Bernard Faure > Quotes

“There is probably no way for Westerners to understand Asian religions from a purely traditional
Indian, Chinese, or Japanese perspective, but perhaps is there no need either to do so.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“It is precisely this [transcendental] privilege that Christian missionaries in China and Japan failed to relinquish when they spoke about Buddhism; but the same failure is found in such "na(t)ive" exponents of Zen as D. T. Suzuki, and it would perhaps be hard to decide which version of Zen, the negative or the idealized, is most misleading. Even if the degree of reductionism is not quite the same in both cases, both interpretations share responsibility for the strange predicament in which Westerners who approach Chan/Zen find themselves: they are unable to consider it a serious intellectual system, for the constraints of Western discourse on Zen cause them to either devaluate it as an Eastern form of either "natural mysticism" or "quietism" or to idealize it as a wonderfully exotic Dharma. In this sense, Zen can be seen as a typical example of "secondary Orientalism," a stereotype concocted as much by the Japanese themselves as by Westerners.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The first encounter with Chan/Zen took place in Japan, where Francis Xavier arrived in August 1549. Xavier's stay in Japan was relatively short, and he had to rely in the beginning on the poor information provided by the Japanese convert Yajirō, who spoke some Portuguese. In contrast to Ricci's, Xavier's judgment reflects the sociopolitical importance of Buddhism in Japanese society prior to the anti-Buddhist repression of 1571, as well as the strong impressions left by his first encounters with Zen masters. Although Xavier and his confreres were puzzled by the many similarities between Buddhism and Christianity and first interpreted them as proof of a past knowledge, obscured in time, of Christian teachings, they eventually attributed them to the work of the devil (Schurhammer 1982, 224).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Perhaps the impossibility in which we are to rid ourselves of cultural and epistemological constraints does not prevent us from understanding other cultures, as long as we remain conscious of these constraints and consider them as providing the necessary perspective for any "thick description.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Owing to the lingering Jesuit influence, the study of Confucianism continued to prevail in Western Sinology, while Chinese Buddhism and Chan came to be considered mere offshoots of Indian mysticism.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“From the outset the Buddhist tradition has been divided between the most uncompromising moral rigorism and a subversion of all ideals in the name of a higher truth, transcending good and evil. Māhāyana Buddhism, in particular, argued that the ultimate truth can be discovered only by those who awaken to the reality of desire and are able to transmute it.”
― Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality

“As it is known to us through East Asian sources, Chan/Zen is the product of two traditions that sometimes overlap, sometimes contradict or ignore each other: namely, the Buddhist orthodoxy the
Sino-Japanese historiographical tradition.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The relation between Christianity and Buddhism is compared by [D. T.] Suzuki to that between wine and tea: whereas tea is tasteless but stimulating, wine "first
excitates and then inebriates" (Suzuki 1970, 273). This line of argument led Suzuki to the conclusion that Zen is neither a philosophy nor a metaphysics nor a religion, but it is, rather, "the spirit of all religion or philosophy." Suzuki went so far as to assert that "if there is a God, personal or impersonal, he or it must be with Zen and in Zen" (Suzuki 1969, 347). Implicit in such statements is an almost Protestant view of religion as a reality that has nothing to do with cults, dogmas, or collective beliefs, but rests on the "inner experience" of the individual. However, owing to the atypical character of such "mystical" experiences, their extreme rarity, and the Christian theology they often presuppose, it seems illegitimate to derive from them a general (if not always explicit) theory of religion, as Suzuki and Nishida, following William James, have done.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Admittedly, it would be naive to expect a sixteenth century Jesuit, a "warrior" for Christ, to apologize for or to compromise his faith, and to that extent Ricci's rejection of Buddhism is consistent. Ricci, however, did compromise with Confucianism, and his justification of his faith was not free of cunning and deception.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Orientalism is but one historical variety of larger epistemological issues, that of the West's encounter with other cultures and of its tendency to disparage and/or idealize them.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Although [D. T.] Suzuki's apparently free-floating, and certainly contradictory, discourse may be charitably interpreted as reflecting the "unlocalized" mind of the enlightened master, it can also appear as a situational reflex to "cash in" on both sides of every issue.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Whereas the Enlightenment had found its model in China, Romanticism turned to India, the source of all mysticism (Schwab 1984; Halbfass 1988).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Although the eighteenth-century European rationalists attacked the Society of Jesus and its proselytism in China, they remained entirely dependent on the Jesuits' information on China, mainly through the collection of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (published until 1818) and through Jean-Baptiste du Halde's Description géographique (1735). In many ways, the Jesuits paved the way for the philosophers' description of China as a "paradisiacal universe," a model of rational government, and Chinese religion as a "heap of superstitions." The humanist tendency of the Jesuits backfired onto Christianity when Voltaire began advocating to "crush the infamous" (Ecraser l'infâme), that is, superstition, hence Catholicism, "under the weight of China and the virtue of the Chinese.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Their common interest in Western mystics like Meister Eckhart led both Nishida and Suzuki to misrepresent Christianity as some kind of inferior version of Mahayäna Buddhism, thus reversing the old schemas applied to the East by Westerners.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The outstanding achievements of Matteo Ricci, the man whom Demiéville called the "founding father of Western Sinology" (Demiéville 1966, 38), had a high cost: in particular, his prejudices against Buddhism and Chinese religion have had enduring consequences; he circumscribed the field of Sinology by excluding entire areas of the Chinese intellectual and religious life. We may therefore wonder to what extent "every Western Sinologist should recognize his forebearer in him [Ricci]" (Demiéville 1967, 88). Certainly, this genealogy has lost some of its legitimizing power and needs to be questioned if it cannot be transcended.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“If there is some truth in the Zen dictum that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, then it follows that the notion of pure experience is by no means the pure experience itself. Assuming that such an experience can be found, any attempt to characterize it, even the least reifying one, will betray it.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Buddhists have always claimed the moral high ground and attempted, with more or less success, to maintain an exigent ideal of purity. Any spiritual practice is fated to confront the obstinate realities of human existence, however.”
― Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality

“Both the ethnocentric and anti-ethnocentric extremes arise from the same root, the tendency to make absolute the differences among cultures and traditions.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The success of [D. T.] Suzuki's work was not related to its literary or philosophical qualities; it was rather the result of a historical coniuncture that prompted the emergence in the West of a positive modality of Orientalist discourse, which found in the image of Zen fostered by Suzuki a particularly appropriate object.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Paradoxically, we may argue that precisely because of his biases Suzuki can be considered representative of Zen—as a sectarian tradition. The appeal to the "pure" tradition, to the "essence" of Zen, is indeed a typical feature of the sectarian attitude. This attitude was already exemplified by Dogen, for whom true Zen stood above the Zen school. Just as Dogen refused to call his teaching "Zen," Suzuki claims that Zen is "neither a religion nor a philosophy" or better that it is "the spirit of all religion and philosophy." The assumption that there is an "essence" of Buddhism, a kind of perennial Dharma to which only "authentic" masters would have access, is to be rejected as ideologically suspect.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The first mention of Chan appears in [Matteo] Ricci's journals, while Japanese Zen is discussed in the letters of Francis Xavier (1506–1552). The images one gets from these accounts are strikingly different; they reflect not only the idiosyncrasies of the two Jesuits but also the different roles played by Buddhism in Chinese and Japanese societies. Whereas the Buddhist tradition in China, and Chan in particular, had been largely assimilated by popular religion, the Zen sect in Japan, under the system of the so-called Five Mountains, remained associated with the ruling class and dominated intellectual discourse.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Without falling into sociopolitical reductionism, it remains necessary to protest against the prevailing tendency, among Western scholars, to read the works of Nishida [Kitarō] and the Kyoto school as expressions of a "pure philosophy" stemming from a "pure experience.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The Zen sect had been favored by the Ashikaga shogunate and had, during the Ashikaga (Muromachi) and the earlier Kamakura periods, supervised commercial and cultural relations with China through the famous Tenryūbune (Tenryūji ships) sponsored by the Tenryūji branch of the Rinzai school in Kyoto. Zen temples played an important cultural role with their schools, the so-called terakoya, and they controlled the celebrated Ashikaga College (referred to by Xavier as the "University of Bando"), a major center for classical Chinese learning. At the beginning of the Tokugawa period, the temples still had important administrative and diplomatic privileges, for instance in the issuing of passports (Boxer 1951, 262). Only later in that period did Zen suffer a setback owing to the rising tide of Confucian orthodoxy.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Suzuki seemed oblivious to Japan's responsibility for the war. In a footnote to Zen and Japanese Culture, he placed all the responsibility on Western intellectualism: "The intellect presses the button, the whole city is destroyed. . . . All is done mechanically, logically, systematically, and the intellect is perfectly satisfied. Is it not time for us all to think of ourselves from another point of view than that of mere intellectuality" (Suzuki 1970, 338). According to Suzuki, all this would not have happened if the Westerners had, like the Japanese, had more respect for nature. In another footnote, he wrote: "I sometimes wonder if any of the Great Western soldiers ever turned into a poet. Can we imagine, for instance, in recent times, that General MacArthur or General Eisenhower would compose a poem upon visiting one of those bomb-torn cities?" Apparently, Suzuki was unaware that perhaps the chief cause of war and its fuel were found in the same warrior mystique that he exalted in several previous chapters of the same book.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Only toward the middle of the nineteenth century did Indian Buddhism suddenly come to the forefront, with the discovery of the Lotus Sūtra in Nepal by Hodgson and its ground-breaking translation by Eugène Burnouf, a French scholar whom Max Müller called "the true founder of a scientific study of Buddhism" (Welbon 1968, 109). The romantic search for origins gave way, however, to cultural versions of evolutionism in which Buddhism, like Hinduism, was reduced to one early stage of mankind.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Nishida has been sharply criticized after the war for lending his support to the imperial (ist) ideology of the Japanese government, but these criticisms have not led—as in Heidegger's case—to a thorough questioning of his philosophy.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“[D. T.] Suzuki's success had also a lot to do with his undeniable personal charisma. As noted already, he did not leave his interlocutors indifferent, and most judgments on his work are influenced by personal reactions to his personality. It is therefore hard to dissociate the image of the man, with his genuine simplicity, warmth, and his status of enlightened layman, from the impression left by his assertions concerning the Chan/Zen tradition.”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“Ricci's attitude toward Buddhism must be placed in its religious context-that of aggressive Counter-Reformation Catholicism engaged in a spiritual battle to win over Chinese society to Christianity. It is perhaps inappropriate to condemn him retrospectively for his lack of tolerance, when the very notion of tolerance would have seemed perfectly irrelevant to him. This virtue was associated with atheists like Voltaire and with whorehouses (maisons de tolérance), as in Claudel's witty remark: "Tolerance? Tolerance? There are houses for that" (Etiemble 1964, 50).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights

“The major contradiction in Suzuki's position, one of which he was acutely aware, is that he negated in actual practice what he advocated in theory, namely, that Zen "is a direct method, for it refuses to resort to verbal explanation or logical analysis, or to ritualism" (Ibid. 3:318).”
― Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights