Jason Wirth

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Shinto: The Way Home: Dimensions of Asian SpiritualityJason M. WirthShinto: The Way Home: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality. By Thomas P. Kasulis. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. Pp. xx + 184.Thomas P. Kasulis wrote his fine new book Shinto: The Way Home: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality as the result of a promise made over a glass of scotch to Henry Rosemont, who is currently editing a series of volumes highlighting various Asian spiritual traditions. These volumes promise to be strong, advanced introductions, and it is already clear that they should be seriously considered as introductory texts for courses in the Asian spiritual traditions. However, feeling "queasy" about his promise, Kasulis confessed that he was "primarily trained as a scholar of Japanese philosophy and there is simply not that much Shinto philosophy to write about" (p. xvi). Yet it appears that the scotch did not inspire frivolous behavior. The book is written by someone who has much love-perhaps even a pure heart and mind (makoto no kokoro)-for the Japanese spiritual heritage, and hence it makes an outstanding introduction to the basics of the Shinto tradition and its many practices. "Reading this book should help readers begin, not end, their study of Shinto" (p. xvii).Kasulis argues that Shinto is for the most part not a religion in the conventional Western sense. In fact, the Japanese word for "religion," shūkyō, is a neologism to designate the teachings (kyō) that comprise a shū, that is, a "discrete religious community with common practices and teachings" (p. 30). Yet Shinto operates in the background for most Japanese people, and so does not necessarily originate or result [End Page 358] in a clearly articulated doctrinal position. It comprises part of the cultural ambiance of Japanese life. It shapes the Japanese wedding ceremony and governs the Japanese relationship to rice (including sake).More significantly, it helps ritualistically inculcate the rudiments of what might be called something like a deep ecology. Certain remarkable locations in nature, certain foci that are spectacularly aberrant or startlingly exceptional, are marked off by a sacred portal (torii) or rope (shimenawa). They are designated as places of awe and wonder, as places inhabited by the kami (gods). In this way, a Shinto ecological aesthetic contrasts directly with a classical Western sense of beauty. The latter is achieved when an object is in maximum proximity to its idea-when it deviates as little as possible from its inherent nature. In Shinto the kami are present in an awesome deviation from the norm (as in a gnarled pine or a wondrously twisted rock).Yet Shinto does not necessarily ghettoize the sacred space, truncating it from its circulation with all of nature. Rather, sacred spots (like sacred practices) are isolated in order to serve as an opening into nature as sacred. They are sacred portals to the sacredness of the whole-"they are holographic entry points for experiencing kami everywhere" (p. 23). Kasulis traces these themes from Japanese prehistory, including their eventual appropriation in the early-eighth-century chronicles the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki, both of which were commissioned by imperial decree. Furthermore, there was much in Shinto that was compatible with the emergence of Buddhism in Japan. The latter helped Shinto remain dynamic and nondogmatic (p. 93), and Shinto helped make some of the more difficult aspects of esoteric Buddhism (Shingon and Tendai) more accessible to commoners (p. 99).However, in the isolationism of the Tokugawa period, Shinto was slowly wrested from its ensconcement in Japanese Buddhism. The influences of Neo-Confucianism and the Japanese code of the warrior (bushidō), the demilitarization of Buddhist monasteries, the relegation of monasteries to census taking, and other measures helped the Tokugawa clan consolidate their own power and enervate Buddhism's hold on Japan. Shinto itself would have to be freed from its Buddhist housing. The most fateful instance of this purification process transpired inadvertently with Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801) and the dawning of the kokugaku or "native studies" movement. Norinaga spent more than three decades deciphering and annotating the linguistic labyrinth of the Kojiki. Yet this was not a mere scholastic exercise. Norinaga assigned the Kojiki the status of scripture...

