Recently I wanted to explore a fascinating passage of the Daoist founder Zhuangzi, where the text recommends “sitting in oblivion” or “sitting and forgetting” (zuòwàng 坐忘). That passage bears striking similarities to mystical practices and experiences from around the globe.
To help figure it out, I turned to Sitting in Oblivion by the Daoism scholar Livia Kohn, which shows how “sitting and forgetting” was developed as a practice and taken up at great length by later Daoist thinkers. One passage of Kohn’s particularly struck me:
The most important aspects of the rather extensive Buddhist imports into Daoism for sitting in oblivion include the organizational setting of meditation practice in monastic institutions, the formalized ethical requirement in the taking of precepts and refuge in the Three Treasures, the doctrines of karma and retribution, the five paths of rebirth, and the various layers of hell, as well as the vision of the body-mind in terms of multiple aspects, defilements, hindrances, and purification. (107)
“Rather extensive” indeed! I knew that East Asian Buddhists had drawn a great deal from Daoism – I have sometimes uncharitably described Chan/Zen as “Daoists cosplaying as Buddhists” – but I hadn’t realized how much the influence went in the other direction. Karma, rebirth, meditation, monastic institutions, taking precepts, taking refuge? At that point you sure sound a lot like Buddhists without the name!
The point got me realizing just how incredibly extensive Buddhist thought came to be throughout Asia – at least the parts of the world we now typically refer to as “Asia”, which sometimes exclude the westernmost parts of the physical continent. Clearly Buddhism proper had a hugely extensive influence across the thinking of the continent, from Mongolia in the north to Borobudur in the south, from Japan in the east all the way to Kalmykia – so far west that it is usually considered a part of Europe. That much wasn’t news to me. But what Kohn got me thinking about is how much Buddhism set the philosophical agenda even for Asians who weren’t Buddhist.
Because it wasn’t just the Daoists. While Neo-Confucians like Zhu Xi criticized Buddhism at length, there was nevertheless an extensive Buddhist influence on their thought as well. In that respect, China mirrored India: while Buddhism eventually died out in most of the Indian subcontinent, Buddhist ideas were taken up in detail by the Indian schools that nominally opposed it. Possibly the most influential non-Buddhist thinker in India was Śaṅkara, who devoted a great deal of energy to attacking Buddhism – yet his philosophy wound up being so close to Buddhism anyway that other opponents called him a “secret Buddhist” (pracchanna bauddha).
Which all brings me to today’s title. One of the more famous attempts to summarize the Western philosophical tradition is this quote from Alfred North Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion. (Process and Reality 53)
If Western philosophical tradition (which is not only European) could be considered a “series of footnotes to Plato”, then could we not similarly consider Asian philosophical tradition as a series of footnotes to the Buddha? Such a claim would be less bold than a claim I’ve heard attributed to Charles Hallisey, namely that what defines Asia itself is Buddhism. It would also call into question a claim I made many years ago, that South and East Asian philosophy are so different from each other that speaking of “Asian philosophy” is merely a matter of political convenience.
But is that claim actually right? Is Asian philosophy just a series of footnotes to the Buddha? The claim does seem suspect given how many major Asian philosophies and philosophers – Confucius, the early Upaniṣads, and Zhuangzi himself, to name just some of the most prominent – predate the Buddha, or at least any possible contact with him and his thought.
The thing is, that same criticism can be applied to Whitehead’s original quote about the West. Nobody seriously considers Plato to be the first Western philosopher. (Nicholas Tampio once made such a claim but didn’t try to justify it and was roundly criticized for it, so I don’t consider that claim serious.) Plato acknowledged his own debt to Socrates, and both of them considered themselves part of a lineage of philosophers going back to Thales. And before Thales, Moses and the early Hebrew prophets were independently questioning the world around them in a way that can reasonably be called philosophical, just like Confucius and the sages of the Upaniṣads.
So the claim that Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato is itself not wholly true. It is a broad and shrewd generalization about the later scope and development of Western philosophy, the way Western philosophy after Plato has generally been done in his shadow, even when it rejects him. But in that sense – to the limited extent that we can say Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato – I suspect that we can indeed make the same generalization about Asian philosophy, that it is footnotes to the Buddha. In both South Asia and East Asia, once philosophy encountered the thoughts attributed to the Buddha, none of it would be the same again.
For me, the problem of saying that “Asian philosophy is a footnote to Buddha” consists in the fact that even in the case of Indian philosophy, there were several philosophical schools competing with each other; you could see the responses from non-Buddhist schools to Buddhism, and you could also find out objections to Samkhya, Mimamsa, etc in Buddhist Sastras. In this way, you could also contend that Buddhism is a footnote to other schools.
