Translating Zen

The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism by Korean-German thinker Byung Chul Han

1.

How can a person write seriously about Zen Buddhism in a language like English, which is so thoroughly informed by Cartesian ways of thinking? How can the values and notions of the philosophy be isolated from the Western concepts that colonize our minds and language?

In what was the most interesting translation job I ever had, I was hired by a philosopher at the University of Hiroshima to translate a series of talks and papers he would be delivering in the US and Europe in the coming year. Philosophy being what I studied as an undergraduate, I had high hopes for the job. But my Japanese philosopher quickly became frustrated with me.

Leanne-san, is it possible for you to forget Descartes while you translate my papers? He wrote superciliously in a style of Japanese designed to be condescending beyond belief.

Well, this took me by surprise! Was it possible that I was guilty of an unconscious Cartesianism?

According to him, it was very possible and he called it a violence against his work!

Since then, I have become sensitive to the way the language we think in orders and shapes our thoughts.

2.

Byung-Chul Han is one of my favorite living philosophers. Born in Korea he has worked at the Berlin University of the Arts for four decades. I love his work (my favorite remains the Scent of Time) —and was therefore excited by his most recent work on the philosophy of Zen. Fully aware of the problems inherent in the language he is writing in, he tackles the subject extremely carefully through an examination from oblique angles: for example, by contrasting various Zen notions with Western philosophy—specifically with thinkers that superficially resemble Zen, like Heidegger, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, as well as with those who have no resemblance whatsoever like Aristotle.

He also illuminates the Zen mindset in haiku poetry and through works of East Asian ink painting.

It is incredibly fruitful.

This was a minor point in the book, but I liked it a lot and so wanted to share. At first glance Haiku can seem to resemble Heidegger’s philosophy of poetry and even more Buber’s concept of the relational self in his I-thou terminology. But, says Han, haiku is permeated in Zen thought so it has no “I” that is relational to an “it.”

Take any haiku at random:

cuckoo:

filtering through the vast bamboo grove

the moon’s light—Basho

There is no desire, no longing, no invocation. Nature is not an “it” but given a voice, and one things blends into another—the moonlight and birdcall, the bamboo… it is like an ink painting where things seem to blur and flow. The world is unbounded.

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Here is a pdf of the book.

I loved the book but still much preferred David Hinton’s approach through language in his recent book on Chan Buddhism called China Root: Taoism and the Original Zen

I will be posting tomorrow morning at 3 Quarks Daily about Robert Frost and my experience at Bread Loaf. I hope you like it! I will post a link here next week.

Note

“Substance (Latin: substantia, Greek: hypostasis, hypokeimenon, ousia) is without a doubt the fundamental concept of occidental thought. According to Aristotle, it denotes what is constant across change. It is constitutive of the unity and selfhood of all beings. The Latin verb substare (literally: to stand underneath), from which substantia is derived, also means ‘to withstand’. Stare (to stand) can also mean ‘to stand up to, to maintain oneself, to resist’. Thus, the activity of existing and persisting is part of substance. Substance is what remains the same, the identical, that which delimits itself from the other by remaining in itself and thus prevailing. Hypostasis can mean ‘foundation’ or ‘essence’, but it can also mean ‘withstanding’ and ‘steadfastness’. The substance stands firmly by itself. The 26 striving towards itself, towards self-possession, is inscribed in it. Tellingly, in normal usage ousia means ‘wealth, possessions, property, estate’. And the Greek word stasis not only means ‘to stand’ but also ‘revolt, tumult, quandary, discord, quarrel, enmity’ and ‘party’. The semantic antecedents of the concept of substance do not at all suggest peacefulness or friendliness, and the concept’s meaning is prefigured accordingly. A substance rests on separation and distinction, the delimitation of the one from the other, the holding out of the selfhood of one thing from that of another. ‘Substance’ is thus conceived with a view not to openness but to closedness.

The central Buddhist concept of śūnyatā (emptiness) is in many respects a counter-concept to substance. Substance is full, so to speak. It is filled with itself, with what is its own. Śūnyatā, by contrast, represents a movement of ex-propriation. It empties out all being that remains within itself, that insists on itself or closes itself up in itself. Śūnyatā spills such beings into an openness, into an open, stretched-out distance. Within the field of emptiness, nothing condenses into a massive presence. Nothing rests exclusively on itself. The un-bounding, ex-propriating movement sublates the monadological foritself into a mutual relationship. Emptiness, however, is not a principle of creation; it is not a primary ‘cause’ from which all beings, all forms, ‘emerge’. It has no inherent ‘substantial power’ that could create an ‘effect’. And it is not elevated to a higher order of being by any ‘ontological’ rupture. It does not mark a ‘transcendence’ that precedes the forms as they appear. Form and emptiness are situated on the same level of being. There is no gradient of being that separates emptiness from the ‘immanence’ of the things as they appear. As has often been pointed out, the Far Eastern model of being does not involve ‘transcendence’ or the ‘wholly other’” page 25-26