Engaging Japanese Philosophy: A Short History by Thomas P. Kasulis (review)

If you have not already done so, read this book. Especially if you are interested in philosophy, or Japan. And whether you are a specialist in Japanese philosophy or not. Though not necessarily in one sitting; most of you will want to take your time with it. (At 750 pages, the subtitle can only be ironic, even given that it covers fourteen centuries.) I can't argue that it's a quick read, but it is engaging—to employ the vernacular meaning side of the philosophical term of the title—and at times it's downright entertaining, particularly some of the biographies and certainly the author's personal experiences (regrettably, fewer than this reader would have liked). It seamlessly integrates political history, cultural history, biography, and philosophy with the views of major (and dozens of minor) philosophers and the most important currents of Japanese philosophy (including Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto, and over the past century or more, various schools of Western philosophy) and the work by individual philosophers. The text is supplemented by black and white photographs (of gardens, architecture, paintings, and sculpture); diagrams (Four Views of Relations, 26; Philosophical Themes Built on Internal Relations, 28; Reality as External Relations, 32; Internally Related Whole and Holographic Whole, 33; Identity without Substance, 184; Self ("I") and Amida according to Shinran, 195); one chart of the Buddhist schools, their texts, and general orientation, 94; and sketches of Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō.

Kasulis is not only a deeply knowledgeable and insightful philosopher, but a wonderful writer, easy on the ear, with a conversational style and a gift for clarity regardless of the abstruseness of the ideas presented. And to engage with the thinkers Kasulis has chosen for in-depth analysis, Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō—to engage with Kasulis himself, as he allows us to do—is to remember why one cares about philosophy in the first place.

What Does This Book Do?

This book does seven things. First, though it is not exhaustive, it provides a survey of Japanese philosophy, introducing readers to fourteen hundred years of major schools and over a hundred thinkers, covering seven or eight of them in depth and with reference to a large number of themes, especially those related to his main argument (see number six below), themes including engagement, knowledge, action, language and translation, being, nothingness/emptiness, transience/death/suffering, and others. As the current worldwide popularity of some forms of Buddhism suggests, many of these issues are as alive today as they ever were—perhaps more as we find ourselves in the midst of a pandemic. Reading the book and writing this review during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself—I can only say—grateful for the opportunity to reconnect through Kasulis's findings with Buddhist texts, philosophers, and ideas I have long been familiar with but now find more pertinent, useful, comprehensible, and insightful. Revealing implicit unities within Japanese philosophy (361), Engaging Japanese Philosophy (hereafter EJP) explores the work not just as individual bodies of thought but as an organic set of often-integrated movements (though not all the thinkers were aware of each other). At the same time, it does justice to the disagreements, divergences, and disjunctures within Japanese philosophy. Those who seek either such an overall view or an in-depth study of certain components will find it welcome and, for a history of philosophy, unusually easy to use.

Second, it provides an introduction to Japanese culture, expanding on much of the work Kasulis did in his 1981 Zen Person, Zen Action; his 2002 Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference; and his 2004 Shinto: The Way Home (all University of Hawai'i Press). As a professor not only of philosophy but of...