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Flowers of Emptiness: by Hyatt Carter
Metaphors of Mind Entangling Vines,1 a koan2 collection dating from1689, is one of the larger collections with a total of 282 cases. Over the past several months I’ve been slowly reading Thomas Kirchner’s excellent translation, taking time to tarry with three or four koans a day and also appreciating the superb scholarship of his many annotations. Case 102 of Entangling Vines presents a metaphor of the mind. With the title listed first, the koan goes like this: The Avatamsaka Sutra’s Simile of the Mind In the Avatamsaka Sutra it is written, The mind is like an artist, ceaselessly producing the five skandhas.3 In all the world, there is nothing that is not produced by the mind. Chinese text: 華嚴心喻 華嚴曰、心如工畫師、作種種五陰。一切世間中、莫不從心造。 When I first read this koan, it made me stop and wonder what Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, the Awakened One, meant by that last sentence: In all the world, there is nothing that is not produced by the mind. Is there only One Mind, or are there many minds, or is it Mind Only as one school of Buddhism claims? Are there One and many minds? Or, as many Buddhist sayings so clearly suggest, are there no minds whatsoever, including No Mind, in the sense of an abiding mind, one that experiences unqualified continuity? A search just now for 無心 (“no-mind”) in the digital Chinese Buddhist Canon, (大藏經) Taisho Tripitaka, yielded 13,279 hits. The more I thought about this, and turned it over in my mind (no-mind?), the more it seemed that the clue to follow was to be found in what it was that Siddhartha awakened to, in his mind, on the night of his Enlightenment, a subject to which I now turn in the next section.
Bodhi Tree Blossoms What the Buddha realized, as he sat under the Bodhi tree,4 was so revolutionary that he had to coin new words—a new technical vocabulary—to express his insights. The key term was pratitya samutpada, variously translated as dependent origination, dependent co-arising, conditioned genesis, conditioned co-production, interdependent arising, and mutual interdependence. Whereas the French philosopher Descartes, with his substance-biased view of reality, held that an individual thing “requires nothing but itself in order to exist,” Siddhartha would reply, first, that there is no such thing as substance, or a thing, and, second, that the momentary events that do exist—they arise, and almost as quickly cease, within an extensive web of mutual relationships. Therefore, since events both arise and cease, the idea of dependent origination requires, for its balanced expression, the complementary idea of dependent cessation.5 The importance of this concept is clearly expressed in the following quote: “Dependent arising (pratitya-samutpada) is the central principle of the Buddha’s teaching, constituting both the objective content of its liberating insight and the germinative source for its vast network of doctrines and disciplines. As the frame behind the four noble truths, the key to the perspective of the middle way, and the conduit to the realization of selflessness, it is the unifying theme running through the teaching’s multifarious expressions, binding them together as diversified formulations of a single coherent vision. The earliest sutras equate dependent arising with the unique discovery of the Buddha’s enlightenment, so profound and difficult to grasp that he at first hesitated to announce it to the world. A simple exposition of the principle sparks off the liberating wisdom in the minds of his foremost disciples, while skill in explaining its workings is made a qualification of an adroit expounder of the Dharma. So crucial is this principle to the body of the Buddha’s doctrine that an insight into dependent arising is held to be sufficient to yield an understanding of the entire teaching. In the words of the Buddha: ‘He who sees dependent arising sees the Dharma; he who sees the Dharma sees dependent arising.’”6 Another term, closely related but with a different emphasis, is idappaccayata, which adds to mutuality the perspective of conditionality. The two ideas are, as it were, two sides of the same coin.7 The Chinese characters that translate these two terms 緣起 = pratitya samutpada and 此緣性 = idappaccayata share a common character 緣 (yuán), relating to causation, that is the common thread 8 linking the two together, with the characters thus presenting pictures worth a thousand words as they show similarity shining forth from difference. A Zen saying leaps to mind: Though not identical, they are not different; though not different, they are not one; though not one, they are not many. And so we have, thus far, pratitya samutpada, dependent origination and cessation, and idappaccayata, the principle of conditionality, or, as it is also sometimes called, this-that conditionality. The basic idea underlying all this is expressed in a simple fourfold formula: 1. When this is, that is; Or, more succinctly: When this is, that is; The original Pali reads: Imasmim sati, idam hoti; And in Chinese:
此有故彼有， Note the elegant pattern of formulation, and reiteration, in each language, perhaps most apparent in the beauty and symmetry of the Chinese characters. And so, to repeat: When this is, that is; One analysis I found online9 observes that causality, understood in this way, is not linear but results from the interweaving of two modes of causation: diachronic and synchronic, with diachronic naming the causal influence of the past, and synchronic, the causation in the present moment. If causation was strictly diachronic, or linear, the world would be totally deterministic whereas randomness would prevail if synchronic causation was the only mode. Together, dancing in measure, they make possible a coherent and self-surpassing pattern and the production of novelty. Quoting from the online article: “The diachronic principle — taking (2) and (4) as a pair — connects events over time; the synchronic principle — (1) and (3) — connects objects and events in the present moment. The two principles intersect, so that any given event is influenced by two sets of conditions: input from the past and input from the present.” And indeed, to indulge in a pun, this is a difference that really makes a difference, for it frees us from what would otherwise be the inexorable circular turnings of the wheel of karma. We are then free to, like the galaxies, spiral upward and outward in expansive growth and creativity.
