Wow, fantastic stuff here. Having a) studied Chinese language (3 years) and culture (40 years), b) read yours and other’s works on Chinese culture (Needham, Hall/Ames, Graham, etc.), and c) studied Buddhist nonduality for 30+ years, I’m in general accord with your views and conclusions here: that Indo-European metaphysics stifled the development of Buddhism in India (maybe less so in Tibet) whereas indigenous Chinese metaphysics was more suitable for the full flowering of Buddhist nonduality.
I can see how such a conclusion is a huge poke in the ribs to your many Indo-Tibetan Buddhist colleagues – Garfield, Westerhoff, Lopez, Newland, the Cowherds, etc. – especially to suggest that, since they’re working within Indo-European languages, they’re “resonant on deep structural levels, sharing assumptions about ultimate ontological and epistemological requirements and entailments.” But understanding classical Chinese thought as you’ve presented it in “Ironies” and “Beyond” as well as Tiantai in “Emptiness and Omnipresence”, I can’t imagine not coming to these conclusions.
It’s also no doubt the case, is it not, that the Indian and particularly Tibetan masters brought Middle Way Buddhism to a different great flowering as well, evidenced by e.g., Chandrakirti, Rime, Ju Mipham, the Dzogchen tradition, etc. Thus, I imagine your claim that ‘only in China has Buddhist philosophical thought fully flowered’ will be a tough one to defend. I mean, how to argue against the nondual heights of Tsongkhapa or Longchenpa? Nonetheless, I truly see your Sinitic point.
Prior to your essay here, in order to entice my study group colleagues outside their comfort zone, I have often spoken about the “four quarters of the world philosophy pie” – Western, Indian, Chinese, everything else – (only three of which have sustained written traditions of speculation on the human condition)… to argue that, if you’re ensconced in the Western tradition only, you’re missing 75% of world philosophical thought. So I very much appreciate the Indo-European -v Sinitic comparison since, once you really get indigenous Chinese thought, the Western and the Indian look a lot more alike.
Also, I don’t think you mentioned the monosyllabic nature of spoken Chinese – wouldn’t it be another instance of MDU: that spoken meaning also relies heavily on context? – evidenced by Chinese conversants who at times clarify an ambiguous monosyllable by writing the character in the air or on their hand? The paucity of phonetic variation is yet another factor in the emphasis on context in Chinese.
Big thanks for your great work. As a lifelong autodidact and nondualist, I truly appreciate your approach and contributions.
One last unrelated question: in the grand world of the internet and contextual essencelessness philosophizing, where does the importance of consensus narrative, particularly as empirical scientific truth, stand? Aren’t the stability and regularity and repeatability of scientific truths philosophically, politically, and ethically critical? Not that all this proves the truths of empirical realist metaphysics, but don’t you think some form of realism is needed, even required, for social stability in the global commons? Does China even have (or need) a realist consensus narrative or is this only a modernist Indo-European need?
Dear Moderator – since I’m unable to edit, please forgive my too hasty first post and replace with this one, thanks:
Fantastic stuff here. Having been a longtime student of Chinese language and culture as well as of Mahayana Buddhism, I’m very much in accord with the views and conclusions in this essay: that Indo-European metaphysics stifled the development of Buddhism in India (maybe less so in Tibet) whereas indigenous Chinese metaphysics was more suitable for the full flowering of Buddhist nonduality.
Isn’t it also the case that the Indian and particularly Tibetan masters brought Middle Way Buddhism to a different great flowering despite the Indo-European context? I imagine the claim here that ‘only in China has Buddhist philosophical thought fully flowered’ should be a tough one to defend particularly since so few take the time to digest the Chinese worldview. Even so, how to argue against the nondual heights of a Tsongkhapa, Longchenpa, or Mipham? Nonetheless, I get the Sinitic-Tiantai point.
Prior to the essay here, in order to entice my study group colleagues outside their comfort zone, I have often spoken about the “four quarters of the world philosophy pie” – Western, Indian, Chinese, everything else – to argue that, if you’re ensconced in the Western tradition only, you’re missing 75% of world philosophical thought. So far, no success. So, I very much appreciate the dual Indo-European -v Sinitic comparison since, once you really see the landscape of indigenous Chinese thought, the Western and the Indian look a lot more alike.
