.
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The aboriginal saving experience sought and celebrated in
Buddhism, particularly Hua-yen Buddhism, has been expressed
in the strategies of Buddhist philosophy as developed in an
accumulating tradition centuries old. But perhaps not well,
not without unnecessary paradox, not without misleading
speculations and practical consequences. The philosophical
strategies of Whitehead's revolution within Western
philosophy are more apt for the presentation of Buddhist
experience, strange as it may seem. Yet there are notorious
difficulties with Whitehead's position, particularly with
that part of his position dealing with the theistic God. An
attempt to do justice to Buddhist experience leads to a
correction of Whitehead's theory, And so a new system
developed from certain roots of process philosophy can serve
as the speculative vehicle for an appreciation of Buddhist
experience. Such is the thesis of Steve Odin's Process
Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of
Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration, a brilliant
first book by a young scholar whose synthesizing erudition
and speculative imagination are unparalleled in his
generation, to my knowledge.(1)
The first and most essential element of system is that it
be able to do many different things, consistently, at once.
Odin's tasks are to appreciate Buddhist experience and
philosophy, to express them for his audience pretty much in
Buddhist terms, then to reexpress them in terms likely to be
familiar to the audience, and relate these to the first
expressions, to construct a platform for critical analysis
that respects the integrity of Buddhism, to exposit and
criticize Whitehead's philosophy from a position that allows
for selective appropriation, to show how reconstructed
process philosophy expresses Buddhist experience and does so
better than equally abstract and categoreal Buddhist
philosophy, and then to confirm the worth of the whole
enterprise by showing how it puts many problematic elements
into place. His book does this with genius.
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Odin's first task as a Western scholar is to create a
recognizable entry into the Buddhist world. There is no
fool-proof way to do this, since any Asian scholar who
disagrees with a Westerner's opinion can always say the
latter suffers from cultural or linguistic ignorance for
which there is never a sufficient remedy. Odin weaves his
Buddhist fabric from a wide variety of Asian texts and
traditions, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese, Yogacara and
Tantric as well as Hua-yen. The cloth hangs together without
obscuring differences and inconsistencies (although the
latter are not much explored) . Odin's distinctive
contribution to Buddhist expression, however, is the creative
use of Korean Buddhism. The book begins with Odin's
translation from the Chinese of the "Ocean Seal" of Uisang
(625-702), First Patriarch of Korean Hua-yen Buddhism; the
"Ocean Seal" is a compressed epitome of Hua-yen doctrine.
Uisang's own commentary on the seal is translated at the end
of the volume in an appendix. Throughout the book Korean
figures such as Wonhyo (617-686) and Chinul(1150-1210) are
analyzed as primary interpreters of Buddhism, thus helping to
make public in the contemporary world the profound
contribution of Korean Buddhism. (Odin's translations and
interpretations of Korean Buddhism were supervised by
Professor Sung-bae Park to whom the volume is dedicated.(2))
The inner argument of Odin's book is in three main parts:
(I) "The Hua-yen Round-Sudden Vehicle of Non-Obstructed
Interpenetration," (II) "A Whiteheadian Process Critique of
Hua-yen Buddhism, " and (III) "Theology of the Deep
Unconscious: A Reconstruction of Process Theology."
I.
Part I, in its first chapter, provides an historical
introduction to Hua-yen Buddhism as an attempt to harmonize
all Mahayana Buddhist schools of its time within its own
doctrine of interpenetration; Odin discusses Chinese, Korean
and Japanese developments of Hua-yen. Chapter Two focuses on
a philosophical analysis of intercausation and
interpenetration, dealing most particularly with Fa-tsang,
the most famous teacher of this school. The center of Odin's
analysis is Hua-yen's four-fold dharmadhatu: of shih ("the
world of mutually exclusive particulars"), of li ("the
all-embracing universal
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reality"), of li and shih ("the unhindered interfusion of
universal with particular"), and of shih and shih ("the
unhindered interfusion of particular with particular") which
is the special contribution of Hua-yen (pp. 18 ff). This
chapter introduces a crucial conceptual tool of the book, the
ti-yung or essence-function construction according to which
each particular, being both essence and function, is a
microcosm of any larger unit, or of the universe.(3) Chapter
Three illustrates the symmetrical interpenetration of all
things through the linguistic device of the interpenetration
of all meanings, using the philosophical strategies of
linguistic analysis pioneered in this field by Frederick J.