Who’s There? 10 To experience ultimate reality, the school of Indian thought known as Advaita Vedanta recommends that one repeatedly ask the question: Who am I? But the question itself begs the question—it assumes that there is an I am about whom such an inquiry can be made. Notwithstanding, Advaita Vedanta claims that such an inquiry, if followed to the end, culminates in an experience of ultimate reality with the revelation, Thou art that or, in Sanskrit, Tat tvam asi. But, as Ajahn Brahamvamso astutely points out: “But such an end-doctrine is plainly begging the question. What is this “That” that you are? The Buddha never circled around the issue in such a fruitless way. For the Buddha would say: ‘Pratitya Samutpada tvam asi—You are Dependent Origination.’ Pratitya samutpada is at the very heart of the Dharma.”11 Among its many negations, if there is one claim about which Buddhism is insistent, it is that there is no self: the doctrine of annata. If this is indeed given, some might conclude that nihilism follows ineluctably. However, between abiding self, or enduring substance, and nothingness, between substantialism and nihilism, there is what Siddhartha called the Middle Way, and this follows from two complementary observations: It cannot be said that there is
something . . . because cessation is seen. What is this Middle Way? Pratitya samutpada. When seen in the clear light of dependent arising and ceasing, all species of a substantial, enduring self are seen, as Brahamvamso puts it, as “transient, insubstantial, granular, and fading away soon after they arise. They are all conditioned. They exist only as long as they are supported by their external causes, which are themselves unstable.”12 And, according to Old Yellow Face,13 as the Buddha is sometimes affectionately called in Zen writings, to “enter the stream” leading to enlightenment requires an understanding of Dependent Origination.
The Self: Inherence or Inheritance? Inherence Another way to think about the nature of the self is in terms of two words: inherence and inheritance. To see the self as inherent is to see it as permanently there as a center of experience. This would be a self that enjoys unbroken continuity of experience, a self that inheres from one moment to the next and somehow underlies or transcends the quantum flux of experience, a self that is always already present as the subject of whatever experiences arise. This self would be solid, substantial, and exist independently, all by itself, on its own, “requiring only itself in order to exist,” as Descartes said. This is the inherent self. To believe that this self is real is, according to Buddhists, a fundamental illusion. Whitehead agrees. Inheritance “Substance” derives from Latin substantia, from sub- + stare, “to stand under,” and, in its technical sense, “refers to the underlying, supporting substratum of change . . . and also contains the idea of the individual subject of change.” It points to what lies at the bottom of things, what is most fundamental in reality. W. L. Reese, in his Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, traces how the word was used, and evolved, over the centuries by philosophers Aristotle, William of Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Santayana . . . Reese’s entry on substance concludes with this statement about Whitehead: “Whitehead attacked the idea of substance by denying the ultimacy of the subject-predicate mode of expression, and substituting for substance an event ontology.”14 Therefore, since event-thinking replaces substance-thinking in Whitehead’s process thought—to name what is most fundamental, a new term would have to be coined to replace substance. Whitehead very carefully chose the term “actual entity” or, to sometimes accent their temporal nature, “occasions of experience.” These are his “atoms,” but unlike the solid atoms of Newton, these atoms are units of process. All the natural unities of our world—subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, living cells, animals, and humans—are constituted by these occasions, or moments, of experience. They arise and perish, flash in and out of existence, in an ongoing process that Whitehead calls serially ordered