Also, wouldn’t the monosyllabic nature of spoken Chinese be another instance of MDU? that spoken meaning also relies heavily on context? – evidenced by Chinese conversants who at times clarify an ambiguous monosyllable by writing the character in the air or on their hand? The paucity of phonetic variation seems yet another factor in the emphasis on context in Chinese. Not sure if this is also true of classical Chinese.
One last thought: in the grand world of the internet and contextual essencelessness philosophizing, where does the *importance of consensus narrative*, particularly as empirical scientific truth, stand? Aren’t the stability, regularity, and repeatability of scientific truths philosophically, politically, and ethically critical? Perhaps a realist consensus narrative is only a modern Indo-European-based need. But what else can we broadly agree on?
Thanks so much for your comments! Yes, I agree that Indian and Tibetan Buddhists have also achieved their own glories in the development of non-dual thought, no question about that. But in addition to the “poke in the ribs” your rightly detect here (in your other message), aimed at reversing the opposite trend of neglecting the Chinese thinkers at the expense of the Indo-Tibetan, the hope here was to raise the question of whether the full realization of non-dualism requires some of the favored Chinese Buddhist moves like unrelenting intersubsumption at every level, the end of the appearance/reality dichotomy at every level, full-on epistemological trivialism which nevertheless maintains its soteriological force, multiple or rather infinite interpenetrating alternate conventional truths, etc. The Tiantai thinkers, in any case, would emphatically say that lacking these, the dualism subtly persists. These themes don’t seem to get much taken up in the Indo-Tibetan thinkers (or do they? Possibly I just don’t know about them, of course–I’d be interested in counterexamples), who are focused on other concerns, so I think they would in any case contest the Tiantai claim that non-dualism requires these wonderfully weird moves–and that is where things get interesting to me in terms of pinpointing the Indo-Euro and Chinese background assumptions, respectively.
Good point about the monosyllabic homophone-rich language and its built in need for contextualization. I think this is maybe part of what’s being played on in the Chan style of the Yunmen school, the stories of Yunmen’s famous “one word” answers. These are of course implausible as records of oral exchanges, and brazenly so, for exactly the reason you mention: it would be impossible for the listener’s to know what single character he was saying in these wildly decontextualized ways. And I think this is the point: even as written texts, the one-word answers are masterpieces of maximal ambiguity, in a single deed invoking several alternate contexts–in a lot of cases, you can see the same answer as working as a teaching that (in Tiantai terms) would serve as all the different levels of Buddhist teaching (Tripitaka teaching, Shared, Separate, Perfect or whatever system you might want to apply), all in a single word.
Your last question is a big one, and I’ve often thought that I should try to write something focusing on this question at length. The short version of my thought about this is that consensus, stability, regularity and repeatability are supremely important–for certain purposes, which are themselves contexts, relative to particular sentient desires. (The old problem of Xunzi’s response to Zhuangzi plays a role here: one answer may be simply to regulate these things on the political level, precisely because they are intrinsically so unstable. But this obviously brings its own problems of power and criteria. But there are obviously good arguments also to be made for making certain things standardized for the sake of effective communication and exchange, as Xunzi thinks we should fix the meanings of words just as we fix and enforce a standardized set of weights and measures.) I see these as forms of local coherence that are always premised on some shared context. The safeguard against chaos is actually similar to the “uphill/downhill” metaphor in this paper. You can’t just change one item while operating within a context (including the desires of self or others) while leaving everything else exactly the same: the particular way things are delineated and terms are defined, the expectations of results, the purposes that went into the setting up of a certain context of definitions. I think even the observed repeatibility depends on the stability of these factors. The point is, thought, that although these can be changed, it is _expensive_ to do so: it requires the expenditure of energy, and that makes some choices more expensive than others. That is, while it is true that anything can be true or false in some sense, you cannot just change one item without changing many others–these things come in massive sets of interconnected premises and assumptions. So while it is true that I can always claim legitimately that this airplane is frog, to do so I also have a lot of other things to change, a lot of premises and conclusions that I have to also be ready to accept, a lot of heavy lifting. The question them becomes how much _else_ one is willing or indeed _able_ at a given time to change. So I think the critique of “alternative facts” or superstitions should perhaps be reframed: I think it’s legit to say to someone who makes an outrageous claim, “Ok, but assuming that’s true, what _else_ has to be true as well? Are you also willing to accept that stuff?” This gets complicated because even “the standards of what counts as consistency” is itself an item that can be challenged and differently construed in different contexts–but that just means we continue this process at the next level, and so ad infinitum. That is our endless task as the old model thought seeking a single truth was the endless task.
