Contemporary Authors

• Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute (Cambridge, MA), 2000
• Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism Open Court (Chicago, IL), 2000
• The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2003
• Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries Hackett (Indianapolis, IN), 2009
• Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought: Prolegomena to the Study of Li State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2012
• Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2013
• Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 2016

1. Emptiness and omnipresence : an essential introduction to Tiantai Buddhism LCCN 2015040149 Type of material Book Personal name Ziporyn, Brook, 1964- author. Main title Emptiness and omnipresence : an essential introduction to Tiantai Buddhism / Brook A. Ziporyn. Published/Produced Bloomington ; Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2016] Description xiii, 317 pages ; 23 cm. ISBN 9780253021083 (cl : alk. paper) 9780253021120 (pb : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2016 130609 CALL NUMBER BQ9118.5 .Z57 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Beyond oneness and difference : Li and coherence in Chinese Buddhist thought and its antecedents LCCN 2012045682 Type of material Book Personal name Ziporyn, Brook, 1964- Main title Beyond oneness and difference : Li and coherence in Chinese Buddhist thought and its antecedents / Brook Ziporyn. Published/Produced Albany : State University of New York Press, [2013] Description xviii, 413 pages ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781438448176 (alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 009313 CALL NUMBER B127.L5 Z565 2013 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Ironies of oneness and difference : coherence in early Chinese thought : prolegomena to the study of Li LCCN 2011038254 Type of material Book Personal name Ziporyn, Brook, 1964- Main title Ironies of oneness and difference : coherence in early Chinese thought : prolegomena to the study of Li / Brook Ziporyn. Published/Created Albany : State University of New York Press, c2012. Description ix, 323 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9781438442891 (hardcover : alk. paper) Shelf Location FLM2015 207371 CALL NUMBER B127.L5 Z57 2012 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 4. Zhuangzi : the essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries LCCN 2008052827 Type of material Book Personal name Zhuangzi. Uniform title Nanhua jing. Selections. English Main title Zhuangzi : the essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries / translated, with introduction and notes, by Brook Ziporyn. Published/Created Indianapolis : Hackett Pub. Co., c2009. Description xviii, 238 p. ; 22 cm. ISBN 9780872209114 (pbk.) 0872209113 (pbk.) 9780872209121 (cloth) 0872209121 (cloth) CALL NUMBER BL1900.C5 E5 2009 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER BL1900.C5 E5 2009 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 5. Being and ambiguity : philosophical experiments with Tiantai Buddhism LCCN 2004010772 Type of material Book Personal name Ziporyn, Brook, 1964- Main title Being and ambiguity : philosophical experiments with Tiantai Buddhism / Brook Ziporyn. Published/Created Chicago : Open Court, c2004. Description xxii, 452 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0812695429 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0f0z5-aa Shelf Location FLM2014 107635 CALL NUMBER BQ9118.3 .Z56 2004 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) CALL NUMBER BQ9118.3 .Z56 2004 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. The Penumbra unbound : the neo-Taoist philosophy of Guo Xiang LCCN 2002075881 Type of material Book Personal name Ziporyn, Brook, 1964- Main title The Penumbra unbound : the neo-Taoist philosophy of Guo Xiang / Brook Ziporyn. Published/Created Albany : State University of New York Press, c2003. Description ix, 186 p. ; 23 cm. ISBN 0791456625 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0791456617 (alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy036/2002075881.html CALL NUMBER BL1920 .Z46 2003 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER BL1920 .Z46 2003 Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 7. Evil and/or/as the good : omnicentrism, intersubjectivity and value paradox in Tiantai Buddhist thought LCCN 00022030 Type of material Book Personal name Ziporyn, Brook, 1964- Main title Evil and/or/as the good : omnicentrism, intersubjectivity and value paradox in Tiantai Buddhist thought / Brook Ziporyn. Published/Created Cambridge, Mass. : Published by the Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute ; Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2000. Description x, 482 p. ; 24 cm. ISBN 0674002482 Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy022/00022030.html Shelf Location FLM2014 107673 CALL NUMBER BQ9118.4 .Z56 2000 OVERFLOWA5S Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM1) CALL NUMBER BQ9118.4 .Z56 2000 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• University of Chicago, Divinity School - https://divinity.uchicago.edu/brook-ziporyn

  Brook A. Ziporyn

  Professor of Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought

  PhD (University of Michigan)

  Brook A. Ziporyn is a scholar of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy. Professor Ziporyn received his BA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Michigan. Prior to joining the Divinity School faculty, he has taught Chinese philosophy and religion at the University of Michigan (Department of East Asian Literature and Cultures), Northwestern University (Department of Religion and Department of Philosophy), Harvard University (Department of East Asian Literature and Civilization) and the National University of Singapore (Department of Philosophy).

  Ziporyn is the author of Evil And/Or/As the Good: Omnicentric Holism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Harvard, 2000), The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (SUNY Press, 2003), Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments With Tiantai Buddhism (Open Court, 2004); Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Hackett, 2009); Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought; Prolegomena to the Study of Li (SUNY Press, 2012); and Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and its Antecedents (SUNY Press, 2013). His seventh book, Emptiness and Omnipresence: The Lotus Sutra and Tiantai Buddhism, was published by Indiana University Press in 2016. He is currently working on a cross-cultural inquiry into the themes of death, time and perception, tentatively entitled Against Being Here Now, as well as a book-length exposition of atheism as a form of religious and mystical experience in the intellectual histories of Europe, India and China.

• ACLS - https://www.acls.org/research/fellow.aspx?cid=f34b109a-f0a4-db11-8d10-000c2903e717

  Brook A. Ziporyn F'05, F'94
  Professor
  Chinese Religion, Philosophy, and Comparative Thought
  University of Chicago
  last updated: 06/08/16

  ACLS Fellowship Program 2005
  ACLS/NEH International and Area Studies
  (Professor Ziporyn has been designated an ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellow.)
  Associate Professor
  Department: Philosophy/Religion (Joint Appointment)
  Northwestern University
  Tiantai Buddhist "Pessimism" and Chinese Modernities

  There has been a sharp increase in interest, both scholarly and popular, in the formerly neglected Tiantai school of Buddhism in the past ten years, in both Taiwan and the PRC. The forms taken by these works show fascinating divergences; in Taiwan, showing the influence of Mou Tsung-san's Kantian Neo-Confucianism and mainstream Buddhist preoccupations, in the PRC the influence of local Zhejiang cultural revivalism and post-Marxist Hegelianism. These modern handlings of Tiantai, itself a doctrine especially attuned to the hermeneutic problems of recontextualization and reappropriation, are an important litmus test for understanding the divergent developments of these modern Chinese cultural sensibilities. My project is devoted to charting these differences.

Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential
Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism
Publishers Weekly.
263.15 (Apr. 11, 2016): p56.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism
Brook A. Ziporyn. Indiana Univ., $85 (336p) ISBN 978­0­253­02112­0
Ziporyn, professor of ancient and medieval Chinese religion and philosophy at the University of Chicago, offers a
casual but dense introduction to the lesser­known Tiantai school of Buddhism. He examines the philosophical and
religious ideas within the Lotus Sutra and three representative figures of the school: Tiantai Zhiyi, Jingxi Zhanran, and
Siming Zhili. Tiantai's basic premises are jarring and seem blasphemous for those, acquainted with popular
understandings of Buddhism: "Buddhahood inherently includes every form of evil," and each experience includes all
other possible experiences interpreted in all possible ways; dwelling more deeply in suffering and delusion leads to
liberation and freedom. By explaining Tiantai Buddhism's radically paradoxical conception of a holistic, monistic
universe, Ziporyn reveals the Tiantai understanding to be underpinned by emptiness as ontological and illimitable
ambiguity. He aims for an introduction "divested of both technical detail and philosophical baggage" and succeeds for
the most part; readers are, however, expected to be very comfortable with dense theoretical investigation. Those who
take the journey with Ziporyn will find a rich and rewarding work, not simply due to the mind­boggling Tiantai
doctrine, but also because of Ziporyn's respect for the tradition and his extraordinary finesse in presenting its
demanding ideas. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism." Publishers Weekly, 11 Apr. 2016, p.
56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449663024&it=r&asid=6d40b9ffe57a16c29c00ccaf0d651bbb.
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Brook Ziporyn, trans. Zhuangzi: The Essential
Writings with Selections from Traditional
Commentaries
Bryan W. Van Norden
China Review International.
16.1 (Spring 2009): p147.
COPYRIGHT 2009 University of Hawaii Press
http://uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/
Full Text:
Brook Ziporyn, trans. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing, 2009. xviii, 238 pp. Hardcover $42.00, ISBN 978­0­87220­912­1. Paperback $14.95, ISBN 978­0­
87220­911­4.
Every translation is guided by previous commentaries, whether this is made explicit or not. For example, familiarity
with the commentarial tradition is needed to understand why D. C. Lau renders [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII.] as "doing one's best" in his translation of Analects 4.15. Readers are only fully empowered to understand and
think critically about texts when they have some access to these commentaries. "However, for many years, those who
could not read the commentaries in the original Chinese were simply out of luck." Consequently, that translations with
commentaries are pullulating is a positive development. A few years ago, Richard John Lynn produced The Classic of
the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the Tao­te Ching of Laozi as Interpreted by Wang Bi (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999). More recently, Edward Slingerland translated the Analects: With Selections from Traditional
Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003), and the author of this review produced the Mengzi: With
Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2008). The translation by Brook Ziporyn
under review is a welcome addition to this genre.
The first section of the book (pp. 3­125) is a translation of all of the Inner Chapters, with selections from the rest of the
received Zhuangzi text. Footnotes are used for cross­references and also for interpretive suggestions by the translator.
(The notes are particularly extensive on the Inner Chapters, sometimes taking up a third of the page.) No two
translators will render the Zhuangzi anywhere near the same way. Consequently, the most we can ask of a translation is
that it be readable and defensible. Ziporyn's version succeeds on both counts. One of the trickier passages for
translators is in chapter 2, where Zhuangzi makes use of an elaborate pun on the senses of [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], which can mean either "this" or "right" (in the former sense contrasting with [TEXT
NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] "that," and in the latter with [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]
"wrong"). Zhuangzi uses the ambiguity to suggest that, just as it is solely a matter of perspective whether we call
something "this" or "that," so it is also a matter of perspective whether we deem something "right" or "wrong." "Hence
we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and Mohists, each affirming what the other negates and negating what
the other affirms" (pp. 11­12). But how do we bring out Zhuangzi's paronomastic point in English? Ziporyn's solution
is to amplify the original text:
"THAT" posits a "this" and a "that"­­a right and a wrong­­of its own. But "THIS" also posits a "this" and a "that"­­a
right and a wrong­of its own. So is there really any "that" versus "this," any right versus wrong? ([TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]). (p. 12)
Even if we are not inclined to handle this passage this way, we can understand what Ziporyn is doing and why.
The second part of the book (pp. 129­212) consists of translations from selected commentaries, keyed to particular
passages. I found that these commentaries, as is so often the case, opened up interpretive possibilities for me, helping
me to see familiar texts in a new light. I was particularly impressed with the comments by the Ming dynasty Buddhist
monk Shi Deqing, who remarks that "Zhuangzi's writing seems at first glance to be absurd and random, recklessly selfindulgent,
but in reality the design is matchlessly rigorous and tightly structured" (p. 134). An example of Shi's
illumination of a text's tight structure may be found in his commentary on the line near the end of chapter 2: "If so were
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ultimately so, its differentiations from not so would require no debate. Thus, even though the transforming voices may
depend on one another, this is tantamount to not depending on anything at all" (p. 20). Shi Deqing suggests:
The idea is that if we contemplate sounds as if they were echoes in an empty valley, free of all biased emotional
consciousness, what right and wrong would there be to them? This line ties together the earlier discussion [at the
beginning of the chapter] of the piping of the earth, where the long wind through the hollows brought forth all the
varying tones and harmonies: all were "transforming voices." (p. 160, parenthetical comment mine)
What an intriguing suggestion!
Supporting materials in the book include a brief introduction, a glossary, a selective bibliography, notes about the
commentators cited, and an index. The introduction will be particularly helpful to the first­time reader. I was pleased
that the translator encourages the reader to explore the variety of seemingly contradictory themes in the text, rather than
focusing on some one to the exclusion of others. (This is an approach I have used myself. Compare pp. xvii­xviii of the
introduction to my review of Scott Cook, ed., Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi, in
China Review International 12, no. 1 [Spring 2005]: 1­14.)
Despite its many good qualities, there are two areas in which I think the translation could be improved. The first
involves the handling of certain key terms. The translator avoids the now standard renderings of [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] as "benevolence," [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] as "righteousness," and
[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] as "Way." Instead, he uses "humanity," "responsibility," and "course,"
respectively. I sympathize with the concern that the conventional translations may not be the best at evoking the right
associations in contemporary readers. However, a large part of the audience for this book will be nonspecialists who are
reading it in conjunction with translations of other Warring States texts. These readers may have trouble recognizing
that Zhuangzi's view of "humanity and responsibility" is a challenge to the conception of "benevolence and
righteousness" that they have encountered in contemporary texts.
My second minor reservation about the translation regards what I see as an interpretive lacuna. Recent scholarship has
made us increasingly aware of the fact that Zhuangzi implicitly criticizes his older contemporary Mengzi in a number
of passages. This fascinating phenomenon helps us to understand Zhuangzi's own stance in terms of what he is
rejecting. However, the translation under review seems to miss this. (Many of Zhuangzi's references to Mengzi are
noted in the translation by Paul Kjellberg in Philip J. Ivanhoe and Bryan W. Van Norden, eds., Readings in Classical
Chinese Philosophy, 2nd ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2005]. However, this work is not cited in the
bibliography, so the translator may not have been aware of it.)
Consider, for example, the passage from chapter 2 that the translator renders "From where I see it, the transitions of
Humanity and Responsibility and the traits of right and wrong are hopelessly tangled and confused" (p. 18, my italics).
The Chinese of the italicized phrase is [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]. Readers of the Mengzi will
immediately be reminded of the latter's claim that [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.], which I translate as
"The feeling of compassion is the sprout of benevolence. The feeling of disdain is the sprout of righteousness" (2A6.4).
The similarity of the two passages (particularly the unusual use of [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] in
connection with [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] and [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.]) is too
close to be an accident. So while Mengzi suggests that we cultivate our sprout­like moral inclinations, Zhuangzi
cleverly twists the metaphor, suggesting that we would not know how to separate a sprout from a weed (if there is a
nonarbitrary distinction between the two).
What is perhaps the most famous passage in the Zhuangzi also seems to make implicit reference to Mengzi: the cook
whose carving of an ox goes beyond ordinary skill, and who, thereby, serves as an exemplar of following the Way
(chapter 3, pp. 22­23). Mengzi had famously used an ox to make a philosophical point, but with quite a different
evaluation. He suggested that King Xuan's refusal to allow the sacrifice of an ox being led to slaughter shows that he
has the compassion necessary to be a virtuous­­if only he will apply it to his own people. Mengzi then cited (apparently
with approval) the saying, "gentlemen keep their distance from the kitchen" (1A7.8). Could it really be a coincidence
that Zhuangzi's ox story turns Mengzi's on its head? Zhuangzi picks a kitchen­worker (not a "gentleman") as a
paradigm of someone who follows the Way, and he follows the Way by slaughtering, not sparing, the ox. (Incidentally,
I worry that it is an awkward overtranslation to render the key phrase [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.],
which the cook says he follows in carving up the ox, as "Heaven's unwrought perforations" [p. 22].)
Yet another example may be found in the fascinating dialogue between Kongzi and Yan Hui in chapter 4. Zhuangzi has
Kongzi advise Yan Hui to engage in the "fasting of the mind," by which he will "come to hear with the mind rather
than with the ears," and "come to hear with the vital energy [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] rather than
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with the mind" (p. 26). As David S. Nivison argued many years ago, that seems to be an intentional inversion of the
hierarchy set up by Mengzi, who suggested that what you "get from doctrines" (i.e., what you hear) is not as valuable
as what you "get from your mind," but that both are superior to what you could get from your "vital energy" (2A2.9a).
(See Nivison, "Philosophical Voluntarism in Fourth Century China," in The Ways of Confucianism [Chicago: Open
Court Press, 1996], pp. 121­132.) Sadly, there is no hint of any of the three preceding textual echoes in the translation's
notes or commentary.
Overall, though, this translation is solid and will prove very useful for years to come. It opens up a window onto a new
range of interpretive possibilities for those who do not read Chinese. Even for those of us who do read Chinese, it is an
extremely valuable resource for quickly surveying a selection of the classic secondary sources on the Zhuangzi.
Bryan W. Van Norden is a professor in the Philosophy Department and the Department of Chinese and Japanese at
Vassar College, where he teaches Chinese philosophy and traditional literature, as well as classical Chinese.
Van Norden, Bryan W.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Van Norden, Bryan W. "Brook Ziporyn, trans. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional
Commentaries." China Review International, Spring 2009, p. 147+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA232383997&it=r&asid=7b0ba6d0bb61b7327dbafdfa73531291.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
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Brook Ziporyn. The Penumbra Unbound: The
Neo­Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang
Wen Haiming
China Review International.
14.1 (Spring 2007): p322.
COPYRIGHT 2007 University of Hawaii Press
http://uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/
Full Text:
Brook Ziporyn. The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo­Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang. Albany, NY: State University of
New York Press, 2003. ix, 186 pp. Paperback $22.95, ISBN 0­7914­5662­5.
The Penumbra Unbound is the first English work devoted to Guo Xiang (ca. 252­312), a philosopher in the Wei­Jin
period (third through fifth centuries C.E.). In this book, Brook Ziporyn discusses Guo Xiang's philosophy in detail,
especially his theory of the image of traces; the dangers of traces; his idea of "vanishing (into) things, i.e., interactivity
without traces"; the unification of independence and interdependence; lone­transformation; and the unity of activity
and nonactivity. Ziporyn provides a thorough overview of Guo's philosophy and its relation to classical Chinese
philosophy. Particularly, he describes how Guo's philosophy emerged out of his understanding of the contemporary
problems of spontaneity and morality in the Wei­Jin period Xuanxue [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] In
doing so, Ziporyn shows great understanding of the historical background of Chinese thought. His comparison of
different philosophies reveals that he has a great sensibility toward Chinese philosophy, especially when he deals with
how Guo developed his ideas out of a preexisting, inherited cultural and philosophical context.
Guo sets up his philosophy through his commentaries on Zhuangzi, one of the two Daoist canons of the pre­Qin era.
Through his commentaries, Guo establishes a unique philosophical system that combines seemingly contradictory
propositions, which have made great philosophical claims on behalf of indigenous (pre­Buddhist) ancient Chinese
philosophy. Insofar as Buddhism borrowed a lot of vocabulary from Daoist texts when it entered China during the Han
dynasty, Guo's philosophy influenced later Buddhism tremendously. Guo's typical philosophical vocabulary was
incorporated into Buddhist translations during the Tang dynasty. Guo's view that everything both is self­soing and does
