Journal of Buddhist Philosophy Vol. 4

JOURNAL OF BUDDHIST PHILOSOPHY VOLUME 4 Contents EDITORIAL rk The Contributions of Buddhist Philosophy 1 Yo G EREON K OPF ew P E E R -R E V I E W E D A R T I C L E S of N Effective Action (arthakriyā), Activity (kāritra), and Nonactivity (nirvyāpāra) 7 ity Z HIHUA Y AO ve rs The Structure of the Dharmadharmatāvibhāga-kārikā as Revealed by Vasubandhu’s Method Presented in the Vyākhyāyukti 45 ni D IANE D ENIS 93 e U The Original Mind Is the Literary Mind, the Original Body Carves Dragons St at R AFAL K. S TEPIEN © PH ILOSOP H ICAL REFLECT IONS Tathatā: The Creation of Doctrinal Foundation for Mahāyāna Buddhism 121 G UANG X ING Discovering an Academic: The Influence of Master Yinshun’s Chan Research on Japanese Scholarship 139 Y ANSHENG H E T RANSLATOR : S COTT H URLEY Continuous Decentering—Sextus and Dōgen 165 C HIARA R OBBIANO 34936_SP_JBP-4_FM_00i-iii.indd 1 2/4/22 7:41 AM BOOK REVIEWS Youru Wang: Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism 183 J INHUA J IA Robert E. Carter: The Japanese Arts and Self-Cultivation 186 © St at e U ni ve rs ity of N ew Yo rk J OHN W. M. K RUMMEL 34936_SP_JBP-4_FM_00i-iii.indd 2 2/4/22 7:41 AM EDITORIAL The Contributions of Buddhist Philosophy N ew Yo rk G EREON K OPF © St at e U ni ve rs ity of Welcome to the fourth issue of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. This will also be the last issue that I serve as editor-in-chief. Editing this journal over the past few years, I have come to realize not only that the journal could benefit from new creative minds but also that my own scholarship has slowly taken me away from Buddhist to global-critical philosophy. In the past years, SUNY Press has been a welcoming and generous home to the journal. It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the journal and the discipline in this capacity and to meet and work with amazing people, authors, reviewers, and advisors in the field of Buddhist philosophy and in academic publishing. And it has been wonderful to work on the first academic journal in the field of Buddhist philosophy in the Anglophone world. It has now been slightly less than a decade since I recognized the need for a journal dedicated solely to Buddhist philosophy (in addition to the amazing journals in Buddhist studies or Asian philosophy) and conceived of the JBP, penned the proposal for the journal, found support among my colleagues, approached publishers to gauge their interest for a journal in our discipline, gathered an editorial and an advisory board, set up a website, and began the dayto-day operation including the call for papers, management of the blind review process, communication with the publisher, the reviewers, and the authors, as well as the editorial work on these volumes. While I had the title “editor-in-chief,” none of these four wonderful issues would have Journal of Buddhist Philosophy, Vol. 4, 2022 SP_JBP-4_01_001-006.indd 1 1 2/4/22 7:32 AM © St at e U ni ve rs ity of N ew Yo rk been possible without my amazing colleagues. I would like to thank the late Nancy Ellegate at SUNY Press who believed in the importance of this project as well as her successors in the position of acquisition editor in our field at SUNY Press, Christopher Ahn and James Peltz. I would like to thank the members of the editorial and advisory boards who lent their support to this project and assisted as consultants and reviewers, my former assistant at Luther College, Hannah Lund, who designed the logo of the journal; Douglas Duckworth and Christian Coseru, who served as associate editors of the journal in the past; Tao Jiang, who served as review editor for two, and Pascale Hugon for all four issues; Marcus Bingenheimer, who maintained our website and solved its occasional glitches; and Agnieszka as well as Francesca Soans, who served as associate editors for the third and fourth issues. Without the help of these amazing people, none of the four issues would have seen the light of day. Starting with the subsequent, fifth issue, Jay Garfield and his editorial team will take over the journal. I am grateful for their willingness to continue this important work. We started the journal to give authors in Buddhist philosophy a venue to develop our field as an independent academic discipline and not just a subfield of Buddhist studies or comparative philosophy. The idea was to give equal space to essays and topics dealing with South and East Asian Buddhist philosophy to not only discuss Buddhist philosophy on its own terms (rather than on the terms of analytical and Continental philosophy) but also to develop an axiology of categories from scriptures and debates within the Buddhist traditions. In a second step, we hoped that these categories would then enter in a dialogue with philosophies from other traditions and contribute to philosophical discourses on current issues of global concern and with global appeal. To facilitate the space for scholars to develop Buddhist philosophy on its own terms and to identify the basic philosophical structures and foundational presuppositions—as well as a set of categories, questions, concerns, and genres—each issue provided papers that contributed to the discourse on a specific topic, peer-reviewed research papers, philosophical reflections on the status of the field, and book reviews. This issue also contains peer-reviewed essays on a variety of topics, philosophical reflections on humanistic Buddhism, the practice of decentering as philosophical strategy, as well as the topic of “suchness” (tathatā), not to mention reviews of recent publications in our field. Issue 3 centered on a special topic section, generously guest edited by Christian Coseru, which introduced innovative approaches to a Buddhist philosophy of mind. The peer-reviewed essays in this issue cover Buddhist philosophy in ancient India, Tibet, China, and Japan. 