Dear old work platform, it's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards? They're customizable workflows? That is floating on a digital cloud 9. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. Hello, and welcome to the new books network. My name is Amode Lele, and I will be your host for new books in Buddhist studies, which I'm co-hosting with Scott Mitchell of the Shin Institute for Buddhist Studies. He will be reviewing books with a cultural and a historical interest. My interest is more philosophical. Going back to my PhD in Buddhist studies from Harvard University, which I also discuss on my blog, Love of All Wisdom, at loveofallwisdom.com, there's a blog in cross-cultural questions in philosophy with a special focus on Buddhism. Today is my first interview for the new books network, and I'll be talking about a book by Professor Jason Clower of California State University at Chico. Professor Clower is a former colleague of mine from Harvard, and he's written a book called The Unlikely Buddhistist, Tantai Buddhism, in Mozong San's New Confucianism. This is a book about a person named Mozong San, who is an early 20th century Confucian thinker. And you might wonder why we're discussing a Confucian thinker in this inaugural interview for new books in Buddhist studies. But as the discussion goes on, I think it will be very clear that not only was Moz deeply interested in Buddhist studies in a way that this book really explores and demonstrates, but there have always been close connections between Confucianism and Buddhism, and people who study one can really benefit quite a bit by learning about the other. And we'll hear what Jason has to say about all of that. Hi, Jason. Hi, thank you for having me. You're welcome. Today, we're talking to Jason Clower about his new book, The Unlikely Buddhistist, Tantai Buddhism, in Mozong San's New Confucianism. And I'm probably getting the pronunciation on some words wrong already because I'm not a psychologist. All right, well, that's good. I really like the book. I love its engagement with the content of Moz's ideas. It takes him very seriously and thinks really about what he's talking about and thinking about. It's very well written, uses clever analogies and metaphors all over the place that I think really make more accessible and bring him to a contemporary Western audience very well. So, Jason, I wonder if you could begin the interview by telling us a bit about yourself. I've been a professor at Cal State Chico for three years now, right after finishing my PhD at Harvard in the Committee on the Study of Religion, focusing on Buddhism, but also more and more as time went by on Confucianism. I ended up there after beginning my graduate studies at the University of Chicago in the Divinity School, where at first I believed that I wanted to be an endologist. And as time went by Chinese, which had been my first love, kind of it came back into the center of my focus. And so I was faced with this painful decision. It was clear that if I wanted to do Chinese religion, I should probably leave Chicago, which was in a kind of lull at that point. Anthony, you, who was their reigning dean of Chinese religion, was wrapping up and not taking new students. And so it was difficult to uproot myself, just I think natural inertia tried to keep me there where I was familiar. But I'm very grateful that I then had to move out to Cambridge. Right. You found it was a good environment for the work that you wanted to do. It was. One of the things that made it perfect, in my case, was its proximity to Boston University, which is actually approaches the study of Confucianism with a much more open spirit than you would find at Harvard, where one of the reigning figures in the study of Confucianism there is Peter Bolle, who's very much a historian and a philologist. He's certainly not somebody who is looking to the neo-confucian tradition for ideas about how to live his life. But Boston University has a larger theological input into Chinese studies. And so the folks that you find there really are what you could call cross-cultural theologians or philosophers in a way that's rarely met with at Harvard, except for Du Weiming. Right. Did you want to say a word or two about who he is? Du Weiming is a for years now he's acted as a kind of cultural conduit between philosophy in the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong and Taiwan and Asian studies in the United States. And he began doing this back in the 80s as a young man. And he was one of the first people of his generation to come out and say that he believed that Confucianism had a future as a living tradition right alongside Buddhism. And eventually during my interactions with him at Harvard, he actually succeeded in persuading me at the very least. Many Americans who are now gravitating toward Buddhism would actually be happier with neo-confucianism or new Confucianism if they knew more about it. And why is that? There are always elements to the Buddhist tradition as we know so well in any country that Buddhism travels to that doesn't sit well with the inhabitants there. In this country, celibacy is one of them. The suspicion of other worldliness is another. And so this creates the need for engaged Buddhism and a lay-athized Buddhism. Buddhist in China already