not stay in any particular moment resonated with the idea of interdependent arising in the Buddhist worldview.
According to Ziporyn, Guo interprets philosophical vocabulary starting with the pre­Qin era. Though Guo offers a
theory of "nothingness," he does not mean that nothingness is totally void, since he typically claims that everything
comes from that "nothingness." He calls the creativity of this nothingness "that which makes each thing what it is"
(suoyiran [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), based on their own "self­determinacy" (zixing [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], pp. 48­49). This self­determinacy is ultimately dependent on the ability to act
spontaneously.
It is in this sense that Guo claims that everything is self­soing (ziran [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "selfso"
as Ziporyn translates). In other words, everything is self­creating or spontaneously becoming, so there is no need to
depend on anything outside itself. In this same vein, moreover, there is no need to reference any teleological motivation
or intention. Guo's simultaneity of conditionality and unconditionality means that things are "unconditioned in the
sense that they have no final cause, no conscious goal, but are conditioned in that they are" (p. 91). The dependence of
things is simply spontaneously so (p. 92). In Guo's notion of self­so, conditionality and unconditionality, dependence
and independence, as well as constancy and change are continuous (p. 95).
The author examines Guo's theory on freedom and spontaneity. For Guo, all things feel comfortable (shi [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) in a remote "dark joining" (ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]); in this
way, everything is "transformation in solitude" (duhua [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). This is a special
sense of causality that can be found in Buddhist interdependent arising (yuansheng [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII]). The things that interact with their environment are mystically harmonious (minghe [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], see p. 66), and in this way things and events are continuous with their world through
obliteratingly becoming (mingran [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], p. 67). In Guo's words, this is to vanish
into a oneness by way of creative transforming (zaohua [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], p. 69).
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The coherence between things and their context is explained with the image of traces, an idea that Guo develops from
his reading of the fourteenth chapter of the Zhuangzi. In Guo's perspective, things leave traces when they travel in the
world. However, the notion of the trace derives from the imagery of footprints, which mirror the feet, but, as Guo
argues, the traces and the feet should be distinguished. For Guo, people should not only forget the traces, but also forget
the feet that make the traces. Thus, Guo suggests a self­soing condition of myriad things with an understanding that
people should forget not only the feet, but also how the feet walk. In other words, people should forget both the body
and what is right and wrong (p. 37); or, all things travel "tracelessly" (wuji [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII],
p. 42) in that they do not see their traces, nor do they leave anything behind when they are walking.
Guo develops a coherent theory of the relationship between freedom and "set determinacy" (dingfen [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], xing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], ji [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII]), which means one's determinations of a given moment are simply what they are and cannot be otherwise in
that moment (p. 59). Guo holds that the world is a complete flux, where each thing is set in its own determinacy: this is
what Ziporyn terms "lone­transformation (duhua [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])." Ziporyn's interpretation
that this lone­transformation is "deliberate" and "motivated by a cognitive evaluation," as well as "teleological," needs
a second examination.
One might be skeptical of Ziporyn's disagreement with Guo, since he criticizes Guo's ideas of self­so, self­right, and
self­forgetting, which have "the result of leading to imitation and artifice, and obstructs the self­so functioning of
spontaneous change" (p. 59). Ziporyn is right in concluding that the traces have a negative function in Guo's writings,
because Guo considers it as something that needs to be left without consciousness in order to reach the state of self­so
self­forgetting. But his way of describing the concept of traces as a "deliberate teleological activity" (p. 61) seems to
betray Guo's meaning of "self­forgetting self­so" because the traces themselves should be regarded as something static
rather than a moving self, and they are not able to function in any teleological way.
Parts 2 and 3 are about the analyses of Guo's philosophy. In "Interactivity without Traces: 'Vanishing (Into)' Things,"
Ziporyn starts with Guo's concept of ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], the literal meaning of which is
"dark." Ming bears a close association with the word wu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], which plays an
important role in Daoist cosmology. Ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], thus, is to forget one's beingwith­things
and to leave without any trace, which is the antonym to its correlate homonym, ming [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], meaning brightness (p. 65). Thus, ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is
to reach the stage of disappearance of the trance­identity of both self and object into the self­so of Non­Being, and then
merge, join, and harmonize with what Ziporyn calls "vanishing (into) things" (p. 66). Guo's idea can be traced to
Laozi's "obliquely unify (xuantong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])," which indicates a continuity between
the subject and the things that are happening. I have reservations about accepting Ziporyn's emphasis on "things"; after
all, in Guo's meaning, ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] is related to a continuity, unification, and
togetherness (he [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of subject and object. So, there should be no "things" left
either in the process of "vanishing things" or "vanishing into things." In "Unification of Independence and
Interdependence," Ziporyn argues that it seems Guo denies the effi cacy of external causality by both claiming that "
[t]he generation of any thing or event always has that from which it comes" because there is mutual necessity of things.
By the phrase "mutual necessity (biwo xiangyin [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])" the author must have an
idea that causality is not a straight, serial, or linear activity; instead, it must be a reciprocal and recursive process. This
goes to show that if you have two terms or events, call them A and B, and A is the cause of B, then B must also be a
cause of A. Causality henceforth does not take the propositional form of a hypothetical conditional; rather, it is
interpreted in Guo's philosophy as a kind of biconditional. While each thing mutually conditions and is conditioned by
an other, all these things are recognized as "self­so," "born of themselves," "self­creating," and "independent" (p. 86). A
dialectical tension is thus established in Guo's philosophy between the independence and interdependence of things.
Ziporyn examines Fung You­lan's, Zhuang Yaolang's, and Tang Yijie's interpretations of Guo's ideas in detail and
concludes that Guo's special notion of identity lies in the oneness of conditionality and unconditionality, of dependence
and independence, as well as constancy and change (p. 95).
In part 3 of Ziporyn's work, he examines the pinnacle of Guo's philosophy, namely, Guo's conception of lonetransformation
(duhua [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and "The Unity of Activity and Nonactivity."
Ziporyn interprets hua as "transform." In defining this term he states, "to change from one thing into another, to
become something different; this assumes the existence of some otherness into which one can change." Thus, hua is
contradictory to du, which suggests "while transforming, one is nonetheless remaining the same one; one is all alone"
(p. 100). However, based on the Yijing study, hua does not necessarily have to be one thing changing into another since
it can mean one thing transforming itself. In this sense, duhua as self­transformation does not contain any selfcontradiction.
Nonetheless, Ziporyn is right in pointing out that Guo is afraid of being trapped in the dilemma that
pervaded the Wei­Jin period: the idea that neither "Non­Being" nor "Being" should be the creator of things. Thus, he
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argues, "the concept of universal causality breaks down, yielding the idea of self­creation, self­so" (p. 104). Ziporyn
further rehearses Guo's concept of causality as follows: "Any object within mechanical causality that operates without
the intrusion of trace­cognition is always vanishing (into) whatever it encounters, taking the totality of others (causes)
to be its self (the effect) moment by moment, and in this way may be likened to the sage who transcends tracecognition
and vanishes (into) all changes, and is thereby independent (p. 119)." I would suggest that his phrase
"vanishes (into) all changes" is better than "vanishes (into) things" considering the nonteleological and continual
relationship between self and others as well as the oneness of cause and effect in Guo's thought. Indeed, the author
expresses this notion of oneness of cause and effect when he analyses Guo's "moving directly forward (zhiwang)" and
"vanishing self­join (mingran zihe [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII])" (p. 119). The author points out that
Guo considers that causes and effects are correlated and transformative to one another, as he outlined this idea by "any
entity is at once both one and many, both self and other, both the effect and its causes" (p. 119).
Thus, generally we cannot find any creator in Guo's philosophy. Guo's sense of creativity and causality is based on the
Chinese lack of interest in creation myths. Even ancient extensive interests in prognostication are not clear in Guo's
philosophy. For Guo, human beings should cocreate with the world: this is the meaning of his use of the phrase
"oblique oneness" (xuantong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) with things that are happening (p. 39). Sages
follow the natural pattern to be self­so, self­right, and comfortable in their determinacy and self­forgetting (p. 45). This
is a creatio in situ sensibility, in the sense that things must fit their determinacy (geanqiyu [TEXT NOT
REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), transforming through the continuity between them and the world. In "The Unity of
Activity and Nonactivity" in part 3, Ziporyn elaborates that it is in this intercausal sense that one's deliberate and
nondeliberate activities are actually continuous by asserting that "activity is in fact a kind of nonactivity" (p. 125). In
Guo's ideal of the inner sage who is outwardly a king, outside and inside vanish (into) one another. Guo suggests that
sages follow along with existence without deliberation, and have no need to change their breath and posture in
changing circumstances­­in this suggestion he values a philosophy (as a way of life) of nonactivity (p. 135).
The author develops a thorough and truthful analysis of Guo's theory of trace and compares Guo's ideas of freedom and
determinism with philosophical idealism­­that is, the theories of Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Hegel. Guo
might agree with Fichte's universal interdependency of things, but he would reject his idea that nature is external to the
individual (p. 151). Kant's Third Antinomy shows the "intelligible freedom" that both opposed positions of freedom
and necessity are defensible by reason equally, and the inability of human reason to solve the problem. This resonates
with Guo's idea of self­so, which he takes as "a word for how it feels to be within necessity" (p. 153). Schopenhauer
sticks to the noumenal­phenomenal split and asserts that all things are both free and determined. This leads
Schopenhauer to arrive at a universal coexistence of freedom and determinism. This kind of doctrine has no parallel in
Guo's work (p. 156). Guo's idea of self­so is Hegel's antipodes because Hegel emphasized the unity of freedom and
necessity for all phenomenal things (p. 159). Furthermore, Hegel's Reason is the inmost nature of one's spirit,
overcomes the things' immediacy, and accomplishes their unity with oneself. But for Guo's self­so, which overcomes
the subject/object dichotomy, there is no need for anything beyond things (such as a superseding moment of rational
and purposive spirit) to unify them.
Finally, there are some points to be clarified concerning Ziporyn's understanding and translation in general. When the
author discusses "the mandate of Heaven" (tianming), he suggests that Confucianism had the idea of heaven or a
supreme god (p. 5). This is a rather controversial position in contemporary debates in Chinese and comparative
philosophy. At the very least, this debate has taught us to exercise caution when attempting to interpret the Chinese
notions of tian, dao, xing, and the like. Any ascription of a transcendent deity, or an absolute other, must be supported
by hermeneutic argument. Similar care should be paid to words such as benti [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII], which Ziporyn translates as "original substance" (p. 18). Chinese philosophy in general, and Guo's philosophy
in particular, does not have a substance/function dichotomy. The term tiyong [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN
ASCII], which is usually translated as "substance/function" (cf. p. 19), is perhaps better understood as formattingfunctioning.
This example would better express the recognition of change and process, as well as correlativity and
continuity, that seems to be present in classical Chinese philosophical texts. Furthermore, the way Ziporyn translates
the term wu as "non­being" (p. 23) for Wei­Jin period philosophers needs more careful consideration. Wu should not be
understood ontologically as simply an opposite of "being," but rather an indeterminate tendency in the mutually
indeterminate­determinacy of creative transformations. Also, the author's view of Guo's dao as being "simply nothing"
is not a very careful way of reading Chinese philosophical vocabulary in English, because dao in Chinese philosophy,
especially in Guo's thought, is an indeterminate field for the creative beings to unfold self­soingly, not the absolute
nothingness against the world of beings.
In this book, Ziporyn makes a major contribution to clarifying Guo's uniqueness and importance in a comparative
philosophical context, especially a better understanding of philosophical Daoism in the English­speaking world.
Because the author discusses the nuance of difference between Chinese terms pervasively, especially in Guo's
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somehow "mystical" terminology, it might be better to have more Chinese characters beside those philosophical terms
in the book.
Haiming Wen is an assistant professor of Chinese and comparative philosophy at Renmin University of China as well
as a post­doctoral fellow at Peking University.
Haiming, Wen
