Relativity of the human world and Dao in Lao-Zhuang—An Interpretation of chapter 1 of the Zhuang-zi and of the Lao-zi1

In this essay I offer an interpretative reading of the first chapter in the two canonical works, the Zhuang-zi and the Lao-zi, and argue that there is an inner connection between the first chapters of the two books. My presupposition is that what Zhuang-zi has argued in “Xiao Yao You” is the theme of the relativity of the position of the human world, which is in accord with the mystery of Dao presented at the beginning of the Lao-zi. Therefore, there are two opposite directions running in the Daoist philosophy in Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi: the first one is from this world (worlds) to Dao; the second one is from Dao to the worlds. While the first emphasizes the relativity of the point of views of the worldly beings, the second shows the mystery of Dao. This can be seen as a hermeneutical circle.     

Eastern Concepts of Love: A philosophical reading of Narada Bhakti Sutra

Bhakti has been an all-pervasive concept in the philosophical and religious traditions of India. The origin of bhakti can be traced in the Vedas wherein the root-word bhaj and various synonyms appear and in that point in time no distinction was made between secular (prema) and religious love (bhakti). Narada Bhakti Sutra (NBS) is a premier treatise on the nature of bhakti that emphasizes the connection between bhakti and prema and treats the age-old enigma about the nature of love in an original fashion. NBS has usually been interpreted in a theistic manner, often with theistic interpolations into the text. This paper interprets NBS with a philosophical approach to discover its unique insights on the perennial philosophical issue, namely, ‘what is love?’ and shows that NBS harks back to the age of the Vedas in which secular love and religious love were inter-twined.     

The Madhyamaka Concept of Svabhāva: Ontological and Cognitive Aspects

This paper considers the philosophical interpretation of the concept of svabhāva, sometimes translated as ‘inherent existence’ or ‘own-being’, in the Madyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy. It is argued that svabhāva must be understood as having two different conceptual dimensions, an ontological and a cognitive one. The ontological dimension of svabhāva shows it to play a particular part in theories investigating the most fundamental constituents of the world. Three different understandings of svabhāva are discussed under this heading: svabhāva understood as essence, as substance, and as the true nature of phenomena (absolute svabhāva). The cognitive dimension shows svabhāva as playing an important rôle in our everyday conceptualization of phenomena. Svabhāva is here seen as a superimposition (samāropa) which the mind projects onto the world.     

The Pari[ndot]āma Aesthetics as Underlying the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a

This paper offers a literary and ideological deconstruction of the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a; it traces the Purā[ndot]a's formation through the convergence of the Vedāntin, the Aesthetic and the Vai[sdot][ndot]ava traditions, and argues that it is the doctrine of Pari[ndot]āma which underlies the treatise. I first examine the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a's literary components; the roots of these are traced back historically to the Vedānta and ālvār traditions, and the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a's nature as an opus universale, representing an all Indian cultural ‘melting pot’, is highlighted. The paper then looks at the relations of Vai[sdot][ndot]avism and dramaturgy, both historically as well as theologically, and argues that the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a was traditionally read as a drama. It proceeds to decipher the aesthetic theory underlying the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a, and argues that it is Bharata's dramaturgical rasa theory. Within the rasa tradition, Abhinavagupta's and Bhoja's positions are highlighted and compared through three seminal points and it becomes apparent that the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a's underlying aesthetic theory is close to the Pari[ndot]āma doctrine of Bhoja where ?[rdot][ndot]gāra is considered to be the supreme rasa. As Bhoja's date is no doubt later than the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a's it is assumed that the Bhāgavata Purā[ndot]a was influenced by one of Bhoja's predecessors. The paper ends by reinforcing this analysis by highlighting a later tradition which had actually accepted this point of view and that is the Gau[ddot]iya Vai[sdot][ndot]ava tradition.     

Confucius's Aesthetic Concept of Noble Man: Beyond Moralism

The prevailing interpretation of ren (humanness) in the Analects is ethical. One consequence of this interpretation is the one-dimensional image of the Confucian junzi (noble man) as a rigid moralist, a fastidious observer of li (ritual). But there are numerous passages in the Analects that resist such a one-sided representation of the junzi, especially Confucius's remarks related to the (Book of) Songs and music. My basic thesis is that Confucius's concept of junji is aesthetic. This is implied by his notion of junji ru (noble scholar) as opposed to xiaoren ru (common scholar). The noble man is one awakened to the beauty of humanness. It is because of this awareness that he ‘sets his mind on the Way, depends on virtue, relies on ren and enjoys the arts.’ Confucius included the Songs and music in his curriculum precisely for the purpose of cultivating in his pupils this aesthetic sensibility.     

