Merleau-ponty and Buddhism

by Park, Jin Y.; Kopf, Gereon; Berman, Michael P.; Brubaker, David; Cipriani, Gerald; Goulding, Jay; Kim, Hyong-hyo; Kopf, Gereon; Mazis, Glen A.; Nagatomo, Shigenori; Olson, Carl; Stevens, Bernard; Toru, Funaki; Ziporyn, Brook

• ISBN13: 9780739118252
• ISBN10: 0739118250
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-13
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism explores a new mode of philosophizing through a comparative study of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and philosophies of major Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna, Chinul, Dogen, Shinran, and Nishida Kitaro. Challenging the dualistic paradigm of existing philosophical traditions, Merleau-Ponty proposes a philosophy in which the traditional opposites are encountered through mutual penetration. Likewise, a Buddhist worldview is articulated in the theory of dependent co-arising, or the middle path, which comprehends the world and beings in the third space, where the subject and the object, or eternalism and annihilation, exist independent of one another. The thirteen essays in this volume explore this third space in their discussions of Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the intentional arc, the flesh of the world, and the chiasm of visibility in connection with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and the five aggregates, the Tiantai Buddhist concept of threefold truth, Zen Buddhist huatou meditation, the invocation of the Amida Buddha in True Pure Land Buddhism, and Nishida's concept of basho.

Author Biography

Jin Y. Park is associate professor of philosophy and religion at American University. Gereon Kopf is associate professor of religion at Luther College.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	p. vii
Credits	p. ix
Introduction: Philosophy, Nonphilosophy, and Comparative Philosophy	p. 1
Body: Self in the Flesh of the World	p. 15
Merleau-Pontean "Flesh"and Its Buddhist Interpretation	p. 17
Merleau-Ponty's Theory of the Body and the Doctrine of the Five Skandhas	p. 45
How the Tree Sees Me: Sentience and Insentience in Tiantai and Merleau-Ponty	p. 61
The Human Body as a Boundary Symbol: A Comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Dogen	p. 83
Space: Thinking and Being in the Chiasm of Visibility	p. 95
The Double: Merleau-Ponty and Chinul on Thinking and Questioning	p. 97
The Notion of the "Words that Speak the Truth" in Merleau-Ponty and Shinran	p. 113
Self in Space: Nishida Philosophy and Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty	p. 133
Merleau-Ponty, Cezanne, and the Basho of the Visible	p. 141
"Place of Nothingness" and the Dimension of Visibility: Nishida, Merleau-Ponty, and Huineng	p. 155
The World: Ethics of Emptiness, Ethics of the Flesh	p. 181
The Flesh of the World Is Emptiness and Emptiness Is the Flesh of the World, and Their Ethical Implications	p. 183
Merleau-Ponty and Nagarjuna: Enlightenment, Ethics, and Politics	p. 209
Ki-Energy: Underpinning Religion and Ethics	p. 229
Merleau-Ponty and Asian Philosophy: The Double Walk of Buddhism and Daoism	p. 241
Notes	p. 255
Glossary of East Asian Characters	p. 283
Bibliography	p. 391
Index	p. 301
About the Contributors	p. 309
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