Review

Reviewed Work(s): Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan
Tradition. by Bernard Faure
Review by: Joseph S. O'Leary
Source: Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 48, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 521-526
Published by: Sophia University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2385307
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 BOOK REVIEWS 521

unfortunately the last three of these terms do not seem to appear in the text again and
are certainly not applied to the descriptive presentation of examples.
The handling of Japanese sources is also not without problems. Readers will find it
difficult, if not impossible, to locate the sources on which many discussions are based.
At other points, it seems that what the author says is in both primary and secondary
sources is in fact not there. I was struck by the observation that in 1060 Kofukuji
issued 'a prohibition against killing deer and other animals on the grounds of the cultic
center, even if the killing was done for the purpose of making an offering to the kami'
(p. 78). Grapard takes this to indicate that deer were sacrificed at Kasuga prior to
this.
The note at the end of the paragraph refers readers to Miyai Yoshio, Fujiwara-shi
no Ujigami-Ujidera Shinko to Somyo Saishi, 1978, p. 380. The prior page quotes a
document issued by Kofukuji in 1060 and I can only assume this is the text in question.
Although the text says that the envoy to the Kasuga Festival and his party could not eat
fish or fowl in the area, there is no reference to deer. Reference is also made to an
earlier prohibition, dated to 863, against taking life in the area, although here too there
is no mention of deer or sacrifice. But then perhaps this is not the source of the
author's discussion?
Despite its problems, this book is in many ways a splendid achievement. For years
many have been struck by a sense of incongruity regarding the gap between the seem-
ing richness and complexity of the Japanese religious tradition and the often dry,
uninspired treatment of this tradition in Western languages. Grapard's book is one of
a growing number of works gradually rectifying this situation. His approach allows
not only for an appreciation of the richness and interrelation of symbolic mediums
such as myth, ritual, architecture, and landscape, but also for an integration of these
elements in the social, political, and economic dimensions of Japanese life. While
there is much here that is imprecise and merely suggestive, there is also much worthy of
emulation.
RICHARD A. GARDNER
Sophia University

Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradi-

tion. By Bernard Faure. Princeton University Press, 1993. viii + 332 pages.
$45.00.

IT was inevitable that poststructuralist theory would sooner or later penetrate Zen
studies. Now that the inevitable has come to pass, in the person of Bernard Faure, all
Zen scholars will have to revise their hermeneutics in light of his The Rhetoric of
Immediacy, 1991, and its sequel here reviewed. These are significant books: they ar-
ticulate the original insights that contemporary intellectual culture can bring to Zen,
but they also betray characteristic blind spots of this culture. Faure has mastered a vast
literature and every page he writes is bursting with ideas. He wants to open 'the field of
Chan/Zen studies to the questions raised in other academic disciplines' and he does so
with the greatest aplomb. But his ulterior aim of 'bringing Chan/Zen closer to the
mainstream of Western thought' (p. 3) is less happily conceived. There is a dimension
of Zen that contradicts this mainstream as a challenge to Western rationalism.
This is scarcely allowed to emerge in Faure's busy methodological revisionism.

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522 Monumenta Nipponica, 48:4

What is disturbing about the present book is the possibility that it may mark the
opening of a new epoch in Zen studies, their 'coming of age' as a thoroughly
positivistic discipline. It seems that Faure regards any discussion of Zen in terms of
religion or spirituality as 'Suzuki-ism' and 'Orientalist' mystification. In the Zen
studies he envisages there is a danger that the spiritual and physical reality of Zen will
be reduced to a rhetorical and ideological 'reality-effect'.
The first part of the book describes the gradual sighting and constitution of Zen as
an object of study in recent centuries and criticizes the Orientalism that has shaped Zen
studies, so as to overcome the contradictions of a 'discourse that represses its own
historicity' (p. 5). I wonder whether the monitory value of this critique of Western
Orientalism is all that great; perhaps a deeper source of misunderstanding of Zen, in
the past and today, is simply Western rationalism. Faure's critique of Zen studies
seems to entail a rationalist hermeneutic of suspicion directed at Zen itself, one that
leaves little room for a hermeneutic of reappropriation. He pulls down three pillars by
which Zen stands or falls, namely, the notions of (1) tradition, (2) spiritual enlighten-
ment, and (3) truth.
(1) Faure notes 'a continuity between Chan and Zen', but points out that 'there are
many historical, cultural, and doctrinal differences as well, and these differences are
not merely superficial: they would surely affect the "essence" of Zen, if this term had
any referent' (p. 3). His stress on the variety of Zen languages and cultures is welcome,
as is his dynamic conception of tradition: 'Tradition is not a clearly defined,
ahistorical, entity: if it exists at all outside the mind of a few people, it is as a fluid
network of relationships, an ongoing process' (p. 121). His dismantling of the 'white
metaphor' of tradition, which imposes an idealized homogeneity on history, masking
its contingencies and discontinuities, opens up the possibility of bringing out the
heterological, nomadic or 'interstitial' dimensions of the Zen story (p. 9). It is odd that
he makes no reference to one feature of the tradition that could temper his radical anti-
essentialism, namely, the physical basis of Zen practice. This gives the Zen tradition a
continuity comparable to the continuity of swimming throughout the centuries. There
may be a great variety in the ideology of swimming, the images and rhetoric associated
with it, the way in which swimming races are organized, the variety of strokes and
methods, but none of this takes away from the essential identity of the practice.
One could say that Zen reinvents the Buddhist tradition as Augustine or Luther
reinvents the Christian one, and that in this sense there is no invariant essence running
throughout Buddhist history. But does this undercut the historical phenomenon of the
transmission of Buddhist wisdom? The dependence of Zen on what went before is as
obvious as that of Christian theology on the Bible or Western intellectualism on the
Greeks. Zen invention is not ex nihilo, but draws on the abundance of the tradition in
a sophisticated way. Such spiritual or theological creativity, sustained by tradition, is
not given due recognition by Faure, who 'explains' Zen discourse in sociological,
psychological, or literary critical categories.
Faure's demonstration that the Zen tradition is a fictional construct might claim to
be an enactment of Buddhism, dissolving illusory 'self-nature' and uncovering 'emp-
tiness'. But would not such a Buddhist hermeneutic reinstate the Zen tradition as a
'skilful means' at the level of 'conventional truth'? If Faure 'stops short of dissolving
it into pure ideological discourse-a Buddhist emptiness of sorts,' and retains Zen
as 'a specific, tangible object of study', it is because he needs it as a juicy target

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 BOOK REVIEWS 523

for deconstructive exercises: 'the deconstructive or performative/rhetorical level of

discourse needs a metaphysical or hermeneutical level on which to operate.' Zen tradi-
tion is essentially a congeries of illusory, ideological constructions: Suzuki's mythical
Zen-ideology is itself 'part of the reality it distorts' and well represents the way that
'the tradition itself emerged from the repeated distortion of previous distortions' (p.
271).
(2). No credence is given to the idea that the Zen tradition, in all its fragility, is a ve-
hicle for attaining and transmitting spiritual enlightenment. The only enlightenment
Faure seems to recognize is rational insight; to which the only alternative is irra-
tionalism. He repeats Mauss's critique of James: 'this theory of religious experience,
as source of religion, considers only states rarely given, exceptional, that is, in last
analysis, it rests on a pathological religious psychology' (p. 79). To equate rarity with
pathology is to discount the experiences of samadhi or prajnia on which the intelligi-
bility of Buddhism largely rests. Again, does the fact that 'there are no pure (i.e.
unmediated) experiences' (p. 78) disqualify the basic thrust of Zen toward experiential
immediacy? A hermeneutics of Zen experience must of course be aware of contextual
mediations, but these do not diminish the immediacy claimed for this experience, any
more than the impossibility of isolating pure sense data diminishes the immediacy of
pain when we put our hand in the fire.
Faure accuses Suzuki of believing in 'a facile "fusion of horizons" ' (p. 113), and
'speaking from within the discursive arena opened by Western Orientalism' (p. 53).
His 'na(t)ivism' was a 'secondary Orientalism': 'He simply inverted the old schemas to
serve his own purposes' (p. 64). Suzuki's critique of positivism is 'only' an expression
of a 'discourse of modernity'. It resembles Heidegger's attitude to the human sciences,
and 'it may partly explain why the German philosopher saw in the Japanese scholar an
intellectual (or rather anti-intellectual) guide (maltre a penser or perhaps a ne pas
penser)' (p. 90). For an adequate hermeneutics of the Zen tradition, there may be
much to be learned from Heidegger, and especially from his conception of tradition; it
is a pity to close off this promising Western avenue to a dialogue with Zen.
The 'Suzuki effect' is explained in reductive sociological terms: 'the success of
Suzuki's work was not related to its literary or philosophical qualities; it was rather
the result of a historical conjuncture that prompted the emergence in the West of
a positive modality of Orientalist discourse' (p. 54). Faure sees Suzuki's thinking
as 'ideologically flawed, informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his
sectarian affiliations' (p. 54). He notes that 'the appeal to the "pure" tradition, to
the "essence" of Zen, is a sectarian attitude,' and concludes that 'the assumption
that there is an "essence" of Buddhism, a kind of perennial Dharma to which only
"authentic" masters would have access, is to be rejected as ideologically suspect' (p.
57). But can one not try to sift the truth of what Suzuki is saying from its 'suspect'
forms of expression? The old warhorse, Hu Shih, is put forward as a more progressive
thinker than the 'traditionalist' Suzuki. A fuller account of Suzuki's reply to Hu's
criticisms might show that Suzuki was not entirely bereft of a critical historical sense
and that Hu's pretention to superior historical insight was rather condescending. Is
there a real contradiction between Suzuki's stress on the 'ahistorical nature of Zen'
and his explanation of the uniqueness of Zen through its historical development (p. 65)?
Does the ahistorical nature of Plotinus's One contradict the historical uniqueness of
the emergence of the idea of the One? Faure's eagerness to see Suzuki's work as a mass

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524 Monumenta Nipponica, 48:4

of contradictions-motivated by 'a situational reflex to "cash in" on both sides of

every issue' (p. 65)-arouses the reader's suspicion; I would wish to see the point
demonstrated in a close reading of the texts.
Rudolf Otto and Heinrich Dumoulin are characterized as 'followers of Suzuki-ism'
(p. 64), as if only the bad influence of Suzuki could 'explain' why these scholars saw a
numinous dimension in Zen! Dumoulin is accused of 'reductionism'-a misuse of this
word-on the basis of the statement that 'as a mystical phenomenon, the satori ex-
perience is imperfect' (p. 64). Faure notes, 'the recurrence of a certain Orientalist
"esprit simpliste" in the interstices of Nishida's complex thought,' but he does little to
undo simplistic stereotypes when he talks of a 'Nishida effect' and states that
'Nishida's disciples have merely amplified tendencies already present in his work' (p.
75). This does no justice to the originality of Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji. The
recent discussion of these thinkers could modify the judgment that the Christian and
philosophical dialogues with Zen have been 'rather sterile' (p. 85).
Stressing the agonistic character of Zen writings, directed against the routinization
of the tradition, Faure calls for a performative scholarship that can match this dimen-
sion of Zen. 'Many Chan texts still refer to a primordial truth, a perennial Dharma to
which the adept must conform,' but the best Zen writing moves 'toward a perfor-
mative conception of truth' (p. 147). This distinction between 'logocentric' and
'differential' Zen permits a hermeneutic retrieval of the radicality of Zen, overcoming
its occultation within the Zen tradition itself. But what is Zen radicality about? Faure
refers to 'a kind of weightlessness, a feeling of elation' (p. 149), which may suggest a
postmodern lightness of being rather than a rooted spirituality. Perhaps it is not so
'unfortunate' that 'this feeling has not yet had a chance to pervade Chan/Zen
scholarship' (p. 150).
(3) Faure has little time for the idea of tradition as the transmission of truth: 'truth
turns out to be, in Nietzsche's famous words, "a mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms-in short, a sum of human relations, which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which
after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people" ' (p. 90). If there is no
more to Zen truth than that, then Zen is an ideological construct to be dismantled, not a
precious tradition that communicates truths of great importance for human existence.
Still, the main emphasis in Faure's writing falls on the more promising topic of the
performative and historically embedded character of truth. 'Chan discourse is not
simply reflecting reality or expressing truths; it is actively producing them' (p. 149).
This insight could bring about a refinement and revitalization of Zen studies, and even
a more effective practice of Zen, but this is thrown away if we ascribe no definite goal
to Zen practice, seeing it as based more on intellectual agility than on attunement to
the real. Even if Zen is seen as something as free as an artistic tradition, there is an
element within which such a tradition moves, a certain constant concern, that needs to
be focused.
In the second half of the book Faure does attempt a redescription of Chan, taking
up the themes of time, space, language, writing, and selfhood: 'Much of Chan
discourse can be explained in terms of the emergence (followed by slow erosion and
reinscription) of a new epistemological configuration marked by a certain dialectic of
orality and literacy, a homogenization of space and time that gives primacy to spatial
and visual imagery, and a predominance of rhetoric over hermeneutic' (p. 272).

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 BOOK REVIEWS 525

Faure's comparisons of Chan space with Newtonian space and with the transforma-
tion of the perception of nature in nineteenth-century Japan (p. 162) obscure the
phenomenon named in utterances such as: 'My body is empty and I see myself as no
different from you: how could you destroy emptiness, or destroy yourself' (p. 163), or
'The unlocalized is your mind' (p. 165). It is misleading to describe this as 'a clean,
abstract space that could ideally be embraced at one glance' (p. 166) or to equate 'the
clear, haughty vision of the enlightened mind' with 'an almost Voltairian perception
of reality' (p. 167), sweeping away the opaque mediations of Chinese cults. The slip-
page here from spiritual freedom to a philosophical worldview, from enlightenment to
Aufklarung, misses the point of the spatial metaphors in Zen. The conclusion that
Chan masters 'idealized space as something "beyond any viewpoint, any latency, any
depth, without any true thickness" (Merleau-Ponty)' depends on an equation of Zen
space-the emptiness that is the goal of meditative striving-with the unquestioned
frame of everyday inauthentic perception in the modern West.
Dismissing Heideggerians who make Dogen an 'existentialist'-an account that does
not do justice to such a work as Joan Stambaugh's Impermanence Is Buddha-nature,
1990-Faure (himself a leading translator of Dogen) reduces the Zen master's thought
to a crude Parmenidism: 'Dogen stresses the immutability of things: "As the time right
now is all there ever is, each being-time is without exception entire time.... Entire be-
ing, the entire world, exists in the time of each and every now" ' (p. 190); 'the apparent
changes in our environment mask a fundamental immobility' (p. 264). Surely the point
is rather to awaken us to a demystified assumption of full present reality-the whole
world is right now! To say that 'Dogen substituted permanence for impermanence'
(p. 190) hardly does justice to his subtle dialectic of permanence and impermanence,
calculated to send us back to the present lived in whole-hearted practice. To cap all
this, Faure quotes Ernst Bloch: 'The primacy of space over time characterizes reac-
tionary language.' Any old slogan will do to beat a Dogen!
On the relation between Zen and language, Faure states: Chan 'was first and
foremost a discourse on practice and a discursive practice' (p. 195). He sees this
discourse as a matter of political strategies, rather than as concerned with doing justice
to spiritual reality: 'the denial of language and its "homeopathic" use appear to play
rather ambiguous roles in sectarian strategies' (p. 201).
Several Chan figures saw poetry as an upaya, 'a means for both the believer to get
closer to reality and the Bodhisattva to convey the truth to others' (p. 206), and 'the
equation between Chan and poetry became a commonplace in Japan' (p. 209). The ten-
sion between this and the apophatic attitude is resolved by the claim that 'live poetry is
a poetry the language of which is no longer language' (p. 211). Faure does not advert
to the strong resonances between these thoughts and Heidegger's meditations on
poetic language. Instead he discusses koan in terms of Lyotard's idea that 'to speak is
to fight . . . and language acts belong to a general agonistic,' and suggests that lesser
Chan masters were 'psychologically empowered by their confrontations with novices'
(p. 213).
'To what extent can the emergence of Chan be seen as that of a new (conception of
the) self?' (p. 243). An elaborate discussion of the history of selfhood East and West
arrives at Zen from a Foucauldian angle: 'The fact that a few rugged "individuals"
denounced this logic [whereby according to Foucault the individual is an effect of
power relationships] within Buddhism does not preclude the possibility that the Chan/