We can turn this around in another way, I think, with Spinoza’s remark about what’s actually going on when someone makes a mathematical error. Someone who says a triangle is round is just using the word “triangle” in a different way from others, he claims, but then whatever is going on in the person’s mind when he then says triangles have an infinite set of coequal radii or something like that is a real and legitimate and thus “correct” mental act: he’s thinking of what we call a circle, and on that basis an actual valid development from premise to conclusion is occurring, and what he says is not false. (Spinoza compares it hearing a neighbor saying “My hall flew down the hen!”–but nevertheless understanding the meaning….) This is perhaps useful even without assuming an absolutist truth for the geometrical examples as Spinoza does: the point is not only that all the claims are relative to the context of the specific ways the terms are applied, and these can admit of a lot of wiggle room from case to case, but also that between different contexts and systems there is a built-in translatability, that being limited to context actually entails being unclosed, i.e., _not_ limited to context, open to encounter with other contexts, and in fact requiring that encounter intrinstically, requiring retranslation from moment to moment even to sustain itself and continue being itself–in other words, in Neo-Tiantai terms, local coherence is global incoherence, and that means each local coherence has a built in link or bridge or attraction to every other. Maybe the embrace of a shared language can also be informed by something like this–a kind of consensus which may be indeterminate with respect to realism; not excluding it, but not requiring it. Not sure if that makes sense, but something along those lines strikes me as a promising way to pursue this question….
Not sure if I answered your questions, but thanks again for the thought-provoking comments! Nice to have a bit of conversation on this.
Thanks so much for your reply. If I may add some further thoughts:
First, my study group colleagues asked about works that further explore this pre-reflective language/fundamental ontology relationship – any suggestions?
In contrast to the exposure Indo-Tibetan Buddhism gets in both academic and popular culture circles, I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about the many unfortunately insurmountable barriers to making Chinese thinkers more visible and accessible. The collective effect of all this must have a lot to do with the neglect of Sinitic thought: 1) Cultural Isolation: China’s post-war isolationism and internal conflict, contrasted with the collective effect of generations of scholars, seekers, and boomers who went to India (and Japan) and brought back their cultural products, add to this the global exposure to Indo-Tibetan Buddhism by the Tibetan diaspora; 2) Strange Language: the sheer unfamiliarity and distance of the Sinitic language and its non-alphabetic writing system; particularly difficulty pronouncing and remembering Chinese names and words as well as confusion from the two transliteration systems; 3) Strange Culture: the most foreign of sophisticated foreign civilizations; the most non-western worldview; per your lecture on religion without God, a strange religion; ancient imperial past, the communist present; collectivist (as opposed to individualist) mentality; 4) Bad Politics: disdain for the CCP and its authoritarian politics, control, and censorship; sympathy for the Tibetan-Uyghur genocide and hatred of Chinese bullying; the distance thus created; 5) Lack of Popularization: compared to Japanese culture (cars, electronics, companies, Zen everything, martial arts, origami, Japanese anime, film, design, gardens, etc.) – way stronger presence due to longstanding isolation of Chinese cultural products. Of course, there is as much or more to attract folks to Chinese culture and thinking, but these barriers are real.
I continue to fully digest the “wonderfully weird” Tiantai moves on Mahayana nonduality. It would appear to me that Indo-Tibetan nonduality goes beyond the appearance/reality dichotomy and other subtle dualisms lingering in Indo-Tibetan Sanskrit-based Middle Way philosophy possibly only through the One Taste or Suchness of Dzogchen, where the sameness-difference of nirvana-samsara, reality-appearance, ultimate-conventional drop away but also entail each other – that special Dzogchen “basic space of phenomena” or Rigpa. Rigpa seems to erase or make the appearance-reality distinction both trivial and supremely important, collapsing-yet-affirming all opposites. But you’re right, even the Tibetan Shentong/Rangtong debate seems to be another example of lingering duality as is the whole Emptiness/Buddhanature dialectic, as are the problems with defining conventional truth in contrast to ultimate truth. Perhaps there’s some overcoming of this lingering dualism in the pluralism in the 19th century Rime movement?
Consensus Narrative/Science question reflections: I would love to hear what you have to say on this topic – please start writing! I agree science and scientific truths are also contexts relative to particular desires and specific practices. But regularity, repeatability, stability per scientific truth seems the best we have to transcend cultural contexts; and doesn’t humanity need extra-cultural repeatability-power to ground consensus reality and broad agreement?… like mainstream science already does… astronomy, physics, chemistry, the periodic table, thermodynamics, biochemistry, and technologies thereof etc. – the combined truth-stability of these is *staggering in its scope and power* to minimize context and generate agreement.
