Philosophy and Reality In Zen Buddhist Thought and Hindu

The logical positivist position has been attacked from another perspective as well - language. Theories of linguistics and discoveries in anthropology in the late twentieth century have influenced a philosophical system, language philosophy, that postulates a deeper foundation for the human concept of reality than the evidence of the senses. And the study of the deep structures that strongly influence our conception of reality shed a new light on the ideas of the Bhagavad Gita.
It all begins with the concept of archetype.

Gudo Nishijima Roshi on Matter vs Reality



Archetypes are images that are created by human beings in the widest imaginable of contexts - the human context. Wherever human begins exist even if their society has never had contact with the outside world, and even in the minds of individual human beings who have never been exposed to cultural artifacts, certain images recur. These images range from complex narrative structures like the quest myth and the hero myth to characters like the earth mother goddess. These images are found in the visual arts, literature, songs, folktales, and even dreams. There have been an abundance of theories about the origins of these images ranging from the assertion that they are evidence of a supernatural world that leaks into the physical world through the agency of the human mind to the assertion that it's our biological structure or the physical structure of our brains that create these images. But the bottom line is that, whatever their origins, archetypes do exist.

But deep linguistic structures go even further than archetypes. Even concepts like a dualistic world view that are universal in human cosmologies and even the basic structures of grammar that can be found in all languages are evidence that there are universal influences on the way we see the world. And these influences precede our physical experience of the world.

Claude Levi-Strauss wrote one of the first books that illustrates the concept of deep structures, The Raw and the Cooked. His study examines an extremely wide range of human experience and shows that humans always view the world in terms of binary opposites, even when there is no empirical reason to do so. For example take the binary opposites "hard and soft." On first glance this duality seems reasonable enough - there are, in fact hard things and soft things in the world, and this distinction can certainly be demonstrated empirically. But what about a stale dinner roll? Is it hard or soft? Well, it depends on the context doesn't it? A stale dinner roll is certainly a hard kind of bread, but on a plate of uncooked pasta, it's the softest thing on the plate. There is certainly a range of hardness that can be measured empirically and a hierarchy can be constructed that arranges the world in order from softest to hardest, but where does one draw the line? Between brick and wood? So is wood soft? The concept of dualism, then, doesn't seem to be derived empirically from nature but linguistically from language.

This is where the language philosophers begin. They too reject metaphysics. The universe is not made of matter or spirit or matter and spirit; the universe is made of language. We, as human beings, see the world through the lens of language. Language precedes experience, the basic - deep - structures of language are hard wired into our brains when we are born. We are not born tabula rasa but with a wealth of structures and perhaps even stories and images - archetypes - born within us.

For the Hindu, the theories of the language philosophers are easily accommodated. The world of illusion - the physical and conceptual worlds - is called maya in the Bhagavad Gita. The term means simply illusion. But there is in Hindu culture an archetype of the ultimate maya, Mahamaya, the earth mother. The earth mother is often presented as the personification of language - the Mother Tongue. And it is Mahamaya who is responsible for the appearances that make the physical and spiritual world seem to exist. But remember, Mahamaya herself is illusion, and behind the illusion she is Brahman. So the Hindu would agree with the language philosophers that, yes, the universe is made of language, and that is why it's a fiction.

Reality & Sensory Experience ~ Shinzen Young



Shinzen shares that he usually doesn't talk about "reality" . He prefers talking about sensory experience because it is based on his own and others investigation over many years. Scientists and philosophers can't agree on what reality means, accordingly Shinzen usually limits what he shares to what he knows is sure. He then shares what he knows for sure, then makes a wild conjecture as to what's really "out there", "for what it's worth". Filmed Nov. 2009 at Mt. Carmel Spiritual Centre in Niagara Falls.

hindu thinking on the nature of reality and brahman

When I was in college I had a philosophy professor who always used the piece of chalk in his hand to illustrate the concept that he was teaching. I remember the particular brand of chalk - AN DU SEPTIC - because the professor always pointed out the indented letters on the side of the piece that he was holding and often voiced his mystification about what the brand-name meant. (He was a language philosopher). And it really was good chalk. When I became a graduate student and began to teach, I used the same brand of chalk and it was far superior to the chalk that the institution where I now teach uses. It didn't break, create dust, and it lasted a long time. Perhaps the crumbly, dusty chalk today is a result of budget cuts, or maybe they found that an ingredient in AN DU SEPTIC chalk was a carcinogen or something.

Anyway, I remember once when my professor defended the thesis that nouns were non-existent. Of course, he used the chalk as an example. He asked his students to tell him what the piece of chalk in his hand was if one subtracted all the adjectives from it. "It's certainly not the whiteness of this piece of AN DU SEPTIC chalk that makes it chalk because we know that chalk can come in many colors," he said. "It's not the fact that this is cylindrical that makes it chalk; we can imagine manufacturing chalk in many different shapes: spherical, cubic, . . ." He would go through all the possible attributes of chalk and never get to its essence. So the professor would conclude, "Therefore, nouns are, in fact, a fiction. All that we have are adjectives."

To get an idea of Brahman, invert my professor's argument. Hindu culture, remember, rejects the existence of everything that can be experienced physically or conceptualized intellectually. Also, remember that the Hindu believes that everything is essentially Brahman and the appearances (the "adjectives" to use my professor's term) are distractions from reality. So when the professor told us that he had proved the non-existence of nouns, to the Hindu, he proved that everything that can be named - you, me, trees, desks, and even AN DU SEPTIC chalk - is, essentially, Brahman.