societies. Thus selfhood, to revert to a static or substantialist term, is reconceived by Whitehead as a serially ordered society of momentary occasions of experience. There is no substantial or enduring self, in this “society,” that enjoys unbroken continuity of experience. As Whitehead says: “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming. The actual occasions are the creatures which become, and they constitute a continuously extensive world. In other words, extensiveness becomes, but ‘becoming’ is not itself extensive.”15 It is not immediately obvious that the stream of consciousness actually flows in what William James called “drops of experience.” Neither a distinct discreteness nor sheer continuity is given to casual introspection but, as Charles Hartshorne observes, “We can almost introspect a single experience, most easily in special cases, such as in listening to music, or in ‘flicker’ experiments.”16 So, you may be wondering, how is it that there is a becoming of continuity? How can this be if events are discrete in all serially ordered societies? Each occasion of experience, in its process of coming to be, inherits from the occasions which precede it. As each momentary occasion arises, or originates, it depends on the inheritance from its predecessors and, most directly, from its very own immediately preceding moment of experience. It is a reenactment, a reiteration. There is no need for creatio ex nihilo, for starting from scratch each time. Is it an exact duplication? Not necessarily. As each occasion arises, contrasts are also felt, contrasts between what is and what might be, and this makes possible novelty or creative advance. Whitehead holds that these evocations of novelty come from God. And so, rather than inherence, we have inheritance. Q.E.D. To be clear, let me emphasize that there is not a subject that is always already there that has or enjoys experience. There is just . . . experience. But it is the nature of experience that it be creative. And not only is experience creative, it is self-creative. A moment of experience is self-creative. We don’t change; we become. Creative experience is also cumulative; rather than like beads on a string, it is more like ripples in a pool, with each new ripple extending beyond but also including the ripples that came before.17 Creativity, for Whitehead, is the ultimate of ultimates.18 Since all the natural unities I named above are instantiations of creative process, the universe is populated with countless centers of creativity. And since creativity flowers in the arising of actual entities that are dependent upon their predecessors, philosopher John Cobb finds close correlations between Whitehead’s concept of creativity and pratitya samutpada, or dependent origination. He writes: “Whitehead was aware of points of contact between his thought and Buddhism. The similarity has become more and more apparent in the years since he wrote. Indeed, his account of creativity and some Buddhist accounts of pratitya samutpada are so similar that I judge them to be alternative accounts of the same feature of the totality. In other words, creativity is pratitya samutpada and pratitya samutpada is creativity.”19 One more observation: The words inherent and inherit are so similar that it might be supposed that they derive from the same root. With that in mind, it is instructive to look at the etymology of the two words Inherent means “to be a permanent quality of; existing in and inseparable from; innate, basic, inborn,” and the word derives from the Latin word inhaerere, meaning “to stick in, or adhere to.” In clear contrast, inherit derives from the Latin word inhereditare which is made up of the two roots, in + heres, with heres meaning “heir.” Following the etymological trail of “inherit,” the American Heritage dictionary traces it all the way back to the Indo-European root ghe-, meaning “to release, or let go.” Note the difference—“to stick in, or adhere to” vs. “to release, or let go”— and note that “heirs” are separate entities from their forbears, especially some of the most evolutionally remote, which James Joyce, in Finnegans Wake (132) called our furbears, and our most immediate, as well, which we call our parents.
