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ABSTRACT
Alterity, the difference that being-other makes, is not an overt theme in the writing of Ueda Shizuteru, and yet by bringing alterity to the fore we are able to connect and examine several themes that Ueda does engage explicitly. It will turn out that several models of alterity are discernable in Ueda’s philosophy, and their common ground opens a mode of being-other that offers an alternative to dominant models of irreducible difference. Ueda’s philosophy of language suggests four alternative configurations that increasingly allow for the dual emergence of authentic otherness and selfhood. Those configurations are intimated in his interpretations of Nishida’s pure experience, of the interplay of language and silence, of a dialogue envisioned in a Zen oxherding picture, and of the poetic form known as linked verse, which best models how discrete beings help create a world in common.
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Notes
1 See Taylor (Citation1987, xxviii) on the author’s play on the word alterity.
2 This is Judith Butler’s summary of points that Irigaray makes; see Butler Citation1990, 9–10.
3 Minh-ha (Citation1989, 76) writes that “trying to find the other by defining otherness or by explaining the other through laws and generalizations is, as Zen says, like beating the moon with a pole or scratching an itching foot from the outside of a shoe.”
4 For the context of these expressions in Zen Buddhism, see Nagatomo Citation2020.
5 Much of the content of this article derives from papers presented at sessions of the American Academy of Religion and other meetings in the early 1990s, some of which included actual dialogues with Ueda as a participant. Other conversations with him in the process of translating his work likewise inspired my responses to his writing. Ueda often repeated or closely paraphrased parts of his work in various published articles, and my presentation here will draw arbitrarily from some rather than others. It goes without saying that the themes of Ueda’s vast corpus exceed the selection chosen here.
6 Forman Citation1990 and King Citation1988 are representative of the vast literature on the lively debate between proponents and critics of the notions of pure consciousness or pure experience. Note that the entire debate implicitly confines language and experience to human beings.
7 For example, in Ueda Citation1982c, 181–187; Ueda Citation1991, 101–118; and Ueda Citation1993, 69–71.
8 This tentative formulation is reminiscent of Fichte’s philosophy of an absolute self-consciousness or will that gives rise to both self and other. Nishida wrestled with Fichte’s philosophy in works that followed An Inquiry, such as Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness, and continued (with many discontinuities) the idea of a unitary source in developing his signature philosophy of place, the dialectical universal, and the world of historical reality. For example, his notion of “contradictory self-identity” suggests a unity that preserves difference rather than sublating it in, say, a synthesis of thesis and antithesis. For Nishida’s own outline, see the third preface in Nishida Citation1990, xxxi–xxxiii; for a précis of this development, see Maraldo Citation2019a.
9 In his presentation to the Seminar on Process Thought and Nishida Philosophy, American Academy of Religion, New Orleans, November 18, 1990.
10 The connection with nothingness is my own proposal in light of Ueda’s and Nishida’s developed philosophy. Unlike Nishida’s later philosophy, in An Inquiry the term nothingness rarely occurs, where it has a privative meaning and designates a stop to consciousness (Nishida Citation1990, 46) or a lack of qualities (46, 55, 165).
11 More exactly, the Preface states “it is not there is an individual person who then has experiences, but that there is experience and then there are individuals” (Nishida Citation1911, 4); see also Nishida Citation1990, xxx and 16, 19, 28, 50.
12 Three volumes titled Tetsugaku ronbun shū 哲学的論文集 [Philosophical Essays], composed from 1935 to 1943, develop the concepts of expressive activity and learning-by-way-of-acting (kōiteki chokkan 行為的直観, enactive intuition). William Haver translates three of these essays in Nishida Citation2012.
13 If Nishida’s term 表現, translated as expression, seems out of place, note that 表現型 translates the biological concept of the phenotype as the way a genetically inherited general trait gets expressed or embodied differently because of interactions with the environment. The related idea that language is a form of expression of reality is found in writings of several medieval Japanese Buddhist teachers such as Dōgen, Shinran, and Nichiren; see Maraldo Citation2019b, 58–59.
14 Ueda’s reflections here also omit reference to Nishida’s 1932 essay “I and Thou,” which directly treats the problem of alterity. For a detailed elucidation of Nishida’s essay, see Davis Citation2011.
15 Book description by Martin Citation1994.
16 In some essays, Ueda speaks of the Abgrund, the abyss, in others, of the Un-grund, underlying grounds or reasons (see, for example, Ueda Citation1989, 3; Ueda Citation2011, 40). In still other essays, he writes of the Kluft or chasm that opens after language is evoked and articulated in a proto-word like “oh” that expresses unity (see, for example, Ueda Citation2011; 32).
17 See Ueda Citation2011, 19; Ueda Citation1982a, 20. We find an interpretation of the dialogue form in general, for example, in “Taiwa to Zen mondō” (Dialogue and Zen mondō), Ueda Citation2001, 261–319. For more on Ueda’s philosophy of dialogue, see Bret W. Davis’s essay in this issue.
18 See for example Trainor (Citation2001, 79). Not surprisingly, there are now also Christian and comparative versions; see for example, Clasper and Janet (Citationn.d.), and all sorts of contemporary adaptations, such as the garish version by Savita (Citation1987). There has also been a mime performance of the pictures by Yoneyama Mamako, performed in Kyoto in 1983.
