The Cult Of Emptiness

Pt. I Sixteenth century : Translation hazards -- The zen shock -- The Buddha's progress -- Chaos and the God of Zen -- Valignano's lectures and Catechism -- Buddhist philosophy -- God's Samadhi -- Pt. II Seventeenth century : Oriental Ur-philosophy (Rodriques) -- Pan-Asian religion (Kircher) -- Buddha's deathbed confession -- The common ground (Navarrete) -- Pan-Asian philosophy (Bernier) -- The merger (Le Clerc & Bernier) -- From Pagan to Oriental philosophy -- Philosophical archaeology (Burnet) -- Zoroaster's lie (Jacob Thomasius) -- Ur-Spinozism (Bayle).

Description: The common western understanding of Buddhism today envisions this major world religion as one of compassion and tolerance. But as the author Droit reveals, this view bears little resemblance to one broadly held in the nineteenth-century European philosophical imagination that saw Buddhism as a religion of annihilation calling for the destruction of the self. The Cult of Nothingness traces the history of the western discovery of Buddhism. In so doing, the author shows that such major philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Cousin, and Renan imagined Buddhism as a religion that was, as Nietzsche put it, a negation of the world. In fact, says the author, such portrayals were more a reflection of what was happening in Europe at the time-when the collapse of traditional European hierarchies and values, the specter of atheism, and the rise of racism and social revolts were shaking European societies-than an accurate description of Buddhist thought. The author also reflects on how this history continues to echo in contemporary western understanding of Buddhism. The book includes a comprehensive bibliography on books on Buddhism published in the west between 1638 and 1890.

The Poetics of Emptiness uncovers an important untold history by tracing the historically specific, intertextual pathways of a single, if polyvalent, philosophical term, emptiness, as it is transformed within twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. This conceptual migration is detailed in two sections. The first focuses on "transpacific Buddhist poetics," while the second maps the less well-known terrain of "transpacific Daoist poetics." In Chapters 1 and 2, the author explores Ernest Fenollosa's "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" as an expression of Fenollosa's distinctly Buddhist poetics informed by a two-decade-long encounter with a culturally hybrid form of Buddhism known as Shin Bukkyo ("New Buddhism"). Chapter 2 explores the classical Chinese poetics that undergirds the lost half of Fenellosa's essay. Chapter 3 concludes the first half of the book with an exploration of the didactic and soteriological function of "emptiness" in Gary Snyder's influential poetry and poetics. The second half begins with a critical exploration of the three-decades-long career of the poet/translator/critic Wai-lim Yip, whose "transpacific Daoist poetics" has been an important fixture in American poetic late modernism and has begun to gain wider notoriety in China. The last chapter engages the intertextual weave of poststructural thought and Daoist and shamanistic discourses in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's important body of heterocultural productions. By formulating interpretive frames as hybrid as the texts being read, this book makes available one of the most important yet still largely unknown stories of American poetry and poetics.

Droit traces the history of the Western understanding of Buddhism following the late 18th-century beginnings of the translation of the Buddhist canon. He reveals how major 19th-century Western philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schlegel, Hegel, and others in fact misinterpreted the Buddha's teaching of nirvana as a life-detesting and negative annihilation of the the individual.

For many Christians in America, becoming filled with Christ first requires being empty of themselves—a quality often overlooked in religious histories. In Emptiness, John Corrigan highlights for the first time the various ways that American Christianity has systematically promoted the cultivation of this feeling. Corrigan examines different kinds of emptiness essential to American Christianity, such as the emptiness of deep longing, the emptying of the body through fasting or weeping, the emptiness of the wilderness, and the emptiness of historical time itself. He argues, furthermore, that emptiness is closely connected to the ways Christian groups differentiate themselves: many groups foster a sense of belonging not through affirmation, but rather avowal of what they and their doctrines are not. Through emptiness, American Christians are able to assert their identities as members of a religious community. Drawing much-needed attention to a crucial aspect of American Christianity, Emptiness expands our understanding of historical and contemporary Christian practices.

In A Glimpse of Nothingness, celebrated mystery novelist Janwillem van de Wetering offers a sequel to his earlier memoir, The Empty Mirror, which concerned the author's experiences at a Zen monastery in Japan in the middle 1960s. Originally published in 1975, A Glimpse of Nothingness chronicles van de Wetering's time at the Moon Springs Hermitage in Maine. The book offers a complete and compelling description of the Zen path pursued by one sensitive Westerner who began his quest by seeking for the sense of it all-and who eventually came to realize at least a part of it. The follow-up to this book is van de Wetering's Afterzen.

"The real history of man is the history of religion." The truth of the famous dictum of Max Muller, the father of the History of Religions, is nowhere so obvious as in Tibet. Western students have observed that religion and magic pervade not only the forms of Tibetan art, politics, and society, but also every detail of ordinary human existence. And what is the all-pervading religion of Tibet? The Buddhism of that country has been described to us, of course, but that does not mean the question has been answered. The unique importance of Stephan Beyerís work is that it presents the vital material ignored or slighted by others: the living ritual of Tibetan Buddhists. The reader is made a witness to cultic proceedings through which the author guides him carefully. He does not force one to accept easy explanations nor does he direct one's attention only to aspects that can be counted on to please. He leads one step by step, without omitting anything, through entire rituals, and interprets whenever necessary without being unduly obtrusive. Oftentimes, as in the case of the many hymns to the goddess Tara, the superb translations speak directly to the reader, and it is indeed as if the reader himself were present at the ritual.

Nagarjuna is one of the finest philosophers who ever lived. This second century Buddhist philosopher from south India is known for his criticism on speculative theories and viewpoints. But his name is better known for introducing the idea of emptiness (sunyata), a philosophical concept that had hugely influenced the discourses of Eastern philosophy, religion, and culture for about 2000 years. Nagarjuna cleverly introduced emptiness (sunyata), into Buddhist discourses to explain its central philosophy: the philosophy of Middle Path. Through the negative mode of argumentation, he taught how we naturally get trapped into extreme viewpoints and speculate on them. His philosophy of Middle Path (Madhyamika) explains the progress of human reasoning moving in its natural course avoiding extreme viewpoints for finding harmony and freedom. During the second century, in a different milieu, Nagarjuna warned his students about the dangers of speculative thought created out of extreme viewpoints and philosophical doctrines. He taught them to look into the structures of such doctrines critically by using negation to know what the truth is. Therefore, the philosophical idea of emptiness (sunyata) is not the end of negation assuming perfect nihilism, but teaching us that it would work like medicine for removing all our ignorance. More precisely, it is like zero (sunya) in mathematics, a number with an undefined value, but real numbers find newer values by associating with it. It is a philosophical tool that helps us control our alleged fears, anger, petty hatred, etc., by invoking the natural course of human compassion (karuna) for us to live and die naturally. Therefore, the structure of emptiness is the philosophy of Middle Path.