In the West there were also philosophical schools that competed with Plato – especially the Jewish and Christian thinkers hostile to Greek philosophy (such as Tertullian). But even those anti-Platonic thinkers were in dialogue with Plato in some respect, as non-Buddhist Asian thinkers were with the Buddha.
Within the South Asian context, yes, you could turn it around and say Buddhism was a response to other traditions (at least the Vedas/Upanisads). The reason I make the claim in the way I do here is to talk about Asia as a whole: in East Asia, Buddhism still set the agenda, in a way that Mimamsa, Samkhya etc. did not.
Hi Amod, thanks for the thought-provoking post. Reading through Whitehead’s quote (and the mention of karma, meditation, etc.), it strikes me that the Upanishads might also fit the bill, and may fit it even better in the context of the Indian subcontinent, and indirectly in the context of the rest of Asia through the influence of Buddhism. The Buddha might then be more like Aristotle in relation to the Platonic corpus, and Mahayana Buddhism in East Asia somewhat akin to Islamic philosophy in transmitting the Aristotelian corpus to medieval Europe.
Buddhism’s fate, on a bigger scale, resembles that of Mimamsa, opposed or absorbed by rival intellectual traditions, enriching them in the process.
As for sitting and forgetting (zuòwàng 坐忘) in the Zhuangzi, which predates the introduction of Buddhism in China, we can read it in relation to other passages on meditation in the Mencius (2A2), and the Neiye (“Inward Training”) chapter of the Guanzi. So why did meditation suddenly become a thing in late 4th century to 3rd century BCE in China? A sinologist has suggested to me that these ideas on meditation come from India. I am not aware of any solid evidence of exchange of ideas between India and China that far back (an article in the Sino-Platonic Papers makes the interesting suggestion that the use of the the term “nameless finger” 無名之指 for the ring finger, which occurs for the first time in Mencius 6A12, comes from the Sanskrit term “anāmikā”). But looking at the Later Mohist Canons and Explanations (jīng shuō 經說), which date to around the same period, I see that the meaning and use of jīng 經 is similar to that of “sūtra” in orthodox Brahmanical traditions: a concise statement of rule or doctrine. Most of these jīng 經 are geared toward laying out a logic of disputation where there’s a winning and a losing side (and which is critiqued in Zhuangzi Ch.2). Which leads me to wonder: could there have been contacts between Chinese merchants and brahmins from the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent who orally transmitted contents of the Upanishads and proto-Nyāya manuals?
See, the thing about the Upaniṣads is they really don’t influence East Asia except through the Buddha. (That’s apart from the fact that only the earliest Upaniṣads predate him; most of them are later.) That’s why I’d compare them more – in this regard – to the likes of Thales, whose influence was less direct than Plato’s.
At least, that’s based on what we know for sure. The hypothesis you present in your second paragraph is very intriguing, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it. If it were true, yeah, it would be strong counterevidence to the idea of Asian philosophy as footnotes to the Buddha, but it seems highly speculative to me so far. It doesn’t seem so far-fetched to me to imagine that meditative practices might have emerged independently in China – if philosophy could emerge independently in three or four different places during the Axial Age, then why couldn’t meditation?
Philosophers are not the best intellectual historians. I am guessing we would be better off quoting Nietzsche than Whitehead, but I will try to stick to the topic at hand.
I suppose we are looking at things a bit differently. I am looking for the earliest corpus (uninfluenced by another such corpus in a geographically different area) that offers a unique framework for viewing ourselves and the world, not quite systematic but rich and suggestive enough to give rise to several different and conflicting traditions and systematizing efforts. The Platonic corpus fits the bill in Western philosophy, even if Aristotle was studied more in subsequent traditions. The Buddha himself seems to me to have been working within the Upanishadic framework (karma, cycle of birth and rebirth, and escape from the cycle as the ultimate goal), even while opposing certain ideas in it (anatman). But Aristotle too opposed Plato’s theory of forms.
The Warring States texts of ancient China, too, particularly Confucian and Daoist texts in the late 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, fit the bill for a body of texts giving rise to a unique outlook on ourselves on the world. That outlook valorizes nature and is committed to naturalism (I remember Prof. de Bary remarking in class that if he had to name one difference between Indian philosophy and Chinese philosophy, it is the latter’s affirmation of nature), and is also committed to ethics or politics which they derive from views about human nature. I am not too familiar with Chinese aesthetics, but depiction of the natural world evoking our feelings of appreciation become established in Tang poetry and paintings, and gradually become suffused with Zhuangzi-esque idioms about skill and spontaneity (esp. in critical literature on landscape paintings). In the Buddhist essay Hōjōki I find ambivalent feelings about the transience of nature, horror and sadness at all the suffering in the form of fire, earthquake, etc., but also quiet pleasure in the beauty of nature in its seasonal changes.