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Haiming, Wen. "Brook Ziporyn. The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo­Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang." China Review
International, Spring 2007, p. 322+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA184642742&it=r&asid=579eeef179217d23422760a4528236c1.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A184642742
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Ambiguity, wholeness, and irony: a new
interpretation of Chinese metaphysics
Kai Marchal
Philosophy East and West.
65.3 (July 2015): p949.
COPYRIGHT 2015 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/pew/index.html
Full Text:
Ironies of Oneness and Difference: Coherence in Early Chinese Thought: Prolegomena to the Study of Li. By Brook
Ziporyn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Pp. ix + 323. Hardcover $85.00, ISBN 978­1­43­844289­
1. Paper $26.95, ISBN 978­1­43­844288­4.
Beyond Oneness and Difference: Li and Coherence in Chinese Buddhist Thought and Its Antecedents. By Brook
Ziporyn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Pp. xviii + 413. Hardcover $95.00, ISBN 978­1­43­
844817­6. Paper $27.95, ISBN 978­1­43­844818­3.
Let me begin with a personal observation. It takes some courage to write a review of Brook Ziporyn's new publications.
The two tomes, Ironies of Oneness and Difference and Beyond Oneness and Difference, center on the history of one
particular notion, li, which, according to Ziporyn, denotes "something interestingly strange" (Beyond, p. 314). The
sheer size of these two densely printed volumes (more than seven hundred pages in total) and their enormous scope
(from Classical Chinese thought through to Neo­Confucianism) make any attempt to understand and to evaluate
Ziporyn's contribution a daunting task. Therefore, I will confine myself to an overview of the major claims and a few
preliminary observations. However, it should be pointed out at the beginning that few books I have read proved to be as
stimulating and satisfying (in both purely theoretical and aesthetic terms) as these two volumes on "oneness and
difference." Hopefully, this publication will reach more than the proverbial "happy few."
Even a modestly engaged student of Chinese thought will spend some time thinking about the term li; but the chances
are high that he or she will walk away with a rather cartoonish image (one common misunderstanding among nonChinese
students being that li represents a concept in the Aristotelian sense, with a clear definitional structure). In the
seventeenth century, the philosopher Leibniz, in his mostly autodidactic attempt to come to grips with Chinese thought,
had connected the term li to the idea of God as a prime mover. (1) In 1947, the French Sinologist Paul Demieville
addressed this issue in a now famous lecture at the College de France. (2) Some years later (in 1955), the Chinese
philosopher Tang Junyi, developed an often quoted sixfold classification in order to explain the various uses of li. (3)
Since then, numerous Sinologists have written about this term, but there can be no doubt that Ziporyn's two volumes
represent a milestone in this long history of reception. (4)
While engaged in the task of writing these two volumes, Ziporyn's explicit goal was "to formulate and structure a
global theory" about Chinese metaphysics as a whole and, more particularly, about li (Ironies, p. vii). Ideally, such a
theory would enable us "to see both the diversity of continuities and discontinuities in the various positions advanced
by Chinese thinkers, and to understand the presuppositions that make them possible" (Ironies, p. 60). In other words,
Ziporyn's inquiry comprises both a transcendental dimension (regarding the conditions of possibility of a particular
way of thinking) and a historical dimension (the textual evidence left behind by individual thinkers). This is a very
appealing way of framing the issue; unlike many contemporary Sinologists, who, in their excessive concern with the
precise meaning of single words or sentences, risk neglecting the specific mindsets underlying these texts, Ziporyn is
able to establish and to go some way toward clarifying the sense of surprise and refreshment that premodern Chinese
texts afford their readers.
Many Sinologists translate li as "pattern" or "law" and tend to understand it in an objectivist way; for example, Rudolf
G. Wagner has claimed that this term, in Wang Bi's (226­249) thought, "describes the structured specificity of things."
(5) Ziporyn offers us many compelling reasons to think that the real story, in Wang Bi and in other thinkers, is much
more complicated. The basic problem seems to be that this term does not simply refer to objective patterns or other
entities that could be grasped by a disengaged observer through a purely theoretical inquiry. Instead, any successful
inquiry into li demands a long process of practical engagement and self­transformation that supposedly leads to the
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discovery of a new horizon of meaning (and not of any kind of entities). Ziporyn offers us an astonishingly broad
variety of translation terms that articulate certain aspects of li emphasized in the various Chinese schools of thought: "a
way of hanging together" (Ironies, p. 5), "what must be cohered with to produce further coherences" (Beyond, p. 229),
"value­laden coherence" (Beyond, p. 47), "nonobstruction" (Beyond, p. 188), "the Omnipresent" (Beyond, p. 48), "copotentiality"
(Beyond, p. 328), "interpervasion" (Beyond, p. 332), et cetera.
In most cases, he renders li simply as "coherence," which is a rather succinct way of summarizing its various aspects
(and this term has rightly gained some currency in the recent literature). Through the metaphor of the pendulum (which
he has borrowed from the historian Ch'ien Mu), Ziporyn succeeds in articulating three deeper aspects of "coherence,"
namely intelligibility, sustainability, and value: all parts of a given whole necessarily cohere in the center (marked by
the swinging pendulum), for otherwise the pendulum would not be sustainable (thus, coherence is also often associated
with stability, harmony, and growth); it is the center that makes the whole pendulum intelligible; and insofar as the
individual actor is asked to stand at the "center of the circle," he or she is also able to see and to realize the valuable
action (Ironies, pp. 77­84).
The metaphor of the pendulum runs through Ziporyn's volumes like a red thread (inter alia Ironies, pp. 99, 126, 244;
Beyond, pp. 62, 155, 21 1). Readers used to more conceptual approaches might still find such a metaphor rather
unpersuasive. But there can be no doubt that such metaphorical communication was held in high esteem by countless
generations of Chinese literati; and I also agree with Ziporyn that the metaphor of the pendulum appropriately conveys
the basic mindset and the deeper "metaphysical" commitments of many premodern Chinese thinkers. In his two
volumes, Ziporyn constantly rewrites his threefold account of "coherence," with the sort of painful reticence, selfreflectiveness,
and destabilizing irony that one might expect not in a scholarly book but rather in a novel written by
Henry James or Marcel Proust. (6) This particular writing style actually embodies one of Ziporyn's core beliefs, namely
that the deeper concerns of Chinese thinkers can only be grasped through such an ambiguous use of language. Ziporyn
thinks that the Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist discourses on li ("coherence") are not about how we understand objects
in the world, but rather about the question of how we understand our actions, our character, and our dispositions (our
practical identity, or what Ziporyn sometimes calls our "value commitment"): "the manner in which [various] items
happen to cohere in this particular action, predicated on the particular human desire in question" (Ironies, p. 69). Unlike
their Western counterparts, Ziporyn argues, Chinese thinkers have never attempted to find a definitive identity for the
individual cat (some sort of "catness"); thus, instead of being haunted by the problem of universals and particulars and
the difference between appearance and reality, Chinese thinkers conceived of the world as being constantly changing,
immanent, undetermined, and "constitutively ambiguous" (Ironies, p. 7). The idea of li, Ziporyn further claims, helped
thinkers like Han Fei, Wang Bi, Guo Xiang, Zhiyi, and many others not to identify things by placing them in a causal
network of other things but to disregard the "identity" of individual things, their causes, and purposes. Thus, in
Confucian texts, li functions as positive, intelligible value and harmony; in Daoist texts as valued "togetherness," which
is ironic, provisional, and unintelligible; and, finally, in Buddhist texts as the ending of suffering and the basic
continuity between apparently separate things.
In sum, all these thinkers believed that only through a strong commitment to "coherence" (and the ambiguous
perspective it offers), are human agents able to create value and to organize, for a larger community, a more
harmonious way of seeing the world (Ironies, p. 130).
In this review, it is impossible to summarize each of the thirteen chapters (fortunately, the author provides us with a
nice overview of his main points; see Beyond, pp. 307­319). All in all, I think Ziporyn gets much right about the
specific narrative of Chinese thought, and his interpretations of the various texts are often very compelling (although I
should add immediately that I only have limited expertise in Chinese Buddhism). However, there might be problems
with some of the details, or, to say the least, there seems to be a need for further clarification regarding the broader
implications of Ziporyn's book. Let me concentrate on five aspects.
First, more literalist interpreters might worry that Ziporyn's interpretative framework is based on assumptions about the
deeper structure of Chinese thought that are not supported sufficiently by textual evidence. For example, it is not easy
to understand why li is used "non­ironically" in texts like the Analects and the Mencius (Ironies, pp. 89­137), since this
term does not appear in the former text at all and, at least according to commentators before the Song dynasty, does not
play a prominent role in the latter. This said, I think that his readings of particular passages are indeed often extremely
powerful (see, e.g., his analysis of the "wild card" in the Zhuangzi, in Ironies, pp. 162­183, or of the often
misunderstood polarity between ti and yong, in Beyond, pp. 149­155). We probably need much more discussion before
a final judgment on the details of Ziporyn's interpretations will be possible.
Second, as previously stated, Ziporyn investigates both the "positions" of individual Chinese thinkers and the broader
"presuppositions that make them possible." While scholars like A. C. Graham, Roger Ames, Chad Hansen, and
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Francois Jullien have developed similar approaches, quite a few scholars (Christoph Harbsmeier, G.E.R. Lloyd, JeanPaul
Reding, and Robert Wardy) have objected that all these approaches rely on the somehow outmoded conviction
that "Chinese" thinking is radically different from "our own" thinking. (7) Unfortunately, the two volumes of "oneness
and difference" do not directly engage with such criticism. As I understand him, Ziporyn is not committed to a strong
version of the Sapir­Whorf hypothesis (compare Ironies, p. 68). However, his account sometimes sounds as if Ancient
China was in fact a world apart, "a world of coherence" (Ironies, p. 8); and his analysis of the problem of universals
(Ironies, pp. 19­47), but also his attack on the "'law' of non­contradiction" (Beyond, pp. 10­12), seem to rely on a
version of linguistic relativism that is not easily defended. Moreover, one might also worry that his concern with
philosophical issues like "sameness and difference" possibly overshadows the particular modes of thought of Chinese
thinkers who simply might not have been interested in such issues at all. If Ziporyn's project is ultimately aimed at
avoiding what he regards as the "impasses" (Ironies, p. 47) of "Western" reason, could one not argue that he has still
not sufficiently incorporated premodern Chinese concerns into his own inquiry (if ever this is possible or even
desirable)?
Third, Ziporyn's theory of Chinese metaphysics represents a value theory that stresses human agency and participation;
the idea of li is said to explain the nature of value and its source, but also the conditions under which human agents can
establish their practical identities. For Ziporyn, "human needs, human desires" are "included" in the Chinese worldview
(Ironies, p. 60), and he once even rather boldly states that "the satisfaction of human desires is the only justification of
any position developed by any early Chinese thinker" (Ironies, p. 200). One might wonder, however, whether such a
characterization is not misleading. At least in later Buddhist and Neo­Confucian texts, human desires are clearly
regarded as obstacles to moral cultivation that need to be overcome or, to say the least, to be morally transformed, but
not satisfied. As especially Mou Zongsan emphasized, many statements about li (in particular in Confucian and NeoConfucian
texts) rather gesture toward an idea of absolute moral value independent of any desire. (7)
Fourth, Ziporyn thinks that human agency in premodern China is thought to be embedded in contexts of value that are
never static but always negotiable (Ironies, pp. 60, 122). He also thinks that Confucianism is about enabling "maximal
communication" (Ironies, p. 113), and Daoism about "simple awareness of the surface itself' (Ironies, p. 182). There is
a whiff of postmodernism hovering about such claims; but the worldview of Classical China might in fact be less
postmodern than has often been claimed. (9) Admittedly, Chinese thinkers have never thought about the world from the
perspective of "a single observer' (Ironies, p. 8). And yet, they have been focused on the idea of a single center (Ironies,
p. 80), and although Daoists apparently understood "coherence" as the free interaction of multiple perspectives, they
still shared the belief in some sort of holistic unity. Therefore, certain intellectual alternatives were in fact excluded in
such a Confucian­Daoist worldview (just think of Wang Chong or the Mohists). Since this worldview was also deeply
intertwined with the political framework of the imperial state, the mere fact that it was sustained over so many
centuries does not make it legitimate. As especially emphasized by Jiang Guanghui, the rise of moder nity in China was
essentially about "abandoning the school of coherence" (zouchu lixue) and the affirmation of ordinary life. (10) On
closer inspection, the premodern Chinese worldview might reveal itself as less open and dynamic than Ziporyn thinks.
Fifth and finally, Ziporyn's emphasis on ambiguity actually challenges one of the most basic presuppositions of Greek
rationalism, but also of our modern science­based worldview, namely: to be is to be intelligible. For Chinese thinkers,
"to say something 'exists' is to say that it is coherently, discernibly, usefully grouped, integrated intelligibly into some
whole" (Beyond, p. 340); the "whole," however, is often thought to be non­intelligible and non­accessible to ordinary
reason. Ziporyn often sounds as if he actually believes that even the most basic features of human existence are
unintelligible­­there can only be an infinite number of interpretations and ambiguous identities. But scientists might
want to object that almost all questions we are facing today do not relate to questions of practical identity, but rather
need to be investigated with appeal to empirical evidence; and mathematicians certainly would point out that