began dealing with this more than a thousand years ago. They've had a lot of time to absorb its resources into their native tradition and come up with something that they feel is either a happy medium between Confucianism and Buddhism or a kind of tertium quid that takes over what appealed to them about Buddhism in the first place. So my experience with Americans has been that they really appreciate the metaphysics of new Confucianism. It's anthropocosmic vision which is loosely Buddhist in origin. The Buddhist practices of self-cultivation that it's taken over together with an unflinching commitment to staying engaged in one's family, in one's country, in one society. And also it has no requirement for celibacy. That's always helpful. And is that are those kinds of considerations? What drove your intellectual journey from studying primarily Buddhism to studying Confucian thinker? Or was it something else in your case? In my case, I was particularly interested in the question of what happens to morality in Buddhism. And I know this is a question that's been in the background of your work also. Right. Although we're here to talk about you today. I think this is a question that's never really and truly been solved in Buddhism. How you can maintain that moral values are really real, truly important. There are all kinds of answers to that question. And they're plausible and they work well. But what I mean is that in the Buddhist tradition, nobody has been able to nail shut the lid of the coffin on that question. And I doubt that it can ever be done. So that's what makes it a second interesting intellectual question. Since that was the very question that drove most of Neo-Confucianism, Confucian criticism of Buddhism and underlay its kind of uneasiness with Buddhism, even as they were attracted to it, they became a natural source of curiosity for me. Did you kind of discover them at Harvard or at Chicago? It was at Harvard, as a matter of fact. It was really almost an accidental thing. I had been talking with my advisor, Robert Jamelo, who's primarily a scholar of the Hawaiian tradition. But also, it knows quite a bit about currents in modern Chinese thought. I said, "By chance do you know of anybody who's had intelligent things to say in modern Chinese scholarship about both platonism and Buddhism?" This was a tradition where it seemed to me moral values came as close as they are in the Western inheritance to being actually built into the structure of the universe. And it so happens that I read Plato in a very unusual way that may not be an appropriate subject for discussion here since we're talking about Buddhism primarily. But in my readings of the platonic dialogues, it seems to me that it was chiefly a moral philosophy and a political philosophy as well. But that's in my way of looking at things. That's a kind of sub-department of moral philosophy. So I was spending a lot of my time reading the Republic, the Theatetus, all the great platonic dialogues, and sort of treating them as puzzle pieces. I was trying fervently to kind of put together into what looked like a coherent way of thinking about morality. And I was looking for somebody who could help me do that. There were aspects to where I thought that was going that felt confusion to me. So I was open to going there, hence my question to my advisor. And he seemed confused, but he sort of said, "Have you ever heard of a fellow named Moz and Son?" And I'm ashamed to say now I never had, because I'm also somebody who has prided himself on being interested in modern Chinese thought. And he, in the same way that people used to say that so much to me was the greatest philosopher that modern China had ever produced. People would say this back in the 60s. I would say Moz and Son is the name that you would put forward now, as the greatest philosopher, at least in the sense of vastness of scope and competence, and the grandness of the questions with which he could deal with at least a respectable level of expertise. All right. So maybe now, so we've got sort of a sense of how you got to Mo. Can you tell us some more about Mo? Probably very few of our audience members have heard of him so far as well. He was one of a handful of cultural conservatives or cultural nationalists who still hadn't given up in the middle of the 20th century on trying to rehabilitate the classical Chinese inheritance to such an extent that they could convince themselves and convince the world that China's classical tradition, by which they really meant Confucianism, not only ranked as one of the world's greatest traditions historically, but actually might at least provide answers to questions that could be found nowhere else in the world, and at most actually produce a kind of triumphant philosophy to end all philosophies. This was a very rare position to take in China of the mid-20th century. The typical story that China scholars tell is fairly correct in my estimation, and that's that the Confucian tradition lost a lot of its prestige around the turn of the 20th century. Even the Qing government stopped holding the imperial, the Confucian-based civic civil-service examinations in 1903, I believe. This was a momentous event. The dynasty itself had kind of washed its hands of the classical inheritance, and before you do it, the educational