Holographic Universe For Whitehead the universe is not a competitive arena for rugged individualists but a close-knit web of intimate social relationships, so close-knit, in fact, that every item in the universe is involved in the concrescence of each actual entity.20 In the initial phase of concrescence, an actual entity takes account of, or prehends, all other actual entities in its immediate past. As Whitehead says, In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity.’ (PR 50)21 Actual entities are internally related, which means that the relations are essential and constitutive of what each actual entity becomes. To the question, what are actual entities made of—the reply is that they are made of other actual entities, plus what they achieve by self-completion. And so, another aspect of what is meant by the word “process” is to say that reality is a social process. Whitehead repeatedly insists that the entire universe conspires to create each new actual entity: The whole world conspires to produce a new creation. It presents to the creative process its opportunities and its limitations. (RM 113) In the first place, no event can be wholly and solely the cause of another event. The whole antecedent world conspires to produce a new occasion. (MT 164) Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe. (PR 223) If Whitehead is right about this, and also about saying that every actual entity prehends all other actual entities in its immediate past, and this entails that they be present, in their objectified state, in that actual entity, this has a startling implication. Indeed, philosopher Jorge Luis Nobo takes us for a quantum leap by pointing out that Whitehead’s adventurous thinking along these lines anticipates the holographic paradigm. In this light, every actual entity is revealed to contain a “metaphysical hologram” of the entire universe; and thus Nobo says: “. . . the metaphysical chronology and topology of the universe are forever captured and enshrined in . . . its actual occasions.” Noting that the universe is never at a standstill, Nobo qualifies what he means: [The universe so captured], it must be noted, is a fleeting momentary state of the universe, which, nevertheless, is permanently captured in the crystallized modal structure of [an actual entity’s] own extensive standpoint. Thus, the holographic conception of reality—the conception which physicist David Bohm, psychologist Karl Pribram, and other contemporary scientists are beginning to find so illuminating in their respective disciplines—has been an essential, but generally unacknowledged, ingredient of Whitehead’s metaphysical thought since 1924, if not earlier. (WM 327) Nobo pushes the envelope even further: . . . the causal objectification of each occasion in [an actual entity’s] immediate past presents for [that actual entity] the entire history of the universe up to the birth of the occasion in question, thereby leaving out only some of the information concerning the complete determinateness of its own contemporaries. (WM 328) And so each momentary throb of actuality constellates within itself a replication, in marvelous miniature, of the entire universe, showing how all things are interdependent, interwoven together in a wonderful pattern of connectedness, a pattern linking all things together in dynamic relatedness. Not only does an actual entity contain the whole of the past universe, it pervades the whole of the future by passing on what it achieves, an achievement that will be taken account of, or prehended, by all subsequent entities. As a holographic entity, each fleeting pulse of experience is Alpha and Omega, with prehensive roots stretching all the way back to the primordial flaring forth of the universe fifteen billion years ago, and branches of influence reaching forward into the future . . . for as long as forever is. Our Buddhist friends have a wonderful image of the holographic universe. They call it The Jewel Net of Indra. It pictures the cosmos as an infinite network of glittering jewels, all different. In each one we can see the images of all the others reflected. Each image contains an image of all the other jewels; and also the image of the images of the images, and so ad infinitum. The myriad reflections within each jewel are the essence of the jewel itself, without which it cannot exist. Thus, every part of the cosmos reflects, and brings into existence, every other part. And thus an actual entity is a holographic entity whose datum is the boundless universe itself, stretching to the farthest reaches of intergalactic space and back to the beginning of time. If this is true of an actual entity, then it must also be true of our own momentary occasions of experience. This means that the entire universe, as a metaphysical hologram, flashes forth in our unconscious experience a dozen or so times every second.
Thinking, Not-Thinking, and Nonthinking In the spirit of symmetry, since I began with a koan, I will end with another, an ancient koan that is known as Yaoshan’s Nonthinking. It goes like this: 1. When Yaoshan the great Master was sitting in meditation,
a monk asked, “What are you thinking, sitting there in such stillness?” Chinese text: 1.