mathematical axioms are not characterized by ambiguity and interpretability (compare Ironies, pp. 24­25). Ziporyn
admits that the Chinese worldview "is never defended on objective grounds, and never could be" (Beyond, p. 343)­­but
if this is so, how convincing is such a holistic worldview based on ambiguous identities today?
These questions and criticisms notwithstanding, Ziporyn's two volumes on "oneness and difference" represent a wellargued
and highly sophisticated attempt at understanding Chinese metaphysics on its own terms. Although I am rather
skeptical about the idea that something like the Bonaventure Hotel, the famous icon of the postmodern age, can be
located in third­century Luoyang, I deeply appreciate Ziporyn's subtle insights into the premodern Chinese worldview,
which is, indeed, very different from our own. I recommend these two volumes unconditionally to the reader.
Kai Marchal
Soochow University
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marchal@scu.edu.tw
Notes
Special thanks go to Christian Wenzel and Peter M. Jones for their helpful comments on a draft version of this review.
(1)­­See Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
p. 167.
(2)­­See Paul Demieville, "Langue et litterature chinoises," Annuaire du College de France 47 (1947): 151­157.
(3)­­See Tang Junyi, Zhongguo zhexue yuanlun: Daolun pian:, Tang Junyi quanji vol. 12 (Taipei: Xuesheng Shuju,
1986), pp. 21­89.
(4)­­There are a few monographs that tackle similar issues, but none of them comes close to Ziporyn's magnum opus.
See in particular Zhang Liwen, Xu Sunming, et al., Li, Zhongguo zhexue fanchou jingcui congshu (Beijing: Renmin
Daxue Chubanshe, 1991), and Jana S. Rosker, Traditional Chinese Philosophy and the Paradigm of Structure (Li)
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).
(5)­­Rudolf G. Wagner, Language, Ontology, and Political Philosophy in China: Wang Bi's Scholarly Exploration of the
Dark (Xuanxue) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 120.
(6)­­Ziporyn makes no attempt to translate the mindset of Chinese thinkers into the more analytic repertoire of
philosophical exposition, which has become popular in the field of Chinese philosophy recently. As I understand him,
he believes that the ideal of conceptual clarity in modern philosophy conceals a basic fact about our existence: we can
never fully articulate our dependencies on others and on all kinds of random events. Thus, in the "Acknowledgments"
of his second volume, Ziporyn expresses his gratitude "to the whole mysterious and unintentional concatenation of
forces that has made it on the one hand possible and on the other hand permissible for me to write books such as this at
all" (Beyond, p. xi). I tend to think that Ziporyn's particular style brings out quite nicely major concerns in Daoist and
Buddhist thought.
(7)­­See, for example, Robert Wardy, Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
(8)­­See, in particular, Mou Zongsan, Yuanshan lun (Taipei: Xue sheng Shuju, 1985).
(9)­­Compare David L. Hall, "Modern China and the Postmodern West," in Eliot Deutsch, ed., Culture and Modernity:
East­West Philosophic Perspectives (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1991), pp. 50­70. For a more critical
assessment see Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2001), and Kenichi Mishima, "Uber eine vermeintliche Affinitat zwischen
Heidegger und dem ostasiatischen Denken," in Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Poggeler, eds., Zur philosophischen
Aktualitat Heideggers, vol. 3, Im Spiegel der Welt: Sprache, Ubersetzung, Auseinandersetzung (Frankfurt a.M.:
Klostermann, 1992), pp. 325­341.
(10)­­See Jiang Guanghui, Zouchu lixue: Qingdai sixiang fazhan de neizai lilu (Shenyang: Liaoning Jiaoyu Chuban
she, 1997). In general, it would have been helpful if Ziporyn had paid closer attention to the political dimension of the
various uses of li. Scholars like Mizoguchi Yuzo or, more recently, Wang Hui have rightly drawn attention to this
dimension.
Marchal, Kai
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Marchal, Kai. "Ambiguity, wholeness, and irony: a new interpretation of Chinese metaphysics." Philosophy East and
West, vol. 65, no. 3, 2015, p. 949+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA426766544&it=r&asid=73dab154725c549ca36902198aa97a0f.
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Ziporyn, Brook. Ironies of oneness and
difference: coherence in early Chinese thought:
prolegomena to the study of Li
J.M. Boyle
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
50.8 (Apr. 2013): p1450.
COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
50­4379
B127
2011­38254 CIP
Ziporyn, Brook. Ironies of oneness and difference: coherence in early Chinese thought: prolegomena to the study of Li.
SUNY Press, 2012. 323p bibl index afp ISBN 9781438442891, $85.00
This is the first of two volumes intended to serve as a lens or dictionary, tracing the range of ways thinkers have
handled basic categories of human experience. Ziporyn (Univ. of Chicago Divinity School) attempts to search out the
basic roots and examine the journeys of prominent thinkers. He begins with questions of coherence, e.g., what a thing
is, and how things hang together. One example of the search would be to ask, in all possible contexts, "why indigenous
Chinese thought had no doctrine of essences as early Greeks did?"; Plato and Aristotle, for example, attempted to
search out definitive identities, individual substances, and universal essences. The author's second aim in this volume is
to uncover the prehistory of the character and development of Li, which over time brings to the fore the East's and the
West's fundamentally disparate ways of thinking, comparing the roots of ontology, ethics, and epistemology as related
to coherence. Chapters range from "Essentials, Universals, and Omnipresence" to "The Yin­Yang Compromise."
Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper­division undergraduates and above.­­J. M. Boyle, emerita, Dowling College
Boyle, J.M.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Boyle, J.M. "Ziporyn, Brook. Ironies of oneness and difference: coherence in early Chinese thought: prolegomena to
the study of Li." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2013, p. 1450. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA324590062&it=r&asid=2765fce512489a9b534dac9ec2fe0d56.
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Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with
Selections from Traditional Commentaries
Paul Fischer
Philosophy East and West.
61.2 (Apr. 2011): p402.
COPYRIGHT 2011 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/pew/index.html
Full Text:
Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Brook Ziporyn.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009. Pp. xviii + 238. Paper $14.95.
Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries is an excellent new translation of the
Zhuangzi. Brook Ziporyn has produced an abridged and annotated edition of the classic for Hackett's growing series of
translations on early Chinese intellectual history. The closest competitors to this new edition are the translations by
Watson (1968), Graham (1981), and Mair (1994). Ziporyn's work succeeds in part because he manages to do both less
and more than the others. With judicious abridgement (sixteen full chapters, including all seven "Inner" chapters, plus
selections from six more­­about two­thirds of the entire work) and valuable added commentary, this book is a great
choice for the undergraduate classroom. Scholars will also find this a valuable addition to their shelves. The translation
often provides a fresh perspective to old problems, and the selection of commentary delivers a focus and accessibility
that engages­­and encourages us to re­engage­­the considerable commentarial tradition.
There are four parts to this text to be considered: the brief introduction, the four online explanatory essays, the
translation, and the selections from traditional commentaries.
The twelve­page Introduction begins with the historical, ends with the philosophical, and finally points the reader to the
online essays. The closing section of the Introduction, "Multiple Perspectives of the Inner Chapters," rather than
attempting to "sum up" the Zhuangzi, instead describes a variety of points of view that Zhuangzi the author seems to
take. The apparent contradictions are resolved in the longest of the online essays, "Zhuangzi as Philosopher," where
Ziporyn gives us an insightful analysis of the problem: the Zhuangzi is justifiably notable not only for pointing out
(ontological and psychological) dependence and relativity, but also for embracing and celebrating the transformations
between (necessarily limited) perspectives. It is precisely here that the famous phrase from chapter 1, "the Consummate
Person has no fixed identity" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) (p. 6), finds its meaning.
The remaining three online essays are shorter and deal with translation issues, the categorization of the text's chapters
by A. C. Graham and Liu Xiaogan, and the use of the term [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Laozi,
which Ziporyn situates between earlier (Confucian and Mohist) and later (Zhuangzian) uses. This last brief essay,
introducing the counterintuitive and "ironic" use of the term dao, would be a useful assignment for students before
reading either text.
Ziporyn's translation stands up well against those of his predecessors. Sometimes it is more colloquial, as with "The
Equalizing Jokebook" for Qi xie [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]t (p. 3), and "this Peng has quite a back on
him" (p. 3). The latter example does not translate anything in the Chinese, and such additions are usually for
clarification, but in rare instances I found them slightly puzzling, as with the addition of "or anything in a man" in "Is
human life always this bewildering, or am I the only bewildered one? Is there actually any man, or anything in a man,
that is not bewildered?" (1) (p. 11). Sometimes the translation seems a little idiosyncratic. Dao, for example, is
rendered as "course," a compromise between Chad Hansen's "guiding discourse" and the standard "way." I think this
works better in theory than in practice, however, because "course" sounds odd in some sentences, for example when
Confucius says to the cicada catcher, "How skillful you are! Or do you have a course?" (p. 78). And the logic behind
the inconsistent use of the uppercase for words like C/course, H/heaven, and S/sage was not always obvious to me from
the context, and might prove distracting to undergraduates, even after being reminded that Chinese has no such
distinctions.
But these are small matters. Much more often, the translation is a delight. Ziporyn's lucid prose is often a marked
improvement over his predecessors:
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Since he receives his sustenance from Heaven, what use would he
have for the human? He has the physical form of a human being, but
not the characteristic inclinations of a human being. Since he
shares the human form, he lives among men. Since he is free of
their characteristic inclinations, right and wrong cannot get at
him. Minute and insignificant, he is just another man among the
others. Vast and unmatched, he is alone in perfecting the Heavenly
in himself. (2) (p. 38)
Footnotes are more plentiful than in the previous translations and are especially helpful with a text like the Zhuangzi.
Shorter notes often provide background and explanatory information, as with the note on Song Rongzi in chapter 1 (p.
5 n. 9). Longer notes engage previous readings of a passage and defend Ziporyn's own understanding and translation,
as with the passage, considered spurious by Graham and Mair, that ends with "He [i.e., the sage] may lose his life
without losing what is most genuine to him, but he is not being a 'man devoted to service'" (3) (p. 41 n. 10).
The selections from traditional commentaries are the most innovative feature of this translation, in keeping with
Edward Slingerland's Analects and Bryan Van Norden's Mengzi translations (also from Hackett). Ziporyn provides
extracts from forty­seven commentators that offer valuable contextualization as well as a variety of perspectives from
which to approach the text. Guo Xiang starts right off in chapter 1 with his signature exegesis of the "spontaneous
attainments" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) of each being (p. 129). Wang Fuzhi, as if the opening
metaphors of this chapter were not perspective­expanding enough, introduces the chapter by saying "All can be
wandered in­­indeed, all are nothing but this wandering" (4) (p. 129). Shi Deqing connects the vastness of the Northern
and Southern oceans to the vastness of the Dao, and then goes on to assert that "without the vastness and depth of the
Great Course, the fetus of the great sage cannot be gestated" (5) (p. 130), which provides an excellent starting point for
both Buddhist and Daoist hermeneutics. Aside from introducing new interpretive concepts, the commentaries can also
serve to explain the continuity of the text, particularly when this is not immediately apparent. The comments of Shi
Deqing on the end of chapter 1, for example, conceptually unite the pericopes on Song Rongzi, Liezi, Xu You, and the
Spirit­Man on Mt. Guye (pp. 131­134).
There are very few typos, "Qu Boyu" [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] inexplicably changing to "Peng
Boyu" (p. 29) probably being the only notable one. The bibliography could have included more articles in English for
the undergraduate looking to write a paper, but overall Ziporyn's translation is smooth, clear, and accurate, his notes are
helpful, and his commentary selections bring new and welcome dimensions to the text as textbook and as an aid for
scholarly research.
Reviewed by Paul Fischer American University in Cairo
Notes
(1)­­[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(2)­­[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(3)­­[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(4)­­[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
(5)­­[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]
Fischer, Paul
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Fischer, Paul. "Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries." Philosophy East
and West, vol. 61, no. 2, 2011, p. 402+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA253926690&it=r&asid=0becda7fedd4eddd1b58a0183cb33615.
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Zhuangzi; essential writings with selections from
traditional commentaries
Reference & Research Book News.
24.3 (Aug. 2009):
COPYRIGHT 2009 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780872209114
Zhuangzi; essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries.
Zhuangzi. Trans. by Brook Ziporyn.
Hackett Publishing Co.
2009
238 pages
$14.95
Paperback
BL1900
Zhuangzi (ca. 369­286 B.C.E.), aka Master Zhuang, was that rare philosopher with a sense of humor. This translation
of the Chinese classic consisting of a 33­chapter guide to living strikes a middle ground between interpretations by
those who view the work as being of multiple authorship and those who attribute the writings to commentator Guo
Xiang. Ziporyn (religion and philosophy, Northwestern U.) supplies introductory notes, biographical sketches of the
commentators, a glossary, bibliography, and index to the "inner" (core) and "outer" chapters.
([c]2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Zhuangzi; essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries." Reference & Research Book News, Aug.
2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA205548498&it=r&asid=3f81c78bc84033fe3df6af8ec424fea3.
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Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism,
Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai
Buddhist Thought
David R. Loy
Philosophy East and West.
54.1 (Jan. 2004): p99.
COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Hawaii Press
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/pew/index.html
Full Text:
By Brook Ziporyn. Harvard­Yenching Monograph no. 51. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 482.
Hardcover $60.00.
Does Mahayana Buddhism have a problem with evil? Buddhism generally focuses on ignorance (a problem of
understanding) rather than evil (Abrahamic sin is more a problem of the will). Early Buddhism does have a lot to say
about the three roots of evil, which need to be transformed into their positive counterparts­­greed into generosity, ill
will into loving­kindness, ignorance into wisdom. But the Mahayana emphasis on sunyata puts a different slant on
samsara. The focus on realizing emptiness seems to work better for ignorance/delusion than for evil: wisdom/prajna
involves realizing that everything is sunya. Then how are we to distinguish good from evil deeds, if from the highest
point of view they are equally sunya?
We can get another angle on what is at stake by using the metaphor of Indra's net, which implies paradoxes for
knowledge and value. Every node is a jewel that reflects all the other nodes­­but that means "deluded" nodes manifest
all those others as much as "enlightened" ones do. We may want to distinguish between those nodes that are aware of
the true nature of the net and those that are not, but every node is an effect (and cause) of all the others. One cannot
adopt a bird's­eye view that observes the whole objectively, because the net does not allow for sub specie aeternitas;
any perspective we might take is nothing more than one more interdependent node.
There is the same problem with distinguishing between good and evil activities. We want to say that there is a
significant difference between a selfish action and a compassionate one, but Indra's net gives us no criterion to
discriminate between them, inasmuch as every node manifests the whole as well as every other node, whether or not it
knows it or intends it. We can play word games about what is truth and what is delusion, but when we turn to good and
evil the stakes become very high. Are we really willing to accept that from the highest point of view crashing a
hijacked airliner into a skyscraper is no better or worse than the compassionate acts of a Buddha?
In 1016 the well­known Tiantai master Siming Zhili (960­1028) publicly announced he intended to do something that
he acknowledged was evil. He defended himself by asking "What difference is there between the Buddha and the
devil? ... [S]ince the original natures of the two are merged together from the beginning, how could their manifestations
be any different from one another? ... [O]ther than the devil there is no Buddha, and other than the Buddha there is no
devil."
Brook Ziporyn's monograph Evil and/or/as The Good is a detailed exposition and subtle defense of Zhili's argument
identifying value and anti­value, with ample reference to Western ethical theory as well as to the Chinese Buddhist
context for his position. Ziporyn elaborates Zhili's claim that good and evil are nothing but two names for a single
entity, which means that each term alone is a way to denote all that exists. For Zhili the perfect man "is capable of both
good and evil" (p. 74).
Ziporyn reflects on how the Chinese tradition provides an alternative to the usual antithetical way we understand the
relationship between good and evil. The Tiantai school, in particular, was known for attributing Buddha­nature to evil.
He begins by explaining "omnicentric holism." Indra's Net is an example (although one not much used in this book):
any point in the system can be the center to which everything else is subordinated and which everything else supports
and explains. Since this includes all subjectivity, any subject's misapprehension of the whole also becomes a complete
and adequate apprehension of that whole. Value paradoxes arise because omnicentrism implies a different
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epistemology: every possible apprehension is not only valid but self­validating, "neither an illusion nor a distortion of
reality, and not subject to invalidation by a privileged perspective" (p. 62). The holism of good and evil results in the
claim that since either "good" or "evil" by itself contains the other and the whole, we do not need to transcend either
one; each is sufficient to embrace the whole.
The basic issue is the relationship between that ultimate truth and the provisional truth. For Nagarjuna that relationship
is fixed and one­directional: ordinary language practices are necessary for expressing the highest truth. For Tiantai,
however, the provisional ends up being equal to the ultimate truth: "all statements are both provisionally true and
ultimately false, and to be provisionally true is itself a form of being ultimately true" (p. 107). Delusion does not
obscure an implicit enlightenment, it expresses an intrinsic enlightenment; and enlightenment can also be read as an
expression of delusion. All views can now be seen to be provisional posits: each one false if taken literally as the only
true perspective, but all are true if they are taken as heuristic claims leading to a realization that every possible view
includes all the others, and that each is therefore a valid center and starting point. The same point applies to good/evil.
Because intent/action is not "owned" by anyone, everything that happens­­Hitler's deeds as much as Sakyamuni's­­
works as upaya for creating Buddhahood.
That any one starting point ends up revealing all the others, that whatever is always reveals itself as (caused by and
effecting) something else­­these are important implications of omnicentric holism. But I have difficulty accepting (or
following) the next move: that this implies that good and bad are identical. That they imply each other and depend on
each other, yes, but to assert that they are the same negates too absolutely the necessary function that duality serves
within ordinary
discourse and life. Perhaps that is Zhili's point, where he is more enlightened than the rest of us, but if so it seems
dangerously one­sided, to say the least. And it is not completely clear that this one­sidedness adequately reflects Zhili's
considered position. Ziporyn mentions that Zhili emphasizes two levels pertaining to practice: one in which good is
realized and evil is cut off, and another in which there is nothing to be realized or cut off (p. 271). Does Ziporyn's
argument emphasize too much the latter at the cost of the former? The fundamental issue, again, is the relationship
between them.
The implications of identifying good and evil are startling, and Ziporyn does not hesitate to draw them out.
"Enlightenment means not the overcoming of evil so as to manifest good but the full manifestation and realization of
both good and evil" (p. 301). "The problem when you hate or lust is that you do not do it thoroughly enough" (p. 310).
"Evil must be fully realized, and this simultaneously entails its overcoming" (p. 312). Zhili says that the more we dwell
on an evil, the more we are free of it. To "transcend" it and to "realize" it are one and the same process. As Ziporyn
glosses, the only way to handle ineradicable evil and suffering is to involve ourselves in it, by accepting it and adding
additional elements that recontextualize and transform it.
How does this apply if I am, say, a cannibalistic serial killer converted to Zhili's version of Tiantai? "First, I should not
strive to discard my tendency to kill and eat strangers; rather, I should contemplate it as identical to the Three Truths­­
either while doing it or while wishing to do it.... At the same time, while enjoying myself gnawing on someone else's
liver, I can discern in this act also the infinite sorrow of the victim, the rage of the authorities, my remorse in the
electric chair, and my terror at death," et cetera (p. 374).
I think we can trust our intuitions here: no, this will not do. Perhaps one confusion here results from conflating delusion
with evil­­a confusion easier to notice from outside the Buddhist tradition. What Ziporyn describes is a meditation
practice that can be valuable as a way to address many of our delusive thoughts and feelings, but that is not a
satisfactory way for serial killers to resolve their own peculiar problems, much less those of a Hitler or a fanatical
terrorist hijacker. "Mr. Hitler, you do not need to discard your tendency to kill all Jews; rather, you should contemplate
it as identical with enlightened wisdom...." The "evil" that Zhili himself proposed to commit was somewhat more
modest: immolating himself to hasten his entry into the Pure Land­­something that we may (or may not) agree would
be an evil­­but the suffering that such a deed would voluntarily bring upon himself cannot be compared with the
suffering inflicted on innocents by torture or mass murder. One can argue for the interdependence of good and evil by
pointing out, for example, that the antithetical duality between them sometimes contributes greatly to the world's
suffering; Hitler and Stalin were trying to redeem the world by purifying it of its evil elements. Zhili's point is that,
given its position within an omnicentric holism, "evil" nevertheless works to enlighten us­­but that is not likely to be
convincing to someone who lost his family in the Nazi Holocaust. Ziporyn repeatedly notes that the setup of a joke
must be serious for the punch line to be funny. What punch line could "redeem" the Holocaust?
Ziporyn's own example is fortuitous since the Pali Canon (Majjhima Nikaya II.98ff.) contains the story of Angulimala,
a serial killer converted by the Buddha. He tries to kill Sakyamuni but cannot run fast enough to catch him, even
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though the Buddha is walking at his usual pace. Astonished, he calls out "Stop!" "I have stopped, Angulimala­­you stop
too," responds the Buddha, who then explains: "I have stopped forever, abstaining from violence towards living beings;
but you have no restraint towards things that live." This impresses Angulimala so much that he renounces his evil ways
and asks to join the sangha, and the Buddha welcomes him as a new bhikkhu. We are not told anything about his
meditation practice (which quickly leads to nirvana), but clearly it does not involve continuing his earlier practice of
killing strangers to collect bones for a necklace. Myth or not, this story contains nothing to support Zhili's position on
how to deal with such evils, and much to challenge it.
Yet none of this contradicts Ziporyn's basic point about the paradoxes built into omnicentric holism, the fact that from
the highest point of view every possible apprehension­­including evil ones­­is neither a distortion of reality nor subject
to invalidation by some other more privileged perspective. The solution to this paradox, I suggest, involves realizing
that this "ultimate" point of view is insufficient by itself­­that it always needs to be supplemented by the "provisional."
We need only to remember the original thrust of Sakyamuni's teaching: ending dukkha was his only concern. From the
highest perspective, dukkha is ended by realizing that it has always been sunya (Nagarjuna's shorthand heuristic term
for interdependent/lacking self­being), as are sentient beings, delusion and enlightenment, good and evil, et cetera. But
that end to dukkha is not enough by itself. If it were, Sakyamuni would not have bothered to teach after his awakening.
We must also address the "provisional" dukkha involving many types of physical and mental pain­­which "evil"
increases. Moreover, these two approaches to dukkha reinforce each other. We should not give a Dharma talk to
someone who is starving, but focus first on repairing that dukkha. The more enlightened we are, the less selfpreoccupied
we will be and the more able to devote ourselves to redressing both aspects of dukkha in the world.
Ziporyn says that for Zhili evil is not overcome in the sense of transforming into something else; the deluded aspect is
never lost because it unifies and redeems by expanding to include other perspectives. From the highest perspective,
again, no such development is any improvement. As a "lower truth," however, this captures the transformation that is
needed­­without in any way rationalizing a serial killer's tendencies to continue his killing. The important point is that
some perspectives are indeed more open, unifying, and encompassing than others; the classical Buddhist example is the
lives of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, which are models for that reason. Yet one does not become a Buddha by continuing
to act on evil impulses with the intention of "contextualizing" them. Rather, when such impulses arise in the mind one
lets them go.
In other words, the highest point of view is not really the highest point of view­­at least, not by itself. It does not
"work" for us without a "lower truth" according to which we can distinguish between evil and good acts, between
delusion (perceiving Indra's net as a collection of separate things) and wisdom (realizing nonself and the
interdependence of all the net's nodes). One needs the provisional positing of a distinction between good and evil in
order to work for the reduction of the world's suffering­­a dukkha that from the "highest" point of view is already
complete and perfect, lacking nothing. But that point of view is insufficient by itself. This is not Nagarjuna's
perspective­­that the lower truth is needed to point to the higher truth. Rather, each truth needs the other. To adopt an
image that Ziporyn employs in a somewhat different way, the relationship between them is like the "two sides" of a
Mobius strip. The two truths or levels of reality constitute one life. The "lower" truth is interdependence, to be realized
and integrated into the way we live. The "higher" truth is the "empty" thusness of each phenomenon, a "just this!"­ness
that interdependence (paradoxically) implies.
Did Zhili in fact commit his great evil and immolate himself? I won't give away the plot­­if only to encourage others to
read this book. My critique does not convey its riches (nor the denseness of its arguments). For example, Ziporyn
almost casually provides the most convincing explanation I have read for why the natural sciences didn't develop in
China: things were understood as "social beings" rather than objects to be analyzed (pp. 42­44). He notices that the
Western tradition considers value as another kind of fact, whereas the Chinese tradition subordinates fact to value, so
that the value theories we extract from Chinese texts are better understood as "evocations of affect meant to incline one
towards a specific type of behavior" (p. 89). And (my favorite): "The implication is perhaps that a sentient being is a
Buddha spending all his time trying to find his Buddha­nature (his true self, his true value), whereas a Buddha is a
sentient being who realizes that the apparent lack of his buddhahood is the proof of his buddhahood and thereby goes
about freely using that buddhahood for the sake of all beings" (p. 181).
To sum up, although I think Ziporyn's main thesis is problematic, this is an immensely stimulating work that deserves
attention because it raises the important issues in fruitful ways.
David R. Loy Bunkyo University
Loy, David R.
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Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Loy, David R. "Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist
Thought." Philosophy East and West, vol. 54, no. 1, 2004, p. 99+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA112087957&it=r&asid=17f699efb6b8a411907fe25404031a76.
Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A112087957

"Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism." Publishers Weekly, 11 Apr. 2016, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449663024&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Van Norden, Bryan W. "Brook Ziporyn, trans. Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings with Selections from Traditional Commentaries." China Review International, Spring 2009, p. 147+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA232383997&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Haiming, Wen. "Brook Ziporyn. The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo­Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang." China Review International, Spring 2007, p. 322+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA184642742&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Marchal, Kai. "Ambiguity, wholeness, and irony: a new interpretation of Chinese metaphysics." Philosophy East and West, vol. 65, no. 3, 2015, p. 949+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA426766544&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Boyle, J.M. "Ziporyn, Brook. Ironies of oneness and difference: coherence in early Chinese thought: prolegomena to the study of Li." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2013, p. 1450. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA324590062&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Fischer, Paul. "Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries." Philosophy East and West, vol. 61, no. 2, 2011, p. 402+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA253926690&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. "Zhuangzi; essential writings with selections from traditional commentaries." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2009. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA205548498&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017. Loy, David R. "Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought." Philosophy East and West, vol. 54, no. 1, 2004, p. 99+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA112087957&it=r. Accessed 5 Feb. 2017.

• H-Net
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/16023/magliola-ziporyn-being-and-ambiguity-philosophical-experiments-tiantai
  Word count: 1650

