Place: Marriott Hotel-Room 410, Philadelphia, USA

Topic: Author Meets Critics

Dale Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism

Chair: Ellen Zhang (Temple University)

Commentator: Youru Wang (Rowan University)

Commentator: Tao Jiang (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

Commentator:John Krummel (LaSalle University)

Commentator: Jacques Fasan (Temple University)

Response: Dale Wright (Occidental College)

Brief Description:

The panel brings together the author of the book, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and five critics in the hope of generating lively discussions on several important issues presented in the book.  Dale S. Wright is David B. and Mary H. Gamble Professor of Religious Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and his book is acclaimed as a prime example of excellence on Chan/Zen scholarship in the west.  The book focuses on the figure of the ninth-century Chinese Buddhist master, Huang Bo, whose recorded sayings exemplify the spirit of the "golden age" of Chan in medireview China.  It addresses significant philosophical issues that arise in the Chan traditions of East Asian Buddhism as it has been transmitted to the west in the twentieth century.

Wright thoroughly critiques the romanticist orientation in the early transmission of Huang Bo’s text to the west by John Blofeld.  In doing so, he methodically thematizes the operative schemes that significantly colored the western reception of Chan, Huang Bo’s text in this connection.  After that, Wright offers his own interpretations of several core philosophical issues that pertain to some widely accepted Chan image in the west, especially the Chan rhetoric of iconoclasm and non-dependence of enlightenment on scriptures.  He points out several contradictions within the Chan tradition itself if those rhetoric were to be taken literally, namely the Chan monastic order wherein hierarchy was strictly observed, the reading of scriptures in the training of Chan monks, the reading of scriptures by Huang Bo even after his enlightenment, etc.  In contextualizing Chan teachings, especially that of Huang Bo’s, Wright’s book greatly enhances our understanding and appreciation of the "real" Chan behind the veil of the image that it projects about itself.

A couple of major themes covered and implied in the book call for further discussions and deliberations.  They include, the Buddhist concept of dependent-origination with its connection to the contemporary theories of (con)text and contextuality, different theories of language in approaching Zen texts, liminality of saying and unsaying in Chan Buddhism as a methodic procedure, the re-appropriation of sunyata (emptiness) as "between-ness: (the Chinese approach to Nagarjuna’s tetralemma in terms of the ultimate and the provisional, silence and speaking, emptiness and dependency/conventionality, and etc.), the (de)construction of mystical/apophatic experience and philosophical expressions, and the critique of "reversed orientalism" in the western interpretation of Chan/Zen.