Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought: Mortality in Traditional Chinese Thought

Ten: Linji and William James on Mortality: Two Visions of Pragmatism

TEN LINJI AND WILLIAM JAMES ON MORTALITY Two Visions of Pragmatism Tao Jiang Buddhist teachings have often been interpreted as pragmatic, and there seems to be a prima facie similarity between certain strands of Buddhism and American pragmatism in that both seek to address the world as it is experienced and both advocate a nonfoundationalist philosophy geared toward results. Such similarities make potential cross-cultural fertilization a promising and exciting philosophical endeavor. However, different traditions can exhibit drastically different sensitivities toward certain experiences, and one advantage of comparative study is to help highlight and bring into sharper focus some taken-for-granted premises within a system, challenge the traditions involved to rethink their project, and enrich the parties involved by expanding their horizons and sensitivities. A case in point is the topic of mortality. Death is a subject that is front and center in almost all schools of Buddhism as it occupies an important place in the Buddhist diagnosis of the nature of existence as suffering. In contrast, the subject does not seem to have garnered a similar kind of attention within the classical pragmatist tradition. Maybe it is because death constitutes the ultimate limit of experience, hence rendering it an impossible target for an experience-based philosophical inquiry. Or, perhaps in American culture there is simply a division of labor such that this subject is left to various religious traditions, most of which transform the problem 249 250 TAO JIANG of death into the promise of a life to come, which some might see as subverting the very nature of the question of mortality. However, William James stands out among his fellow pragmatists in that he explicitly takes up the issue of death and struggles with it in his works, especially later in his life. His writings offer a unique and precious opportunity to examine a pragmatist perspective on mortality and immortality and to engage the Buddhist on this subject. Such a comparative endeavor promises to be revealing in terms of exposing the fundamental difference between these two traditions, which share a pragmatic inclination on many other issues; this is indeed what I hope to accomplish in this essay. On the Buddhist side, I will use the teachings of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist Linji 臨濟, who lived in ninth-century China and is best known for using mindboggling pedagogical devices known as gong’an (J. Kōan) 公案 to instruct his disciples. I will look into what issues motivate James and Linji in their confrontations with mortality, how those issues are formulated, and why they are important to them respectively and comparatively. In covering the what, how, and why through contextualization and recontextualization in my study of James and Linji, I hope that this comparative context can shed new light on both thinkers in regard to their responses to human mortality and desire for immortality, as well as to the traditions they represent. I will make the case that the motivating drive for James in his struggle with mortality and immortality is his hope to accommodate a whole host of human experiences, as well as the various modes of experience, while seeking to promote people’s spiritual and ethical well-being; on the contrary, Linji questions the variety of modes of experience in implicating the problematic role of a reifying mind in those experiences and confronts ignorance and attachment in his teachings with the hope of bringing our confused, chaotic, and ignorant mind into a state of clarity, peace, and enlightenment. Furthermore, James’s approach to the problem of mortality and immortality is fundamentally metaphysical, whereas Linji’s is primarily metapractical. Let us start with James’s treatment of the subject in his lecture “Human Immortality,” delivered as part of the Ingersoll lecture series at Harvard in 1898.1 WILLIAM JAMES ON MORTALITY AND IMMORTALITY James begins his lecture “Human Immortality” with the acknowledgment that “[i]mmortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man” (2). In a number of respects, this acknowledgment sets the tone for his subsequent deliberations ; that is, people have a spiritual need for immortality, even though he confesses that “my own personal feeling about immortality has never been of the keenest order, and that, among the problems that give my mind 251 LINJI AND WILLIAM JAMES ON MORTALITY solicitude, this one does not take the very foremost place” (2). In other words, his motivation in considering this subject is not primarily personal, at...