Teaching by Example: An Interpretation of the Role of Upamāna in Early Nyāya Philosophy

In this paper I will discuss the significance of upamāna (knowledge by analogy or comparison) in the Nyāyasūtra as a source of knowledge and its role in understanding and learning about the world. Some philosophers, particularly Buddhists, have argued that upamāna is reducible to inference. I am going to defend the Nyāya view that upamāna is in fact a fundamental source of knowledge which plays a significant role in teaching and learning. In fact, I am going to argue that by introducing upamāna as a pramā[ndot]a the Naiyāyikas accounted for the way humans acquire certain types of knowledge. Finally, I will highlight the similarities between the role of upamāna in the Nyāyasūtra and some of Wittgenstein's remarks on family resemblance and proof.     

Hebrew and Buddhist Selves: A Constructive Postmodern Study

Our task will be to demonstrate that there are instructive parallels between Hebrew and Buddhist concepts of self. There are at least five main constituents (skandhas in Sanskrit) of the Hebrew self: (1) nepe? as living being; (2) rūah as indwelling spirit; (3) lēb as heart-mind; (4) bā?ār as flesh; and (5) dām as blood. We will compare these with the five Buddhist skandhas: disposition (samskāra), consciousness (vijñāna), feeling (vedanā), perception (samjñā), and body (rūpa). Generally, what we will discover is that both Buddhists and Hebrews have a ‘bundle’ theory of the self; both see the body as an essential part of personal identity; both overcome the modernist distinction of the inner and the outer; and both avoid language about the will as a distinct faculty. In sum, both present us with a fully somatic and nondualistic view of being human.     

Making Sense of the Philosophy of Sport

Beginning from an earlier claim of mine that there was really no such area of study as the philosophy of sport, Part One of the paper reconsiders the place previously given to David Best’s distinction between purposive sports and aesthetic sports. In light of a famous cricketing event in the 1977 contest between England and Australia (‘The Ashes’), in which Derek Randall turned a cartwheel after taking the winning catch, the paper clarifies that not all aesthetically-pleasing events taking place in sporting competitions can be understood as the aesthetic in sport. Then, in Part Two, the force of the claim that philosophy is one subject is explored. The conclusion is that a focus just on the philosophy of sport is necessarily inappropriate, since it will present the student with only cases from sport to then apply to sport. Rather, one’s understanding must be informed by (much of) the breadth of philosophy. Charles Travis’s view of occasion-sensitivity provides a clear example of appropriately contextual appeal. Part Three of the paper returns to the need for an institutional account of sport, one recognizing that there is no one occasion on which a particular sport is played; and hence no single set of conditions which can uniquely identify that sport. Thus, soccer played with one’s children typically differs from elite soccer: but both are (genuinely) soccer. When one turns to the appreciation of sport (in the light of Stephen Mumford’s excellent Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion [2012a]), one recognizes that, in order to genuinely appreciate sport, one cannot detach oneself from the outcome as completely as Mumford’s extreme purist seems to. But reflection on that case may also return us to contextualism by moving us away from attachments to the complete or the exceptionless in our accounts of spectating as of sport: maybe there is no one thing that occurs in all the relevant cases.     

Deciphering Heidegger's Connection with the Daodejing

This paper carries out an intensive study of Heidegger's famous reflection on the word dao and of his citations from the Daodejing, with the purpose of elucidating his complex relation with Daoist thinking. First I examine whether dao could be said to be a guideword for Heidegger's path of thinking. Then I discuss Heidegger's citations, in six places of his writings, from five chapters of the Daodejing, by situating them in the immediate textual context as well as against the broad background of the fundamental presuppositions and orientations of Heidegger and Laozi's thinking. My examination of Heidegger's citations from the Daodejing has for the first time gathered together all the relevant materials discovered so far.     

Interpreting Causality in the Health Sciences

We argue that the health sciences make causal claims on the basis of evidence both of physical mechanisms, and of probabilistic dependencies. Consequently, an analysis of causality solely in terms of physical mechanisms or solely in terms of probabilistic relationships, does not do justice to the causal claims of these sciences. Yet there seems to be a single relation of cause in these sciences—pluralism about causality will not do either. Instead, we maintain, the health sciences require a theory of causality that unifies its mechanistic and probabilistic aspects. We argue that the epistemic theory of causality provides the required unification.     

