The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy: #REF!

1. Buddhist Philosophy on a New Human Frontier

1. Buddhist Philosophy on a New Human Frontier The great systems of Western philosophy all have seen themselves as dealing with something which has variously been termed Being, Nature, or the Universe, the Cosmos at large, Reality, the Truth. Into this state of affairs there recently entered the discovery that natural science is forced by its own development to abandon the assumption of fixity and to recognize that what for it is actually "universal" is process; but this fact of recent science still remains in philosophy, as in popular opinion up to the present time, a technical matter rather than what it is: namely, the most revolutionary discovery yet made. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy Americans already have in their widest angles of awareness many of the insights of John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead that enable them to understand some of the essential forms of thought in which Buddhism is presently finding itself at home. Writing from Burma twenty-five years ago, for example, I was so deeply impressed with what goes by the name of "pragmatisml/ in American circles that a chapter bearing the title liThe Pragmatic Bent of Buddhism" appears in the book I was writing at the time.l Buddhist discussion groups in Rangoon, furthermore, were suggesting at the time that Whitehead's phrase lithe aesthetic foundations of the world" furnished a striking parallel to the precise meaning of nirvana. It was an intuitive, unconscious flow of quality in the fleeting present that held the Buddha in a state of euphoria for forty-nine days, the Enlightenment with which Buddhism began. 1 2 The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy Americans deserve, however, more adequate and specific information regarding the contributions Dewey and Whitehead have made to the philosophic outlook Buddhism is encountering on these shores. Together these two philosophers have had more impact on the American linguistic and cultural system than any pair of philosophers since the ancient Greeks. They have persuaded men and women to take a closer look at what is immediately given in their original, individualized, unthought, concrete experience and consider the possibility that this experience is their only direct and close engagement with life. Dewey and Whitehead stand together in opposing patterns of thought and action that obstruct new penetrations into the inexhaustible vastness of human experience, its connectedness with the rest of nature, the active energies passing from one particular occasion to the next. Both are opposed to the "trickle down" doctrines of "cultures of belief'12 whereby individuals look outside themselves for the clues to the significance of their lives. Both consider, in Dewey's words, lithe immediate existence of quality, of dominant and pervasive quality, as the background, the point of departure, and the regulative principle of all thinking.//3 Compared with the power of this qualitative flow in our experience, our forms of understanding are anemic, lacking solidity and life. Whitehead and Dewey stand together on this, that the aesthetic flow of quality through the perceptions, intuitions, memories, and aspirations of the live creature constitutes at once both a direction and a motivation for living.4 "There is in every individual," the Buddhist scholar K. Venkata Ramanan writes, "a feeling for the qualitative reality of events.// "Unlike other creatures," Ramanan continues, "the human individual has a thirst to regain the dynamic, organic relatedness of which richness of life consists. To set free the sense of the real from its moorings in abstractions constitutes the chief-most mission of the farer on the Middle Way/'s Buddhism carries out a frontal attack against the kind of ignorance that leads people to turn their backs on the quality of the passing moment, "complacently perched," as a recent book out of Sri Lanka has it, "on their cozy conceptual superstructures regarding the world."6 It is doubtful if Buddhism's struggle against life's abstractness has ever found conditions more conducive to its acceptance and profound Buddhist Philosophy on a New Frontier 3 understanding than it finds in Dewey and Whitehead. For the length and scope of their careers, these two leading American philosophers labored to see more clearly the infinite fertility of human experience, insisting that rational principles and their institutional embodiments are justified only as they become searchlights illuminating more of the unthought and enhancing the vividness of individualized experience in everyday life. Rational principles become forms of misunderstanding when they disinherit men and women from the flow...