system was geared toward what was called Yomishiyu, foreign studies, meaning foreign languages, mathematics, political science, the sort of things that people thought were going to help China to build gunboats in Canada and have a parliamentary system of government and bring all these great fruits of modernity to them. Once the Confucian tradition lost its government backing, and there was no longer a paycheck in it, it stopped being something that people could take it seriously. In a couple of generations, it had actually become the object of vilification. As this was going on, there were always a few more conservatively-minded thinkers who weren't ready to give up on the classical inheritance yet, and wanted to make some kind of a case for its value. One group of these conservatives thought that the Chinese literary past was at least a helpful background against which to understand Chinese history and contemporary China. But there were other people in Mozambas, one of them who thought, "No, not just that. It's not just a museum piece. It's actually been unjustly maligned. It's one of the greatest, if not the greatest, philosophical traditions in the world, and the only reason that people have grown away from it is because they've been temporarily blinded to its real value." And in particular, because they've become so enamored of these things that the West really and truly is good at empirical learning, science and technology, certain political questions and forms of organization, so enamored of that, that they've simply forgotten about these other things, which China does better and which are actually more important. So he and a group of his friends, who came to be called the New Confusions, set out to make themselves the spokespeople and the saviors of the tradition. When they began this in the late 50s, nobody really paid them much mind, but they were extremely persistent and they educated a lot of students. In Hong Kong, in Taiwan, those students took over important chairs in philosophy and literature. They emigrated abroad. Duwe Ming was one of them. And really through dint of sheer effort, they made themselves probably the most formidable single block of philosophers in modern China. Great. Thank you for that. I think that clarifies a lot more about Mo in general, and we've heard a bit about how you came to be interested in him. Now, of course, this is a Buddhist studies forum, new books in Buddhist studies, and we're talking about a Confucian thinker. But the reason for that is your book is specifically on Mo's buddology and on his approach to Buddhism. Could you tell us a bit first about why you chose that as a topic? People have been studying mozzles on for a long time now, chiefly in China, but now increasingly in Western languages. And the people who get interested in this are usually people whose main focus is Confucianism. That only makes sense. But there was a problem or a gap. And that is, you can't read very far into Mo's own some with encountering, without encountering, a lot of distinctly Buddhist turns of phrase. As you read deeper, you'll see him acknowledge openly that he's taken this or that central structure of his thought directly from Buddhism. What's happened in the scholarship is that people tend to skirt that. It's still the case that expertise in Chinese Buddhism and expertise in the Confucian tradition really have nothing to do with each other. That is, the learnings that give you expertise in the one to help you not a wit with the other. And so it's very difficult as a person whose home, intellectually, is Confucianism, to make much sense of what Mo is doing when he takes these Buddhist ideas, what precisely these ideas are supposed to mean and how he's distorted them or adapted them if at all in his appropriation. Since my home base was in Buddhist studies, it looked like this was a place where I could make a contribution. And I didn't feel terribly mendacious in claiming that this was a central piece of his thought that really needed to be explicated because Mo is absolutely unambiguous. He pays homage to the Buddhist philosophers. He thinks that you can't really do justice to Confucianism without having a very solid understanding of the Chinese Buddhist tradition in all its parts, which is a difficult thing for anybody to do. And it sounds like the central question of your book is really why Mo undertook all this study of Buddhism and why he said so much about Buddhism, that that's sort of the puzzle that you're trying to put together. He devoted 10 years of his career to the study of Buddhism. And I talked with his students and his practice was that he would go to the library at his university and he would take out the Taishou Canon, his enormous collection of volumes, and he would simply work his way through them. And he had a notebook, a commonplace book, where he would jot down passages that interested him. And he simply read his way through the canon. Why? Right. And so if that's your question, what's your answer? Why so much Buddhism? Mo says at the very beginning of his writings on Buddhism, he thinks that in point of fact, in China's history of philosophy, the Buddhist philosophers have simply been better at doing their job than the Confucian philosophers. Not mind you that Buddhist philosophy is more correct