Regarding views of science: I’m a longtime student of systems theory and science in general and, although I’m not an expert, I have tracked the emergence of what could be called a kind of “postmodern science” based in situatedness, probability, fundamental uncertainty, indeterminacy, habits of nature, in opposition to mainstream traditional science based in laws of nature, essences, universals, and transcendent reasoning – it’s a relatively recent view of science that appears to mesh well with Chinese views. Thus, with respect to traditional Chinese views, truths in science can be seen in these two ways:
• As Laws and Essences: instantiations of universal laws of nature, principles, unchanging mathematical formulations, determinate rules, foundational truths, etc. (per traditional modernist science) or
• As Probabilities and Relations: statistical habits of nature, regularities rather than rules or laws, recurring patterns that derive from example and experience supported by reason and logic (these are the various types of systems theory known as the sciences of complexity, nonlinear dynamics, emergence theory, non-equilibrium self-organization, instability and chaos, indeterminism, and fundamental uncertainty) [Perhaps best described by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in their classic “Order Out of Chaos”; by Prigogine in “The End of Certainty”; by Stengers in “Cosmopolitics vols, I and II”; and by Gigerenzer et al in “The Empire of Chance”, among hundreds of more specific volumes on complexity, chaos, nonlinear systems, self-organizing systems, etc.]
Although both are still within the sphere of Indo-European based metaphysics, the former is the mainstream traditional view (most prominent in physics) whereas the latter represents a distinct break from certain aspects of Enlightenment modernist metaphysics.
Following Prigogine’s original articulation of “science’s new dialogue with nature” and coinciding with rise of the computer (70s to 90s), a new philosophy of science has begun to emerge that goes by the name The New Mechanical Philosophy or the New Mechanism. [See Stuart Glennen, “The New Mechanical Philosophy” and Carl Craver, “Mechanisms in Science” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Craver “In Search of Mechanisms”.] It’s not at all old-school mechanisms. But this latter probabilities view, at least to me, has parallels with Chinese views in that it abandons basic Indo-European needs for grounding, certainty, natural law, essences, universals, etc. and operates more from an acceptance of *ambiguity, probabilities, uncertainty, relations and contexts*, as opposed to a fundamental ontology and causal principles – maybe not nondual but is certainly essenceless and context based. In any event, I would love to see a Neo-Tiantai approach to Kuhnian science – it’s paradigms, practices, injunctions – as contexts that generate stable coherences, regularities across all of time and space (not regularities as universals but as probabilities) – a Neo-Tiantai view of the periodic table, the Standard Model, relativity theory, basic laws of thermodynamics and chemistry… like that.
Observation: having worked 35 years with East Asian students and colleagues in international education programs, I came to appreciate how East Asian cultures continually struggle to maintain their cultural identity against the multi-pronged onslaught of modernization-Westernization, in every sphere of life. It thus made me appreciate that there are *two cultural historical encounters* between Chinese/East Asian systems and Indo-European systems: 1) the Absorption of Indian Buddhism; and 2) the Absorption of Western Modernity. It’s easy to overlook how, unlike Western cultures who’ve lived out their own history, contemporary Chinese and other East Asian peoples live in a kind of layered fusion worldview of not one but two sophisticated Indo-European systems they’ve had to absorb, struggle with, integrate, adapt their indigenous cultural worldview to. Apart from India having to absorb the Islamic monotheism, neither India nor Europe had to struggle through similar integrations of foreign cultural systems comparable to East Asia. Only in the past 50-100 years is the West having to encounter and wrestle with Asian and non-Indo-European cultural systems (although Urs App locates the beginning of the Western encounter with Asian cultural systems in the 18th century [App, Urs (2010), “The Birth of Orientalism”. Philadelphia: U of Penn.]).
Lastly, a suggestion: my experience is that folks find your writing rough going; thus, might there be a place for someone (one of your students?) to summarize and assemble your ideas into a more accessible package? Something that more easily digestible? Little by little I’m trying to bring attention to your work through reviews of your books on Goodreads.com, Amazon, and on Academia.edu.
Also FYI: My already-posted comments on your site seem to load only in Windows/PC browsers. I can’t get them to load at all in my MacOS or iOS browsers.
Many thanks for this opportunity to engage these fascinating ideas.
