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Kopf on Ziporyn, 'Emptiness and Omnipresence: an Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism' H-Buddhism Kopf on Ziporyn, 'Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism' Review published on Tuesday, June 19, 2018 Brook A. Ziporyn. Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism. World Philosophies Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. 336 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-02108-3; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-02112-0. Reviewed by Gereon Kopf (Luther College) Published on H-Buddhism (June, 2018) Commissioned by Rafal Stepien (University of Oxford) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51179 In his recent Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism, Brook A. Ziporyn tackles the enormous and indispensable but also thankless task of presenting classical Tiantai ideas to a contemporary anglophone audience. On the first page of his introduction, Ziporyn warns the reader that “it should be noted at the outset that many people, even those who are used to the complexities of Buddhist thinking and its sometimes surprising paradoxes, tend to find Tiantai claims wildly perplexing, contradictory, even shocking” (p. 1). The reason for this is threefold. First, Tiantai Buddhist thinkers have a reputation of using confounding concepts to describe reality, such as the infamous “yiniansanqian一念三千, The Presence of All Three Thousand Aspects of Existence as Each Moment of Experience” (p. 1). Second, these kinds of phrases, which are difficult enough to understand in their original context, are almost impossible to express and explain in English to an audience prone to applying a conceptual framework alien to the Tiantai texts. Finally, Ziporyn chooses as his testing ground the Tiantai idea with the single most potential to shock a contemporary anglophone audience, namely, the non-duality of happiness and suffering, good and evil, Buddha and Mara/devil. Ziporyn proposes to read classic Tiantai texts and ideas in the context of early twenty-first-century intercultural and global philosophy. The context of this work is an intensified interest by anglophone scholars in Buddhist philosophy qua philosophy, as seen by an increase in journals, publications, conference panels, and academic societies dedicated to this topic. Of course, it is not the project of Buddhist philosophy that is new. Buddhist thinkers have engaged in philosophical analysis and made “philosophical claims” for over two thousand years.[1] In addition, scholars trained in academic philosophy, such as Fyodor Stcherbatsky (1866-1942) (see, for example, his 1930 Buddhist Logic) and David Kalupahana (1936-2014) (see, for example, his 1976Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis), have long presented Buddhist thinkers and texts as philosophy in European languages. However, it is only recently that scholars of Buddhist philosophy have been included in philosophy departments at universities—University of Hawai’i is one of the trailblazers in this area—and that the scholarship of Buddhist philosophy that heretofore had been relegated to philology, area studies (mainly Indology and Tibetology), and religious studies is now being incorporated into the various discourses of academic philosophy. In other words, Buddhist philosophy is now increasingly recognized as a living and relevant philosophical tradition and its representatives and scholars as viable partners in philosophical discussions and as contributors to the solution of contemporary Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kopf on Ziporyn, 'Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism'. H-Buddhism. 06-19-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/1944813/kopf-ziporyn-emptiness-and-omnipresence-essential-introduction Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism issues. In addition, it has been recognized that Buddhist philosophy is not limited to South Asia but expands to and has been practiced in East Asia as well. Subsequently, there has been a need for elaborations in European languages of Buddhist philosophy originating in East Asia. This is exactly wherein the significance of Ziporyn’s work lies. In some sense, Emptiness and Omnipresence constitutes an introduction of Ziporyn’s early work as presented in his Evil and/or/as The Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (2000) and Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism (2004) to a wider audience. This is important to recognize when assessing the value of the current work for two reasons. First, while his earlier books developed the key concepts of Tiantai philosophy from the writings of Tiantai Zhiyi (538-97), Jingxi Zhanran (711-82), and Siming Zhili (960-1028), the designated goal