Philosophy and Spiritual Experience:

The case of a Japanese Shin Buddhist

The following summary represents the course's high point in philosophy of religion thus far. Please read it carefully and thoughtfully, in preparation for discussion in class, in conjunction with the selection from the preface of Tanabe's work, Philosophy as Metanoetics. The following paragraphs are arranged excerpts from "Dialectic and Religious Experience in Tanabe Hajime's Philosophy as Metanoetics"--also available on-line in a nearly complete copy--by Jeffrey Wattles, published in The Religious Philosophy of Tanabe Hajime, ed. Taitetsu Unno and James W. Heisig (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1990). The KSU main library has a copy (B5244 .T34 R45 1990).

Philosophy as metanoetics (repentance) is a philosophy inaugurated and informed and sustained by religious experience. Tanabe Hajime's book lays the groundwork for a philosophy of living for scholars and non-scholars alike. From this complex book one may reconstruct a sequence of stages.

In the first stage, complacent confidence in reason and in the independent self abounds.
Then reason exhausts itself in the effort to resolve insuperable theoretical and/or practical problems, "antinomies."
Then comes the religious breakthrough: one confesses one's weakness and repents of one's sins and pride and receives "resurrection" through the saving grace of Other-power (tariki).
Thinking, newly revived, expounds the contradictions of life and thought using the dialectics of absolute mu, nothingness. In particular, philosophy reflects upon Other-power and criticizes a naive concept of the otherness of Other-power.
Then a reconstructive way of thought is found which affirms a mediated unity of the absolute and the relative.
Finally, all activities of truth and goodness and beauty (199.2) are transformed. People are "restored to life as coworkers of God or the Buddha" (190.3).

Stage 1: naive self-confidence. The evil tendency intrinsic to finite beings is to take their relative independence (both as individuals and as a group) to be absolute. This evil is reflected in pride, in the materialism of the present age, and in the inability of existing political arrangements to achieve both liberty and equality.

Stage 2: reason crashes on the rocks of antinomy. Everyone must go through the breakdown of practical, scientific, and philosophic reason. Tanabe's own experience suggests to him that without radically acknowledging the impotence of reason to reconcile its contradictions, one will never perform thoroughgoing zange, repentance, which opens the way fully for the invasion of grace.

Stage 3: repentance and conversion and resurrection through the grace of Other-power. After the breakdown of reason comes repentance and saving grace. Metanoetics in effect begins in and remains in a fundamental either/or: either one has repented, submitted to Other-power or not. One of Tanabe's contributions is to reaffirm spiritual experience as the center of philosophy. The modern temper prefers to domesticate spiritual experience, to treat it an hypothesis, to assign it a marginal role, or to present it as a report of something extraordinary which is immediately thematized and treated objectively.

A reductionist critique is waiting in the wings for Tanabe's claims about Other-power.

According to a Freudian and historicist analysis, Tanabe's sustained and intense mental crisis during the war led to psychic exhaustion. This exhaustion he acknowledged as he abandoned his previous philosophical orientation. Upon releasing his hold upon the subjective factors that had led to his exhaustion, Tanabe experienced an influx of power from the unconscious.
He interpreted that influx in terms of the only live alternative available to him--Shinran's religious philosophy. Though he had not been consciously thinking of adopting this alternative religious teaching, he had been aware of it; and the reorganization of his psychic life was being prepared in his unconscious during the time of his mounting crisis. Thus he mistook his psychic influx for a gift from "Other-power."
Steven T. Katz, for example, has emphasized that religious experience is mediated through tradition.

But Tanabe's critical relation to Shinran begins to address this concern. Tanabe gives us the information that would permit a reductionist critique to be mounted while maintaining superb allegiance to the ground upon which alone that critique could be defeated: the quality inherent in the very insurge of Other-power which "sweeps aside all doubt about itself" (2.2).

Tanabe refuses to descend to the level of trying to prove the validity of his own repentance or the reality (non-illusoriness) of Other-power. It is rather his strength to affirm and unceasingly to reaffirm Other-power in undoubting faith, whether expressed in the moment of the immediacy of indubitable power (2.2), in the dialectics of mediation, or in symbol (294-95).

What qualities of the religious Other are manifest in spiritual experience?

Other-power saves the sinner; it is the Great Compassion (24.2) whose activity inspires gratitude.
Other-power engages the total personality (88.3).
It acts through relative beings whom it choses to function as axes of transformation (24.2).
Other-power is to be obeyed (81.3),
Other-power may be discerned as the deepest part of the self.
One could not truly repent without the grace of Other-power.