Wow, fantastic stuff here. Having a) studied Chinese language (3 years) and culture (40 years), b) read yours and other’s works on Chinese culture (Needham, Hall/Ames, Graham, etc.), and c) studied Buddhist nonduality for 30+ years, I’m in general accord with your views and conclusions here: that Indo-European metaphysics stifled the development of Buddhism in India (maybe less so in Tibet) whereas indigenous Chinese metaphysics was more suitable for the full flowering of Buddhist nonduality.
I can see how such a conclusion is a huge poke in the ribs to your many Indo-Tibetan Buddhist colleagues – Garfield, Westerhoff, Lopez, Newland, the Cowherds, etc. – especially to suggest that, since they’re working within Indo-European languages, they’re “resonant on deep structural levels, sharing assumptions about ultimate ontological and epistemological requirements and entailments.” But understanding classical Chinese thought as you’ve presented it in “Ironies” and “Beyond” as well as Tiantai in “Emptiness and Omnipresence”, I can’t imagine not coming to these conclusions.
It’s also no doubt the case, is it not, that the Indian and particularly Tibetan masters brought Middle Way Buddhism to a different great flowering as well, evidenced by e.g., Chandrakirti, Rime, Ju Mipham, the Dzogchen tradition, etc. Thus, I imagine your claim that ‘only in China has Buddhist philosophical thought fully flowered’ will be a tough one to defend. I mean, how to argue against the nondual heights of Tsongkhapa or Longchenpa? Nonetheless, I truly see your Sinitic point.
Prior to your essay here, in order to entice my study group colleagues outside their comfort zone, I have often spoken about the “four quarters of the world philosophy pie” – Western, Indian, Chinese, everything else – (only three of which have sustained written traditions of speculation on the human condition)… to argue that, if you’re ensconced in the Western tradition only, you’re missing 75% of world philosophical thought. So I very much appreciate the Indo-European -v Sinitic comparison since, once you really get indigenous Chinese thought, the Western and the Indian look a lot more alike.
Also, I don’t think you mentioned the monosyllabic nature of spoken Chinese – wouldn’t it be another instance of MDU: that spoken meaning also relies heavily on context? – evidenced by Chinese conversants who at times clarify an ambiguous monosyllable by writing the character in the air or on their hand? The paucity of phonetic variation is yet another factor in the emphasis on context in Chinese.
Big thanks for your great work. As a lifelong autodidact and nondualist, I truly appreciate your approach and contributions.
One last unrelated question: in the grand world of the internet and contextual essencelessness philosophizing, where does the importance of consensus narrative, particularly as empirical scientific truth, stand? Aren’t the stability and regularity and repeatability of scientific truths philosophically, politically, and ethically critical? Not that all this proves the truths of empirical realist metaphysics, but don’t you think some form of realism is needed, even required, for social stability in the global commons? Does China even have (or need) a realist consensus narrative or is this only a modernist Indo-European need?
Dear Moderator – since I’m unable to edit, please forgive my too hasty first post and replace with this one, thanks:
Fantastic stuff here. Having been a longtime student of Chinese language and culture as well as of Mahayana Buddhism, I’m very much in accord with the views and conclusions in this essay: that Indo-European metaphysics stifled the development of Buddhism in India (maybe less so in Tibet) whereas indigenous Chinese metaphysics was more suitable for the full flowering of Buddhist nonduality.
Isn’t it also the case that the Indian and particularly Tibetan masters brought Middle Way Buddhism to a different great flowering despite the Indo-European context? I imagine the claim here that ‘only in China has Buddhist philosophical thought fully flowered’ should be a tough one to defend particularly since so few take the time to digest the Chinese worldview. Even so, how to argue against the nondual heights of a Tsongkhapa, Longchenpa, or Mipham? Nonetheless, I get the Sinitic-Tiantai point.
Prior to the essay here, in order to entice my study group colleagues outside their comfort zone, I have often spoken about the “four quarters of the world philosophy pie” – Western, Indian, Chinese, everything else – to argue that, if you’re ensconced in the Western tradition only, you’re missing 75% of world philosophical thought. So far, no success. So, I very much appreciate the dual Indo-European -v Sinitic comparison since, once you really see the landscape of indigenous Chinese thought, the Western and the Indian look a lot more alike.
Also, wouldn’t the monosyllabic nature of spoken Chinese be another instance of MDU? that spoken meaning also relies heavily on context? – evidenced by Chinese conversants who at times clarify an ambiguous monosyllable by writing the character in the air or on their hand? The paucity of phonetic variation seems yet another factor in the emphasis on context in Chinese. Not sure if this is also true of classical Chinese.