of Emptiness and Omnipresence is to put the concepts developed in Ziporyn’s earlier work in dialogue with ideas and thinkers in the field of academic philosophy. In other words, while the presumed audience of the earlier two volumes were experts in Buddhology and/or Buddhist philosophy, the addressed readers of this later one are those with a background in academic philosophy who want to make sense of the rather confounding concepts developed in the Tiantai Buddhist tradition. The key question Ziporyn pursues in the current work is not so much “What did Zhiyi, Zhanran, and Zhili say?” but rather “How can we understand what Zhiyi, Zhanran, and Zhili said today?” The importance of this distinction lies not so much in the expectation a given reader may or may not have but rather in the scholarly method the author employs. And, of course, the methodological question is a serious and weighty one: how can one read and apply concepts developed in Tang and Song China within the contexts of contemporary philosophical discourses? This is an enormous task that, I believe, Ziporyn is exceptionally qualified to tackle. Ziporyn tackles this momentous task in ten chapters: “Just Here Is the End of Suffering: Letting Suffering Be in Early Buddhism,” “Rafts and Arrows: The Two Truths in Pre-Tiantai Buddhism,” “Neither Thus nor Otherwise: Mahāyāna Approaches to Emptiness,” “Buddha-Nature and Original Enlightenment,” “How to Not Know What You’re Doing: Introduction to the Lotus Sūtra,” “The New Middle Way: Highlights of the Lotus Sūtra in Tiantai Context,” “The Interpervasion of All Points of View: From the Lotus Sūtra to Tiantai,” “Tiantai: The Multiverse as You,” “Experiencing Tiantai: Experiments with Tiantai Practice,” and “Tiantai Ethics and the Worst Case Scenario.” This outline combines a decidedly historical as well as guiding conceptual structure. In one sense Ziporyn traces Zhili’s dictum “outside of the devil, there is no Buddha and outside of the Buddha there is no devil” from the early Buddhist ruminations on suffering, via early Indian Mahāyāna conceptions of emptiness (śūnyatā) and “Buddha-Nature” (tathāgata-garbha) as well as Tiantai formulations of Buddhahood in the light of the “three truths” san( di), to a post-Holocaust application of Zhili’s scandalous claim as what Ziporyn calls “Hitler-bodhisattva” (p. 260). In another sense he explores the Tiantai non-dualism of “evil and/or/as/good” in the light of the Buddhist notions of “suffering,” “emptiness,” “buddha-nature,” and what he calls the Tiantai conception of the “Multiverse” (p. 143).[2] In Ziporyn’s hands, these two approaches form a cone that takes the reader from general Buddhist ideas, via basic Mahāyāna and Tiantai conceptions, to Ziporyn’s specific application of Tiantai non-dualism to the problem of evil. It is impossible to summarize this conceptual roller coaster in the format of a book review, so let me focus here on the highlights of this philosophical adventure. Ziporyn commences his analysis of Tiantai thought with the gateway concept of Buddhism, suffering. Starting with the Buddha’s mission Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kopf on Ziporyn, 'Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism'. H-Buddhism. 06-19-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/reviews/1944813/kopf-ziporyn-emptiness-and-omnipresence-essential-introduction Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Buddhism to alleviate suffering captured in the four noble truths, Ziporyn articulates the first paradox of the Buddhist project. If suffering is caused by desire and, subsequently, the alleviation of suffering requires the suppression of desire, the attempt to alleviate suffering by suppressing desire is based on the desire to alleviate suffering/suppress desire. If all events are conditioned, so is the alleviation of suffering and, with it, nirvāṇa itself. The end of suffering, so states Ziporyn, lies in the awareness of suffering: “Awareness of the desire as desire is the only way to ‘let go’ of a desire” (p. 20). “‘Awareness’ is the name for this state of neither activity nor passivity” (p. 21). The second piece of the conceptual puzzle, according to Ziporyn, is the notion of the “bodhisattva” ideal as articulated in the Lotus Sūtra. Since everything is empty and thus skillful, including the notions of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, means that everything turns out to be “neither thus nor otherwise” (p. 54). Saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, “being sentient beings” and “being Buddha,” are not stages but lenses through which certain conditioned states are viewed: “All states are neither Nirvana nor suffering but are susceptible to be viewed as either, or as both. Nirvana neither begins nor ends. But
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