  Magliola on Ziporyn, 'Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism'

  Author:
  Brook Ziporyn
  Reviewer:
  Robert Magliola

  Brook Ziporyn. Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism. Chicago: Open Court, 2004. xxii + 452 pp. $32.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8126-9542-7.

  Reviewed by Robert Magliola (National Taiwan University and Abac Assumption University of Thailand, retired; Seminar Associate, Columbia University Seminar in Buddhist Studies)
  Published on H-Buddhism (January, 2007)

  From Tiantai to Neo-Tiantai: Intersubsuming Western Philosophy

  This book philosophizes. It philosophizes by transforming Tiantai Buddhism into a Neo-Tiantai Buddhism which engages with western philosophy, especially modern and contemporary western philosophy. I belong to that minority which affirms that "living philosophy" is one of the things Buddhist Studies should do, and I recommend this book as a brilliant example of such a genre.

  In the introduction, and then the first sections of part 1, Brook Ziporyn exposits the key teachings of Tiantai so as to set them up as a springboard for his project, the formation of his Neo-Tiantai. Insofar as his exposition establishes the parameters for all that follows, I here indulge it at some length. In Ziporyn's reading, Tiantai extends the Lotus S?tra's famous claim that ?r?vakas, by denying Bodhisattvahood, are in fact practicing the Bodhisattva path without knowing it (p. 15). Tiantai takes the clue from this collapse of the ends-means relation, by in effect applying it to N?g?rjuna's distinctions between the Two Truths, conventional truth (Buddhism and ordinary speech) and ultimate truth (Emptiness, the "unspeakable") and even to N?g?rjuna's distinction within the mundane between ordinary truth and the false (non-Buddhist religious and philosophical theories).

  Tiantai's Three Truths are Emptiness, Provisional Positing (of what N?g?rjuna calls ordinary truth, but also of what N?g?rjuna calls false teachings), and Centrality (reversible as-ness, which Ziporyn shall re-name "Intersubsumption"). Emptiness and Provisional Positing are exactly equivalent, and this equivalency constitutes Centrality, which is reversible as-ness. In Ziporyn's words, "the differentiations between things, their conventional designations, as well as any cockamamie philosophical or religious theory or personal illusion about them, are just as ultimately true and untrue as their Emptiness … both of these aspects are just as ultimate as the fact that these two aspects are simply aspects of one another. This is the interfusion of the Three Truths, which means even Centrality is not more ultimate than the other two. To indicate any of the three is to indicate all three: they are three ways of saying the same thing" (p. 16). Ziporyn calls Tiantai's Three Truths, in "philosophical" terms, Global Incoherence, Local Coherence, and Reversible As-ness ("Intersubsumption") respectively, and with refinement from affiliated Tiantai teachings, and some personal "tweaking," these become the engine for what Ziporyn calls Neo-Tiantai. His Neo-Tiantai asserts that identity per se is synonymous with its own constitutive impossibility (p. 39). Any proposition, and indeed any experience, will at the same time globalize (make into a whole) and destroy itself, in such a way that these two are one and the same. For example, "To know how to squeeze new meanings out of old premises is to know oneself, for one has no self but this constant, somewhat desperate, and vaguely disreputable rereading and recontextualization of old claptrap." The real truth that is delivered by exegetical ingenuity is that the exegetes are right in spite of themselves, "precisely by being so wrong." They are "getting at the true kernel of the matter by straying so unjustifiably from the 'original meaning', although the true kernel" is not what they believe they see revealed but rather the very process of "finding true kernels in old lies" (p. 40). The rest of Ziporyn's four-hundred-fifty-two page book is the application of this Neo-Tiantai formulation in terms of the classical issues of philosophy (with reference as well to John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Frank Oz, and a host of others).

  Part 1 has as its title, "Neo-Tiantai Basics: Enframement, Coherence, and Agency--The Thusness and Otherwiseness of All Coherences," and it is through this suite of puncta that the narrative logically moves. I would single out as crucial the progressive exposure of the "Four Ways of Being Thus and Otherwise: Impermanence, Illusion, Tertium Quid, Asness" (pp. 62-73). Comparative philosophers will appreciate, I think, Ziporyn's reference to, and interpolation of, Merleau-Ponty here and throughout part 1. "Impermanence" is a face of Global Incoherence: "Whatever appears in experience will be transcended, i.e., will disappear, will be recontextualized, will assume a meaning other than the one it has appeared as." But "Impermanence" turns out to be "Illusion" as a face of Global Incoherence: "Whatever appears is transcended already…. [W]herever there is appearance of any coherence there is also necessarily already transcendence of that appearance, the two are necessarily inseparable." But "Illusion" turns out to be the situation of "Tertium Quid": "Whatever appears is thereby transcended" (p. 65). The final step is "Asness": "Appearing per se is being transcended per se. To be thus is to be otherwise" (p. 66). The Neo-Tiantai of part 1 permutates the great Tiantai masters, Zhiyi, Zhanran, and Zhili; and engages with Kant and Hegel, Frege, Whitehead, Nishitani, Davidson, and ?i?ek (among others).

  Part 2, "Desire and the Self: Towards an Ethics and Psychology of Constitutive Impossibility," includes an extended treatment of ethics. If one applies the notion of Thusness and Otherwiseness to conventional definitions of good and evil, then "the essence of Neo-Tiantai ethics lies in recontextualization, rather than elimination or substitution.... My obsession or compulsion or stupidity or malice may be seen, when the camera draws back to the right distance, as it were, as a point in a curve describing bliss, generosity, health, and so on. The question lies then in how far back the camera is to be drawn. And the implication is that at any level of focus or analysis we may be resting at, it would be possible to push forward and discover that our present figure is made up of plenty of components that are horrible when judged by its standard, and vice versa; there need be no final level at which this process must stop" (p. 287). This formulation may generate a consequence which has been pejoratively attributed by many Buddhists to Tiantai itself: if every behavior is also every other behavior, both good and bad, neither good nor bad, then ethical responsibility loses its motivation. Even soteriological intervention loses its driving force. Neo-Tiantai considers itself immune from this criticism, because one should live one's localized "coherence" very intensely, even while recognizing all other things/events are negatively/positively transcribed into it (and vice versa), but for Tiantai's adversaries, this is precisely the flaw--the immunity tends to vacate moral earnestness.

  In particular I recommend to "Continentalists" (scholars working in European philosophy) Ziporyn's treatment of the double-bind (pp. 270-271 et circa), a motif they will recognize from the French poststructuralists, especially Lacan and Derrida. Ziporyn advises that one do what most successfully seems to fulfill, with one stroke ("a single token"), the contrary demands of one's ad hoc double-bind (of course, for Tiantai, anything can be a double-bind and anything can be a stroke, depending on one's "focal apparatus"). This localized "solution" is analogous, suggests Ziporyn, to the Lacanian "objet petit a, standing as a plug covering the 'stain of the Real', i.e., the crack revealing the inconsistency of the Big Other" (p. 270). The representative problem is ("provisionally," I assume) both satisfied and destroyed--one becomes the problem and hence is free from/as it.

  Part 3, "Hermeneutics and Autoerotics: Truths and Other Hidden Parts, and How They Welcome Their Demise," recontextualizes Neo-Tiantai in terms of the As-ness between/of erotics and hermeneutics (cf. Nietzsche, Bataille, the Post-Structuralists). Ziporyn is--with one stroke--classically Buddhist (and Tantrist, it seems to me) and philosophically "postmodern French" in his emphasis on the force of desire. In a sexual register, desire is said to be either "solitary" ("onany") or "shared" ("love," here taken to be re-contextualized auto-eroticism). Love as repackaged onany? We are far from the conventional reading of the Bodhisattva vows here! Ziporyn would/could deploy Intersubsumption to simultaneously affirm the conventional reading too, but then the end-result seems to be a flattening of morality again. For the counterpoint of auto-eroticism in hermeneutics, and a romp through academic politics, see especially (and appropriately, according to Ziporyn) the very same pages (pp. 423-426). For Neo-Tiantai's disagreements with Zen, see pp. 408-409; with Levinas, pp. 347-350; with deconstruction, p. 418. "Pragmatically, if we may invoke an old trope, in deconstruction, all is wrong and false, while in Tiantai, all is right and true," says Ziporyn. I demur. In fact, I have shown at some length in my own published work that for Derrida, all is not "wrong and false." As for all being "right and true," Derrida is Jewish enough to know that is impossible, very impossible indeed.

  I close with some words about Being and Ambiguity's style, the high intellectuality of which is laced with a Rabelaisian flippancy very offensive to some. Ziporyn's text is "living philosophy." It doesphilosophy. The counterpoints of Hegel and Lennon, etc., of classical elenchus and double-entendre, etc., "act out," theatricalize, Neo-Tiantai's principle of Intersubsumption. That is, the text doesthe philosophy.

  Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=12697

  Citation: Robert Magliola. Review of Ziporyn, Brook, Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. January, 2007.
  URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12697

  Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.

• Zhuangzi
  http://www.engagingwithzhuangzi.com/index.php/2015/11/01/through-the-looking-glass-a-review-of-ziporyns-being-and-ambiguity/
  Word count: 511

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: A REVIEW OF ZIPORYN’S BEING AND AMBIGUITY

  Whenever I discuss one of Ziporyn’s books I must begin by admitting that I haven’t understood the half of it. This is especially sad in this instance since this particular work seems to have only one idea to expound upon, albeit in many different ways. This is omnicentrism as found in Tiantai Buddhism.
  What is omnicentrism? It is the understanding that every “coherence”, every idea about anything—“right or wrong”—, implies, contains and depends upon every other possible coherence of which it must remain incoherent. Every single thing is the center of Everything. But this means that everything is a Non-Exclusive Center—there are infinite centers. It also means that every coherence is “constitutively impossible” in that as a Local Coherence it must assume of itself that it is coherent, which it cannot possible be given its subsumption within Global Incoherence. This is the best I can do, or at least all I will attempt to speak of Ziporyn’s thesis. Instead, I’d like to make some more general observations about his project.
  Ziporyn attributes his interest in omnicentrism to Zhuangzi, which makes it of special interest to me. Indeed, there is much here that helps to understand Zhuangzi’s “equalizing of things and our theories about them” and how he can justifiably advocate for his point of view that holds that all points of view are equally affirmable.
  Though generally careful to avoid his own advocacy, Ziporyn does, I believe, think that this understanding can have a very real and practical transformative effect in our interface with ourselves and the world. The “transformative recontextualization” that an understanding of omnicentrism implies can change our being in the world for the better. This is also at the heart of Zhuangzi’s project as I understand it.
  I would compare Ziporyn’s thought projects to those of the great Hindu and Buddhist philosophers (whom I have admittedly not read in depth—they also being beyond my limited powers of concentration and intellect, and their having admittedly religious agendas). There are two ways of coming to understand them—one can be very, very smart or one can experience that of which they speak. They take reason to the very frontiers where Zhuangzi suggests the mind rest and accept that it can go no further. And this is where that scary thing called mysticism must step in.
  What is especially noteworthy about this particular thought project is that it bravely constructs a new “thought experiment”, what Ziporyn calls Neo-Tiantai. By his own admission, it’s not Buddhism (thankfully), and it’s not strictly scholarship (also thankfully), and it’s not strictly speaking philosophy (at least, I assume, in the estimation of professional philosophers). This is what I try to do with Zhuangzi, though admittedly not really up to the task. Zhuangzi, however, at my reading, already does most of the work himself—there’s really nothing religiously contentful to pare away.

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