The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy: #REF!

2. Process Philosophies East and West

2. Process Philosophies East and West There is growing evidence that the world is not lust "out there" to be looked at by a detached spectator, but that the spectator is so deeply involved in his field ofobservation that at every moment he is a participant in what is going on. This involves a shift from objects to events, and from substance to process- from amechanistic world view to adynamic web of interacting processes. A process himself, man attempts to report on what has been, and still is, going on. Herbert V. Guenther, Kindly Bent to Ease Us One should not act or speak as if asleep. The world is one and therefore common to those who are awake; but each one who is asleep turns to a world all his own. Heraclitus, Fragments Three times during the past twenty-five centuries, process philosophies have challenged the established intellectual and cultural membrane that interprets the meaning of human experience and value. Three times these philosophies have failed to rise to dominance, submerged by the prevailing ideas of the time and place. The first process philosophy to appear is associated with the teachings of Gautama Buddha in the sixth century B.C. Strictly speaking, Buddhism is neither a philosophy nor a religion in the ordinary Western meanings of these terms; it is, however, a method of awakening to what is really real in the world, a fact that could make it fit both Western categories, broadly defined. 9 10 The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy The second process philosophy is found in the so-called fragments of Heraclitus (536-475 B.c.l, lithe weeping philosopher of Ephesus," the first of the precocious Greeks to place himself at the center of the social revolution of his time, just prior to the Peloponnesian War. The "fragments" are actually self-contained sayings designed for memorization in a community in which most people were unable to read. We should not think, therefore, that we have only the odds and ends of his larger work of continuous unfragmented prosej we have Heraclitus in a style derived from oral forms of communication, a style aimed at inducing people to accept a new way of life. The third appearance of process philosophy, this time in a fully rounded-out and systematic form, came during what Max H. Fisch calls "the classical age of American thought,III beginning about 1880 with William James and Charles Peirce and continuing to the eve of World War II in the work ofJosiah Royce, John Dewey, and the Anglo-American Alfred North Whitehead. At all three points where process thought was emerging, certain cultural dislocations were moving sensitive and perceptive individuals to shake off the ways their communities had sought to rationalize and justify the established order of life. At all three points, a universal problem that is not well understood even today came into focus: men and women everywhere live with a largely unrecognized tension, anxiety, and conflict between what is concretely and directly disclosed in immediate experience and the abstract constructions of reason and science. In every cultureworld we know anything about, people are induced by the forms of custom and convention to turn away from their own feelings and aesthetic sensibilities. In their relatively underdeveloped stage of human evolution, people are easily persuaded that they must live by other people's notions, notions that everyone is pressured to believe, but as Zen has been shouting from the housetops for centuries, those who cling to words, letters, rules, conventions , and linguistic systems will never comprehend what any speaker is trying to communicate. The philosophies of Buddhism, Heraclitus, and the American "classical age" philosophers all seek to reverse the claims of the linguistic and cultural superstructure and return individuals to their own deeper-than-cultural awareness of life's rich qualitative Process Philosophies East and West 11 flow. All three philosophies remind us that even the most ingenious works of intelligence, once they have been institutionalized , have meaning that is microscopic and meager in comparison with the qualities found in the experiences of everyday life. All three focus attention upon the subliminal levels of experience , upon Whitehead's "tacit dimension" of the "deep experiences of organic existence,"2 the fountainhead from which all the ingenuity and creativity of the human world are constantly watered. All three open the gates of quality flowing from the aesthetic foundations of the world. Rationality...