than Confucian philosophy. He's still a Confucian at the end of this process of investigation, but he thinks that the Buddhist philosophers do a better job of explicating in a systematic way what the message is, which is at the core of their tradition. He doesn't discount the huge differences as he sees them before between the essential message of the Buddhist tradition and of the Confucian tradition. But he simply says, the Buddhists were much, much better at taking the ideas that were latent in their scriptures and putting them out in an orderly manner, creating what you or I would call a philosophical system. In the course of doing that, he believes they developed certain ideas that could be abstracted away from their Buddhist context and applied very successfully to the Confucian tradition that would actually, and when you did that, he believed, you would discover that the paragons of the Confucian tradition were not the people who had been celebrated most in Confucian history. So in doing this, in making these appropriations from Buddhist philosophy, he was preparing to rewrite the history of Confucianism, and this in fact is what he did. So what are those ideas that he draws from Buddhism that he thinks can rewrite the history of Confucianism? The central distinction is between what he calls the theory of separation and the perfect theory. Right away in reading Mozart's Buddha-logical materials, you see that he's fascinated most by the practice of "pondiao". This is the famous Chinese Buddhist philosophic practice of comparing the different schools of Buddhist thought to one another and determining which is better than the next, figuring out what the merits and demerits of each school are. And famously, the story goes, "The Buddhist tradition and all its diversity kind of landed in China all at once. They suddenly received more than 1500 years of evolution of Buddhist thought all together." And the problem was to make sense of the diversity without actually rejecting any part of the tradition. If it was all Buddha-Vuchana, then it all had to be saved. But where there were apparent contradictions, they had to find some explanation, some way to harmonize these parts with each other. This is the famous practice of "pondiao". Most studied his way through the various Chinese systems of "pondiao", and he found one that appealed to him particularly much. He was a system of a man named Ken Tai-ji, the founder of what came to be called the Ken Tai School of Buddhism. He lived in the Sway dynasty just about the turn of the 6th and 7th centuries. And in Ji, he found a distinction that he thought wasn't just useful for Buddhist philosophy, but useful for any philosophy, including Western philosophy, including Taoist and Confucian philosophy. It was the distinction between a theory of separation, a bia jiao, and a perfect theory. For Mo in its Buddhist context, the pivotal question here is, what is a Buddha exactly in relation to the rest of us? And how does his experience differ from ours? And how would we have to change materially in order to become Buddhas? If it's the case that the realm that we live in is so utterly different from the realm that a Buddha lives in, that we have to actually dismantle it completely or utterly upend it or replace it, that would be a theory of separation. And a corollary of that in Mo's analysis is that you would actually have to dismantle your mind. You would no longer have a mind that had the ordinary six Buddhist senses that you and I do. So the picture that emerges of a Buddha in these kinds of thought, which would include maybe most significantly from yoga-tara, the picture that emerges of a Buddha there is almost like an automaton. He may seem to us as though he walks and talks and sleeps and eats, but in fact he doesn't. And certainly from his own standpoint, if he can even be said to have a suggestive standpoint, there's no participation in the ordinary empirical world. This is a point that Paul Griffiths made a long time ago in his book on being Buddha about the yoga-tara tradition. On a personal level, Mo finds that kind of vision abhorrent for much the same reason that neo-confusions in general found Buddhism as a whole kind of abhorrent. But also because he believes that it's not actually faithful to the real Buddhist message. Mo agrees with G that the Buddha's central supreme triumphal revelation came in the Lotus sutra, where he explained that everybody is going to become a Buddha, not an Arahat, not a Pratyakan Buddha, but a Buddha. Such that the Buddha is an eternal, all-pervading being. To Mo, this was an image of Buddhahood that he could embrace. It was a vision in which we don't have to become other than we are in order to be a Buddha. To somebody who's interested in Chinese Buddhism, it's clear that these kinds of ideas pop up all over in the Chinese Buddhist tradition as a whole, not just Gentai, but the tradition of the awakening of faith and the Hawaiian school take what they understand of the Tatagna-garta tradition and run with it. And they give us this vision of a mind that's innately enlightened. It may be adventiciously defiled, like a mirror covered with dust, but all we have to do is blow away these impediments. And we'll discover that we've always already been a Buddha. And Mo also believes that it's