LIN CHEN-KUO

Metaphysics, Suffering, and Liberation

The Debate between Two Buddhisms

L IN Chen-kuo

HE CORE OF Buddhist practice consists in meditating on the cause of suffering in order to overcome it. The need for such practice is only intensied as Buddhism attempts to face modernity. For suffering and modernity, as apparently disconnected as they may seem at rst sight, present an ineluctable challenge to philosophical meditation. Is modernity merely a new form of human suffering? Or is there a sense in which modernity really constitutes the unnished project of the Enlightenment? These are questions the Buddhist thinkers share with Western intellectual history today. In this essay I propose, in the rst place, to locate the question of suffering in the context of modern discourse and examine postmodern positions associated with gures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida. In a word, these postmodernists attribute the suffering and illusion of modernity to the fact that the metaphysics of identity or subjectivity in which modernity is embedded is intrinsically oppressive. Having considered this view, I will then attempt to lay out the reasons why I consider the legacy of the Enlightenment as worth preserving today. In the second place, I wish to consider how modern Buddhist thinkers and scholars of Buddhist philosophy respond to the call of modernity, focussing on the confrontation between Critical Buddhism and Topical Buddhism. The Critical Buddhists, in particular O-yang Ching-wu (18711943) and L Cheng (18961989) of the Chinese Institute of Buddhist Studies, and Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shir of Komazawa University in Japan, argue that the Sinicized forms of Buddhism are corrupt and incompatible with the project of modernity. In contrast, Topical Buddhist thinkers such as Nishitani Keiji of the Kyoto

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school and Malcolm David Eckel contend that the Critical Buddhists fail to see the limits of logocentrism or to give difference its due. While both sides agree in criticizing the metaphysics of identity for its lack of social conscience, the Topical Buddhists insist that religious or sociopolitical liberation must be achieved through the critique of self-centered rationality. In a third and concluding section I will argue that the unnished project of modernity can be carried on through negative dialectics in the Buddhist sense. In line with the Mahayana clich that there is no nirvana without samsara, we need to see that modernity cannot be achieved without suffering. If samsara and suffering are ontologically part of modernity, as Adorno points out in his Dialectics of Enlightenment, then metaphysics will not be eliminated or overcome completely. The problem is rather how to engage in more joyful and deconstructive forms of metaphysics.

THE KARMA OF MODERNITY

Even though we now recognize Hegels announcement of the coming of world history as a Eurocentric myth, the fact is, the encounter between European modernity and other traditions continues to take place on all sides. Historically, the Buddhist encounter with modernity began with European colonial expansion to Asia prior to the eighteenth century. The Western discovery of Buddhism not only brought about the so-called Oriental Renaissance in the West, but also changed the self-understanding of Buddhist traditions.1 Under the shadow of colonialism, Buddhists were led to view themselves through the lens of another culture, or even to rewrite their own traditions with alien categories, thus effecting a kind of reverse Orientalism from within. The irony and ambivalence of the situation is only further complicated when Buddhists now turn around and try to confront the complexity of modernity in its present-day forms. From the very outset, we seem to be trapped in a hermeneutic circle of (mis)understanding. Accordingly, it seems apropos to begin with a brief digression on recent philosophical reections on modernity since the 1980s. The debate between Habermas and the young conservatives like Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty offers one way into the question. We could also look back to Heidegger and his reading of Nietzsche in the early 1940s or, as both
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Habermas and David Kolb suggest, back to Hegel.2 For the sake of brevity, I will restrict my remarks here to Habermas in the attempt to track the shifting horizon of modernity in terms of attitudes toward metaphysics. For it is here, in the critiques of metaphysics, that the pathology of modernity witnessed in all radical critics is most visible.3 Some may question whether the assumption of such a relationship between modernity and metaphysics is legitimate. To the social scientist, Western modernity is manifest in the structures of industrial society, in capitalism, technology, and liberal democracy.4 Weber, as is known, attributed the dynamism behind these structures to rationalization, but just how this works out in the concrete for modern civilizations is far from self-evident. Philosophically and historically, we need to look to a deeper understanding of beingthat is, of the world and human beingsin the thought of gures like Descartes and Kant. In order for society to be rationalized in the form of modernity, there must be some sort of underlying metaphysical mind-set at work. In the modern age, the processes of rationalization are carried on within an epistemological framework of the subject-object duality. This framework measures and certies our knowledge of the external world. The foundation of epistemic certainty is therefore located on the side of the subject: for Descartes, in the ego of the cogito; for Kant, in the autonomous self as law-giver and world-viewer. The subject, in particular the thinking subject, becomes the center of being, while the object is reduced to something external to and represented by the subject. This mind-set functions not only in the epistemic realm, but extends to the ethico-political realm as well, where things and persons are objectied and represented by the thinking subject. They become items of reason, objects for rationalizaton. This mode of thought lies behind the great achievements of the Enlightenment. As Heidegger has observed:
Western history has now begun to enter into the completion of that period we call modern, and which is dened by the fact that man becomes the measure and the center of beings. Man is what lies at the bottom of all beings; that is, in modern terms, at the bottom of all objectication and representability.5