19 For accounts of the various versions, see Suzuki (Citation1960, 127–129) and Yanagida Seizan's bibliographical introduction in his co-authored book with Ueda (Ueda and Yanagida Citation1982, 243–286).
20 See Davis (Citation2022, 320–338) for an explication of the Pictures in general, and on Ueda’s interpretation, see Döll (Citation2020, 493–496).
21 Bae Yong-kyun’s 1989 film Why Has Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East? similarly reverses the roles: the oxherding boy is lost when the ox finds him and leads him out of the forest to his home temple. At the end, the boy, able now to take care of himself, is leading the ox.
22 App (Citationn.d.) cites the diagnosis of the Japanese Zen master Bankei: “Your self-partiality is at the root of all our illusions. There aren’t any illusions when you don’t have this preference for yourself.”
23 Although the phrase “neither the same nor different” conventionally describes the relationship between the one who acts and the one who is reborn to experience the consequences, the implication is that one’s past and future selves are no closer than contemporaneous other selves; see Collins Citation1982, 180, 190. I take this Theravadin position, which Collins places in opposition to the Personalists or Puggalavadins, to be definitive for Mahayana thought as well, and thus applicable to the Oxherding Pictures.
24 For an overview of various versions, see the “Oxherding Pictures Index” on the Terebess Asia Online web site https://terebess.hu/english/oxindex.html.
25 Ueda develops this interpretation further in Ueda and Yanagida Citation1982, 15–153.
26 McCarthy (Citation2010), in developing an ethics of nondual self in relationship, brings contemporary feminist thinkers such as Irigaray into dialogue with Japanese philosophers.
27 The title of the Japanese translation is resonant with Buddhist connotations: Tasha toshite no jiga 他者としての自我 (Ego-Self as the Other). Ricoeur takes pains to distinguish the sense of self defined in terms of an unchanging core of the person, what he calls idem identity or the sameness preserved when we make comparisons, and self, defined in terms of selfhood, or ipse identity.
28 We find a remarkable parallel to Ueda in Minh-ha (Citation1989, 76), who writes:
The other is never to be known unless one arrives at a suspension of language, where the reign of codes yields to a state of constant non-knowledge, always understanding that in Buddha’s country … one arrives without having taken a single step; unless one realizes what in Zen is called the Mind Seal or the continuous reality of awakening … a process of constantly unsettling the identity of meaning and speaking/writing subject, a process never allowing I to fare without non-I.
29 For another way to recognize alterity from a Buddhist perspective see the insightful book, Klein Citation1995 (especially the chapter “Gain or Drain? Compassion and the Self-Other Boundary”).
30 The only “other” that the verses explicitly present is the figure of the ox, which is a manifestation of the self. In the translation of Victor Sōgen Hori, the verse to the twelfth picture reads: “With bare chest and unshod feet, he walks into the market, daubed with dirt and smeared with ashes, laughter fills his face. Without using mystic arts or divine powers he makes withered trees at once burst into flower.” https://terebess.hu/english/oxherd31.html, accessed July 22, 2021. In that site, in stark contrast to Ueda, the contemporary Zen master Harada Shōdō reads the last picture as relating the Zen teaching “to know how to be truly alone, how to be one with one’s solitude in a full way.”
31 One text that uses Zen mondo to exemplify an event of the free exchange of self and other is Ueda Citation1989, 35–36. Davis (Citation2022, 121–122) explains how Ueda’s examples of Zen dialogues call on each interlocuter to be other-centered rather than self-centered. Deserving further attention is the power of live dialogue to challenge self and other that is evident in the Rinzai Zen practice of sanzen or interviews with a teacher. Maraldo (Citation2021) examines the limits of critical studies of encounter dialogues and historical construction in Zen in general.
32 Renku (連句) are also called renga (連歌): ku (句) suggests the line or verse; ga (歌) refers to the entire poem. The Buddhist background of renku poetry is explored by Ebersole (Citation1983).
33 Different from the renga chosen by Ueda, I choose an example translated by Barnhill (Citation2010, 2). See Hare (Citation1979) for the history of the linked verses at Imashinmei Shrine, which the poet Sōgi compiled from previous renga masters in 1476.
34 For an elaboration of Gadamer’s and Ueda’s approaches to language via a longer poem by Rilke, see Maraldo Citation2019c, 6–13.
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Notes on contributors
John C. Maraldo
John C. Maraldo is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of North Florida. After earning a Dr. phil at the University of Munich (Der hermeneutische Zirkel: Untersuchungen zu Schleiermacher, Dilthey und Heidegger, Karl Alber Verlag, 1974 & 1984), he spent several years in Japan teaching and studying Japanese philosophy and Zen Buddhism. He was a guest professor at the University of Kyoto and at the Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, and in 2008-09 held the Roche Chair in Interreligious Research at Nanzan University, Nagoya, Japan. In addition to numerous articles in comparative hermeneutics, phenomenology, and Japanese philosophy, his publications include a translation and study of Heidegger: The Piety of Thinking (together with James G. Hart, 1976); Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism (co-edited with James W. Heisig, 1995); Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (co-edited with J. W. Heisig and T. P. Kasulis, 2011); Japanese Philosophy in the Making 1: Crossing Paths with Nishida (2017) and 2: Borderline Interrogations (2019), and The Saga of Zen History and The Power of Legend (2021).