Berkeley, Huineng, Body, and Idea
It has been said that when Buddhism came to China it was swiftly shorn of it’s more elaborate, metaphysical, speculative, and “otherworldly” features and became a grounded, “earthy” and practical wisdom. In other words, it was divested of its Indian characteristics and remoulded according to Chinese interests. This happened simply because of the conditions of Chinese society, including it’s intellectual cultural conditions, at that time. Universal religions and philosophies do this naturally when a group, or even a person, adopts and practices them. Of course, identifying these characteristics is quite arbitrary and in itself quite contrary to the universal claims of the religions/philosophies. I think (personally) focus on the characteristics often obscures and distracts from the practice. But there are instances which might strike the fancy as representing such ephemeral particularities and ‘flavours’. Thus, we have a good candidate for a Chinese flavour of Buddhist thought in the Platform Sutra.
“reality is the body of ideas, ideas are the function of reality”. So says the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, the Chinese philosopher-cleric Huineng in the Platform Sutra.
At first glance, this seems to be an almost Berkeleyean idealism. The Irish philosopher-cleric, Berkeley held that subjective perception was what constituted reality; that all existence was the creating-perceiving of the absolute perceiver, the Christian God. In Berkeley’s sense, the world is indeed the production of a subjective mind, if a very unique mind. However, Huineng’s philosophy is not subjective-creative idealism- at least not in the sense that there is a great Ego-consciousness producing things. Buddhism generally doesn’t deny the existence of a creating and ruling deity or deities, only that the way to attain enlightenment is through overcoming delusion and realising reality; the reality that encompasses both creator and creation, and all the dualities. How do we then understand his talk of ‘body’ ‘idea’ and ‘reality’?
As human beings we explain things. We need to do that to continue living in the sense of practical survival. Further, we do that for all sorts of creative and inquisitive purposes. These too are practical, if not in such a self-evident manner. Thinking is practical. Functioning. In a very basic sense, philosophy is simply the practice of explaining what is happening, and reality is what happens. Reality happens whether explained or not, but the act of explaining is also reality; part of what happens is that we explain what is happening. Therefore, reality is composed of what we term mental just as it is of physical. In fact, the duality between the two is itself a function of perception/thinking.
For Buddhists, the cause of suffering is attachment, born of ignorance. Ignorance in believing the enduring, or self-sufficient, or the solidity of what is abstract- the ego (the self-and-other) and grasping according to that belief. In fact, if there was one philosopher whose philosophy (or rather, the common understanding of a part of his philosophy) if not further developed and ‘broken through’ represents the antithesis of the Buddhist view, it would be Descartes. Descartes found a ground against further doubt in the “cogito” “I think, therefore I am”. What Descartes identifies here is actually the ego-consciousness, and thus he recognises the obscuring entity but does not go further in doubting. If he did, he might have broken through to what Buddhists point to.
For Huineng, the dualities of substance which Descartes got stuck with are overcome by the duality-that-is-non-dual, of ‘substance and function’; quite a Chinese notion. Substance is simply the empirical universe. Function is the phenomenon of consciousness. The phenomenon of consciousness includes (in humans anyway) the aspect which objectifies, explains, etc reality as the empirical universe. Both together are aspects of the same fabric of Reality.