Modernity is therefore the triumph of a human-centered or subjectcentered world view in which everything is reduced to the status of representation.6
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Heideggers critique of modernity and Western metaphysics calls to mind Hegels articulation of the oppressive character of a reason universally grounded in the structure of self-relationship, that is, in the relationship of a subject that makes itself an object.7 In this regard, Hegel may be regarded as the rst thinker to discern this negative dialectic in the Enlightenment. The solution he proposed to this impasse of modernity was to restore the primordial innocence and harmony of nature and history by revitalizing the unitary, reconciling power of reason. In the face of the one-dimensional mind-set of modernity, Hegel never lost his optimistic condence in the mediating, unifying power of reason in history. But the dialectical hopes for the realization of universal history we nd running through the pages of the Phenomenology of Mind were not matched by events in the real world. Quite the opposite. In the twentieth century we nd thinkers like Heidegger and Adorno typifying the strong sense of the suffering and helplessness of reason in the tide of events. In a ourish of despair over the possibility of a logocentric philosophy, Heidegger asserted that only a god can save us.8 And for Adorno, the practice of metaphysics becomes a mockery in an age stained by the memory of Auschwitz.9 Instead of philosophizing, Heidegger says, what human beings need to do is open themselves to the presence (or the absence) of a god who promises them liberation from their fallibility in the midst of beings. The fallibility of modern persons is evidenced in the age of technology as enframing (Gestell). The essence of man is framed, claimed and challenged by a power which manifests itself in the essence of technology, a power which man himself does not control.10 For Heidegger this is the discloser of modernity itself.11 The Being of individuals is enframed by their very attempt to frame the world in which they live, and this oblivion of Being is their saddest fate. For Adorno, the melancholy and suffering of modernity is not merely a matter of ontological pathology. It is a mourning reduced to silence in the ashes of the spirit. All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage.12 Even after half a century, the agony and despair are still discernible. Suffering can never be kept in silence: The need to let suffering speak is the premise of all truth.13 The objectivity of suffering, in contrast, belongs to the systematic coercion of a metaphysics of identity for which nonidentity is experienced as negativity. In Idealist thinking, the power of suffering has been relegated to the transcendental subject, with the result that nonidentity is, in the nal stage of the dialec301

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tic, totally assimilated and wiped away. Adorno saw it as his vocation to rescue the element of nonidentity from the control of this Idealist way of thinking.14 In the face of negative metaphysicians like Heidegger, Adorno, and Derrida, Habermas defends the need for a unity of reason to remain perceptible in the plurality of its voices in our times.15 Granted reason can no longer be perceived in terms of transcendental subjectivity, and granted, too, the coercive nature of reason that Adorno and Heidegger warn of, Habermas yet believes that reason-in-communication is still required for our ongoing project of modernity. He insists that we should recognize the signicance of the Enlightenment project out of which objective science, universal morality and law, and the liberation of art from the esoteric have emerged. It has enabled modern human beings like us to live a rational everyday life.16 Habermas warns that the negative metaphysicians are in fact secret accomplices of the metaphysical Idealism they seek to overcome:
Negation, which opposed the many to the one as Parmenides opposed nonbeing to being, is also negation in the sense of a defense against deep-seated fears of death and frailty, of isolation and separation, of opposition and contradiction, of surprise and novelty. This same defensiveness still betrays itself in the idealist devaluation of the many to mere appearances.17

Habermas rejects negative metaphysicians and metaphysical Idealism as extremes. In the latter, empirical individuals are conceived of merely as duplications of an Idea; in the former, reason is degraded for its oppression and refuge is found in a totaliter aliter.18

