American poet and translator, David Hinton, has recently produced a magnificent collection of translated texts from the Chan/Zen Buddhist and pre-Buddhist literary tradition. His thorough attention to literal accuracy has, rather than make an already difficult and obscure subject even more so, actually revealed Chan/Zen in it’s roots to be extremely accessible, earthy and empirically minded.
One of the important terms and concepts is that which he translates as “Origin tissue/ Existence tissue”. This points to the ontological foundation which grounds the paradigm of the Chan/Zen philosophy/spirituality (Chan and Zen are just the respective Chinese and Japanese terms for Buddhist meditation, coming from the Sanskrit word ‘Dhyana”). The term Origin-Tissue understands Reality as a single undifferentiated and generative tissue, the source of both consciousness and the empirical universe, an active organic totality wherein absence gives birth to presence and visa versa.
Reading Hinton's translations reminded me of ideas I found in one of my favourite philosophers, Nishida Kitaro. Not surprisingly really, since Nishida’s engagement with philosophy was based on a deep familiarity with and experience of Zen practice. Nishida, unlike many Japanese philosophers before him, was thoroughly engaged in philosophy regardless of cultural background. He put great efforts into finding productive ways to explain his experiences by referencing philosophers and philosophical systems and concepts that westerners would be familiar with. One of his concepts, coming from a Hegelian influence, was his ‘self-realisation if the concrete universal’.
Briefly “ Science explains things in terms of quality, force or energy. But these are abstractions, and when we substantialise them and project them behind the alterations of phenomena, as their explanations, we are reversing primary and secondary. If we focus on these alterations in immediate experience, however, we find that they are not discrete, but constitute a continuous process, which is the self-realisation of the concrete universal”[1]
This understanding of the development and manifestation, or better, the character of constant change of the phenomenal universe, is something akin to “Origin Tissue/Existence Tissue”, which itself is a term basically synonymous with “Dao” or “Dark Enigma” or in Buddhist terms “Emptiness” (or even in monotheistic terms, God) as the generative ontological foundation of existence before any names and concepts separate it from experience.
We cannot properly name it, nor is language ever going to be appropriate in terms of capturing it. Reality is it’s expression, not visa versa. To quote Nishida “ it is not correct to say that the totality of elements (the concrete universal) is one, or many, or that it changes, or does not change. As the eye cannot see the eye, nor the camera photograph itself, so it is impossible to capture this totality within the lens of the camera of cognition, yet it is immediately tangible as the freedom of the will”
This organic totality, of which our individual experiences are simply particular instances of it’s universal functioning, is not merely the world of scientific necessity (although it certainly includes it as an aspect) is not a transcendent realm of concept and pure ideas, nor is it either mechanistic nor purely teleological since it is just ‘itself’. It is in the most radically basic and hence accurate description, a creative source-tissue where non-being emerges from being, and being from non-being (the patterned fluctuation of phenomena) that is already presented to and in us as our experience of free will creative consciousness and pre-cognitive intuition, wherein things appear from a generative nothingness and dissolve back into it.
[1] “Intuition and Reflection on Self-Consciousness” Nishida Kitaro, 1917