Schelling and Nishitani both confront the problem of absolute negation in post-Kantian philosophy and drive it beyond its eventual development into existentialism. This essay seeks not so much to sort out all of the similarities and contrasts between these two thinkers on this issue but rather to consider the issue of absolute negation itself and to consider it in and between the two thinkers as a gateway to an ontological conversion, a transformation into the positive manifestation of beings just as they are. Just as access to Dante’s paradisio demands that one first traverse through the inferno, or as the rebirth in Zen of heaven and earth requires the Great Doubt and the Great Death, we must plunge into the depths of absolute negation. Yet this descent is not an end itself, but rather the opening to a new image of thought and a new sense of philosophy.

How are the teachings of a thirteenth-century master relevant today? Twenty contemporary writers unpack Dogen's words and show how we can still find meaning in his teachings. Engaging Dogen's Zen is a practice oriented study of Shushogi (a canonical distillation of Dogen's thought used as a primer in the Soto School of Zen) and Fukanzazengi (Dogen's essential text on the practice of "just sitting," a text recited daily in the Soto School of Zen). It is also a study of the entire self. Here, the principles of Soto Zen practice are unpacked and explained by leading contemporary Buddhists from the living tradition--monks, priests, academics, and community teachers. Tackling Dogen's approach to key issues, such as the preeminence of shikantaza, universal buddha nature, and what it means to be a Mahayana Buddhist, the contributors to the volume help Zen practitioners and any who are trying to deepen their lives to appreciate better the teachings of Soto Zen and make these teachings part of their lives. By revisiting what remains precious in Shushogi and Fukanzazengi, we let them breathe just as we learn to breathe in zazen. We find that Soto practice not only engages Dogen and Sakyamuni, but all of our sisters and brothers, and indeed the great earth itself. Includes essays from Kosho Itagaki, Taigen Dan Leighton, Tenshin Charles Fletcher, Shudo Brian Schroeder, Glen A. Mazis, David Loy, Drew Leder, Steven DeCaroli, Steve Bein, John Maraldo, Michael Schwartz, Tetsuzen Jason M. Wirth, Leah Kalmanson, Erin Jien McCarthy, Dainen David Putney, Steven Heine, Graham Parkes, Mark Unno, Shudo Brian Schroeder, and Kanpu Bret W. Davis.

Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy. Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard’s extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard’s most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world.

This essay argues for the importance of Nishitani Keiji’s thought as a critical resource to confront what the unfolding ecological crisis reveals about who and what we are. The first part considers the importance of “nature” for Nishitani that accords with insights that both resonate with his Zen practice and heritage, and which open up tacit dimensions of the Jōdo Shin tradition. The second section turns to Nishitani’s highly original Zen “existentialization” of science in general, and by extension, contemporary climate science in particular, in order to highlight Nishitani’s Great Death as a response to the unfolding ecological catastrophe. In treating climate science as a kōan, we not only come to see who we are, but also come undone and awaken to a new relation to the Great Earth.

As is well known, the renowned Hegel scholar, Franz Rosenzweig, had a dramatic break with Hegel in particular and German Idealism more broadly, as strikingly evidenced in his magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. In the third or 1815 draft of Die Weltalter, Schelling writes that while “all thinking must begin the dialectic, it cannot end in the dialectic.” Schelling continued his turn toward what he called “positive philosophy,” which emerges “toto caelo” differently than from the “universality” and “indeterminacy” of negative thought. What is this new mode of thought, born—both for Schelling and for his unexpected admirer Rosenzweig—from the limitations of negative thought? How does one characterize this rupture within Idealism itself?

"Blessed are they who are empty, for in them life finds no restrictions, no barriers."I begin by expressing my heartfelt gratitude to my three astute readers, all of whose own work I admire and esteem. They already inhabit the philosophical universe to which my book aspires, and I am moved that they recognize this. Writing, to borrow Paul Celan's famous simile, often seems like a message in a bottle, tossed out to sea. How rare and wonderful that it washes ashore, and rarer still when received in a heartland!These insightful comments, provocative embellishments and commentaries, and well-posed questions are, to my thinking, the highest honor that a reader can grant a text. I learned much from them. As Maurice...