The Cheng Brothers’ Onto-theological Articulation of Confucian Values

In this article, I attempt to provide a new interpretation of li (commonly translated as ‘principle’) in the neo-Confucian brothers Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi. I argue that (1) the two brothers’ views on li are not as radically different as many scholars have made us to believe; (2) li in both brothers is a de-reified conception, referring not to some entity, including the entity with activity, but to activity, the life-giving activity of the ten thousand things; and (3) this life-giving activity, in terms of its mysterious wonderfulness, is called shen (literally meaning ‘God’ or ‘divinity’), and thus we have a Confucian theology (shen-talk) in the Cheng brothers, very similar to the Christian theology of creativity by Gordon Kaufman.     

The Jagannath Temple and Online Darshan

Darshan—the act of seeing the divine in an image—is an important form of worship for most Hindus. Darshan is now available via the Internet. In this article I consider the possible significance of online darshan for the important Jagannath Temple in Puri in the Indian State of Orissa and for devotees of the Hindu god Jagannath who resides there. From this case study I conclude that online darshan does not necessarily bring about a decline in the importance of temples and their deities. This challenges those globalisation theorists who claim that local sites decline in importance as a result of advanced communications technologies and instead supports Roland Robertson's theory of ‘glocalization’. I further conclude that despite this, online darshan is an important development for devotees of Jagannath, because it allows access to the deity which may previously have been difficult or even impossible for most of the year. I also consider online darshan in general and suggest that the glocalization processes that it is giving rise to are worthy of future research.     

Wittgenstein,Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu: The Art of Circumlocution

Where Western philosophy ends, with the limits of language, marks the beginning of Eastern philosophy. The Tao de jing of Laozi begins with the limitations of language and then proceeds from that as a starting point. On the other hand, the limitation of language marks the end of Wittgenstein's cogitations. In contrast to Wittgenstein, who thought that one should remain silent about that which cannot be put into words, the message of the Zhuangzi is that one can speak about that which cannot put into words but the speech will be strange and indirect. Through the focus on the monstrous character, No-Lips in the Zhuangzi, this paper argues that a key message of the Zhuangzi is that the art of transcending language in the Zhuangzi is through the use of crippled speech. The metaphor of crippled speech, speech which is actually unheard, illustrates that philosophical truths cannot be put into words but can be indirectly signified through the art of stretching language beyond its normal contours. This allows Eastern philosophy, through the philosophy of the Zhuangzi to transcend the limits of language.     

Research Report: Students' knowledge of abnormal psychology

The present study aims to compare whether final year psychology students (n = 26) could answer more items on a multiple choice questionnaire (MCQ) correctly on abnormal psychology than prospective psychology candidates (n = 77) and final year engineering students (n = 26). The three groups of students completed MCQs in five different fields of abnormal psychology namely; eating disorders, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders and depression, sexual disorders, and personality and compulsive disorders, respectively. They were also asked to indicate their confidence level in relation to the accuracy of the answers they had given. The results showed that final year psychology students scored higher on levels of accuracy, as well as confidence on all measures compared to the two other groups. On the subject of sexual disorders, engineering students scored higher than prospective psychology students. Implications of the present findings are discussed.     

Technology from the Standpoint of Sunyata

Keiji Nishitani's critique of technology as a dehumanizing force is objected to by showing that it is possible to establish a relationship with technology characterized by the standpoint of sunyata. In order to support my claim, I offer an interpretation of sunyata as a lived experience in which knowing and being are unified. One method used to experience the identity of knowing and being is the method of negatio negationis. I argue that technology embodies this method, and that thus has a built-in process that allows users of technology to achieve a samadhi experience in the use of tools and machines. Hubert Dreyfus’ theory of embodiment is offered in support of this claim. If it is possible to establish an intimate relation with certain technologies, then the nature of technology cannot be reduced to its most obvious dehumanizing and destructive effects.     

