Visions of Power: Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism

Reviewed by Frank J. Hoffman

Asian Philosophy

Vol.7 No.3

Pp.237-239

Nov, 1997

COPYRIGHT 1997 Journals Oxford Ltd. (UK)

            The position of the reviewer of books is paradoxical. At once the 
            reviewer is supposed to be in a privileged position vis-a-vis the 
            object of study and at the same time a 'learner' who keeps up with 
            the field. In extreme cases, reviewers sometimes pose as knowing 
            more than the author being reviewed, but that they are so learned 
            could seldom be true in view of the submersion in the material 
            required to write even a competent, let alone a brilliant work. 
            The work at hand, Visions of Power, is a brilliant one; even a 
            cursory look could tell that without prior knowledge of the author's 
            other impressive works. In an erudite translation by Phyllis Brooks, 
            Visions explores the mental universe or imaginare of Soto Zen 
            Buddhist master, Keizan Jokin (1268-1325), through a postmodernist 
            lens that focuses on The Record of Tokoku (Keizan's chronicle of the 
            founding of monasteries) and kirigami (secret initiation documents). 
            

            Dreams are central to this work, and Keizan's understanding of them 
            as explicated by Faure is as an opportunity for awakening, a window 
            on the truly real. Unlike in Tibetan use of dreams, Keizan does not 
            try to control and eventually dissolve dreams. Instead, dreams are 
            revelatory of a divine other or others, and as such, are in the 
            realm of 'other power' (jiriki) rather than of 'self-power' 
            (tariki). One might say that, in Keizan, dreams are, in two senses 
            'self-authenticating' - both in themselves and as vehicles to 
            justify claims of patriarchal power. Although the depths of the 
            epistemological problematic hidden in the former sense of 
            'self-authenticating' are not explored in Keizan, the use of dreams 
            in real politick is both transparent and sophisticated. There dreams 
            have an analogous function to that of icons and relics. Besides 
            providing the reader with a detailed treatment of both process and 
            product - of an analysis of five steps in the process of animating 
            Buddhist icons and of the technicalities of Japanese icons and 
            relics - Faure is equally able as a theoretician to draw on C. S. 
            Pierce to explicate the niceties of sign, symbol, and icon. 
            Overall the work disentangles three levels: theoretical, practical 
            (which contradicts it), and the collusion of these. It would thus 
            not be inaccurate to see a large scale Marxian 
            thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis frame as the canvas on which Faure 
            depicts, with illuminating levels of detail here and there, a 
            postmodernist vision of Keizan's power. Some fine brush-work emerge 
            in areas that are theoretically-nuanced by turns with 
            Wittgensteinian, Freudian, and gender-based thinking. Since Faure's 
            conclusion self-reflectively relativises his own work, it is 
            difficult to say what claim to truth is really made by the volume. 
            Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn in a bygone era proclaimed that truth 
            and beauty are all we know 'on Earth' and all we need to know. In 
            Faure one finds a more complex, if at times unsettling, picture. In 
            Faure's eyes one sees in Keizan more a grandiose imagining 
            facilitating self-aggrandisement in a 'no self' Buddhist world than 
            simple truth, and more 'ash icons' than pristine beauty. Especially 
            after Faure, it is difficult to view Buddhism innocently. 
            Yet there are worlds within worlds. Faure himself has created an 
            imaginare with no' clear criteria of truth. "Keizan," Faure writes, 
            is "a figment of my imagination" - only a name for what is 
            reconstructed "on the basis of scanty documents". Whatever truth 
            there is in the reconstruction is said to be "mingled with the 
            personal mythology of me, the author". Such a predicament brings to 
            the fore essential contradictions within the postmodernist 
            hermeneutic, which, in the guise of humility is proud, and in 
            seeming not to assert, asserts all the more strongly in a way which 
            seems irrefutable because self-aware. It would be unfair to lay such 
            problems at Faure's feet in particular, and yet it is clear that he 
            bears some responsibility for executing the template so well. 
            Visions of Power is a work that repays careful inspection on several 
            levels, but it has no more to say to the reader jaded by the 
            postmodernist sensibility than any other such work. In seeing the 
            work as such, one is paying it the same compliment Faure paid to 
            Keizan by seeing him as representative of culture and of Soto 
            paradoxes.