What does the statement A&B are related mean? Different cultures see relations differently – on the right are so called integrity dominant cultures.
Thomas Kasulis is Professor and past Chair of the Department of Comparative Studies in the Ohio State University with interests in Comparative Religion, Japanese Religious Thought and Western Philosophy. He has written numerous books and scholarly articles on Japanese religious thought and Western philosophy. He has co-edited for SUNY Press a three-volume series comparing Asian and Western ideas of self in different cultural arenas: Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice (1993), Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice (1994), and Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice (1998). He is the author of Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (University of Hawaii Press, 2002), a comparative cultural philosophy of relationship based on his Gilbert Ryle Lectures of 1998.He teaches courses listed in Comparative Studies, Philosophy, and East Asian Languages and Literatures focusing on religion and philosophies of Asia, comparative religion, and philosophy of religion.
The topic of the lecture is zen & the ethics of responsibility/ responsiveness. As we will see, in zen tradition responsiveness is more important than responsibility, so we have to adjust our thinking a bit as normally we think of ethics as responsibility.
What is ethics?
- The philosophical analyses of how we ought to behave in relation to each other and to the natural world
- Danger of interpreting this is disembodied, idealistic, and abstract – there is no such impersonal “thing” as ethics; only ethical thinkers, actions, motives
- Thinkers as human beings are encultured beings
Philosophy & Culture: How does culture affect philosophizing?
- Culture teaches dominant repetitive patterns
- One of most crucial micro-patterns: way to understand relation
- Relevance to ethics: the philosophical analysis of how we ought to behave in relation to each other and to the natural world
What does the statement A&B are related mean? Different cultures see relations differently – on the right are so called integrity dominant cultures.
Knowledge is something that connects not me-->reality but self-->other (person).
In this way, it is not built but building, not painted but painting – it’s happening now and we are part of it.
Integrity’s responsibility-centered ethics/ Ethics of responsibility:
- Apply general principles, laws
- Justice is blind
- Equality
- Protection of autonomy
Intimacy’s responsiveness-centered ethics/ ethics of responsiveness:
- Sensitivity to particular
- Justice is compassionate (has not two, but even three eyes)
- Harmony (like music, overlapping)
- Protection of belonging with (the same with others and with nature - nature does not belong to us but we belong with it)
Zen Buddhist Ethics
- Zen Buddhist ethics as Buddhist - Indian: Mahāyāna Buddhist context: wisdom = compassion, feeling other person’s pain not knowing it. I want to help other people because it hurts me when others suffer, when I overlap with them.The double overlap is movie.
- Zen Buddhist ethics as East Asian - Chinese, Japanese: a) before Zen = Confucianism for interpersonal relations; b) Daoism (& Shintō in Japan) for human-nature relations (we are animals in nature, being parts of each other and harmonizing itself and together).
The Buddhist way of thinking was not in China before it came from India – Buddhist psychology (dynamics of inner self); Buddhist yoga (disciplines for transforming dynamics of inner self) –> inner transformation to serve interpersonal relations & relations with nature –> how to control your emotions, what techniques can I use, looking inward, where do my emotions come from, which emotions and helpful/ harmful… all this was pretty much Indian introduction to China in 1st century - Zen Buddhist ethics as responsiveness
Kokoro and creativity
Responsiveness - the master tests the depth of the student's insight by demanding a spontaneous response proving their engagement in the here-and-now without deliberation or thought. An object can be a vase or a paperweight (on a stack of papers) or a weapon or a metaphor - it doesn't transform, you have to see, what it is at the moment at the spot. We have to be responsive to this what it is right now.
The idea moves from from solidarity to communal, from no-mind to opening the mind, from no-action to creative expression of responsive no-mind. Don't have agenda, be responsive to now.
Zen Buddhist Ethics of Responsiveness (focus of training ethics)
(-) Deconstruct behaviors & attitudes supporting external relations and integrity (muting the sense of responsibility in order to be more responsive):
- be unprincipled, ignore rules, reject blind authority (it's external - see the first picture)
- undermine habituated categories that pre-filter experience - to poise vs poisoning
(+) Enhance intimacy by maximizing internal relations (cultivating responsiveness):
- authentication, not authority
- paradigms of past masters make tradition of openness, not tradition of restriction
- meaning as contextual, never fixed - distinctiveness of each new situation
- language as conferential not referential - reality and language come into being together w/in each context (each time is the first time, you don't get used to clock's ticking, background noise etc)
Wisdom and Compassion inseparable
- to know another's pain is to feel that pain as one's own; to feel pain is to know pain
- Zen technique: exchanging roles among chief disciples
Responsive capacity develops through emulative (master-disciple) praxis involving somatic & mental, affective & intellectual parts. Praxis deconstructs external relations and enhances internal relations. Praxis develops openness or de-habituation, not character development through good habits (contrast w/ virtue ethics of Aristotle).
See also the article Diamond Sutra
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