THE UNFINISHED PROJECT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Whether they take a positive or a negative attitude toward modernity, Western thinkers are clearly aware of the intrinsic relationship, theoretical and practical, between the modern world and metaphysics. Heidegger makes the eschatological claim that only through the destruction of metaphysics is Being capable of disclosure, while Adorno diagnoses metaphysics of identity as the cause of historical catastrophe. For his part, Habermas, too, recognizes the necessary transition towards postmetaphysical thinking, although as a defender of modernity he must
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eventually part camp with such irrational philosophers. As diametrically opposed as the positions are, both sides agree that difference and plurality must be liberated from the tyranny of sameness. When we look to the East, we nd in the tradition of Buddhist thought a similar philosophical reection and debate over the challenge of modernity. For modern Buddhist thinkers, the question is fraught with ambivalence. On the one hand, they are fascinated by the legacy of the Enlightenment to be found in science, technology, democracy, and human rights. On the other hand, some of them are skeptical of the wholesale acceptance of modernization and its nihilistic consequences. For both sides, there arises the following questions: Is authentic Buddhism compatible with the project of modernity? Or should it take a basically critical stance? There seems to be no way out of the ambivalence, at least not until the idea of authenticity has been claried. This is nowhere more apparent than in the faceoff between Critical Buddhism and Topical Buddhism. The very terms Critical Buddhism and Topical Buddhism are neologisms borrowed from Hakamaya Noriaki to designate two Buddhist positions. According to Hakamaya, Critical Buddhism sees methodical, rational critique as belonging to the very foundations of Buddhism itself, while Topical Buddhism emphasizes the priority of rhetoric over logical thinking, of ontology over epistemology. In the West, critical philosophy is represented by the tradition that begins with Descartes, while topical philosophy is best typied by Vicos attempts to reform Cartesianism. In the Buddhist tradition, the former refers to Buddhas teaching critically understood, while the latter refers particularly (though not exclusively) to Sino-Japanese forms of Buddhism like tathgata-garbha thought, the doctrine of original enlightenment, and the philosophy of the Kyoto school.19 Hakamaya and others attack Topical Buddhism on the grounds that it is doctrinally and practically corruptin other words, that it is a false Buddhism. I adopt his labels without intending to imply any sectarian preference. Thus, unlike Hakamaya, I use the term Topical Buddhism as a neutral, descriptive term only. It would be simplistic to dismiss Critical Buddhism as no more than a modern brand of Buddhist fundamentalism or essentialism whose only aim is to return to a certain purer form of Buddhism.20 Indeed, rather than a return to the origins, the key concern for Critical Buddhists is
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bringing Buddhism back to the modern world as the only place where the problems of theory and sociopolitical praxis can be properly tested. In their view, insensitivity to the theoretical roots of monistic metaphysics on the part of Sino-Japanese Buddhism lies at the root of an unconsciousness of, or even complicity with, sociopolitical injustices like military imperialism, ethnic discrimination against aboriginal Japanese or foreigners, Japanese ethnocentrism, and so on. In other words, they contend that monistic metaphysics or dhtu-vda (a neo-Sanskritism coined by Matsumoto) are to be blamed for individual and social sufferings of this sort. The monistic metaphysics in Sino-Japanese Buddhism, exemplied in the doctrine of original enlightenment, appears for the rst time in The Awakening of Mahayana Faith. According to Hakamaya this doctrine has three characteristics:
1. All existents are grounded in a singular, changeless toposthat is, in an original enlightenmentas an ultimate reality or substance. The structure of this metaphysics is the same as the Brahmanist doctrine of atman or Taoist naturalism. In contrast to topical metaphysics, true Buddhism teaches the doctrine of dependent arising, that all beings are in the groundless ux of temporal becoming. 2. Since the doctrine of original enlightenment presupposes transcendental subjectivity, it contradicts the Buddhist notion of no-self and subjects people to egocentric authoritarianism. 3. As a kind of experientialism, the thought of original enlightenment also leads Buddhists to indulge in belief in an ineffable Suchness or Nature, which contradicts the spirit of true Buddhism without recognizing the priority of intellect, logic, and language.21

This same critique of metaphysics is visible in Matsumotos criticism of dhtu-vda, in which the doctrine of tathgata-garbha (the matrix of Buddhahood) is singled out as a main target. As a metaphysics of origin or locus (dhtu), dhtu-vda presupposes a One, a Real, or a Self (atman) underlying all existents (dharmas) as their common ground. In contrast to the permanence and substantiality of the One, all existents are reduced to illusory appearances. The presupposition of sameness in this metaphysics in turn conceals social discriminations and injustice in the sense that all differences are reduced to representations of an unchanging sameness.22 Compared to Heideggers critique of logocentrism or self-centered rationality, the Critical Buddhists are more concerned with the authori304

