Despite the cultural and intellectual distances between Martin Heidegger’s thinking of being (Sein) and Zen Buddhism’s meditation on the empty mind and no-self (kongxin ; wuwo ), both have been portrayed as disclosing “primordial experience” through the dismantling of the sedimentations involved in language and conceptual thinking.Whereas Heidegger’s destructuring (Destruktion) of the history of metaphysics and fallen inauthentic everydayness discloses the possibility of a more originary encounter with being and reorientation of individual existence (Dasein), Zen Buddhism’s aporetic and puzzling strategies seemingly throw even standard Buddhist teachings into question in revealing original mind (benxin ) and self-nature (zixing ).
2. Heidegger and Zen apparently converge in overcoming objectifying, representational, and calculative thought as derivative in light of a more originary abiding presencing.
3. Such comparative portrayals have been increasingly questioned as critics of Heidegger and Zen, and of their potential convergence, warn that this totalizing and constant presence is a rei?cation that problematically repeats rather than overcomes metaphysics.
4. Heidegger himself emphasized the holding sway and presencing of being. But these concepts are understood primarily temporally and ecstatically, and evoke absence and interruption as much as—if not more than—abiding presence, singularity and alterity as much as universality and identity, and transience and transformation as much as constancy. The fundamental temporality, historicity, and hermeneutical character of Heidegger’s thinking of being are particularly evident in his lecture courses of the early and mid-1920s, which help contextualize the strategies and claims of Being and Time and his later thought. Heidegger’s early strategy of formal indication ( formale Anzeige) is a process of destructuring and emptying pre-established contents and models through formalization in order to allow concrete phenomena in their variety, texture, and particularity to show themselves from themselves. This strategy is re?ected in his methodological atheism requiring the suspension of faith in philosophy, the emptying of the sacred, and the formalization of religious categories that he redeploys in his analysis of human existence.
5. Rather than positing an abstract or mystical “presence” underlying beings, a totalizing being subsuming individual life, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of factical life stresses the lived enactment, performativity, and practice of being. Heidegger’s early hermeneutics is illuminative in contrast with the paradoxical performative strategies of Hongzhou and Linji Chan Buddhism. In these strategies, emptiness is an enactment and practice of emptying and clearing, proceeding through interruptions of ordinary conventional dispositions. Destructuring aprorias and paradoxes—including the rei?cation of sacredness and central Buddhist teachings—are skillfully employed to encounter the phenomena themselves “just as they are” ( faruru ). Rather than sublimating phenomenality into a monistic or totalizing presence, including the presence of “absolute nothingness,” Heidegger and Chan Buddhism indicate strategies for allowing things to be encountered immanently from out of themselves in their singularity and contextual interdependence. These strategies of derei?cation proceed through transformative encounters with what resists being thought, perceived, or categorized in customary terms by ordinary understanding. Nothingness and emptiness are indispensable yet traceless moments in attending to, responding to, or being mindful of the phenomena themselves in their upsurge and self-occurrence (phusis) or the one interdependent suchness (yiru ) of the myriad dharmas (wanfa ).
6. Chan Buddhism faces the rei?cation of its own means of communication, which would undermine rather than encourage insight into the self, responsiveness to things, a