The Concept of Yuko-Datotsu in Kendo: Interpreted from the Aesthetics of Zanshin

As kendo continues to gain in international popularity, there are hopes for its adoption in the Olympic Games as an international competitive event, even while moves to further this aim have not necessarily occurred in Japan or elsewhere. One reason for the efforts to achieve a form of globalization of kendo different from Judo is the attempt to adhere to and preserve the unique concepts kendo, the sport embodies by remaining true to the forms of traditional Japanese culture. This is epitomized by the importance given to zanshin (the combination of posture and fighting spirit after striking), one of the key concepts that constitute yuko-datotsu in kendo. Our purpose in this study is to discuss the intersubjective nature of the decisions regarding the conditions for point-scoring in competitive sports. In particular, we will focus on the aesthetics required for zanshin in kendo, focusing on the theory behind yuko-datotsu (point score), which will also considerably influence its international dissemination. Kendo is characterized from the perspective of western rationalism as an appreciation of form and rules of behavior referred to as formalism and, in this respect, it has unique characteristics differing from those of modern sports that are disseminated internationally. In martial arts, besides refinement and proficiency in the rules of behavior by rigidly adhering to form and rules of behavior and repetition, the aim is to transcend said form and the rules of behavior and embody the spiritual nature dwelling in the background. Kendo should remain traditional path and keep zanshin in the value of point (yuko-datotsu) for its virtue. Kendo has not yet developed into an international competitive sport, but it is in the process of traversing that Geido path as a Do for the purpose of character building through it. Throughout life, one should try to devote oneself to kendo with thought for the value of transcending form and the rules of behaviour, and embodying the spiritual nature of the sport that inheres in its background. That is why one may perceive an evident hesitation or indeed negativity regarding the possible internationalization or development as an Olympic event.     

The Meaning of Prakṛti in the Yogasūtra and Vyāsabhāṣya

It is a common mistake, especially, perhaps, among students of the religions and philosophies of India, to assume that the word prak?ti, best known as the ultimate material principle in the Sā?khya and Yoga systems of religious thought, the material cause of the world in Hindu theologies and, as such, an epithet of the goddesses in Hinduism, always refers to an ultimate principle. Even in Sā?khya and Yoga texts the word prak?ti is used in various ways. Prak?ti does not always refer to the ultimate principle. Translators often leave the word prak?ti untranslated and mislead the reader to assume that the ultimate principle is referred to, when it is not. This article discusses the use of prak?ti in the Sā?khya-Yoga texts the Yogasūtra and the Vyāsabhā?ya and criticises some translation practices.     

The Divine Command Theory of Mozi1

In this study, I will examine the famous ‘divine command theory’ of Mozi. Through the discussion of several important chapters of Mozi, including Fayi (law), Tianzhi (the will of heaven), Minggui (knowing the spirits) and Jianai (universal love), I attempt to clarify the arguments of Mozi offered in support of his distinctive ideas of serving heaven, knowing the spirits and loving all. The analysis shows that there are serious problems with his assumptions, hence they fail to support his conclusions as to the heaven–human relationship, and the man–man relationship. That is to say, at least in the texts covered, Mozi did not justify the moral or social relationship in society by appealing to the religious relationship.     

The Lieberman Syndrome: Public and Private Jewishness in American Political Culture

Shortly after the Second World War, Jewish communities in the Czech lands began to remember the Jewish victims of the conflict through a ceremony called the “tryzna”. This article investigates the structure and timing of tryzny to understand how Czech‐Jews memorialized the tragedy that had recently befallen their community. By 1952, it became standard practice for Jewish communities to host a tryzna in March to commemorate the Nazi liquidation of the so‐called “Czech family camp” at Auschwitz‐Birkenau in 1944. The proliferation of tryzny ensured that Czech‐Jews mourned and commemorated the dead of the Second World War in a religious and then increasingly public way. What began as small community events, coalesced and grew into national mourning ceremonies. Tryzny link a national story of loss and an awareness of the larger Jewish genocide with Jewish funerary practices. These tryzny evolved within a communist state, in a world where the concept of the “Holocaust” had not yet entered international consciousness.     

A Comparative Study on Vaastu Shastra and Heidegger's ‘Building,Dwelling and Thinking’1

This article aims to correlate Vaastu Shastra, an ancient Indian theory of architecture, with Heidegger's ‘Building, Dwelling and Thinking’ as they explain architecture in relation to the world where we live and build. Design as an evolutionary learning process is fundamentally a hermeneutic. Interestingly, some of the basic principles of Vaastu Shastra are coincidently similar to the points made by later Heidegger. As such, the main concern is to explain how man is related to the building and the universe, i.e. it establishes a relationship between man and nature. In this context, a dwelling place should be a place where environment is always suitable for human beings to live comfortably. In this article, first Vaastu Shastra is discussed, and then attention is drawn to the prominent parallels between Vaastu and Heidegger.