藥山大師坐次、有僧問、兀兀地思量什麼。 [Lines are numbered so that the English and Chinese can be correlated.] Dogen (1200-1253), founder of Soto Zen in Japan, came up with an intriguing way of looking into this koan. In the line where the master says, “I’m thinking of not-thinking,” the characters that translate not-thinking are: 不思量 The first character, 不, means “not” and is pronounced in Japanese as . . . fu. The Japanese character that marks the possessive is の and by placing this after fu, the phrase becomes 不の思量 and the characters, now four in number, translate as “Not’s thinking,” meaning not the absence of thinking, but that it is naught, nothingness, sunyata, or emptiness itself, that’s thinking. Or dependent origination, pratitya samutpada, that’s thinking. Or perhaps, in this case, it’s idappaccayata that’s thinking. Or is it annata that’s thinking? By the same logic, the sentence, “How do you think of not-thinking?” 不思量底如何思量 becomes, by once again inserting the genitive marker: 不思量底如何の思量 which, translated, neatly answers the question with this answer: Not-thinking is How’s thinking. As Hee-Jin Kim, a writer and professor whose analysis I follow here, points out: “How as an interrogative evokes a quality of absolute significance: the incomprehensible, indeterminate truth/reality, and consequently, not-thinking is equated to How’s thinking. This whole complex meaning is called nonthinking ( 非思量 ) which is the essence of zazen. . . . All in all, zazen is authentic thinking—the trinary complex of thinking, not-thinking, and nonthinking—which is none other than the most concrete reality of the self and the world.”22 And, to give a Western perspective, here are two examples that, while not koans per se, at least tease thought in the manner of a koan — Whitehead invites us to wonder about this question: Does the thinker create the thought, or the thought, the thinker?23 And this from the autobiography of Charles Hartshorne: This chiefly is a book of recollections of people I have encountered. Among these people is a person called Charles Hartshorne. Does one encounter oneself? Quite so. Relations to oneself are not so different from relations to others as many suppose. Indeed, perhaps the greatest illusion of all is not to see this. Buddha and his followers saw it. The Hindus, generally, almost saw it. Unfortunately, most Western philosophers have not been able to see it. But Peirce and Whitehead saw it; and I began to see it before I knew about them or the Buddhists.24 And, last but not least, to return to the question I wondered about at the beginning: what did the Buddha mean when he said — In all the world, there is nothing that is not produced by the mind. What is this mind? Let’s take the possibilities I listed, in order: It cannot be One Mind, meaning God, because Buddhism is a non-theistic religion. It cannot be many minds, as commonly understood, because the substantial mind, or self, has been deconstructed. The school called Cittamatra, or Mind Only ( 唯識 ), with its absolutist dogma, is a departure from the Middle Way and the idea of interdependence, and so cannot lay claim to being the mind whereof the Buddha spoke. Nor can it be One and many minds, God and the world, which would be the answer of process philosophy, and also my answer.25 That leaves no-mind, or better, Not’s-mind, or Not’s-thinking, the many minds in their various incarnations of pratitya samutpada: dependent origination. Emptiness, sunyata.26 Emptiness, yes, but, ah . . . flowers of emptiness.27
Notes 1. Entangling Vines: Zen Koans of the Shumon Kattoshu, translated by Thomas Yuho Kirchner with a Foreword by Ueda Shizuteru. “Entangling Vines” is a translation of the Chinese characters: 葛藤. 2. Of the many ingenuities and subtleties in the Zen tradition, one of the most impressive is the koan (Chi. kung-an [公案], pronounced in Japanese as two syllables: ko-an). A koan is a Zen “problem” or a Zen “story” or a theme of zazen to be made clear, and may be thought of as an ideal of bafflement. Logical reasoning will get you not closer but only ever more distant from the “solution” of a koan. Zen master Robert Aitken: “Koans are the folk stories of Zen Buddhism, metaphorical narratives that particularize essential nature. Each koan is a window that shows the whole truth but just from a single vantage. It is limited in perspective. One hundred koans give one hundred vantages. When they are enriched with insightful comments and poems, then you have ten thousand vantages. There is no end to this process of enrichment.” One of the most famous and widely used koans is the Mu Koan, or Joshu’s Dog: A monk asked Joshu in all earnestness, “Has a dog Buddha
nature or not?” The Japanese word mu [無] means “no,” not,” or “nothingness.” As Aitken observes, “Forty generations of Zen students have breathed the word Mu, evoking the living presence of the Old Buddha himself. Thus Mu is an arcanum, an ancient word or phrase that successive seekers down through the centuries have focused upon and found to be an opening into spiritual understanding. In everyday usage the word ‘Mu’ means ‘does not have’—but if that were Joshu’s entire meaning, there wouldn’t be any Zen.” 3. Kirchner notes: “The five skandhas are the transitory “aggregates” that constitute all physical, mental, and other elements in the phenomenal world. The five skandhas are: form, sensation, perception, mental formations, and consciousness.” 