Advaita Vedānta and Zen Buddhism: Deconstructive Modes of Spiritual Inquiry. By Leesa S. Davis. London: Continuum, 2010. ISBN: 9781441121097, pp. xxi, 222. $120 (cloth), $44.95 (paperback).
Author Affiliations: Elizabethtown College
摘要
In this concise and focussed study, Leesa Davis examines the strategies of teachers in both the Advaita Vedānta and Zen Buddhist traditions aimed at cultivating a non-dual awareness in their practitioners through the deconstruction of the subject–object duality that typically characterises conventional experience. Davis isolates four specific methods by which these teachers destabilise their students’ deeply ingrained habit of experiencing and interpreting the contents of experience in dualistic terms. She labels these methods or ‘deconstructive techniques’ (i) unfindability analysis, (ii) bringing everything back to the here and now, (iii) paradoxical problems, and (iv) negation (p. xx), and explores the workings of these methods through interviews with contemporary practitioners.
Davis’ thesis is that, the radical differences in the ontologies of Advaita Vedānta and Zen Buddhism notwithstanding, the deconstructive strategies pursued by teachers in these two traditions are, in many respects, virtually identical, as are the results that they yield in the experience of their practitioners. Both traditions are united in seeing subject–object dualism as an inadequate and distorting overlay upon the true nature of reality, and thus in seeking to deconstruct this overlay. Davis is careful not to conflate, and always to distinguish, the advaitavāda, or teaching of non-difference, of …