Streng.(4) In the second and third chapters Odin is careful
to point out that the symmetry required of mutual penetration
may hold in "ideal" affairs such as language, but may not
hold for spatiotemporal physical events.
Chapter Four is presented as one of the main dialectical
engines of the book. Its point is to use the categories and
insights of the Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenologies
(with an emphasis on Gestalt psychology) to explicate the
character of experience in Hua-yen. Unlike most Heidegger
commentators who make him smaller in order to be understood
in pre-accepted terms, Odin brilliantly takes Heidegger's
notions of phenomenology as "enlightening" or "lighting" or
opening to the glow and radiation of things as plainly
reflected in the radiant Buddha worlds of Mahayana. Several
years ago Thomas J. J. Altizer suggested that Buddhism,
better than the Western tradition, supplies the experience
that Whitehead explicates.(5) Now Odin makes a case that
Buddhism is a plain foundation for Heidegger's efforts. Odin
articulates certain Buddhist mental techniques as versions of
Husserlian imaginative variation, and argues that the
distinction between core and horizon is central to the
Buddhist experience. In particular, Odin likens prajna to the
noetic act which by practice of alternating one's focus on
core and horizon finally puts them in equilibrium; sunyata is
the noematic pole at which there is an openness to the
reality or irreality of all things by virtue of the arbitrary
dominance in any corehorizon structure. Odin writes:
The Hua-yen Buddhist enlightenment experience of
li-shih-wu-ai can be phenomenologically analyzed in
terms of its noetic/ noematic intentionality
structure so that prajna can be described as a
non-focal or decentered act of perceptual awareness
resulting
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from a radical reversal in the noesis, i.e., a shift
of attention from core to horizon, this being what
Heidegger terms Gelassenheit or "releasement into
openness," and sunyata is its noematic correlate,
namely, the region of openness, or the
open-dimension of the perceptual field. (p. 39)
This idea is heavily illustrated by Buddhist examples and is
developed in several dimensions. One critical point needs to
be emphasized in preparation for a later point. Throughout
the chapter Odin speaks of the gestalt as "value-laden."
Surely our own experience is value-laden, and so is the
radiant, blissful and compassionate peak experience of
Buddhism. But Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology
cannot admit that because, for both, phenomenology is
description and, for the latter, interpretation. The noetic
act of describing reduces the noematic object to a fact for
description. Were the noematic object to be a value or
value-laden, the appropriate noetic act would be
appreciation. Both Husserl and Heidegger, the former for the
sake of science and the latter in faithfulness to Nietzsche,
reject "values" and their appreciation as Romantic if not
just Bourgeoise. While correct in noting that experience,
even peak experience, is value-laden, Odin is not sensitive
to the polemic thrust of phenomenology against these
experiential elements. He struggles with this problem in an
attempt to show that Hei- degger's notions of "care" and that
of the "shepherd of being'' give rise to ethics; but the
struggle is unconvincing (pp. 47-49).
The fifth chapter interprets Hua-yen by virtue of its
connection with meditation, specifically Ch'an Buddhism. In
the meditative realm, as well as the realms of the gestalt
and the linguistic, the symmetry of interpenetration makes
good sense. Odin presents a fascinating discussion of the
Korean Buddhist Chinul who argued, somewhat unorthodoxly,
that sudden enlightenment is compatible with and may even
require further gradual practice for the attainment of
ultimate enlightenment. Chinul's theory of "nature
origination" presents a view of causation unmediated by
traditional Buddhist dependent origination, such that any
person is in very nature idential with Buddha. The point of
Chinul's doctrine was not to render an account of causation
within the material world but to stimulate salvation by an
act of "nascent faith" which realizes both identity with
Buddha and the necessity of further growth. By limiting
Chinul's claim to the soteriological realm,
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Odin prescinds from the question whether it makes
metaphysical sense; thus he removes it from any critical
force in the Whiteheadian attack on symmetrical causation.