part of the Buddhist teaching and the yoga in the Lotus sutra, and the Nirvana sutra, that Buddhas actually continue always to participate in embodied form in the lives of other sentient beings. And it's not just that they appear to participate, they really do. Their nirmanakayas are as much a genuine instantiation of the Buddha as the Dharmakaya. They're not a kind of falsification or a mere hologram. Oh, go ahead. So this should take us back. The perfect theory is basically claiming that Buddhas are, in some respect, identical to ordinary people and the world around them, whereas separation theories of separation draw a sort of gulf exactly between Buddhas and everything else. Exactly. Okay. And in the theory of separation, they're very clear that reality resides only on one side of that gulf. That is, it's the Buddha as Dharmakaya, which is the real reality. And everything else's illusion is illusion, if not in the sense of being vaporous mist, you know, it's still real on a relative level of truth. But there's no parody at all between the world of the Dharmakaya, the Dharmadhatu, and the only contingently real world of regular embodied existence. Right, right. Mo wants to make those two things convertible. They're interpenetrating in a way that's a text like the awakening of faith may sometimes claim that it endorses, but in fact, it doesn't. For Moa really is a two-way street. The Dharmakaya is truly the Buddha in the same way that Dharmakaya is. And the yours and my experience as defiled protagonist is legitimately real just as much as those aspects of experience, which are only available to a fully enlightened Buddha. We're not dreaming this up. Right. And so Mo kind of clearly prefers the perfect theory on the Buddhist side. Now, how does he apply it to Confucianism? Why does he think that Confucians should care about this Buddhist distinction? This is a great question. And this is where Mo is an extraordinarily gutsy Confucian. Mo thinks that Confucians since the Song Dynasty got the Confucian tradition wrong. For him, there was a watershed moment in the Song Dynasty when the new Confucians took up the question of what is a human mind? Is it really infinite in some respect? Is it somehow co-extensive with heaven? Or is it merely an utterly finite container that shares some of the essence of heaven or its nature, its sheen? But really is separate from luminous reality. The figure who is posthumously nominated as the great and final spokesman for the Confucian tradition was Juicy of the Southern Song. And Juicy came down emphatically on the latter side. Our minds are not somehow one with heaven or the cosmos. We are finite beings. We have a nature which is informed by the heavenly principle. And we can cause our minds to more closely manifest that nature. But we ourselves are not infinite beings. Mo saw this as an analog to the Buddhist theories of separation. It just so happened that he was a partisan of a different camp that said no, no. In fact, the human mind, your waking mind, the one that makes decisions about ethical matters on a daily basis, that very mind is in fact the same as heaven itself as the way that thou itself. So that the principle of the way isn't just a kind of abstract pattern that other things do or don't cohere to. It's a living force and it takes on personhood in people like you and me. Mo saw that distinction in the Confucian tradition as being importantly analogous to the distinction between the theories of separation and the theory separation and the perfect theory and Buddhism. And he thought, aha, the Buddhists of the Tian Thai school following duty have done a great job of constructing a philosophical apparatus to make clear what this difference is and try to demonstrate the superiority of the perfect theory position. And so what he did was try to abstract it away from its Buddhist context and place it down over the Confucian tradition to show people you see, juicy was wrong. It's this perfect theory kind of Buddhism that best represents our tradition. It best enunciates the original spirit of Menchis and the mythical sage kings. So Tian Thai Buddhism basically gives Mo a resource for rejecting the metaphysical theory that he finds in Jushi. Exactly. He then refutes or rebut Jushi with the same kind of argument that Tian Thai uses to refute specimens of the theories of separation like the Hawaiian school. Right. And so if he does that, why does he ultimately reject Tian Thai Buddhism? Why does he remain a Confucian and reject the Tian Thai school that he obviously sympathizes with quite a bit? As much as Mo saw it as his mission to open the eyes of other Confucians to the value to be found in the Buddhist tradition. He still was not a Buddhist and at the end of the day, he still criticized Buddhism for the very same things that people have been criticizing it for the last thousand years. Namely, he doesn't think that there is really a place in the Buddhist tradition for recognizing the primacy of moral value. He thinks it's ruled out on grounds of Shunya Tan, Pratea Samutpada. That's not to say that he thinks that Buddhism is immoral and such, or that he doesn't recognize that there is such a thing as moral inquiry and Buddhism. But he says, if you're that firmly committed to doctrines of Pratea Samutpada and Shunya