchange. I then discuss key Mahayana Buddhist concepts of emptiness and two truths that lead to a dynamic and open way of understanding reality and responding in the world. I turn to examples of original texts to give a flavour of the varied and distinctive forms of literature in the Buddhist tradition. This is intended partly to keep the reader alert to cultural difference (from a Western standpoint, that is) while exploring the creative potential of Buddhist thought. Hermeneutics again provides a framework for interpretation. This paper establishes a philosophical ground for a critical and creative dialogue between Buddhist thought and nursing. (shrink)

In order to overcome the unhealthy perspective of body-mind dualism and become capable of holding the “higher” and healthier perspective of body and mind as will to power, Nietzsche stresses that one must engage in a process of cultivation of the body. Such a practice of self-cultivation involves leaving behind incorporated illusory and life-denying perspectives and incorporating more “truthful” and affirmative perspectives on life. In this article, Nietzsche’s views on the body and its cultivation will be further explored and compared (...) with Japanese Buddhist thought on body, mind, and cultivation. In Japanese thought, the notion of shinjin-ichinyō (oneness of body and mind) was developed in order to overcome a dualistic approach to body and mind. The unity of body and mind plays an essential part in the philosophies of both Kūkai and Dōgen. Whereas in early Indian Buddhism, self-cultivation took place primarily through the mind (citta), in Japanese Buddhist practice the body, not the mind, is the primary locus as exemplified in Dōgen’s somatic practice of zazen. Although from the everyday perspective, body and mind are experienced as two separate things, a higher perspective is possible in which body-mind is experienced as a continually changing configuration of dharmas that doesn’t contain any “I.” Such a higher perspective is called “samadhic awareness” by Dōgen, in which “body and mind are cast off” (shinjin totsuraku). For both Nietzsche and Dōgen, their “philosophy am Leitfaden des Leibes” does not aim at discovering “truths” by means of introspection and thinking, but at increasing the body’s capacity for the incorporation of new and liberating perspectives. (shrink)