Joseph S. O'Leary is an Irish theologian who has taught in the Faculty of Letters, Sophia University, Tokyo, since 1988. His principal publication is a series of books on fundamental theology: Questioning Back (Winston-Seabury, 1985); Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (Edinburgh University Press, 1996); Conventional Truth and Reflective Judgment (University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming). He is currently writing a Christian commentary on the Vimalakīrti Sutra for the series Christian Commentaries on Non-Christian Sacred Texts, edited by Catherine Cornille. Address: Department of English Literature, Sophia University, 7–1 Kioi-cho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102–8554. E-mail:
關鍵詞
Buddhism; Nirvana; Anxiety; Everyday Life; Taoism
摘要
Buddhism relentlessly exposes the impermanent, painful, and insubstantial character of all phenomena, but it ends up reinstating the conventional samsaric world as the place where nirvanic emptiness can be encountered and where compassion can be skilfully exercised. In Hegel and Heidegger one also finds dialectical reversals that bring a positive result from the ordeal of the negative. In Heidegger, the encounter with nothingness in anxiety brings a discovery of the phenomenon of being. In Hegel, the dialectical self-dissolution of received metaphysical notions generates a positive method of grasping the real. Heidegger's meditative thinking has an affinity with Hegel's Concept, in that both free the mind from the painfully constricted forms of metaphysics. Heidegger is also near to Daoism when he grounds the clarity of logical thought in a more obscure, originary kind of thought, and when he characterises the movement of thinking, at this more originary level, as a ‘way.’ All four dialectical paths reveal their vitality, in reciprocal critique, when rooted in the human quest to bring the everyday into connection with ultimate meaning.
目次
Anxiety and nothingness 466 Dialectic in Heidegger 468 Buddhist dialectic 470 The dark origins of thought: Heidegger and Daoism 473 Notes 476 References 477