Tan, you can't really affirm moral value as solidly as you must as a Confucian can. And so, Tiantai Buddhism as brilliant as it is philosophically is ultimately limited by the fact that, hey, it's still Buddhism. The best that you can do to reform it then is to try to take its really laudable philosophical constructions and just move them over to a place that has its basic philosophical priorities, straighter, and that's Confucianism. Right. And you think that he gets several things wrong about Buddhism in his critique of it. Is that right? I, or at least inadequate. At least inadequate. Mose criticisms of Buddhism are nothing like his analysis of the various schools of Buddhist philosophy in their rigor. The parts of Mose Cannon, his oeuvre, where he explains what it is that he thinks it's fundamentally wrong with Buddhism as such, really don't add up to more than a few pages. And the arguments that he deploys to the extent that there are even really arguments and not just bald assertions or questionable references to Chinese history, the arguments that he deploys there really aren't any different from the arguments that his teacher, Shunya Li, used. And those arguments in turn are really no different from the arguments that were floating around in the Ming Dynasty or the Southern Song. He may be right. He may be wrong about a question like whether Buddhism can affirm moral value with satisfactory robustness. Maybe he's right. Maybe he's wrong. But my problem is he doesn't even try. In Mose's own lifetime, there were Buddhists tackling this question. And Mo knew of them. I know this because I know that he's sad, he's subscribed to at least one of their magazines. He sometimes gave lectures in seminaries, Buddhist seminaries, that were struggling with this kind of reform of Buddhist thought or re-annunciation of it. He simply didn't engage it. So as a critic of Buddhism, he's given a confusion analysis of the tradition that probably provides resources for a really intelligent argument about this, but he himself didn't carry it out. And so if he doesn't really say enough about Buddhism, what can we learn by studying him if we're not confusions ourselves? Or both of these? Or him in general. Happily, very little of his Buddha-logical work, the 2000 or so pages that there are of it, most of that is not about the supposed flaws that he finds in Buddhism. It's simply Buddha-logical doxography. And in that sense, I think he's an extremely formidable scholar. For example, his explanation of the Tantai tradition is nothing like the explanation, the exegesis that's been put forward by the leading Japanese scholars of Tantai. How does his version differ from there? Like Ando Toshio. The Japanese exegites tend to focus on the Tantai doctrine of the three truths. This is the part where G famously says, well, you know, the rest of the Mahayana talks about relative truth and absolute truth, but I'd like to observe a further distinction, something that we'll call the middle truth. And that is the simultaneously holding in mind of the validity of the relative truth and absolute truth in their proper spheres. It's, and he brings this up for contemplative purposes. That is, he's going to have you meditate on the relative truth, he's going to have you meditate on absolute truth, and then he's going to have you meditate on both of these things as simultaneously true. In the Japanese scholarship, which flows mostly from the thought of Ando Toshio. This is pointed to as the signal contribution of Tantai and what makes Tantai, Tantai. Mo disagrees completely for reasons that sound very strange. He says, no, really, that's nothing more than a kind of elaboration on basic Nagar Julian epistemology. There's nothing truly controversial there. If you get Buddhists to agree to use the terms in the way that should be suggesting that any Buddhist will agree to these formulations, no, where the Tantai tradition materially disagrees with others like Yogitara, like the Hawaiian tradition, is in what he calls its ontology. Twinyo Luen is the word that he uses there, which is different from the ordinary Chinese word for ontology in its parmenadian sense of being the study of eternal, unchanging being. That's something called Bandi. When Moses' ontology, in this sense, what he means is simply the study of whatever is acknowledged to exist, if only in some tentative way, so that when Buddhism produces discourse about the contingent being of a conditioned Dharma, for most purposes, that's ontology. That is, it's talking about things which are, they don't exist in a parmenadian sense, they don't have Subhava, but nonetheless, they're accorded a provisional existence very well. We will call this ontology. Mo observes that where the schools of Buddhist philosophy that he's really interested in go to war with each other, it's over their accounts of what and how things are. For example, the discussion that I mentioned before, the discussion of what exactly is a human mind in relation to Buddhahood? If the human mind that you and I have is so utterly deluded that in order to experience enlightenment has to be demolished or turned upside down, Austria perverted, then that would indicate that the mind is deeply, not just unsound, but unreal. In fact, it's going to have to be destroyed in order for