By Tuệ Sỹ
Obviously, the educational ideal with its applied methods in Buddhism has a long history. Its range of activities is not limited within the libraries and dharma-halls in monasteries but extends to several royal courts, government offices, or any public places where two people are gathered at the very least. Furthermore, its history encompasses various periods of social changes, different national nuances, and so on. All of these are collected to produce a quite great history in the field of Buddhist education.
In spite of this, education remains a highly new task for the Buddhist intellectuals today. The current encounter between the Eastern and Western civilizations seems unremarkable in comparison with the cultural marriage of more than ten centuries between the Sino-Indian civilizations in the late 1st century through the 11th or the 12th century, particularly in the Tang and Song dynasties. Therefore, our main difficulty today is not of methodology as it has been actually proven by Buddhist scholars’ contributions to the field of Western languages. Various styles of presenting Buddhist philosophy and literature to the world have not been regarded as “an inaccessible matrix” any more. In the old days, the Chinese had a very sophisticated experience of learning how to master the underlying flow of the Buddhist teaching and adapt it successfully to their own national nuances and literary tradition. Though they are separated by the perilous Pamir Mountains and the vast deserts in the middle of High Asia—a natural border too dangerous for common travelers to cross barefoot, the two countries have ever been able to sympathize with each other. Without such a dangerous border, why is it so difficult for the sympathy between the Eastern and Western civilizations? The point is that the difficulties that Buddhism really faces are not directly related to science and technology or spiritual traditions of the East and the West. However, if we put the problem aside, we are liable to fall into the field of metaphysics as it is said in an anecdote about Zhuangzi: “You’re not a fish, so how can you know what it enjoys?”
As we know, some topics with regard to science and technology in the West and spiritual traditions in the East have usually been set forth in the conferences held in some universities in Asia, and later taken as a mission that they have to do their best to accomplish “perfectly on its every side.” Based on their own given significance and ways of development, these topics may be considered nothing other than a slogan. So we are not going to examine its effective value.
Obviously, science and technology are generally accepted as the unique product of the West alone, and the Western philosophers in the 21st century have mastered the essence of the product in a very elaborate manner. With regard to existentialism, for instance, one of its vital propositions is Existence before Essence, viz., people are born as a blank slate and create essence through unique experiences. In the other philosophers’ contributions to the subject of human languages in the modern Western philosophy we may discover what the essence of science and technology is, and what the nature of spiritual traditions is. … (to be continued)
~ English translation by Phan Minh Trị. Source in Vietnamese: Duy Tuệ Thị Nghiệp