One last thought: in the grand world of the internet and contextual essencelessness philosophizing, where does the *importance of consensus narrative*, particularly as empirical scientific truth, stand? Aren’t the stability, regularity, and repeatability of scientific truths philosophically, politically, and ethically critical? Perhaps a realist consensus narrative is only a modern Indo-European-based need. But what else can we broadly agree on?
Thanks so much for your comments! Yes, I agree that Indian and Tibetan Buddhists have also achieved their own glories in the development of non-dual thought, no question about that. But in addition to the “poke in the ribs” your rightly detect here (in your other message), aimed at reversing the opposite trend of neglecting the Chinese thinkers at the expense of the Indo-Tibetan, the hope here was to raise the question of whether the full realization of non-dualism requires some of the favored Chinese Buddhist moves like unrelenting intersubsumption at every level, the end of the appearance/reality dichotomy at every level, full-on epistemological trivialism which nevertheless maintains its soteriological force, multiple or rather infinite interpenetrating alternate conventional truths, etc. The Tiantai thinkers, in any case, would emphatically say that lacking these, the dualism subtly persists. These themes don’t seem to get much taken up in the Indo-Tibetan thinkers (or do they? Possibly I just don’t know about them, of course–I’d be interested in counterexamples), who are focused on other concerns, so I think they would in any case contest the Tiantai claim that non-dualism requires these wonderfully weird moves–and that is where things get interesting to me in terms of pinpointing the Indo-Euro and Chinese background assumptions, respectively.
Good point about the monosyllabic homophone-rich language and its built in need for contextualization. I think this is maybe part of what’s being played on in the Chan style of the Yunmen school, the stories of Yunmen’s famous “one word” answers. These are of course implausible as records of oral exchanges, and brazenly so, for exactly the reason you mention: it would be impossible for the listener’s to know what single character he was saying in these wildly decontextualized ways. And I think this is the point: even as written texts, the one-word answers are masterpieces of maximal ambiguity, in a single deed invoking several alternate contexts–in a lot of cases, you can see the same answer as working as a teaching that (in Tiantai terms) would serve as all the different levels of Buddhist teaching (Tripitaka teaching, Shared, Separate, Perfect or whatever system you might want to apply), all in a single word.
Your last question is a big one, and I’ve often thought that I should try to write something focusing on this question at length. The short version of my thought about this is that consensus, stability, regularity and repeatability are supremely important–for certain purposes, which are themselves contexts, relative to particular sentient desires. (The old problem of Xunzi’s response to Zhuangzi plays a role here: one answer may be simply to regulate these things on the political level, precisely because they are intrinsically so unstable. But this obviously brings its own problems of power and criteria. But there are obviously good arguments also to be made for making certain things standardized for the sake of effective communication and exchange, as Xunzi thinks we should fix the meanings of words just as we fix and enforce a standardized set of weights and measures.) I see these as forms of local coherence that are always premised on some shared context. The safeguard against chaos is actually similar to the “uphill/downhill” metaphor in this paper. You can’t just change one item while operating within a context (including the desires of self or others) while leaving everything else exactly the same: the particular way things are delineated and terms are defined, the expectations of results, the purposes that went into the setting up of a certain context of definitions. I think even the observed repeatibility depends on the stability of these factors. The point is, thought, that although these can be changed, it is _expensive_ to do so: it requires the expenditure of energy, and that makes some choices more expensive than others. That is, while it is true that anything can be true or false in some sense, you cannot just change one item without changing many others–these things come in massive sets of interconnected premises and assumptions. So while it is true that I can always claim legitimately that this airplane is frog, to do so I also have a lot of other things to change, a lot of premises and conclusions that I have to also be ready to accept, a lot of heavy lifting. The question them becomes how much _else_ one is willing or indeed _able_ at a given time to change. So I think the critique of “alternative facts” or superstitions should perhaps be reframed: I think it’s legit to say to someone who makes an outrageous claim, “Ok, but assuming that’s true, what _else_ has to be true as well? Are you also willing to accept that stuff?” This gets complicated because even “the standards of what counts as consistency” is itself an item that can be challenged and differently construed in different contexts–but that just means we continue this process at the next level, and so ad infinitum. That is our endless task as the old model thought seeking a single truth was the endless task.