4. Bodhi is the Sanskrit or Pali word meaning “awakening” or “enlightenment,” and the Bodhi tree is the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment on that long-ago night when, at an auspicious moment, he glimpsed the morning star. The Chinese characters for bodhi are: 菩提. 5. In the quantum flow of Whitehead’s creative process, there is perpetual concrescence, or “growing together,” and perpetual perishing of actual entities as the many become one, and are increased by one. David Griffin finds the idea of perpetual perishing problematic, and argues, convincingly, that the process is better described as a perpetual oscillation of efficient and final causation. 6. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Transcendental Dependent Arising: A Translation and Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta, 6-7 7. There is, in fact, a cluster of terms: pratitya samutpada 緣起 idappaccayata 此緣性 sunyata: emptiness 空 wu-zhu: Not abiding; having no independent nature 無住 annata: no-self 無我 asvabhava: without self-nature 無自性 nian-nian wu-chang Instant after instant, no permanence; unceasing change 念念無常 These terms are mutually implicative. To understand one is, in a sense, to understand them all. Idappaccayata is pronounced: Ee-dah-pah-chah-YAH-tah. 8. To unravel this footnote, follow the thread of thought below: The character 緣 is made up of two components: 糸 and 彖. In his excellent book, Chinese Characters: Their Origin, Etymology, History, Classification, and Signification, Dr. L. Wieger, S.J., provides this discussion of the meaning of the first component: 糸: a strong thread “The bottom of this character (a primitive) represents the twisting of several small threads into a big one. It is the 120th Radical of characters relating to textile matters or tissues. Textile matters, chiefly the silk, interested the Chinese from the remotest antiquity; hence the importance given to these elements in their writing.” (page 230) Hence, the common thread . . . 9. Go to: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/glossary.html Go to the word idappaccayata in the Glossary and click on MORE, a link that will take you to the article. 10. Who’s there?—The opening words of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, and, as much to the point, the query of all Knock, Knock jokes. Harry Levin, a literary scholar, has written an entire book on the implications of these two words. The title of his book? The Question of Hamlet. 11. Brahamvamso’s document can be found at: http://www.buddhanet.net/budsas/ebud/ebsut057.htm 12. Process philosophy, which, like quantum theory, replaces substance thinking with an event ontology, is in basic agreement with this analysis. And, with the revelations of quantum theory in mind, compare this from a book entitled The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects: “The tangible world is movement . . . not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects ‘in movements,’ it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement. “This movement is a continued and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy (in Tibetan tsal or shoug). All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they may assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events . . . the movement is intermittent and advances by separate flashes of energy which follow each other at such small intervals that these intervals are almost non-existent.” 13. in Chinese:黃面老子which, word for word, can be translated as yellow face old dude. 14. W.L. Reese, Dictionary of Religion and Philosophy, 55-56 15. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 35 16. Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method, 195. 17. I borrow this metaphor from Elizabeth Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience, 22-24. 18. Whitehead on creativity: “Creativity” is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity. “Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates. “Together” is a generic term covering the various special ways in which various sorts of entities are “together” in any one actual occasion. Thus “together” presupposes the notions “creativity,” “many,” “one,” “identity” and “diversity.” The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the “many” which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive “many” which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively “many” in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of “primary substance.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21. 19. Here is Cobb’s extended statement, which provides more nuance: “Whitehead describes such occasions of experience as instances of the many becoming one and being increased by one. There is not first an occasion of experience that then reaches out to others. The occasion of experience only comes into being as others coalesce into it. In short, there is no substance with attributes. There are only relationships merging into unified experience. The ongoing process in which this occurs, always and everywhere, Whitehead calls creativity. “Whitehead was aware of points of contact between his thought and Buddhism. The similarity has become more and more apparent in the years since he wrote. Indeed, his account of creativity and some Buddhist accounts of pratitya samutpada are so similar that I judge them to be alternative accounts of the same feature of the totality. In other words, creativity is pratitya samutpada and pratitya samutpada is creativity. “This does not mean that there are no differences between Whitehead's understanding of creativity and the understanding of pratitya samutpada found in a particular Buddhist thinker, such as Nagarjuna. There are differences. And certainly the two terms are informed by different contexts of use, function differently, and have different connotations. But this does not mean that they refer to different features of reality. “An analogy will help to explain this. Two people may both know the same person, John