enlightenment to come about. That's the exact opposite of what moses as the central tentai position, which is the very mind that we already have, this embodied creaturely mind, is right now already a candidate for Buddhahood, and in some very, very subtle tenuous sense is already a Buddha. So, Mo takes this observation of the central topos of Buddhist philosophy, and he writes the history of Chinese philosophy from that perspective, how they've disagreed materially on these questions of what he calls ontology. Do you think that Mo's interpretation of tentai in this sense is preferable to that of the Japanese scholars that he gets things that they don't? I do. Could you say a bit more about that, but why you think this understands something they don't? To my mind, it's Mo's perspective that really makes clear what was happening at the end of tentai's history as a distinct tradition. As often happens with these schools of Buddhist thought in China, the supposed founder, in this case, G, was not the person who actually set about building a sort of sect that is a self-conscious tentai tradition with its own special name that stood in concert distinction to other traditions like the Hawaiian. The person who was the real empire builder in that respect was a figure in the Song named Jili. His challenge was to hold fast the borders of tentai identity against Hawaiian Buddhism, which was quickly becoming the new vogue in Song china. So much, though, that in fact, Jili had to actually struggle to prevent his own disciples from concluding that really the originary tentai texts of Jili were just trying to say the same things that the Hawaiian thinkers had thought all along. That is of collapsing tentai into Hawaiian and not seeing what Jili and also Mo thinks is a huge rift between the two over their ontology. So Mo really helps us to see more clearly what the distinction is between tentai and Hawaiian. I think Mo nails it. When you finally put on those glasses and you look at the two schools of thought, you suddenly realize that yes, indeed, there is an enormous difference between them, not just philosophically, but with serious soteriological consequences as well. The whole understanding of what's going to happen to the mind in order to achieve enlightenment changes. And Mo, I think Mo gets it right, tentai really does rescue the particulars. Hawaiian does not. And Hawaiian mundane reality is going to vanish when you and I attain Buddhahood. You don't. In Hawaiian enlightenment, the world goes away. We're just in some sort of formless space, whereas tentai preserves the world as something that will still be there in our enlightenment. Right. Right. In the Hawaiian version, we suddenly become party to this marvelous, splendid, Dharmadhatu, full of glorious wondrous gunas. We don't see things like dumpsters and rotting banana peels anymore. Whereas the tentai Buddha hangs out in a world that has those impurities. The tentai Buddha lives in a world that has sketchy massage parlors. It's like it's like the Dao Te Ching where the master says the Dao is in the piss and shit. Exactly. Right. And Mo shows us that the tentai has that kind of vision in a way that Hawaiian does not and nobody or at least nobody recent had adequately made that distinction before. Exactly. Great. Well, thank you very much. I think we're we've taken a fair bit of your time. But let's move on to a final question about what you're working on now and if it has any relation to this work on the unlikely butologist? It does. I've got two projects now and they're both related more or less directly. One is that I'm translating a pair of works. There's a very good biography of Mo that was written in Beijing by a scholar named Lee Shan. I'm translating that biography and also a volume of some of Mo's late lectures. Mo is one of these thinkers who is a little bit too clever for his own good to the point that he really wasn't very good at communicating his ideas in a form that people who weren't his disciples could decipher until the last 10 years of his life. At that point, happily he gave a series of lectures that were jotted down and they're really they're a pretty easy entree to his thought. So I'm translating those as well. In the longer term, I'm also working with a colleague of mine Ayala V at George Washington University. We're writing a history on the common roots of this new Confucian tradition represented by people like Mo and also the tradition of what's sometimes called humanistic Buddhism. Figures like Ian Schwan, who by the way, completely missed the distinction between Hawaiian and Gentai. Could you explain a bit who they are, the humanistic Buddhist? You have contact these days with a Taiwanese Buddhist organization overseas. There's a very good chance that it'll be one of a handful of missionary organizations, Dharmadram Mountain, Buddhist Light International, or the Suji Foundation, who are the heirs to a 20th century revisioning of Buddhism as a sort of charitable works society. They're monastic Buddhists who think that the the work of the Mahayana in the modern world needs to be to build schools on hospitals and spread the good word of Buddhism. Are they then the kind of people that you think might be better off as new Confucians, or at least that do we mean things would be better off as new