Indian Mind Essentials Of Indian Philosophy And Culture

Author(s): Richard H Robinson
Publisher: Richard H Robinson

Page 10

THE INDIAN (ESSENTIALS OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHY AND CULTURE) 97
in the Pali Suttas, but Gautama does not in fact say so in any Sutta.
Junjiro Takakusu's article, "Buddhism as a Philosophy of "Thusness'," is probably the most inscrutable piece of Oriental English ever published. Moore recognizes (footnote, p. 86) that "there is much in this chapter which is strange and difficult for the Western reader." He recommends preparatory study of Buddhism, and attributes the difficulty in part to the condensation of so much material into so little space. This is very charitable, as the more extensive treatment of the subject in Takakusu's Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy is equally impenetrable.
too.
The trouble does not lie on the superficial linguistic level. Takakusu's manuscript has been well edited, and lapses in English syntax and idiom are remarkably few. The vocabulary at first glance looks English, But further examination reveals the whole difficulty. The taxt is an intellectual palimpsest in which layers from several languages, cultures, periods, and schools are neither properly erased nor clearly readable. For example, Takakusu is very fond of "determinism," and "indeterminate." He never defines these terms, and uses them in various and puzzling senses: "Void" means "indeterminate" (p. 103); "the indeterminateness of Nirvana" (p. 104); "Confucianism is a determinism in the sense that Heaven is considered the basic principle of human life" (p. 104); "The idea of indetermination in the world of differentiation is expressed by many terms: 'having no special nature' or 'having no definite nature'; 'all things are emptiness' or 'having no special state'; 'all are of temporary existent by combination of causes' " (pp. 105-106). Then he says: "[Nirvana] simply meant the eternal continuation of his [the Buddha's] personality in the highest sense of the world" (p. 108). Nirvana is thus not indeterminate in any of the meanings Takakusu gives, unless "in the highest sense" really signals a shift of truth-level. All these English phrases mask Sino-Japanese calques for Sanskrit terms such as sunya, nihsv abhava, asadbhuta, and pratityasamutpada. But then Takakusu tosses the reader a specious analogy with modern physics which indicates that he has understood neither term of the comparison. "Buddhism has been teaching the Principle of Indetermination of matter and mind for over 2,500 years, but no anxiety or inconvenience has been caused by it as some modern physicists fear over the spread of the idea of the Uncertainty Principle of physical science" (p. 106). At the risk of further uncharity, one may hazard the suggestion that Takakusu himself is not troubled by multivalence, self-contradiction, and sheer meaninglessness, because for him language is not a means of communicating ideas but of inducing emotive states and ritually validating cultural institutions.
If this is the real purpose of his verbal behavior, it is disguised by sporadic attempts to philosophize. He presents an elaborate dialectic which he says is Nagarjuna's, but which is in fact Takakusu's own homegrown cross between Nagarjuna and Hegel (pp. 111-112). It is an oscillation between "commonsense truth" and "higher truth" in which the synthesis of the two at each stage becomes the common-sense truth for