Watsuji Tetsurô; emptiness; ethics; Buddhism; Japanese Philosophy
摘要
Watsuji Tetsurô (1889–1960) is famous for having constructed a systematic socio-political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought (based on lectures given in the 1920s), in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine-tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non-duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities.
目次
1. Retracing Watsuji’s Buddhism 609 2. Primitive Buddhism: Dharma and Dependent Arising 611 2.1 Dharma 611 2.2 Dependent arising 613 2.3 The foundation of morality 617 2.4 Recapitulation 619 3. Mahāyāna: The Return to and from Emptiness 619 3.1 Nāgārjuna 619 3.2 Yogācāra buddhism 621 3.3 Recapitulation 623 4. Philosophical Buddhism in Systematic Ethics 623 4.1 Non-duality and negation 624 4.2 Hegelian Buddhism 625 5. Shifts and Dilemmas 627 5.1 Dialectics of emptiness 627 5.2 Between is and ought 629 5.3 Hermeneutics and transcendence 630 6. Conclusion 631 References 632
