Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism

Description

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. Challenging the dualistic paradigm of existing philosophical traditions, Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophy in which the traditional opposites are encountered through mutual penetration. Likewise, a Buddhist worldview is articulated in the theory of dependent co-arising, or the middle path, which comprehends the world and beings in the third space, where the subject and the object, or eternalism and annihilation, exist independent of one another. The thirteen essays in this volume explore this third space in their discussions of Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the intentional arc, the flesh of the world, and the chiasm of visibility in connection with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and the five aggregates, the Tiantai Buddhist concept of threefold truth, Zen Buddhist huatou meditation, the invocation of the Amida Buddha in True Pure Land Buddhism, and Nishida's concept of basho. In his philosophical project, Merleau-Ponty makes vigorous efforts to challenge the boundaries that divide philosophy and non-philosophy, the East and the West, experience and concepts, the subject and the object, and body and mind. Combining the Eastern philosophical tradition of Buddhism with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism offers an intercultural philosophy in which opposites intermingle in a chiasmic relationship, and which brings new understanding regarding the self and the self's relation with others in a globalized and multicultural world. Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism Contents Abbreviations Credits Introduction Part I - BODY: SELF IN THE FLESH OF THE WORLD 1 Merleau-Pontean “Flesh” and Its Buddhist Interpretation 2 Merleau-Ponty's Theory of the Body and the Doctrine of the Five Skandhas 3 How the Tree Sees Me 4 The Human Body as a Boundary Symbol Part II - SPACE: THINKING AND BEING IN THE CHIASM OF VISIBILITY 5 The Double 6 The Notion of the “Words that Speak the Truth” in Merleau-Ponty and Shinran 7 Self in Space 8 Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne, and the Basho of the Visible 9 “Place of Nothingness” and the Dimension of Visibility Part III - THE WORLD: ETHICS OF EMPTINESS, ETHICS OF THE FLESH 10 The Flesh of the World Is Emptiness and Emptiness Is the Flesh of the World, and Their Ethical Implications 11 Merleau-Ponty and N āg ārjuna 12 Ki-Energy 13 Merleau-Ponty and Asian Philosophy Notes Glossary of East Asian Characters Bibliography Index About the Contributors