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tarian character of Idealist ontology. The philosophical and practical consequences of their position are clear in their attempts to reclaim the validity of reason, which they consider to have been lost in Sinicized forms of Buddhism. They insist that both the Cartesian tradition and true Buddhism lead to pluralism and individualism through the emancipatory power of reason. In the encounter with modernity, they take a rm stance against postmodernism or deconstruction, which they see as a direct offspring of topical thinking.23 Like Habermas, the Critical Buddhists choose to carry out the project of modernity because they see that both the West and Buddhism share the same idea of enlightenment, namely as a quest for liberation from ignorance and domination. In this sense, their critique of hongaku and tathgata-garbha metaphysics must not be dismissed too quickly as no more than sectarian ravings or a longing for fundamentalist certainties.

CRITICAL BUDDHISM IN MODERN CHINA

While the voices of Critical Buddhism from Japan have provoked heated controversy on both sides of the Pacic, attention has yet to be given to another movement of Critical Buddhism in modern China. In broader perspective, Critical Buddhism is merely one local case in East Asia of a variety of responses within Buddhism to the challenge of modernity. In this regard, we cannot pass over developments in areas like China and Taiwan without risking the confusion of a few trees for the whole forest. Critical Buddhism in modern China is best represented by O-yang Ching-wu, the founder of the Chinese Institute of Buddhist Studies, and his successor, L Cheng. From the 1920s to the 1940s the Institute had devoted itself to the return to Indian Buddhism through promoting the study of Abhidharma, Prajpramit thought, Madhyamika, Yogacara, Vinaya, and Buddhist logic, in the hopes of reforming false Buddhism and reinforcing true Buddhism. This new Buddhist movement was based on three tenets:
1. Mind is quiescent by nature, but it is deled by klea. 2. The proper model for Buddhist practice is cognitive conversion (parvtti-sraya) from the deled mind to the quiescent mind. 3. The achievement of conversion results in a quiescent life-world made up of the interpenetration of the minds of sentient beings and the Buddhas, all of whom share the quiescent, perfected mind. 305

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Obviously, this model is based on the Yogacara system.24 Taking these tenets as normative, O-yang and L denounced the ideas of original enlightenment and Origin Returning (fan-pen huanyan B), the ideological core of Chinese Buddhism (Tien-tai, Hua-yen, Chan, and Pure Land).25 They argue that these notions, as inventions of the Chinese apocryphaThe Awakening of Mahayana Faith, the Leng-yen ching, and Yan-cheh ching in particularare to be rejected as totally heterodox. L Cheng stresses the conceptual incompatibility between original enlightenment and the quiescence of mind. In addition to the historical unreliability of the foundational texts, the doctrine that mind is already enlightened by nature is not coincident with the doctrine that mind ought to be quiescent. In Ls view, the doctrine of original enlightenment presupposes an Idealist ontology, while the notion of quiescent mind can be understood merely in terms of epistemological conversion. L goes further to point out that the doctrine of original enlightenment is necessarily coincident to conservative ideology because it implies no intention to change the real world. If one accepts this doctrine, then every effort should be expended to rediscover original enlightenment as a dynamic subjectivity, since it is only in this sense that ones religious journey can be said to have been completed. Focus on the quiescent mind, in contrast, sees cognitive conversion and progress (transformation, parvttisraya) as a function of the mirror-like nature of mind in the epistemological sense (the light of reason). L Cheng takes this latter, epistemological stance in refuting the ontological position of original enlightenment. It is also worth noting here that L Cheng stresses the importance of cognitive conversion as the foundation of sociopolitical reform and progress. In an article written in 1954, most likely under the inuence of Marxist theories of the sociology of knowledge, L reinterpreted parvttisraya as the radical change of cognition that leads to a better knowledge of social reality, which in turn prompts social action in the direction of true social reform.26 Not surprisingly, L saw the ontology of original enlightenment and its practice of Origin Returning as inclined to support the status quo and to reject calls for social change.27 Ls approach implies further that the ideological distinction between Conservative Buddhism and Progressive Buddhism is drawn in terms of a contrast between ontology and epistemology. In this regard, it must be
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said that L favors logos over mythos, logic over rhetoric. He concludes that, under the shadow of the doctrine of original enlightenment, all the Sinicized forms of Buddhismincluding Tien-tai, Hua-yen, and Chanhave been corrupted into forms of anti-intellectualism, pantheism, mysticism, and conservatism.28 As if foreseeing the coming controversy between modernity and postmodernity, L never questioned the adequacy of rationality.