We can turn this around in another way, I think, with Spinoza’s remark about what’s actually going on when someone makes a mathematical error. Someone who says a triangle is round is just using the word “triangle” in a different way from others, he claims, but then whatever is going on in the person’s mind when he then says triangles have an infinite set of coequal radii or something like that is a real and legitimate and thus “correct” mental act: he’s thinking of what we call a circle, and on that basis an actual valid development from premise to conclusion is occurring, and what he says is not false. (Spinoza compares it hearing a neighbor saying “My hall flew down the hen!”–but nevertheless understanding the meaning….) This is perhaps useful even without assuming an absolutist truth for the geometrical examples as Spinoza does: the point is not only that all the claims are relative to the context of the specific ways the terms are applied, and these can admit of a lot of wiggle room from case to case, but also that between different contexts and systems there is a built-in translatability, that being limited to context actually entails being unclosed, i.e., _not_ limited to context, open to encounter with other contexts, and in fact requiring that encounter intrinstically, requiring retranslation from moment to moment even to sustain itself and continue being itself–in other words, in Neo-Tiantai terms, local coherence is global incoherence, and that means each local coherence has a built in link or bridge or attraction to every other. Maybe the embrace of a shared language can also be informed by something like this–a kind of consensus which may be indeterminate with respect to realism; not excluding it, but not requiring it. Not sure if that makes sense, but something along those lines strikes me as a promising way to pursue this question….
Not sure if I answered your questions, but thanks again for the thought-provoking comments! Nice to have a bit of conversation on this.
Thanks so much for your reply. If I may add some further thoughts:
First, my study group colleagues asked about works that further explore this pre-reflective language/fundamental ontology relationship – any suggestions?
In contrast to the exposure Indo-Tibetan Buddhism gets in both academic and popular culture circles, I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about the many unfortunately insurmountable barriers to making Chinese thinkers more visible and accessible. The collective effect of all this must have a lot to do with the neglect of Sinitic thought: 1) Cultural Isolation: China’s post-war isolationism and internal conflict, contrasted with the collective effect of generations of scholars, seekers, and boomers who went to India (and Japan) and brought back their cultural products, add to this the global exposure to Indo-Tibetan Buddhism by the Tibetan diaspora; 2) Strange Language: the sheer unfamiliarity and distance of the Sinitic language and its non-alphabetic writing system; particularly difficulty pronouncing and remembering Chinese names and words as well as confusion from the two transliteration systems; 3) Strange Culture: the most foreign of sophisticated foreign civilizations; the most non-western worldview; per your lecture on religion without God, a strange religion; ancient imperial past, the communist present; collectivist (as opposed to individualist) mentality; 4) Bad Politics: disdain for the CCP and its authoritarian politics, control, and censorship; sympathy for the Tibetan-Uyghur genocide and hatred of Chinese bullying; the distance thus created; 5) Lack of Popularization: compared to Japanese culture (cars, electronics, companies, Zen everything, martial arts, origami, Japanese anime, film, design, gardens, etc.) – way stronger presence due to longstanding isolation of Chinese cultural products. Of course, there is as much or more to attract folks to Chinese culture and thinking, but these barriers are real.
I continue to fully digest the “wonderfully weird” Tiantai moves on Mahayana nonduality. It would appear to me that Indo-Tibetan nonduality goes beyond the appearance/reality dichotomy and other subtle dualisms lingering in Indo-Tibetan Sanskrit-based Middle Way philosophy possibly only through the One Taste or Suchness of Dzogchen, where the sameness-difference of nirvana-samsara, reality-appearance, ultimate-conventional drop away but also entail each other – that special Dzogchen “basic space of phenomena” or Rigpa. Rigpa seems to erase or make the appearance-reality distinction both trivial and supremely important, collapsing-yet-affirming all opposites. But you’re right, even the Tibetan Shentong/Rangtong debate seems to be another example of lingering duality as is the whole Emptiness/Buddhanature dialectic, as are the problems with defining conventional truth in contrast to ultimate truth. Perhaps there’s some overcoming of this lingering dualism in the pluralism in the 19th century Rime movement?
Consensus Narrative/Science question reflections: I would love to hear what you have to say on this topic – please start writing! I agree science and scientific truths are also contexts relative to particular desires and specific practices. But regularity, repeatability, stability per scientific truth seems the best we have to transcend cultural contexts; and doesn’t humanity need extra-cultural repeatability-power to ground consensus reality and broad agreement?… like mainstream science already does… astronomy, physics, chemistry, the periodic table, thermodynamics, biochemistry, and technologies thereof etc. – the combined truth-stability of these is *staggering in its scope and power* to minimize context and generate agreement.
