inspired by Hajime Nakamura, The Heart Sutra, and Alfred North Whitehead
What we need is not some special experience, but an awakening to life as it is—not some special perfect life, but the precious imperfect life we’ve been given.
The only use of a knowledge of the past is to equip us for the present. No more deadly harm can be done to young minds than by depreciation of the present. The present contains all that there is. It is holy ground; for it is the past, and it is the future.
- Alfred North Whitehead, Aims of Education
The Phenomenal is Actually the Real
“The Japanese are willing to accept the phenomenal world as Absolute because of their disposition to lay a greater emphasis upon intuitive sensible concrete events, rather than upon universals. This way of thinking with emphasis upon the fluid, arresting character of observed events regards the phenomenal world itself as Absolute and rejects the recognition of anything existing over and above the phenomenal world.
What is widely known among post-Meiji philosophers in the last century as the “theory that the phenomenal is actually the real” has a deep root in Japanese tradition.” “To begin with, the Tendai sect in Japan is not the same as in China. The Tendai scholars in medieval Japan, using the same nomenclature as that used in continental Buddhism, arrived at a system of thought that is distinctly original…. On the Asian continent, the word for enlightenment meant the ultimate comprehension of what is beyond the phenomenal world, whereas in Japan the same word was brought down to refer to understanding things within the phenomenal world.”
Nakamura Hajime (1912-1999) Ways of Thinking of Eastern People – India, China, Tibet, Japan in True Emptiness, Wondrous Being Buddhism: The Way of Emptiness, edited by Nicole Bea Pastoukoff
The Ultimate is actual in virtue of its Accidents
In all philosophic theory there is an ultimate which is actual in virtue of its accidents. It is only then capable of characterization through its accidental embodiments, and apart from these accidents is devoid of [11] actuality. In the philosophy of organism this ultimate is termed ‘creativity’; and God is its primordial, non-temporal accident.* In monistic philosophies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed ‘The Absolute.’ In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 7). Free Press. Kindle Edition.
Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form
The Heart Sutra is a seminal text in Mahayana Buddhism. Central to its teaching is the concept of emptiness (Śūnyatā), which asserts that all phenomena lack inherent, independent existence and are instead interdependent and transient. This idea is encapsulated in the famous line, "Form is emptiness, emptiness is form," which suggests a non-dual understanding of reality where physical forms and their true nature of emptiness are intrinsically linked.
For Process Buddhists, the fact that form is emptiness means that the concrete events of this world are not self-contained substances that can be grasped by self-contained subjects. There are no self-contained substances or subjects. All concrete events are empty of own-being. And the fact that emptiness is form means that the emptiness of concrete events is itself the phenomenal world. We do not go beyond the world to find ultimacy, we live in the world and, in so living, find what is ultimate. The present moment is holy ground.
- Jay McDaniel
God and Emptiness
Years ago, I was an English teacher for Zen Master Keido Fukushima from Tofukuji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. We became great friends, and I always sensed from him that philosophical concerns with "ultimate reality" got in the way of enlightenment and authentic living, if those concerns took us away from what was happening in the here and now of daily life. He helped me see that, in Zen, nirvana is this very world, rightly understood. There is no place to go other than here-and-now - or, to use the phrase above, the phenomenal world of sensible concrete events.
He also led me to think that ultimate reality is not necessarily good or evil. Or, to be more precise, ultimate reality includes all that we see in the world around us: the joy of a child's laughter, the pain of loss, the serenity of a quiet forest, an act of tenderness, an act of violence. All are part of the phenomenal world. Not that I didn't believe in the importance of goodness: of love and honesty, peace and tenderness. He did, too. But I realized that, when it comes to ultimate reality, they are part of the story, not the whole story. Ultimate reality is actual in virtue of its instances, says Whitehead. Tenderness and violence are both instances of ultimate reality.
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Is God, too, an instance of ultimate reality, but not ultimate reality itself? Whitehead thought so. He speaks of God as the "primordial accident" of ultimate reality, which he calls Creativity.
Whitehead makes sense, too. As a Christian influenced by Buddhism, I believe in God. Here I am helped by Pure Land Buddhism with its idea of a cosmic Bodhisattva who seeks the well-being of each and all, and also by Whitehead's idea of a divine reality who does not create the world but saves it, present to the world with a "tender care that nothing be lost." God is the spirit of goodness at work in the world. But God is not all-powerful or all-determining.
But, influenced by Zen, I am not content to think of God in abstract terms or as an 'answer' to questions. I am not interested in a God whose existence is simply inferred. I get nervous when people speak of God as a principle or a mere idea. The only God who makes sense to me is a God who can be directly experienced and known in what Hajime Nakamura below calls "the phenomenal world."
The phenomenal world is not just the sensory world. It is also the emotional world, the relational world, the world of other people, plants, animals, relationships, dreams, and, yes, love. What I find so helpful in Whitehead is not his idea that God is necessary for a system to be complete and consistent, but rather that God is someone who can be felt in my interactions with the world, and in moments of prayer as Deep Listening.
God is not necessary but is instead contingent. God could not be, but is! That's the grace, the surprise. My suggestion is that even God is part of the phenomenal world, as real in God's way as are people and rivers, sadness and joy, in their ways. There's nothing more real than God and the world. No ultimate reality beyond experience. There is only our experience, which includes our experience of a God who is not the whole of ultimate reality but nevertheless beautiful: in Whitehead's words, "a fellow sufferer who understands."
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I realize that what I have said above will not make sense to people who think of God as the ultimate reality. They speak of God in honorific terms, almost as if God were a king on a throne. I find Whitehead more helpful, who himself draws from Jesus.
"There is, however, in the Galilean origin of Christianity yet another suggestion which does not fit very well with any of the three main strands of thought. It does not emphasize the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover. It dwells upon the tender elements in the world, which slowly and in quietness operate by love; and it finds purpose in the present immediacy of a kingdom not of this world. Love neither rules, nor is it unmoved; also it is a little oblivious as to morals. It does not look to the future; for it finds its own reward in the immediate present."
Love finds its rewards in the immediate present. Is this not Zen? And it neither rules nor is unmoved? Is this not Pure Land? It does not seek God in high abstractions, and it does not reduce God to universal principles. It is too alive for this, too personal, too immediate.
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The God of immediate experience is not a thing to be grasped. God is not self-contained. God is not the grammatical "subject" of an experience to which predicates are added, as if the subject already exists and can be confirmed by our mental assent. God is empty of such substantiality. The Heart Sutra says that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. John Cobb agrees: "God is not a substance. Instead God is an instance, albeit the all-inclusive instance, of dependent origination." Emptiness is this dependent origination and it is always in the immediacy of the here-and-now. Emptiness includes among its instances a dependently originating form, God or Amida Buddha, who is part of the immediacy of experience. The phenomenal is what is truly actual. Even emptiness is empty.
- Jay McDaniel
see also Emptiness and Abba: https://www.openhorizons.org/emptiness-and-abba-zen-metamodern-christianity.html