From a soteriological point of view there can be a total
interpenetration of nascent and fullfilled Buddhas.
The upshot of Odin's Part I is a many-aspect presentation
of Hua-yen Buddhism which softens or removes any commitment
to claims that there is total interpenetration of past and
future in the temporal passage of the material world. Despite
the fact Hua-yen Buddhism asserts such temporal
interpenetration, its basic experience is about something
else, namely the ideal world.
II.
Part II of Odin's book is "A Whiteheadian Process Critique of
Hua-yen Buddhism." There are many, many points of convergence
between Whitehead's organic philosophy and the Buddhist
sensibility, and most people who know enough about both to
comment have stressed these convergences. In one fundamental
and pervasive point, however, there is direct opposition.
Broadly put, Whitehead and most process philosophers,
especially Hartshorne, argue that although the present
contains the past it does not contain the future except in
outline. Change, if it is real, consists in adding or
creating something in addition to past conditions, which
Whitehead explains with his doctrine of creativity. Most to
the point, moral responsibility depends on the possibility
that action in the present makes a difference to what will
occur, a difference that would be missing if the future were
wholly determined by the past. In other terms, human freedom
is possible if and only if the present can make a difference
to the future when the past cannot. Therefore the future
cannot wholly interpenetrate the past and present, and there
is an asymmetry to causal process. To the extent Hua-yen
Buddhism asserts a total symmetry of temporal orders, it
cannot be right.
The polemic here is that the Hua-yen Buddhist theory
of total non-obstructed interpenetration and
unhindered mutual containment with its underlying
symmetrical infrastructure has
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accounted for complete ontological togetherness,
cohesiveness and solidarity, but at the expense of
all creativeness, novelty and freedom. Each dharma
can be exhaustively factored or reductively analyzed
into its causal relations and supportive conditions
without remainder. By definition, total determinism
is entailed by such a view in that each dharma is
simply an effect of its manifold of causes: there is
no creativity, freedom or novelty. (pp. 77 f)
But of course one must ask, why believe Whitehead rather
than Hua-yen determinism? Odin offers two kinds of reasons.
The minor one is that the soteriological interests of
Buddhism would be better off with Whitehead than with its own
categories. For instance, even though the novice recognizes
an identity with Buddha, there is still more work to be done
to bring this recognition to complete fulfillment; otherwise
there would be no point to the Bodhisattva's vows. The
asymmetrical view of process accounts for this well. The
major reason to believe Whitehead, however, is that the view
is intrinsically worth adopting. Here Odin introduces his own
carefully wrought version of process philosophy, which he
calls a theory of "cumulative penetration."
Chapter 6, the first in Part II, develops the theme of
"creative synthesis and emergent novelty"; this is contrasted
with the symmetries of Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna
and Nishida.
In the final analysis, the basic discrepancy between
Hua-yen Buddhism and Whiteheadian process theory is
this: the Hua-yen principle of sunyata or universal
relativity accords a primacy to causal relatedness
in terms of a dialectical interpenetration between
the many and the one; whereas Whitehead's Category
of the Ultimate (creativity-many-one) accords a
primacy to the principle of creativity, in terms of
a cumulative penetration of manyness-into-oneness,
such that the many become one and are increased by
one. (p. 81)
Chapter 7 presents the process view in terms of the
transmission of feelings; it constitutes one of the subtlest
expositions of Whitehead I have
P.191
seen. Odin introduces the notion that asymmetry consists in a
movement from the objectivity of the past to the subjectivity
of the present. Once the present moment is finished it adds
to the objects for subsequent feeling. Odin carefully relates
this to many dimensions of Buddhist experience, with
interesting discussions of Dogen and Nishida. He derives from
Whitehead and elaborates with great force a fundamental
metaphysical principle: actuality requires limitation. Put
conversely, if everything is in everything else, nothing is
definitely actual. The most brilliant moment of Odin's book,
from a metaphysical standpoint, is the brief six page Chapter
8, "Negative Prehensions." Not only does a present actual
moment exclude the future, but it must select among and grade
the infinite potentialities presented by the past. Odin
introduces this extraordinarily subtle and technical point
from Whitehead's theory with fine rhetorical control. The
discussion recognizes the parallel Whiteheadian point, that
value is the outcome of limitation, and that an actuality is
in fact an embodiment of selective value.
Whitehead's theory of negative prehensions therefore
stands as a brilliant effort to account for the
precise manner in which some data is included and
some excluded from the creative process of
experiential synthesis, thereby presenting a scheme
adequate enough to interpret the exactitude and
uniqueness of each moment of experience, each one
having its own novel intensity of emotional tone and
qualitative immediacy. (p. 110)
The most forceful dialectical payoff of Odin's argument is
that the Buddhist experience of bliss requires just such a
metaphysical achievement of value as provided by negative
prehensions. He accounts for this with Whitehead's theory of
experience as a dipolar rendering of objective contrasts into
unified subjective immediacy.
In Chapter 9 Odin compares the attacks on "substance"
philosophy which Buddhism and process philosophy make
respectively. The former attack utilizes the symmetrical view
of relations. The latter consists in rejecting a notion of
"simple location" found in most substance theories, but
employs the claim that each actual thing has its own
creativity added to its conditions. Buddhism would call such
creativity an unacceptable "own nature." Does Whitehead's
theory of actual occasions claim that physical
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process is the only ontological reality? Justus Buchler
argued that it does and that this is a mistake.(6) Odin
adopts a view close to Buchler's in saying that while
asymmetry is the character of the causal order of actual
events there are in fact many other orders in which symmetry
of relations might be the dominant character.
In Chapter 10 Odin summarizes his "metaphysics of
cumulative penetration" and uses it to treat three main
Buddhist themes: Enlightenment, Compassion, and Bliss. For
reasons that will become apparent below, I will stress his
treatment of the third. With a subtle discussion of Tantric
elements in Buddhism, he describes bliss as the ecstatic
enjoyment of the togetherness of all things. Togetherness is
a symmetrical order. But emotional intensity and value
consist in embodying contrasts in diploar relations, he
argues persuasively. Then,
in a framework of interpenetration, there is a
complete unobstructed mutual fusion and mutual
identification between all dialectical opposites,
such as one and many, subject and object, or cause
and effect, thereby establishing a condition of
"sameness"... As such, the irreducible dipolar
contrasts are collapsed, which in turn precludes
intensity of aesthetic-value feeling and final depth
of satisfaction. Hence the Tantric conception of
ultimate reality as mahasukha or ecstatic pleasure
and bliss which is generated by yuganaddha or
interpenetration of opposites, is better interpreted
in terms of the Whiteheadian process hermeneutic as
aesthetic-value feeling arising out of irreducible
dipolar contrasts within a framework of cumulative
penetration. (p. 152)
III.
Part III of Odin's book is a wholly original extension of
Whitehead, and its brevity here augurs future systematic
work. Chapter 11 argues that Whitehead's categoreal
description of God is simply mistaken and incoherent, as
several thinkers have claimed. Nevertheless, several of the
crucial functions Whitehead assigns to God can instead be
performed by a cummulative
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collective unconscious. Appealing to Jung for the outlines of
a theory of the unconscious, Odin argues that unconscious
archetypes supply patterns of eternal objects that function
as divine lures. These archetypes are causually effective
within process and account both for the phenomena of
Whitehead's God's primordial nature and for those of the
consequent nature. Those two natures are but abstractions
from concrete process, Odin argues, and one avoids the
philosophical difficulties of separating God from the world
and creativity as Whitehead does.
Chapter 12 focuses on the primordial divine nature in
the collective unconscious and highlights the symmetrical
relations in archetypical functioning, particularly Jung's
notion of synchronicity. Odin concludes with a sweeping
flourish across Buddhist schools, arguing that the principal
experience in Tantric and Hua-yen traditions is that of the
symmetrical togetherness of divine possibilities. And the
point of Buddhist practice is to achieve this experience.