Regarding views of science: I’m a longtime student of systems theory and science in general and, although I’m not an expert, I have tracked the emergence of what could be called a kind of “postmodern science” based in situatedness, probability, fundamental uncertainty, indeterminacy, habits of nature, in opposition to mainstream traditional science based in laws of nature, essences, universals, and transcendent reasoning – it’s a relatively recent view of science that appears to mesh well with Chinese views. Thus, with respect to traditional Chinese views, truths in science can be seen in these two ways:
• As Laws and Essences: instantiations of universal laws of nature, principles, unchanging mathematical formulations, determinate rules, foundational truths, etc. (per traditional modernist science) or
• As Probabilities and Relations: statistical habits of nature, regularities rather than rules or laws, recurring patterns that derive from example and experience supported by reason and logic (these are the various types of systems theory known as the sciences of complexity, nonlinear dynamics, emergence theory, non-equilibrium self-organization, instability and chaos, indeterminism, and fundamental uncertainty) [Perhaps best described by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers in their classic “Order Out of Chaos”; by Prigogine in “The End of Certainty”; by Stengers in “Cosmopolitics vols, I and II”; and by Gigerenzer et al in “The Empire of Chance”, among hundreds of more specific volumes on complexity, chaos, nonlinear systems, self-organizing systems, etc.]
Although both are still within the sphere of Indo-European based metaphysics, the former is the mainstream traditional view (most prominent in physics) whereas the latter represents a distinct break from certain aspects of Enlightenment modernist metaphysics.
Following Prigogine’s original articulation of “science’s new dialogue with nature” and coinciding with rise of the computer (70s to 90s), a new philosophy of science has begun to emerge that goes by the name The New Mechanical Philosophy or the New Mechanism. [See Stuart Glennen, “The New Mechanical Philosophy” and Carl Craver, “Mechanisms in Science” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Craver “In Search of Mechanisms”.] It’s not at all old-school mechanisms. But this latter probabilities view, at least to me, has parallels with Chinese views in that it abandons basic Indo-European needs for grounding, certainty, natural law, essences, universals, etc. and operates more from an acceptance of *ambiguity, probabilities, uncertainty, relations and contexts*, as opposed to a fundamental ontology and causal principles – maybe not nondual but is certainly essenceless and context based. In any event, I would love to see a Neo-Tiantai approach to Kuhnian science – it’s paradigms, practices, injunctions – as contexts that generate stable coherences, regularities across all of time and space (not regularities as universals but as probabilities) – a Neo-Tiantai view of the periodic table, the Standard Model, relativity theory, basic laws of thermodynamics and chemistry… like that.
Observation: having worked 35 years with East Asian students and colleagues in international education programs, I came to appreciate how East Asian cultures continually struggle to maintain their cultural identity against the multi-pronged onslaught of modernization-Westernization, in every sphere of life. It thus made me appreciate that there are *two cultural historical encounters* between Chinese/East Asian systems and Indo-European systems: 1) the Absorption of Indian Buddhism; and 2) the Absorption of Western Modernity. It’s easy to overlook how, unlike Western cultures who’ve lived out their own history, contemporary Chinese and other East Asian peoples live in a kind of layered fusion worldview of not one but two sophisticated Indo-European systems they’ve had to absorb, struggle with, integrate, adapt their indigenous cultural worldview to. Apart from India having to absorb the Islamic monotheism, neither India nor Europe had to struggle through similar integrations of foreign cultural systems comparable to East Asia. Only in the past 50-100 years is the West having to encounter and wrestle with Asian and non-Indo-European cultural systems (although Urs App locates the beginning of the Western encounter with Asian cultural systems in the 18th century [App, Urs (2010), “The Birth of Orientalism”. Philadelphia: U of Penn.]).
Lastly, a suggestion: my experience is that folks find your writing rough going; thus, might there be a place for someone (one of your students?) to summarize and assemble your ideas into a more accessible package? Something that more easily digestible? Little by little I’m trying to bring attention to your work through reviews of your books on Goodreads.com, Amazon, and on Academia.edu.
Also FYI: My already-posted comments on your site seem to load only in Windows/PC browsers. I can’t get them to load at all in my MacOS or iOS browsers.
Many thanks for this opportunity to engage these fascinating ideas.