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526 Monumenta Nipponica, 48:4

Zen individualization process may by and large have served the growth of power re-
lationships' (p. 258). Certainly, Zen selfhood is historically and culturally inscribed:
but is this the central issue? Again, is meditation only 'a disciplinary mise au pas
of recalcitrant minds and bodies or conventional selves, in the name of a greater-and
forever elusive-self' (p. 259)? In Zen monasteries, as in the panoptical prisons of
Foucault's Discipline and Punish, the constant scrutiny exacerbates the monks's sense
of guilt and subjectivity (p. 260). Can we see monastic life as only a fascist indoctrina-
tion, ignoring the testimony of monks to the spiritual freedom they have found? I
doubt whether such phenomena can be fully accounted for in terms of an opposition
between individual spontaneity and institutional control.
Zen scholars will learn much from Faure's suggestions for new approaches to their
specializations. Indeed they are under an obligation to explore the perspectives that he
has opened up. But their and our loss will be great if they abandon the primary
ermeneutical challenge, that of translating into the language of today the prajfia-in-
sight which is the heart of Zen and which is what most makes its study worthwhile.

JOSEPH S. O'LEARY
Sophia University

Eloquent Zen: Daito and Early Japanese Zen. By Kenneth Kraft. University of
Hawaii Press, 1992. 268 pages. $34.00.

To be Japanese seems to be a search for identity by looking into the mirror of an

culture. There may be no mirror at all; it could be more like catching one's reflect
a window of a dimly lit room as one peers outside. How much of the window is sim
the proverbial island mentality, stimulating leisured reflection about whatever was
ashore; how much is siege mentality, necessitating panicked scrutiny of whatever
challenges the ramparts?
These are typical anthropological questions-but what happens when a Japanese
viewer engages in seeking identity through a largely foreign religious experience, for
instance, Ch'an Buddhist realization newly imported during the Kamakura period?
This is an experience with a goal not only of transforming or dissolving self-identity,
but also with such possible results as dissolving the act of comparing to an other. Once
such a process begins, it can take with it much of one's past structure of symbolizing
and may also begin to challenge a new creativity within a fluid universe where all
referents can quite easily turn into symbols.
Here begins the fascinating tale of Shiho Myocho, 1282-1337, one of the first great
actors in the drama of nativization of Lin-chi Ch'an in Japan, and the subject of Ken-
neth Kraft's study, Eloquent Zen. Shuiho, better known by the posthumously awarded
imperial title Daito Kokushi, was an actor whose ultimate review would come 450
years later, from an even greater one, Hakuin Ekaku, 1685-1768, the formulator of
current Rinzai practice. Hakuin characterized Daito as 'Japan's most poisonous
flower'. This was certainly praise of the highest order in suggesting that Daito's efforts
enticed the native mentality into Zen practice, often to overwhelm the practitioner to
stimulate numerous opportunities for realization (satori). But it could just as well have
suggested prophetically that the brilliance of Daito's efforts was limited largely to his

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