According to the theology of the deep unconscious
then, OceanSeal-Samadhi is to be comprehended as an
atemporal envisagement of all possibilities. It is a
realization of the synchronically ordered archetypal
reality of the collective unconscious, in an act
which Platonic philosophy termed anamnesis, or the
"recol- lection" of the realm of archetypes, which,
according to the Jungian psychological hermeneutic,
means precisely the archetypal imagination. Thus,
the simultaneous interpenetration of all times and
spaces the infinite realms-embracing-realms occuring
in the Ocean-Seal-Samadhi must not be attributed to
physical actuality which is regulated by the
principal of karmic inheritance or cause and effect,
but only to the synchronistic archetypal reality of
the archetypal imagination as empirically manifested
in dreams, interior visions and other spontaneous
expressions of the collective unconscious. (p.175f)
IV.
Odin's is a new systematic vision which brings East and West,
abstract philo- sophy and concrete experience, to a common
meeting ground. I have
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summarized extensively in order to give a sense of the scope
and subtlety of this view and to stimulate further
discussion. I want now to enter that discussion as a
participant (with a different though closely related vision)
by asking several questions.
1. If value and its embodiment in emotional intensity
are the outcomes of selective limitation, as Odin so
beautifully argues (and I agree), how can any ideal order
with symmetry and total mutual interpenetration be valuable?
In the passage quoted above, Odin claims that the Tantric
experience of bliss is better interpreted in terms of
cumulative penetration precisely because total
interpenetration collapses the contrast needed for value. But
then how can this Tantric experience be of the ideal order
rather than the real order? And if it be of the real order,
need not the vision be historical, that is, related to
concrete, limited actuality?
Odin goes a long way toward answering this question by
claiming that the dipolar character of Whitehead's God exists
within the unconscious, thus combining both temporal
asymmetrical limitation and atemporal, symmetrical total
interpenetration within the "asymmetrical perimeters
underscoring the metaphysics of cumulative penetration." (p.
159) But what is the relation between the two poles in the
unconscious that allows for both symmetrical and asymmetrical
orders without making the former, the allegedly infinite set
of eternal objects which in Whitehead are indistinguishable
from one another, to collapse into the night in which all
cows are black? To put the point crudely, if Whitehead's
theory of God is incoherent regarding the relation between
primordial and consequent natures, how is it an advance to
transfer it to finite individuals? To frame the question with
the most refined abstraction, does not Odin's project depend
on making the symmetrical order ontologically dependent on
the asymmetrical order which contains value?
2. Is it methodologically wise to interpret diverse
aspects of Buddhism into mutually exclusive Western
philosophies? What does it say about Buddhism if its
emptiness and wisdom experiences are best displayed by
phenomenology and its soteriological elements of practice and
bliss by process philosophy? Phenomenology arose from a
philosophical commitment to the positive factuality of
things, a factuality open to description undefiled by
assertions of existence or value. Even with its hermeneutical
development by Heidegger and his followers phenomenology sets
description as basic and valuation as a function of the
subject constituting a world. Merleau-Ponty
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and others have recognized that experience is value-laden but
have not shifted from the underlying positivistic
metaphysics, only from talking about things to talking about
the experience of things. If the Buddhist experience of
emptiness and wisdom is mainly an ontological reversal of
field and foreground as understood by phenomenology, that
experience cannot include the valuational elements involved
in practice and the attainment of bliss. Process philosophy,
on the other hand, has a dialectical conception of reality in
which definite actuality requires negation in the form of
negative prehensions. This is the source of the selective
limitation characteristic of value. Like phenomenology,
process philosophy can employ distinctions of core from
horizon, but only in such a way as to embody a selected
valuation. If Odin really means that kind of core-horizon
distinction, it would be better to say so rather than force a
value language on the phenomenologists for whom that has been
anathema (with a few noted exceptions such as Scheler).