Now the concern is that perhaps the ideas and practices related to meditation in the Mencius, Zhuangzi, and so on, which become important in later Confucian and Daoist traditions under the influence of Buddhism, do indeed come from India, though from northwest Indian subcontinent which I am guessing was more Brahmanical than Buddhist at the time. I completely agree with you that meditation could be an indigenous development. We are given a much shorter timeline for that development (decades instead of centuries), but why not? It’s like the convergent evolution of wings in mammals like bats and birds. Likewise for “nameless finger”, we can come up with a just-so story about the usage of this name in different areas without any linguistic contact: as the 4th finger is less prominent both in its use and location, it often lacked a separate name for it, and for similar reasons was used for wearing a ring.
But as for the use of the word “jing” in the sense of sutra in a pre-Buddhistic sense (as in Panini’s sutras, Nyaya sutras and so on, and not in the sense of the Lotus Sutra, etc.) in Later Mohist literature, the coincidence seems harder for me to explain away. It looks less like convergent evolution, and more like finding the tooth of an animal found only in continent X in another continent Y. Given that this finding was unique, and no other such animal remains were ever found in Y.
Another similarity: one of the Later Mohist jing (B17, starting off a section on optics) states that a “shadow does not move”. And the same statement is defended in Vatsyayana’s commentary on the saadhya-sama fallacy under sutra 1.2.8 (where “does not move” illustrates the fallacy of the unproved prover). The difference in context detracts from the similarity, but suggests that further investigation might be fruitful. And if fruitful, removes the bar from thinking that meditative practices might have also come from India.
The Later Mohist texts unfortunately form a marginal (and lost) chapter of China’s intellectual history, perhaps in part because it was so effectively critiqued by Zhuangzi Ch. 2. Angus Graham suggests that this chapter marked a paradigm shift in debates from “You are wrong, I am right”, to “You have a narrow view, I have a broader one”. (Xunzi, for instance, criticizes other philosophers as being blinded by some bias or other and not seeing the whole picture, or grasping only a corner of the Way). So, even if proto-sutra literature influenced Mohist thought, it was not a lasting influence (which is a pity), except through Hui Shi and Zhuangzi who appear to have criticized their project.
Western philosophy emerged in Greece, and hence, Plato was likely aware of the different streams. Therefore, even if he was not the first Western philosopher, he interacted with all branches of Western philosophy then extant, and hence subsequent Western philosophy may be characterized as a sequence of footnotes, not always in agreement or reverential, to him. Can we claim the same about Buddha and Chinese philosophers like Confucius, i.e., that either side knew the thoughts of the other?
Buddha’s influence on Chinese philosophy is more akin to Aristotle’s (and by extension Plato’s) influence on Islamic philosophy. Would we characterize Islamic philosophy also as a set of footnotes to Plato?
There is no such thing as “Asian Philosophy”. There are two independent traditions of Asian Philosophy that met later: the Indian and the Chinese. Plato was the first thinker of the third philosophical tradition (the Western) who considered all main problems of Philosophy. I do not find either in Indian or in Chinese philosophies a single philosopher that had the same influence in them as Plato had in his. The Upanishads and Confucius would be the main candidates, but there are many important discussions that are still not present in them.
Well, I do think that in Moses and the Hebrew Bible you find proto-philosophical reflection of the sort you find in Confucius’s Analects – which of course became hugely influential for the later Western tradition. I think it is vaguely possible that Plato might have heard of Moses or the Hebrews, but even if he had, it would have been so vague and distant that I wouldn’t really count it as an influence or response.
So again, the characterization of Western philosophy as footnotes to Plato is itself not fully accurate – but I think it does apply to Islamic philosophy almost as well as to Jewish and Christian.
There are three traditions of philosophy in the strict sense of the word, arising respectively in Greece, India and China. The first includes Jewish and Islamic Philosophy. There is no such thing as “the philosophy of Buddha”. We do not really know what he taught exactly. Nikaya Buddhism is the most ancient form of Buddhism we know. It is archaic or presystematic philosophy, as that of Laozi or Confucius, the Upanishads and the Presocratics. But in later confucianism, the Indian darshanas (astika and nastika) and Plato we have already full-fledged philosophy.
That’s a fair comment. Getting further with it would surely require us to define philosophy, which is always a difficult task – though maybe the surprising thing is that the discussion managed to get this far without it.
I agree completely. With a wide idea of Philosophy, every group and even every individual has its own Philosophy. In a narrow sense, there is only Philosophy in the West. Using a middle concept of Philosophy, we can speak of the 3 traditions. In the first sense, Philosophy is universal; in the second, it is a singularity; in the third, it is something particular.
