Encounters of Mind , livre ebook

Encounters of Mind
SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture
__________
Roger T. Ames, editor
Encounters of Mind
Luminosity and Personhood in Indian and Chinese Thought
Douglas L. Berger
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Production, Diane Ganeles Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berger, Douglas L., author.
Encounters of mind : luminosity and personhood in Indian and Chinese thought / Douglas L. Berger.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in Chinese philosophy and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5473-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
E-ISBN 978-1-4384-5475-7 (ebook)
1. Buddhist philosophy. 2. Buddhism—India—Doctrines. 3. Buddhism—China—Doctrines. I. Title.
B162.B42 2014
181’.043—dc23
2014008113
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1
Heart and Person: Early Chinese Thought
The Conscious Body
The Heart: Keeping Tallies and Moral Feelings
Personal Cultivation and Sociality
When Spirit Dethrones the Heart
Chapter 2
Two Brāhmi ṇ ical Selves
The Unconscious Body
Affects, Habits, and New Bodies
Time, Identity, and the Abode of Memory
Selves as Persons in Brāhmi ṇ ical Thought
Chapter 3
Eliminating Identity and the Luminous Mind in Yogācāra
Bodily-Cognitive Interdependence
“Self” as a Reification of Habits
Stored-Up Awakening and the Luminous Mind
Chapter 4
Mind, Nature and Conduct: Two Approaches of Chinese Buddhism
Origin, Nature, and Causality
Making Our Nature Our Aim
Lumps of Flesh with Bright Minds
Guests, Hosts, and Trust in Oneself
Chapter 5
A Space for Moral Reflection: The Confucian Rapprochement
Mind as Matter and Sense
Coherence and Unity in Feeling
Varieties of Learning for Oneself
Chapter 6
Luminosity, Potential, and Personhood
Luminosity: Making the World Manifest
The Body, Nature, and Potentiality
The Provocation of Optimism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I would like first of all to thank Roger Ames, editor of the SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture, for all the work he did in making the appearance of this volume possible. Thanks also go to Nancy Ellegate, senior acquisitions editor, and Diane Ganeles, senior production editor, at State University of New York Press, for their most helpful assistance.
I have been working on the issues brought together in this book for the past eight years and so owe a debt of gratitude to all the sources of intellectual inspiration that have informed it. These not only include, obviously, the works of centuries of South and East Asian philosophers but also those of more recent scholars as well. Foremost among these have been Professor J. N. Mohanty of Temple University, Professor Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad of Lancaster University in Great Britain, Professor Tao Jiang of Rutgers University, Professor Dan Robins of the University of Hong Kong, Professor Sor-Hoon Tan of Singapore National University, and Professor Roger Ames of the University of Hawai’i. Whether found explicitly in these pages or not, their ideas have had great influence on me as I made the long and winding journey of putting this work together. I also owe my graduate students at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale enduring thanks for their contributions to the last eight years of seminars that have helped shape what ended up in these pages.
I must note that the sabbatical I was granted from Southern Illinois University in the fall of 2012 gave me the time that was necessary to write this manuscript.
A special note of gratitude must go to the wonderfully kind and cheerful staff of the Just Us! Coffee Roasters Co-op on the 5800 block of Spring Garden Street in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Most of the book was written in this cozy place, and the patience and friendliness that were shown to me by the people who worked every daily shift here always kept my spirits up during all the hours I was at my keyboard. I’ve not ever been at a better place to write, and that was because of the good folks there.
My most profound thanks to Ying Zhang, for her love, support, and help. This volume is dedicated to her.
—Douglas L. Berger Halifax, Nova Scotia
Introduction
One can only wonder about how hopeful the first Buddhist monks from South Asia, who traveled along the mountainous trading routes to the Central Kingdom around the turn of the first millennium CE, were about their mission. They carried with them a legacy of reflection, arisen out of ongoing centuries of debate with brāhma ṇ a -s, ascetics, and secular South Asian thinkers, on consciousness, the makeup of the human person, and the need to overcome desire. That legacy was of course deeply rooted in a world of language, institutions, and values that prevailed in their more native ambits. They wandered into a culture with a radically different language, with relatively more worldly philosophical and sociopolitical commitments, as well as distinctive conceptions of what persons were, how they were constituted, and what their most important aims should be. Indeed, it would take centuries of itinerant searchers making forays back and forth along the Silk Road paths, sprawling transliterated texts, pitched conflicts with Confucian classicists, and tumultuous changes in imperial fortune before Buddhist ideas and practices would take a strong hold in China. But take a strong hold they did. And they transformed, in fundamental and lasting ways, how Chinese philosophers of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist persuasions would come to regard the nature of human consciousness, and what consequences the nature and capacities of consciousness had on what being a person means.
Those of us who participate in cross-cultural philosophy in the early twenty-first century sometimes fancy ourselves as being hermeneutic pioneers of a sort, better informed than people of previous ages and with unprecedented opportunities to learn from and more sensitively critique other cultures. We may be tempted to suppose that, with our virtual libraries, translation tools, and the opportunity to communicate globally in an instant, we are among the first ones to wonder about a certain case of textual corruption, a disagreement of socially embedded presuppositions, or even a cultural imperialism of ideas. Of course, such temptations are conceits, especially for a generation of academics who often have much less at stake in cross-cultural philosophical debates than generations and eons of immensely learned, and probably less distracted, peoples that have gone before us. There are far too many rich, and sometimes even miraculous, instances of sustained cross-cultural philosophical encounter in human history to meet with such attitudes. And the encounter between Indian and Chinese thought that was facilitated by the migration of Buddhism must surely be counted as one of the grandest of those instances. We are only still beginning to rediscover the treasures of that engagement. And, because we are only at a relative beginning point in mining these treasures, our attempts to philosophically engage with them ourselves over the past three or so centuries and seriously reflect on what implications these traditions of thought and their own dialogue may have for the various dilemmas of the Western tradition and the crossroads at which we presently find ourselves have been, though faltering, also intriguing and provocative. This study proposes to take its own part in these ongoing processes of learning and engagement.
The chapters of this work propose to follow what over time became a progression, in a variety of South and East Asian schools of thought, of debates about the relationship of concepts of mind or awareness to the constitution of personhood. These developing debates eventually resulted first in the appropriation of South Asian Buddhist thought into China and, after that, in impressively synthetic efforts to understand this relationship in Chinese Buddhism and the legacies their efforts worked on the medieval Confucian approach to learning. We begin with an examination of pre-Buddhist Chinese thought, with special attention to the texts of the Mozi, Mengzi, Xunzi, Analects , and Zhuangzi , in order to comprehend some prevalent perspectives on mind and personhood prior to the arrival of Buddhism in China. Despite the vastly different aims and worldviews of these texts, some shared assumptions will reveal themselves about the vital energies that nurture and propel the body to action; the functioning of the sense organs; the widely variant conceptions of the functions of the heart as the center of feeling, judgment, and moral inclination; and, in the case of the Zhuangzi , the provenance of “spirit” in grounding the ultimate core of human “genuineness.” We will then turn to two of the most influential frameworks for formulating the relationship between embodied personhood and conscious, ultimate selfhood in the foundational Brāhmi ṇ ical treatises and commentaries of Sā ṃ khya and Nyāya in South Asia in order to glean what matrix of views helped to contextualize and in some ways shape the approaches of South Asian Buddhist philosophy. Next, we undertake a detailed examination of the Buddhist school of Vijñānavāda, both in its textual and commentarial articulation in the early generations of its development and als