Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism

Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism
Author: Youru Wang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2003-12-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134429762

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As the first systematic attempt to probe the linguistic strategies of Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism, this book investigates three areas: deconstructive strategy, liminology of language, and indirect communication. It bases these investigations on the critical examination of original texts, placing them strictly within soteriological contexts. Whilst focusing on language use, the study also reveals some important truths about these two traditions and challenges many conventional understandings of them. Responding to recent critiques of Daoist and Chan Buddhist thought, it brings these two traditions into a constructive dialogue with contemporary philosophical reflection. It discovers Zhuangzian and Chan perspectives and sheds light on issues such as the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, de-reification of words, relativising the limit of language, structure of indirect communication, and use of paradox, tautology and poetic language.

Teaching the Daode Jing

Teaching the Daode Jing
Author: Gary Delaney DeAngelis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2008-04-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199715726

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The Daode Jing, a highly enigmatic work rooted in ancient Chinese cosmology, ontology, metaphysics, and moral thinking, is regularly offered to college and high-school students in religion, philosophy, history, literature, Asian studies, and humanities courses. As a result, an ever-expanding group of faculty with very different backgrounds and training routinely confront the question: "How should I teach the Daode Jing?" Written for non-specialists who may not have a background in ancient Chinese culture, the essays collected in this volume provide up-to-date information on contemporary scholarship and classroom strategies that have been successful in a variety of teaching environments. A classic text like the Daode Jing generates debate among scholars and teachers who ask questions like: Should we capitalize on popular interest in the Daode Jing in our classrooms? Which of the many translations and scholarly approaches ought we to use? Is it appropriate to think of the Daode Jing as a religious text at all? These and other controversies are addressed in this volume. Contributors are well-known scholars of Daoism, including Livia Kohn, Norman Girardot, Robert Henricks, Russell Kirkland, Hans-Georg Moeller, Hall Roth, and Michael LaFargue. In addition, there are essays by Eva Wong (Daoist practitioner), David Hall (philosophy), Gary DeAngelis (mysticism), and a jointly written essay on pedagogical strategies by Judith Berling, Geoffrey Foy, and John Thompson (Chinese religion).

Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought

Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought
Author: Youru Wang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 485
Release: 2007-03-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1135988137

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The striking parallels between Derrida’s deconstruction and certain strategies eschewing oppositional hierarchies in Asian thought, especially in Buddhism and Daoism, have attracted much attention from scholars of both Western and Asian philosophy. This book contributes to this discussion by focusing on the ethical dimension and function of deconstruction in Asian thought. Examining different traditions and schools of Asian thought, including Indian Buddhism, Zen, other schools of East Asian Buddhism, the Kyoto School, and Daoism, the contributors explore the central theme from different contexts and different angles. Insights and notions from the contemporary discussion of Derridean deconstruction and its ethic or Derridean-Levinasian ethic as a paradigm for comparison or interpretation are used as a framework. Furthering our understanding of the relationship between deconstruction and the ethical in Asian traditions, this book also enriches the contemporary ethical discourse from a global perspective by bridging Asia and the West.

The Ethical Dimension of Forgetfulness

The Ethical Dimension of Forgetfulness
Author: Youru Wang
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-08-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781032300733

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This book investigates the various meanings of forgetting and their ethical dimension in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi. It will be of interest to researchers in Asian philosophy, religion and culture, moral philosophy or ethics, the study of memory and forgetting, and comparative or cross-cultural philosophy and ethics.

Aimless Wandering

Aimless Wandering
Author: Hakim Bey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 28
Release: 1993
Genre:
ISBN:

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Dao Companion to Chinese Buddhist Philosophy

Dao Companion to Chinese Buddhist Philosophy
Author: Youru Wang
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2019-01-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9048129397

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Too often Buddhism has been subjected to the Procrustean box of western thought, whereby it is stretched to fit fixed categories or had essential aspects lopped off to accommodate vastly different cultural norms and aims. After several generations of scholarly discussion in English-speaking communities, it is time to move to the next hermeneutical stage. Buddhist philosophy must be liberated from the confines of a quasi-religious stereotype and judged on its own merits. Hence this work will approach Chinese Buddhism as a philosophical tradition in its own right, not as an historical after-thought nor as an occasion for comparative discussions that assume the west alone sets the standards for or is the origin of philosophy and its methodologies. Viewed within their own context, Chinese Buddhist philosophers have much to contribute to a wide range of philosophical concerns, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of religion, even though Western divisions of philosophy may not exhaust the rich contents of Chinese Buddhist philosophy. .

Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored

Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored
Author: Jennifer R. Rapp
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-03-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0823257452

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Rapp begins with a question posed by the poet Theodore Roethke: “Should we say that the self, once perceived, becomes a soul?” Through her examination of Plato’s Phaedrus and her insights about the place of forgetting in a life, Rapp answers Roethke’s query with a resounding Yes. In so doing, Rapp reimagines the Phaedrus, interprets anew Plato’s relevance to contemporary life, and offers an innovative account of forgetting as a fertile fragility constitutive of humanity. Drawing upon poetry and comparisons with other ancient Greek and Daoist texts, Rapp brings to light overlooked features of the Phaedrus, disrupts longstanding interpretations of Plato as the facile champion of memory, and offers new lines of sight onto (and from) his corpus. Her attention to the Phaedrus and her meditative apprehension of the permeable character of human life leave our understanding of both Plato and forgetting inescapably altered. Unsettle everything you think you know about Plato, suspend the twentieth-century entreaty to “Never forget,” and behold here a new mode of critical reflection in which textual study and humanistic inquiry commingle to expansive effect.

Patriarchs on Paper

Patriarchs on Paper
Author: Alan Cole
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520959752

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The truth of Chan Buddhism—better known as “Zen”—is regularly said to be beyond language, and yet Chan authors—medieval and modern—produced an enormous quantity of literature over the centuries. To make sense of this well-known paradox, Patriarchs on Paper explores several genres of Chan literature that appeared during the Tang and Song dynasties (c. 600–1300), including genealogies, biographies, dialogues, poems, monastic handbooks, and koans. Working through this diverse body of literature, Alan Cole details how Chan authors developed several strategies to evoke images of a perfect Buddhism in which wonderfully simple masters transmitted Buddhism’s final truth to one another, suddenly and easily, and, of course, independent of literature and the complexities of the Buddhist monastic system. Chan literature, then, reveled in staging delightful images of a Buddhism free of Buddhism, tempting the reader, over and over, with the possibility of finding behind the thick façade of real Buddhism—with all its rules, texts, doctrines, and institutional solidity—an ethereal world of pure spirit. Patriarchs on Paper charts the emergence of this kind of “fantasy Buddhism” and details how it interacted with more traditional forms of Chinese Buddhism in order to show how Chan’s illustrious ancestors were created in literature in order to further a wide range of real-world agendas.

Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion

Ineffability: An Exercise in Comparative Philosophy of Religion
Author: Timothy D. Knepper
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2017-11-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3319641654

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This collection of essays is an exercise in comparative philosophy of religion that explores the different ways in which humans express the inexpressible. It brings together scholars of over a dozen religious, literary, and artistic traditions, as part of The Comparison Project's 2013-15 lecture and dialogue series on "religion beyond words." Specialist scholars first detailed the grammars of ineffability in nine different religious traditions as well as the adjacent fields of literature, poetry, music, and art. The Comparison Project's directors then compared this diverse set of phenomena, offering explanations for their patterning, and raising philosophical questions of truth and value about religious ineffability in comparative perspective. This book is the inaugural publication of The Comparison Project, an innovative new approach to the philosophy of religion housed at Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa, USA). The Comparison Project organizes a biennial series of scholar lectures, practitioner dialogues, and comparative panels about core, cross-cultural topics in the philosophy of religion. Specialist scholars of religion first explore this topic in their religions of expertise; comparativist philosophers of religion then raise questions of meaning, truth, and value about this topic in comparative perspective. The Comparison Project stands apart from traditional approaches to the philosophy of religion in its commitment to religious inclusivity. It is the future of the philosophy of religion in a diverse, global world.