THE PLACE WHERE AN ABSENCE IS PRESENT

According to the Topical Buddhists, the story needs to be rewritten completely. Modernity cannot simply be imported from the West to the East as is. Its underlying reason-centered or subject-centered worldview needs to be brought into question. In contrast to the Critical Buddhists uncritical acceptance of reason, Topical Buddhists are more skeptical of rationality. They view Western modernity as still ensnared in the metaphysics of identity. On this point they would consider themselves more critical and self-reective on the problem of modernity than the Critical Buddhists. In his critique of modernity, Nishitani Keiji, one of the most prominent Topical Buddhist philosophers, traces the roots of modernity to Cartesianism. According to Nishitanis analysis, Descartes conceived body and mind as two separate substances, belonging to two different worlds. The whole natural world, including the human body, becomes the cold and lifeless world of death, the world of mechanism, in which each individual ego is like a lonely but well-fortied island oating on a sea of dead matter.29 This destiny that seems to have befallen modern men and women is Nishitanis concern. In support of this concern, Nishitani sets out to expose the selfdeception embedded in the ego of the Cartesian cogito. For Descartes and for modern people, the ego of the cogito is taken as the ultimate foundation of the certainty of our knowledge and existence. It is a pure and selfevident rationality. Nishitani digs more deeply into the roots of the ego and concludes that its self-consciousness is in fact a result of its being mirrored in the eld of self-consciousness. That is, because this ego is seen as self-consciousness mirroring self-consciousness at every turn and the cogito is seen from the standpoint of the cogito, ego becomes a mode of being of the self closed up within itself.30 It is clear to Nishitani that
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modernity is grounded on the self-enclosing, self-attaching egothe same ego that Buddhism identies as the constitutive cause of the samsaric world. Buddhism recognizes that rationality must be disenchanted and uncovered as a mere self-deception, as Hegel and Nietzsche were later to recognize. Thus for Nishitani the rise of nihilism from within the very bosom of modernity is a matter of dialectical necessity. In Nishitanis scheme, modernity unfolds in three stages: the eld of consciousness, the eld of nihility, and the eld of absolute emptiness. In the eld of consciousness, as represented by Cartesianism, the world is structured within the subject-object duality. The object is known and appropriated through the representation of the subject in pursuit of its desire.31 Representational thinking, to which Heidegger ascribes the whole Western metaphysical tradition, characterizes the essence of modernity.32 In the eld of nihility, a stage made necessary by disillusionment with representational consciousness, things cease to be objects, and, as a result, appear as realities cut off from representation. In other words, nihility is itself a reality, and vice versa. Nishitani goes further to explain in Heideggerian terms: the being of beings discloses itself in the nullifying of nothingness (das Nicht nichtet).33 But Nishitani does not stop short at this Nietzschean-Heideggerian realization of nihility. Rather, he sets out to articulate a positive and afrmative notion of nothingness as the groundless home-ground of beings. In his words:
Prior to the appearance that things take on the eld of consciousness, where they are objectivized as external realities, and prior to the more original appearance things assume on the eld of nihility, where they are nullied, all things are on the eld of emptiness in their truly elemental and original appearances. In emptiness things come to rest on their own home-ground.34

In this regard he appeals to expressions of the Zen-Buddhist-awakened experience of nothingness such as hills, rivers, the earth, plants and trees, tiles and stones, all of these are the self s original nature, and all things come to realize themselves.35 It is precisely because of this conception of absolute emptiness that Nishitani and the Kyoto school are seen by the Critical Buddhists as the modern inheritors of hongaku thought.36 This prompts us to ask: Does Nishitani slip back into mystical, speculative metaphysics? Does he com308

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mit himself to something transcending language and reasoning, something not admissible in Buddhism? Again we listen to Nishitani in his own words:
True emptiness is nothing less than what reaches awareness in all of us as our own absolute self-nature. In addition, this emptiness is the point at which each and every entity that is said to exist becomes manifest: as what it is in itself, in the Form of its true suchness. The unity of the absolute near side is not the result of a process but rather the original identity of absolute openness and absolute emptiness. It is the absolute one, the absolute self-identity of the absolute two: the home-ground on which we are what we are in our self-nature and the home-ground on which things are what they are in themselves.37