2 Journal of Buddhist Philosophy SP_JBP-4_01_001-006.indd 2 2/4/22 7:32 AM © St at e U ni ve rs ity of N ew Yo rk In some sense, we have achieved some of our goals in these first four issues. Buddhist philosophy has become more visible as an independent academic field and we have provided a venue for scholars to explore Buddhist philosophy on its own terms. But, of course, there is still a long way to go. I therefore hope that the journal continues to facilitate the exploration of Buddhist philosophy and to remind people in Buddhist studies and in philosophy in general of the importance of framing Buddhist philosophy on its own terms. In the second part of this editorial, I would like to reflect on the work that still needs to be done in Buddhist philosophy besides the obvious work of developing conceptual structures from the schools and texts belonging to the Buddhist traditions in Buddhist tradition and of exploring their relevance to the philosophical discourse in general. Ironically, Evan Thompson’s Why I Am Not a Buddhist, which I reviewed for the Pacific World, illustrates this point. In this book, Thompson implies a personal trajectory from Buddhism—and particularly Buddhist modernism—to cosmopolitanism. In the last chapter of this book, Thompson cites the cosmopolitanism of Anthony Appiah, a “partial cosmopolitanism” that does not dissolve individuality and particularity into the universalism of a globalism but, on the contrary, through conversation and respect, attempts to embrace both dimensions of human existence. The same sentiment applied to the micro level is echoed by Iris Marion Young when she observes that “community appears in the opposition of . . . separated self/shared self” (Young 1990, 228) and by Mutai Risaku who proposed that a cosmopolitan community has to consider “all of humanity” and guarantee the right to “self-determination” and thus protect peace and justice, (MRZ 9: 216). One could and should mention philosophers such as Sri Aurbindo Ghose (1872–1950), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Trinh Minh Ha as having a truly global theory of cosmopolitanism. I think the conception of cosmopolitanism is extremely relevant to the discussion of the role Buddhist philosophy has in today’s world for two reasons: (1) a cosmopolitan community has to recognize, accept, and include all individuals and particular communities as individual and particular communities in the sense of Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition.” (2) It is necessary that the various individuals, cultures, and traditions not only contribute responses to preformulated and rehearsed questions about, for example, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics but also actively contribute concerns, questions, and conceptual frameworks to the discourse. In other words, a global and cosmopolitan world requires a decolonization and a decentralization of our ways of thinking. By the same token, a cosmopolitan philosophy requires a decolonization of philosophy proper. The Contributions of Buddhist Philosophy 3 SP_JBP-4_01_001-006.indd 3 2/4/22 7:32 AM © St at e U ni ve rs ity of N ew Yo rk I see the goal and purpose of a journal of Buddhist philosophy as the following: 1) journals like the JBP introduce thinkers, scriptures, positions, concepts, ways of thinking to the Anglophone world and make them more accessible. 2) The submissions to this journal not only provide new and, to the eyes of some American and European readers, “exotic” answers to the question formulated by the Euro-American traditions but also envision an alternative way of doing philosophy. This also applies to our philosophical investigations into the nature of the mind, the theme of last year’s special topic section. I believe that it is only in equal conversations of mutual respect and what Jessica Benjamin calls “mutual recognition” (1988, 33) that a truly cosmopolitan and global philosophy can emerge. This is why we need the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. At the end of this introduction, I would like to get a bit personal. When I read scriptures like the Vimalakīrti-Sūtra and philosophers such as Chengguan 澄觀 (738–839), Dōgen 道元 (1200–1253), and even Kuoan Shiyuan’s 廓庵師遠 (twelfth century) Ten Ox-Pictures (Shiniutu 十牛圖), I not only encounter new responses to old questions but alternative ways of thinking. To be more concrete, my study of Buddhist philosophy inspires me to facilitate the development of multilingual and multifaceted cognitive attitudes and habits. Most of all, I am inspired to engage in new ways of doing philosophy, ways that encourage and accept a multiplicity of viewpoints like the numerous jewels on Indra’s net and what I call philosophy of expression. Such a philosophy focuses on an ethics of understanding rather than an ethics of judgment.1 The purpose of philosophy is to understand and not to destroy positions other than my own. This is, quite frankly, the main motivation I have for studying Buddhist philosophy in the first place. It is only in the encounter with numerous traditions and in the interactions of and fluency in multiple philosophical languages that our philosophy becomes truly cosmopolitan. Therefore, I hope that the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy will see many more editions in order to provide a space in the Anglophone academia where Buddhist philosophy is framed on its own terms. N OTES 1. See my “Expression in Japanese Philosophy” in Key Concepts in World Philosophies: Everything You Need to Know about Doing Cross-Cultural Philosophy, edited by Sarah Flavel and Chiara Robbiano (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) and my “Philosophy as Expression: Towards a New Model of Global Philosophy” in Vol. 11 of Nishida tetsugakkai nenpō [The Annual Review of the Nishida Philosophy Association], 2014), 181–155. 4 Journal of Buddhist Philosophy SP_JBP-4_01_001-006.indd 4 2/4/22 7:32 AM W ORKS C ITED A BBREVIATIONS MRC Mutai risaku chosakushū『務台理作著作集』[Collected Works of Mutai Risaku]. 9 vols. Tokyo: Kobushi Shobō, 2000–2002. O THER S OURCES © St at e U ni ve rs ity of N ew Yo rk Benjamin, Jessica. 1988 Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon. Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism, edited by Amy Gutman, 25–73. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The Contributions of Buddhist Philosophy 5 SP_JBP-4_01_001-006.indd 5 3/15/22 3:26 PM