Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Suzuki Daisetsu

214 Suzuki Daisetsu 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966) Suzuki Daisetsu (Teitarō) enjoyed an extraordinarily productive career bringing Zen Buddhist ideas to the West. Born in Kanazawa, he grew up with Nishida Kitarō*, Japan’s most famous modern philosopher. While taking classes at Tokyo Imperial University, Suzuki began a life of practice as a Zen layman under Zen Master Shaku Sōen from Engaku-ji in Kamakura, who attended the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where he met Paul Carus, the editor of The Monist. He then introduced Carus to Suzuki, who later served as his collaborator and translator for several years. Returning to Japan, he eventually settled permanently at Kyoto’s Ōtani University in 1921, where he founded the Eastern Buddhist Society and the English-language journal, The Eastern Buddhist. After World War ii, Suzuki’s writings on Zen and mysticism became immensely popular in the West and he spent several years as a visiting professor in the United States, including a period from 1952 to 1957 at Columbia University. During this latter period of his life, he engaged many western thinkers, including philosophers, theosophists (he was a member himself), psychologists, and theologians. His works in English include Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes), Zen and Japanese Culture , Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist, Zen and Psychoanalysis (co-authored), and annotated translations of the Lakāvatāra sūtra and Shinran’s Kyōgyōshinshō. His collected works in English and his collected works in Japanese each exceed thirty volumes. Moving freely between textual criticism and religious interpretation, Suzuki never made any pretense to arguing philosophically, but others did sometimes apply his ideas to philosophical questions. The following excerpts on what Suzuki dubbed “the logic of affirmation-in-negation”—the core of what he has to say on the subject—are prime examples of this. In the first, he applies it to Zen thinking and in the second, to the Pure Landž Buddhist idea of other-powerž. [tpk] The lo gic of affirmation-in-negation Suzuki Daisetsu 1940, 510; 1944a, 274–83 I do not claim to know very much about philosophical logic, but I would like to say something about how Buddhism understands the term. There is a sutra whose name I translate as the Prajñā Wisdom Sutra. The Sanskrit word źprajñāŻ was rendered into Chinese as “wisdom,” but as this does not capture the full meaning, I prefer the somewhat redundant term “prajñā wisdom”.… To understand why, let us begin by contrasting prajñā with the Sanskrit word for s u z u k i da i s e t s u | 215 consciousness, źvijñānaŻ. The prefix vi- carries the sense of “dividing,” reflecting the fact that the role of consciousness is to distinguish one thing from another. It is this clash between prajñā and vijñāna that Buddhist philosophy has developed . It shows up in a variety of forms in the Prajñā Wisdom Sūtra, such as the following: “The mindž is not the mind, therefore it is the mind”.… The Chinese rendition of the Sanskrit original, taccitam acittam yaccitam (“mind is not mind, which is to say, it is mind”) uses the copulative soku, “which is to say.” Thus we may speak of a “logic of affirmation-in-negation (źsoku-hiŻ)” in which affirmation immediately entails negation, and negation affirmation. Such is the logic of prajñā wisdom.… In today’s language, we would say that affirmation and negation are “selfidentical ,” which is in fact the force of the copulative soku. This does not mean the kind of relationship in which one thing here is negated by another thing there. What is there remains there, and what is here remains here, but at the same time as we affirm this, we also affirm that what is here is there, and what is there is here. To our customary way of thinking about words and things, when we place two elements in an affirmative or soku relationship the effect would be to negate their two-ness. Not so for Buddhism where the negation (hi), just as it is, is an affirmation (soku). Thus when two elements are related to each other negatively, that relationship is at the same time an affirmation. It is not that the negation stands in opposition to the affirmation. Rather, what is expressed as negation is itself the affirmation. Historically and grammatically, our ordinary language of predication has been contrived in such a way that, as an expression of affirmation, it cannot be made...