The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy: #REF!

Preface

Preface When it comes to understanding the philosophies of a people across the barriers of radically different linguistic and cultural systems , a bit of common street knowledge is the best advice: "It takes one to know one." Throughout its long history, Buddhism has been one of the world's systematic formulations of reality as a social process, with everyone and everything being related to everyone and everything else in what Hajime Nakamura and Daisetz Suzuki call "the interrelatedness of existence."Until the present century, efforts in the West to understand the world with the same intensity and depth as Buddhism were all dominated by Plato's "accent on form," the substance- and being-centered thinking of the Greek tradition. Heraclitus had carried out a brief revolution against such thinking, but his exalting of change was smothered until some of his insights were resurrected by Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Gustav Theodor Fechner, Etienne Boutroux, Henri Bergson, and Charles Renouvier, all of whom returned us to what James Wayne Dye terms "preanalytic modes of awareness.III Systematic elaboration of this process orientation was achieved by Charles Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and Charles Hartshorne, providing for the first time in the history of Western philosophy insights giving us direct access to the Buddhist Way. One of the leading physicists of our time, furthermore, indicates how fundamental the perspectives stemming from highenergy quantum physics can be in establishing a new way of thinking about our experience in the world. "If we think of the totality," David Bohm, writes, ix x Preface as constituted of independent fragments, then that is how our minds will tend to operate, but if we can include everything coherently and harmoniouslyin an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border (for every border is a division or break) then our minds will tend to move in a similar way, and from this will flow an orderly action within the whole. The widespread and pervasive distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, etc., etc.), which are now preventing mankind from working together for the common good, and indeed, even for survival, have their origin in a ldnd ofthought that treats things as inherently divided, disconnected, and "broken up" into yet smaller constituent parts.2 It is clear that Bohm's kind of process thinking relates us directly to the Buddhist view of the self-surpassing oneness of a world that, in each fleeting moment, with its living moment-tomoment manifestation of reality, is forever new. The world is never the same twice; the universe is alive. Most of the difficulties the West has had in understanding Buddhism are traceable to the lack of awareness of a fully developed philosophy of process and the intrusion of attitudes and assumptions that make Buddhism as strange as the other side of the moon. Illustrations abound. Drawing an object lesson from one of the most prestigious Western scholars, we can see that there was no way T. I. Stcherbatsky could understand either the Buddhist view of the interrelatedness of existence (what Kenneth Inada calls "relational origination'1 or a point even more central to Buddhist thought-namely, that what is really real is the living moment, each momentary occasion of experience becoming a part of the permanent past and contributing itself to the individualized , spontaneous, original, concrete experiences yet to come. Stcherbatsky floundered on insights such as these merely through the lack of a systematic process philosophy comparable to the Buddhist system. "A dependent existence," he writes, "is no real existence."3 By emphasizing interdependence, Stcherbatsky believes, Buddhism makes the momentary realities unreal, and the Buddhist understanding of reality as a social process goes by the board. The insight is hidden that the foundations of the world Preface xi are in these vivid, free, creative, responsive, original momentary occasions of experience, to which Buddhism seeks to return us, from the abstract, impersonal, thing-centered, being-oriented world in which all of us are reared. Buddhism urges us to probe our own individualized experience of the IIcells of the universe," the momentary "really real things" in the "creative urge of the universe ," as Whitehead puts it, "ever plunging into the creative advance." With Whitehead's insight that "we feel massively our present to be the product of the immediate past and the producer of the future" Buddhism heartily agrees in all of its different centuries and "sectarian" forms...