Doe. Their relations with John Doe may have been quite different. Hence when they speak of John Doe, they say different things and these statements have different consequences for their ongoing relationships. Still they are both speaking of the same person. A discussion between them about John Doe may enrich the understanding of both about this one person. Their growing understanding does not directly involve any change in John Doe. “Thus, to say that creativity is Whitehead's way of identifying that feature of reality named pratitya samutpada by Nagarjuna does not mean that they fully agree in their accounts. It does mean that where their accounts differ, these differences either supplement one another or conflict with one another and require adjudication. “In fact, however, more impressive than the differences is the wide range of agreements. For both, that of which they speak is ultimate in the sense that nothing underlies it, whereas it is constitutive of all things. It is neither subject nor object, neither concrete nor abstract, neither mental nor physical. It is neither one nor many, neither actual nor ideal. It is devoid of all attributes or qualities whatsoever. It is ineffable in the sense that language formed to speak of its instances cannot apply to it. What can be said is that it is the process of originating dependently or of the many becoming one.” John B. Cobb, “Amida and Christ.” 20. Like Siddhartha Gautama, Whitehead also had to invent a new technical vocabulary to express some of his revolutionary insights. For a discussion of some of these terms, such as actual entity, see my essay “An Introduction to Process Thought in Five Easy Pieces.” It can be found online at: http://hyattcarter.com Click on the button Process Philosophy, at the top of the Home Page, and then click on the title of the essay. The essay is also available as the first chapter in Part Four of my book: Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel: Essays along the Journey 21. Key to title abbreviations: PR Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead RM Religion in the Making, Alfred North Whitehead MT Modes of Thought, Alfred North Whitehead WM Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity, Jorge Luis Nobo 22. Hee-Jin Kim’s analysis can be found in his essay, “The Reason of Words and Letters: Dogen and Koan Language,” in the book, Dogen Studies, William LaFleur, ed., pp. 54-82. 23. Whitehead’s answer to this “koan” can be found in his book, Process and Reality, in section 3 of chapter 6, pp. 147-51 (Corrected Edition). Here’s the gist: “Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker. The thinker is the final end whereby there is the thought. In this inversion we have the final contrast between a philosophy of substance and a philosophy of organism. The operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a ‘superject,’ and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject.’ The operations are directed from antecedent organisms and to the immediate organism. They are ‘vectors,’ in that they convey the many things into the constitution of the single superject. The creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual. The former swing is dominated by the final cause, which is the ideal; and the latter swing is dominated by the efficient cause, which is actual.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, 151. 24. Charles Hartshorne, The Darkness and the Light, 5. 25. Here in a nutshell (“not”shell) is how process thought sees God and all creatures, God and the world, working together in co-creation: Process thought teaches that every momentary occasion of experience throughout the universe begins with the touch of God. In human terms, and to use an analogy from the NASA space shuttle, God provides “lift-off” and an initial aim in the right direction. But it is then up to us to make the in-flight decisions that take us to our destination. God is always reliably there in the beginning to help us get started, but at a crucial point in the creative process, God says, “You take it from here!” We complete what God initiates. What we and all creatures achieve in this process of self-actualization then becomes a part of God’s concrete actuality. Our achievements are “cells” in the body of God. God and the world are thus sources of novelty one for the other and constitutive of one another. Without this mutual immanence, made possible by the divine relativity, both God and the world would be completely static. All that can be surveyed in the vast saga of evolution, all the glory, all the grandeur, is the result 26. Does this mean that Buddhism trumps process thought, or vice versa? Is it a neat question of one or the other? No. Reality is far too complex for any one tradition, or discipline, to be exhaustive in its revelations. As John Cobb has pointed out, Buddhism and Christianity, for example, now stand facing each other not with only one possibility of mutual exclusion but, rather, with many great possibilities of mutual transformation. 27. Flowers of Emptiness (Japanese: kuge 空華 ) is the title of one of the chapters in Dogen’s major book, Shobogenzo. In his introduction to this chapter, translator Hubert Nearman gives this explanation of the term: “Kuge, the title of this discourse, has various meanings. “Dogen extends the meaning of kuge to refer to things as they really are: the flowerings of Buddha Nature (That Which Is as Unbounded as Space) . . . The flowering that Dogen speaks of refers to the whole universe as it is, which blossoms forth from within Buddha Nature, as well as to the blossoming of kensho, that is, the seeing of one’s True Nature.”
空華
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