This dissertation examines the understanding of the human person in the thought of the Japanese Zen master Shin'ichi Hisamatsu (1889-1980). The treatise seeks to (a) explicate Hisamatsu's understanding of the root problem of human existence, (b) analyze the awakening to the "true Self without life-and-death even as it lives and dies" which constitutes for Hisamatsu the resolution to that problem, (c) delineate Hisamatsu's view of the method for achieving this resolution, and (d) examine Hisamatsu's critique of traditional Zen for its indifference to socio-political concerns.
(a) For Hisamatsu, human existence is inherently beset by a fundamental problem or "ultimate antinomy" which is the origin of the basic anxiety and estrangement of human life. (b) As the locus of this problem is the very nature of personhood--in consequence of the awareness of transience and radical negativity concomitant with an "I"-hood essentially characterized by the dualities of life and death, value and disvalue--no resolution can occur within the matrix of ordinary personhood, but only through the "Great Death" of the "I" which is at once the awakening to the true Self. (c) The precondition for this awakening is the actualization of the ultimate existential impasse which Zen terms the "great doubt block." Hisamatsu defines this impasse, which obtains when the tension between the demand for and the impossibility of resolution is brought to its ultimate pitch, as the combined absolute contradiction of the intellect, absolute anguish of the emotions, and absolute dilemma of the will. He contends that only with the actualization and subsequent breakup of this supreme deadlock can the human predicament be resolved. (d) Hisamatsu criticizes Zen for its exclusive preoccupation with the ultimate human problem at the expense of socio-political perplexities. He proposes a broadened Zen compassion which would address both. Nevertheless, his proposal remains sentimental. The thesis critiques this sentimentality primarily through the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, who argued against similarly sentimentalized forms of Christianity and secular thought during World War II. The author's attack, while directed against Hisamatsu specifically, is intended as a challenge to all Zen attempts at a political activity or "Zen ethics," especially those which, in accordance with the long-standing doctrine of ahimsa, hold Zen and Buddhism to an unconditional pacifism.
