What Eastern philosophy can contribute
02
May
Trying to understand the etymology of Being in the East, as indicated by Han
in his book Absence, I searched for the words Being/Staying and didn’t find the symbol that the author points out, by putting being, possessing or having I found the symbol 有 (you) which “represents a hand holding a piece of meat” (p. 17) … “However, being as a demand, an appetite, does not dominate Chinese thought” (HAN, 2014, p. 18).
Quoting Zhuang Zhou, “the sage walks in non-being” (you yu wu you, 慧於無為者, Z. [Zhuan Zhou] Book Z), who also talks about “walking in simplicity” (you yu dan, 游宇丹) (p. 18).
He also quotes the Chinese sage L. Laozi who also denies “essence” (wu, wu, 非無 ) and through non-essence (wu wu, L. [Laozi], §14), “or rather au-sence”, in German Abwesen (essence) where ab means negation, I recall that the English word absence is also very close to German.
For this Taoist philosophy, the sage walks where there is “neither door nor house” and according to Han he is compared to a quail that has no nest, that is, it has no fixed abode, so “it walks like a bird that leaves no trace” (p. 19), but Taoist non-walking is not totally identical to Buddhist “non-housing” (wu zhu, 無竹 ), but negativity connects them.
The Japanese Zen master Dogen also teaches dwelling nowhere: “a Zen monk should have no abode, like the clouds, and no fixed support, like water” (p. 20).
Laozi’s wanderer does not pursue any direction, he has no intention, he goes nowhere (p. 20), and all this suggests a non-being, but this is not Eastern nihilism, because there too “fixed essentialities emerge … the soul also insists” (p. 21), like the figure who recommends walking in non-being to the ‘ground of heaven’, where he sought advice, Wu Ming (無名 , literally, ‘the nameless one’, Z. Book 7).
This unprecedented interpretation, for me, of a fusion of Buddhism and Taoism seems, in its non-being, to suggest a transcendence like the divine of the non-secularized West, “that which is” and which in fact cannot have a name, because it is thus pure language in silence and non-being.
In the same way that previous analyses of Western philosophy have been based on logicism and a binary logic where Being is and non-being is not, and Eastern philosophy is moving in the direction of non-being, absence can also indicate a form of being that transcends Being-is.
I see a certain possible fusion and a new horizon in a hermeneutic circle in this oriental “absence”: being, non-being and transcendent non-being (absence or emptiness).
Han, B.-C. (2024) Ausência: sobre a cultura e a filosofia do extremo oriente. Trad. Rafael Zambonelli, Petrópolis, RJ, Brazil: Vozes.
Dogen, Eihei, Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Unterweisungen zum wahren Buddha-Weg. Heidelberg: Kristkeitz Werner, 1997. (cited by B.-C. Han).
Zhou, Zhuang. Das whare Buch Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland, Düsserldof: diederichs, 1969. (cited by B.-C. Han).
