Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook

Abe Masao

750 Abe Masao 阿部正雄 (1915–2006) Following the trail that had been blazed by D.T. Suzuki,* Abe Masao spent over thirty years in dialogue with western philosophers and theologians, representing Zen thought and the tradition of Kyoto School thought as he had inherited it from Tanabe Hajime* and, above all, Nishitani Keiji*. Although born into a Pure Landž Buddhist family and, as a young student at Osaka City University, moved by the ideas of Shinran* he found in the Tannishō (A Record of Lament over Divergence), Abe lost his faith for a period. In 1941 he left his job and returned to study western philosophy at Kyoto University, where he met Hisamatsu Shin’ichi*, whose critique of Pure Land Buddhism turned Abe to Zen. After completing his studies he taught briefly at a number of universities in Kyoto until 1952, when he received a permanent position at Nara Educational University. At age forty he spent a brief period at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he attended the lectures of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and D.T. Suzuki. For fourteen years after retiring in 1980, Abe taught at six universities in the United States. In 2000 he was awarded the Award of Merit from the Society for the Promotion of Buddhism. In a lengthy essay on Nishitani’s classic work Religion and Nothingness, Abe laid out the contours of an approach to absolute nothingnessž that he would develop over many years. In particular, he stressed the dynamic, creative quality of emptiness ž or śūnyatā—an idea present in germ in Nishitani and Tanabe—as the common foundation of all religions. Like his two teachers, he also developed a philosophical interest in the thought of Dōgen*, collaborating on an English translation of the Shōbōgenzō and composing a series of essays on the work. His wide-ranging interests, shaped in part by his encounters with leading Christian theologians in Europe and the United States, always brought him back to the bedrock of ideas he had found in his Kyoto professors, and in this sense he was instrumental in making their ideas more widely known in the West. The essay from which the following excerpt has been taken offers a glimpse at his style of debate with the ideas he found in western philosophy. [jwh] Śūnyatā as formless form Abe Masao 1987, 139–48 According to Plato, beyond the realm of phenomena perceptible by our senses and subject to time and to change, there exists a realm of “forms” which are immutable, timeless, and knowable only by the pure intellect. This realm exists independently and transcends the phenomena that participate in a b e m a s ao | 751 the forms. Forms are realities and prototypes which make individual things what they are—as the copies of the former. Like Plato, Mahayanaž Buddhism insists that everything in this world is mutable, transient, and subject to time and to change. Unlike Plato, however, Mahayana Buddhism does not expound the existence of an immutable, eternal, and transcendent realm beyond this world. There is nothing eternal, transcendent , and real behind or beyond this transitory world. In spite of the fact that the human intellect desires and expects to find the existence of an immutable, eternal, and transcendent world beyond this mutable, temporary, and immanent world, if we are to awaken to the ultimate reality we must overcome such a dualistic way of thinking. What is real in Mahayana Buddhism is not eternal, self-existing “forms” but źśūnyatāŻ, which literally means “emptiness,” and which is without any form whatsoever…. For Plato this actual world perceived by our senses is a perpetual flow of everchanging appearances of which no real knowledge is possible. It is the world of earthly phenomena, a mutable and unreal shadow play. Plato arrived at the theory of forms in an attempt to determine the real nature of moral goodness which, according to Socrates, is the same for all. Since only by really knowing goodness can one become truly a good man, it became a serious problem to know the true and unchangeable reality of things. In this connection, Plato employed the Pythagorean doctrine that the soul can realize its divinity and contemplate eternal numerical truth that transcends our sense perception.14 Thus Plato’s theory of forms might be said to be motivated by the problem of moral goodness and the problem of knowing reality. He insisted that “there certainly are self-existent forms unperceived by sense, and apprehended only...