3. Given his overall systematic strategy, how will Odin
address the ontological question? Phrased in Western ways,
that question is What is Being?, or Why is there anything
actual at all? Whitehead addressed that question by saying
that God decides on a vague form for each emergent actual
entity which is prehended by that entity and used as a
subjective aim guiding its creativity. Without this "divine
lure," for Whitehead, there could be no principle for
reducing the occasion's many antecedent conditions to a new
unity. I agree completely with Odin that Whitehead's solution
is inadequate but would suggest that one needs to acknowledge
a different kind of divine creativity. Odin merely shifts
Whitehead's God to more mundane tasks.
Buddhism does not address the ontological question the
way the West does, and for a reason intrinsic to its
tradition. The ontological question arises in the West out of
a recognition that, although sheer chaos has nothing to be
explained, any kind of order or complexity does. What is the
cause of definiteness? If the world has some definiteness,
then the world needs to be explained. The Buddhist tradition
is not so committed to the actual reality of definiteness. Of
course definiteness is often represented as the imaginative
creation of a Buddha, of which there are thousands, each with
its Buddhaworld. This line of thinking is central to Hua-yen.
Odin's stroke of interpretive genius is to see these multiple
Buddha-worlds as alternate potential patterns of
possibilities. But whereas Buddhists want to say that our own
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world is just one of these multiple Buddha-worlds, Odin wants
to say ours is actual and the rest are potential. Whereas
some Buddhists would finesse the ontological question by
asserting the ontological parity of all Buddhaworlds and
allowing that they are not really different - a chaos of
Buddhaworlds- Odin must face the ontological question
squarely. To escape it he would have to abandon the role of
limitation, selection, or negative prehension in cumulative
penetration.
I do not ask these questions to suggest that Odin cannot
answer them but to spur him on to do so. His book contains
suggestions about how he might respond. Let me close with a
reinterpretation of what he has done. Although bearing the
form of a comparative study, Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen
Buddhism is an original, large-scale systematic philosophy
which arises out of broad knowledge and reflection on Indian,
East Asian, and Western philosophy together. This is an
extraordinary achievement. Hegel made a feeble attempt at
catholic paideia with his chapter on Lamaism in his History
of Philosophy lectures. Schopenhauer and Emerson attempted to
take Eastern philosophy more seriously. Whitehead and Northop
responded well to its claim upon our philosophical attention
in the 20th century, and recent writers such as Chung-ying
Cheng, David L. Hall, Tu Wei-ming and myself have attempted
systematic philosophy like Odin with reference points in
diverse world traditions. But none of us, in my opinion, has
combined catholic scholarly depth with speculative
originality to the degree Odin has achieved in his first
book. The book will be challenged both for its scholarship
and for its speculative ideas. Because of its quality,
however, that challenge will have to be on a higher plan than
has usually characterized the discussion.
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NOTES
1. Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism: A Critical
Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration.
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982). xxi,
242 pp. Page references in the text are to this book. My
enthusiasm should be put in the context of my personal
association with the book which I first saw in an early
draft as a dissertation, then in a later draft as a
manuscript accepted into my Series in Systematic
Philosophy at SUNY Press, and now in its greatly
expanded and improved published version which I have
been asked to review, despite my protestations of prior
bias. To finish this personal parenthesis and partially
redeem my objectivity, I can say that Odin's is a system
that can stand by itself, and this review shall attempt
to let it do so.
2. Odin is heavily influenced by Park's pioneering book,
Buddhist Faith and Sudden Enlightenment (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1983) which sets Korean
Buddhism off over against the Japanese Buddhist revival
of the Kyoto School.
3. The source for this point in Odin is Park, ibid.,
Chapter 4.
4. Compare Frederick J. Streng, Emptiness: A Study in
Religious Meaning (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1967).
5. Thomas J. J. Altizer, "The Buddhist Ground of the
Whiteheadian God," Process Studies 5/4 (Winter 1975).
6. Justus Buchler, "On a Strain of Arbitrariness in
Whitehead's System, " Journal of Philosophy 66/19
(October 1969)