Hi Boram! In the new studies of genetic drift, which now replace all the old rhetoric of migration and conquest, and get reported as preprints ahead of publication on Biorxiv, you do find a trace of Chinese Han genes contributing to the mix in the North of India. It’s a small trace, and has not been studied further, so it’s not clear what it really means, but there is now a definite possibility of ancient exchanges with Han China, over the thousands of years reflected in generic drifts.
Thats the view from Harvard reported in Biorxiv as doi.org/10.1101/292581. There is also a very different view from the Hindu University in Banaras, where Sanskrit is not traced through syntax from the Indo-European languages, but through vocabulary from the Austronesian family. On that perspective the dreams and yoga of the Upanishads are set against the Dreamtime of the Australian aborigines and related ancient cultures, which obviously had their own influences in China. That’s on Biorxiv as doi.org/ 10.1101/2024.01.09.574778.
So a lot of old academic bets are off around now, and new horizons of research and speculation open.
Hi Orwin, yes, this is certainly interesting, thanks for sharing it. Study of ancient DNA might help settle several ongoing debates, like the Aryan migration thesis. As to ancient China, there have been speculation about the Zhou folk having Indo-European roots. But, as Amod reminds us, China’s connections with India or with Indo-Europeans remain highly speculative in the absence of sufficient evidence, both material and textual. In any case, the period I am speculating about comes afterward, during the Warring States period in China, and pre- to early Classical period in India when I am assuming there should have been proto-sutra literature orally taught from teacher to student together with exlanatory glosses on them, gradually evolving into the sutra literature that we know of.
Proto-suta literature: that’s a very interesting notion. And in the moksha-dharma from Book XII of the Epic there are lots of references to people teaching sixteen, twenty-four, twenty-five or twenty-six principles, in the way of Samkhya – but obviously briefly stated. Also lots of references to scholars, who emerge as a new community between farmers and warriors.
Interestingly, the name Athavan, of the 4th Veda, can be read as atha + va, yes but, and no, which speaks to scholars picking up disputes in doctrine, law and even medicine. And from their work in the 4th era of the Vedas came sutra texts on ritual and on law.
Jacobi in his introductions to the Jain Sutras for the Sacred Books of the East showed the older Hindu law books on ascetic practice informing the Buddhist regulations, so this background is all prior to the Hindu empires. I found Jacobi offering the best insight prior to the recent studies of Vedic lineages, migrations and now genetics
For the pre- classical literature problem, another ground-breaking study offers a new insight: the Dead Sea scrolls re-dated using AI now seem to predate the Hasmodean kingdom, which was earlier thought necessary to host a literary culture. Similar assumptions are still made about the so-called iron age and Magadha in India, but can now be questioned, with iron attested early in Tamil Nadu and the nascent scientific literature in North India serving to make urbanization possible by enhancing mining and agriculture.
I’m very interested in this tangle of problems, as background or early context for Ayurvedic medicine and the Yoga Sutra puzzle. The late Vedic soma sacrifice used a herb sourced from China, so there was from then a regular trading connection, although carefully hidden in Hindu heartlands. But as soon as Sanskrit scholars turned to follow the Buddha, there was an opening, and Chinese pilgrims followed in time.
The history of agriculture now gains a lot from genetic studies. The Harvard study I mentioned , lead by
Vagheesh M. Narasimhan and Nick Patterson, solves the Aryan problem along the way, in a most ironic fashion. Ancient farmers from Anatolia found their way to the mountains of Iran, and there were met by emigrants (!) from the fringe of the Indus Valley civilization, who later took field agriculture back to North India. So Indo-Aryan dissolves into Indo-Hitite, with an ancient emigration, but from the Punjab, not from Bharata as the nationalists imagine.
Meanwhile, another drift came south am Indo-European heartland in Kazakhstan, skirting round the Anatolian settlements in Iran, with the trace of Han Chinese, to form the earliest Brahmin populations in North India, which were therefore not actually Aryan, as the Vedas actually record. Barley cultivation spread from Anatolia, but the barley remembered in Bharata from the golden age of Pariksit grew wild, having hitched a ride with the migrants.
The assimilation of Aryan agriculture to the Vedic pastoralism followed with the late Vedic adoptions in kevala lineages, reflected in books 9 and 10 of the Rig-Veda. But this process is complicated by the presence also of agriculturalists from South-East Asia, carrying the Austronesian vocabulary. Three factors interact to make a chaos – that’s notorious in chaos theory, and a hard puzzle for us here. A lot.depends on how you layer the books of the Rig-veda with Brahmanas, Upanishads, sutras, and the Epic.