Tanabe refuses theistic accounts (in terms of a personal God) because he sees in them a static, dogmatic tendency to view God as another being. Static concepts are fatal to progress in thought. Theism represses freedom of thought (thereby reflecting the arbitrary and selective "divine" will) and insists on a fixed starting point in myths and revelations that do not permit reciprocal transformation of faith and reason.

But God, as Tanabe recognizes, need not be limited to this caricature. "Of course, if we identify the will of God with the love of God, and divine grace with the working of divine love, then grace, far from destroying human freedom, only draws it out" (82.4).

Tanabe explores transcendence primarily as transcendence-in-immanence.

He records "the transferring activity of Other-power working within and flowing forth from the bottomless depth of one's mind" (205.3).
He finds the "center of the self" located in decision (10.2).
"In metanoesis [repentance] the Original Vow of the transcendent Amida Buddha becomes active in a direct manner, entering immanently into the consciousness of sentient beings" (227.2).
The "higher and deeper self" is identified as "the spontaneous ideal element of self-consciousness" (175.2)
The "higher and deeper self" is identified as the authentic existence implied in self-consciousness of inauthentic existence (152.1)
The "higher and deeper self" is identified simply as self-consciousness of the higher self as realized in action (72.3).

The phrases just cited illustrate a problematic continuum that joins two distinct factors:

Other-power operative as an uncanny kind of other, a non-intuitable presence within the depth of the mind mind and
one's own higher self, accessible in self-consciousness.

The point that is essential to Tanabe is that Other-power cannot be intuited as an immanent, eternal now (113.4; 75.2). If "the Buddha-nature within" or "the Kingdom of Heaven within" are taken as terms indicating some datum for introspection, then, he says, they are nothing more or less than symbols of "the realization of eternal nothingness in one's individual existence brought to action-witness" (292.3). But if Tanabe wants to avoid the danger of overeasily ascribing every movement of repentant mind to the guidance of Other-power, does he not need something like a distinction between self-consciousness (even consciousness of a higher self) and indwelling spirit, however obscure the distinction may be phenomenologically (experientially)?

Stage 4: dialectical critique. But how is the Other-power encountered in repentance to be conceived? Tanabe speaks of mu, nothingness, whose meaning derives partly from Mahayana tradition and partly from western philosophy; following the latter, nothingness is simply that which is not any one of the relative beings, but their context. The concept of nothingness also honors mystery and launches an unceasing effort to articulate the most remote subtleties of consciousness and action, as attention continually moves between the finite which it can conceive and nothingness which is finally unfathomable.

If Tanabe's concept of nothingness were a mere abstraction of rational negation, his critique of the alterity of Other-power in the name of nothingness would leave a dilemma:

Either

gratitude to Other-power loses all focus and reference, and merges into aesthetic bliss (which Tanabe consistently rejects); or else

a stalemate results between a naive affirmation of Other-power and a flat, thoroughgoing, logical denial of the alterity of Other-power--an antinomy characteristic of stage two.

This second horn of the dilemma is a non-progressive circling between religion and secularism from which there is no exit. In such conflict, both intellectual and spiritual levels would become falsified. The concept of Other-power would ossify, and intellectual dialectic would pre-empt the spiritual significance of nothingness. From the intellectual standpoint, gratitude to Other-power would be demoted to the status of a mere antechamber to truth. Affirmation would be seen merely as a moment in an overarching negation. Artistry in action would mean skating over that thin and now transparent ice that portends doom for the slow and over-heavy tread of naive consciousness: it is transparent to the bottomless movement that hastens to negate every position-taking and -denying. A new religion of philosophy would result that the non-scholar could not share. One could no longer say, "How great Thou art!" but only, "The greatness is so transfinite that it cannot be a Thou."

The legitimate conclusion of this critique is that thinking about Other-power on the basis of analogy with otherness between relative beings does not yield an adequate cognition. But a problem remains. This critique addresses the most fundamental concept in religion, the concept of Other-power, or, put more generally, the conviction that there is some other person, reality, or level beyond the relative or mundane. There has been controversy (for example, in Hegel scholarship) about whether genuine religion can survive such an incursion into its essential concept. But as Tanabe goes into the cave of thought to do battle with the Minotaur of static concepts, the one thread that he carries with him is a concept of nothingness which is no cold and distant abstraction. It is not a postulate of reason, though reason can explain that mu cannot be one of the relative beings. Tanabe tacitly associates the notion of being with the notion of thing, and so it is clear that Other-power cannot be a thing but rather no-thing--mu. Nothingness is an ab-sent (nonperceived) reality whose significance is mediated by the life and rigor and warmth of Mahayana Buddhism, especially the Pure Land tradition, as well as by other eastern and western philosophers.