To read passages on the literal surface, we cannot but agree with Hakamaya that Nishitani does indeed assert something called the unity of the absolute, the original identity, and the absolute one in terms that parallel the assertions of an ontology of original enlightenment or dhtuvda. What is more, his frequent appeal to Sino-Japanese Buddhist terms such as nature-origination (shki suru), reciprocal interpenetration (egoteki sny), and immediacy (genj), suggest a reliance on the Huayen and Zen traditions, the most notorious examples of hongaku thought. If this is indeed the way to read Nishitani, then there seems no way around the criticisms raised by Hakamaya. Surely this is not the only way to read Nishitani, let alone the only correct way. One may, for instance, consider his idea of the Absolute in light of the Zen and Nietzschean notion of play. With the introduction of the notion of play into metaphysics, the eld or topos of Absolute Emptiness need no longer be taken simply in the sense of a substratum or ground of existents. The topos would rather refer to our daily lifeworld in which (as Nishitani himself points out) all things exist without aim or reason outside of themselves and become truly autotelic and without cause or reason, a veritable Leben ohne Warum.38 This playful, selfemptying life-world is permanently invisible as long as the things of life are viewed only through the lenses of self-centered reason or subjectivity. It becomes visible only when envisaged in playful samdhi. As Nishitani notes further, the visible in playful-samadhi must be empty of the telos or substance ascribed by the subject-as-reason. It is, therefore, neither necessary nor legitimate to read any meaning of substance into Nishitanis eld of absolute emptiness. We cannot afford to overlook the
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deconstructive implications in the Idealist vocabularies employed by Nishitani and his fellow thinkers of the Kyoto school. As for the troublesome notion of topos or eld, it is always understood by the Critical Buddhist as something illogical, irrational, or mystical. According to Nakamura Yjir, however, the meaning of topos in relation to individual can be traced back to an analogy with the role of the chorus in relation to that of the hero in Greek tragedy.39 The Greek word tpoV means a common ground but with rich connotations of rhetorical theme, community, and common sense. Topos in this sense has long been restricted by logocentric tendencies in Western philosophy to something invisible and insignicant. The more obvious choice, particularly in the ethos of modernity, would be to place rhetoric beneath logic and the community beneath the individual. In this regard, the Topicalist has been at pains to note that modern men and women can only end up alienated from their home ground if they do not realize the absurdity of the logocentric ethos. Only through the reclaiming of the life-world can modern individuals be redeemed from the reason-centered ethos of modernity and its nihilistic consequences. If the thinkers of the Kyoto school are seen to be obsessed by Hegelian and Heideggerian discourse, and to this extent not yet free of idealistic speculation, Malcolm David Eckel presents a methodological alternative in his 1992 book To See the Buddha. In an attempt to revitalize the context of Buddhist discourse, Eckel tries to retrieve the religious meaning of Bhvavivekas philosophical texts by placing them within a narrative and metaphoric context reconstructed in the light of Hsantsangs pilgrimage report, rather than follow other scholars in treating him only as a logician and epistemologist.40 Eckel makes clear that his aim in challenging the conventional assumption of the separation between theory and practice, elite and popular, religion and philosophy, and mythos and logos in particular is to bring the complex and abstract concepts of Buddhist philosophy down to earth. In so doing, he concludes that the logos of Bhvavivekas rational investigation is embedded in its own mythos.41 In the course of his hermeneutic praxis, Eckel claries his own critique of modernity, arguing that the emptiness of logos as well as the emptiness of mythos can only be perceived together through a place that is empty. In his own words, to see a Buddha is nothing but to see a Buddha as a place where an absence is present. By appealing to Nishitani
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Keijis notion of absolute nothingness as place, Eckel expounds how a Buddhist perceives things in their mere conventionality, which leaves no space for metaphysics of identity:
The logic of place takes on a very distinctive character when one asks, as philosophers do, not just about the location of the Buddha but about the location of Emptiness. Buddhist logicians, unlike the logicians of other Indian schools, did not think that it was possible, however, to perceive such an absence directly. A perception of the absence of something like a pot on a particular spot of earth had to be based on the empty spot of earth. Perception of Emptiness also had to be based on a perception of the thing that is empty. But if all things are empty of identity, in what does Emptiness reside? Jnagarbha explains that it is the thing itself (vastumatra) in its mere conventionality: merely to see a conventional entity as it is, without superimposing on it any ultimate reality, is the same as seeing it as Emptiness.42 (italics mine)