Confucians? Well, no. These are people who really understand what's distinctive about the bodhisattva path, and they're in it with both feet. The life of selfless sacrifice, of celibate monasticism, of radical dhana and self-adnegation are things that they're committed to. They're not really in any confusion about what kind of Buddhists they want to be. However, like the new Confucians, they are motivated by a powerful desire to save an old tradition by persuading modern people that it suits their needs. And for in both cases, it's not merely about adding surface decoration and doing a few charitable activities. They really think that they need to just to recover a lost tradition of civic engagement that somehow got neglected in centuries of codification. And so your project is going to be telling the history of how they got there. Right. It turns out that those two branches really, they have common roots not just intellectually, but they share the very same figures as their founding stars. For example, there was a fellow named Yanglen Hui, who was a classical scholar who lived at the end of the 19th century. And he was instrumental in bringing Confucian texts that had been destroyed during the typing rebellion, including almost all of the central Yogotara commentaries, bringing them back from Japan into China to be available again for examination. And so our modern day humanistic Buddhists traced their line of development to young men who worked under his tutelage and who reinterpreted those documents that he brought back to develop a picture of Buddhism as something that was called by the Bodhisattva ethos, to participation in politics and economy and social welfare. What also so happens that his students were among the followers of what went on to become the new Confucian tradition. And in at least one case, the person of a man named Oyama Jing Wu, they were the very same people. That is this one figure whose Aala Vib's focus of research was alternately a proto-humanistic Buddhist and a proto-new Confucian at different seasons of his life. So when you find out more about the biographies of these characters who were at the launching pads of these two movements, you find out that they were either the same people or they were literally visiting each other's houses, having meals together, and writing poems together in their off hours. So it sounds like both in the unlikely bodhologists and in this later work, you're doing a lot to show people that actually it is really important to study Buddhism and Confucianism together. Studying from one will tell you a lot about the other. If I have one ideological hobby horse that I'd flog, it's a Buddhologist, it's that the study of Chinese Buddhism really can't be divorced from the study of Confucianism. To some extent, that's also true in reverse. The Confucian influence on the Buddhist tradition is much, much clearer because the great Buddhist scholars almost invariably had had a Confucian education as children. But I truly believe that it makes as little sense to try to study Chinese Buddhism and Chinese Confucianism in isolation from one another as it does to say study the reformation in isolation from the counter-reformation or Protestantism separately from Catholicism. And unfortunately, that's what we've had to do for a long time. The Taiping Rebellion did a lot to damage the kind of human resources of both those traditions that propagated themselves. And so, recovering either one became a labor of love that had to be a career in itself. We're just getting to the point now where there are enough inherited generations of scholarship that it actually is possible to be at least fairly conversant in both traditions at the same time. And in history, that's been the natural condition. Well, it sounds like an exciting moment in the study of Chinese traditions then. We really are now in a position to stand on the shoulders of giants. I suppose you could say one leg on the shoulder of a different giant. -Exactly. -Yeah. Great. Well, it sounds like a great project. And I really want to thank you for being on the show today. I really enjoyed it. Take care. -Thank you, it was a pleasure. -Likewise, you've been listening to Jason Clower discussing his book, "The Unlikely Bootologist," on the new books network channel, "New Books in Buddhist Studies." I'm your host, Omod Lele. Thank you for listening. [end] [BLANK_AUDIO]
The 20th-century Chinese philosopher Mou Zongsan is relatively little known in the West, but has been greatly influential in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, as well as influencing Confucian studies in North America. His work helped revive Confucianism at a time when many thought it dead. Yet at the same time, Mou devoted significant scholarly time and effort to writing about Buddhism. Why? Jason Clower‘s The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Brill, 2010) attempts to explain why Mou thought Confucians could benefit from the study of Buddhism. In this interview, he explains Mou’s interest in Buddhism, and demonstrates to us why the study of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism are inseparable.
Jason Clower is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at California State University, Chico.
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