Back to conventionality, as Eckel and the other Topical Buddhists claim, is tantamount to saying back to the life-world, and back to the life-world is the same as back to Emptiness. For Buddhism, there is no Emptiness perceivable without a place in our daily world. As suggested in Dgens verses, A leap year is met one in four / Cocks crow at four in the morning,43 the experience of enlightenment is perceivable only in the signs of our daily worldthe seasons, sounds, smells, touches, and so onwhich are empty in themselves.44

SUFFERING IN A JOYFUL BUDDHISM

The controversy between Critical Buddhism and Topical Buddhism is not restricted to its contemporary episodes discussed in the foregoing. It has led to great ideological variety throughout the Buddhist tradition. What makes the quarrel especially signicant in our times is that it has arisen in the context of Buddhisms encounter with modernity. But what is the meaning of this modern tale of two Buddhisms? Both Critical Buddhism and Topical Buddhism agree that there is no room for metaphysics of identity or substance in Buddhist thinking. The reasons are obvious. The connections between metaphysics and desire have been recognized already from the earliest beginnings of Buddhism. In the twelve links of dependent arising we see that on account of desire (tah) there is clinging (updna). The clinging is further classied
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into four aspects: clinging to sense pleasures, to rituals, to metaphysical theories, and to soul or substance theories. As K. N. Jayatilleke remarks, we believe in certain metaphysical theories and soul- or substance-theories because we are impelled by our desires to believe in them.45 And we are impelled to believe in metaphysics, as Nietzsche points out, because we are always in need of security and comfort. But we must not overlook a more complicated relation between metaphysics and the world-formation of life-and-death, as indicated by the last four links of depending arising: clinging (to metaphysics), becoming, birth, aging, and death. Unless this relation is fully claried, we are not able to truly understand why the critique of metaphysics is every bit as important in Buddhism as it is in Western philosophy. On this issue, too, we nd that both sides of the controversy do not disagree. The discrepancy arises rather in a difference of opinion over how metaphysics is to be overcome. On the one hand, for the Critical Buddhists, it entails an uncompromising destruction or elimination of (monist) metaphysics. Only after the complete destruction of metaphysics can a pluralistic, liberating world be established on the basis of pure rationality. For the Topical Buddhists, on the other hand, the modern liberalism and individualism that characterize modernity still fall under the shadow of subjectivism and logocentrism.46 They retain a permanent suspicion of the project of modernity, insisting all the while that their critique of logocentric modernity is neither a romantic reaction nor a kind of quasi-critique as proposed by the Critical Buddhist but an uncompromising absolute critique (to introduce a term coined by Tanabe Hajime) directed against reason itself. Without absolute critique or great death, there will be no afrmation of great life, no return of the life-world as the groundless home-ground. At this point I am not inclined to arbitrate the debate. Nor do the sectarian aspects of the question interest me. I wish merely to note that the mutual misunderstanding seems to me to outweigh their understanding of their respective positions. (For example, absolute nothingness or original enlightenment in Topical Buddhism is never taken to mean monistic substance.) The more pressing question concerns what stance Buddhist thinkers will take in the confrontation with modernity and postmodernity. Will it be a fundamentalist Buddhism, a positivist Buddhism, a Heideggerian brand of Buddhism? Or will some of them dare, like the wandering Dionysius, to make metaphysics a playful enterprise? Perhaps
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this latter, third alternative, will take us beyond negative metaphysics or negative theology and nudge Buddhism one step further in the direction of a joyful science. If Buddhism is viewed as a joyful science, suffering in metaphysics and modernity can be recognized without turning it into an obsession with utopian liberation. For the joyful Buddhist, the metaphysics of identity or subjectivity that belongs to the project of modernity, as conventional knowledge (samvtti-satya), is indispensable for ultimate knowledge (paramrtha-satya). It is also clear that the logic of either/or that is often employed by both sides in the debate fails to recognize the dialectical paradox involved in bringing metaphysics, suffering, and liberation into relationship with one another. Only by fully recognizing and afrming this intrinsic paradox can one play and laugh without losing the critical consciousness of suffering.

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