Buddhism
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Buddhism is simultaneously one of the world's major religions and one of its great philosophical systems. That we in the West tend to think of this as a self-contradictory state is true only because of the historical division in the West since the late Middle Ages between philosophical enquiry (which has allied itself with secular disciplines) and religious inquiry. However, while it is certainly true that we must consider Buddhism to be a religion (because it like all religions it offers a way for the individual to link himself or herself to the divine and the eternal) we should also understand that it is an epistemological system. By this I mean that in additional to providing a way for the individual to understand the divine, Buddhism also provides those who study its teachings with ways of understanding this world. This paper explores this epistemological facet of Buddhism - and specifically of Zen Buddhism - by focusing on the ways that Buddhism is intimately linked to specific means of interacting with and particular ways of understanding the world. Many of these basic ideas are set forth in Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, although to acquire a more fully developed understanding of Buddhist epistemology I have examined a number of other sources as well. Of course, coming to anything like a complete appreciation of Zen thought (from either a religious or a philosophical basis) would require a lifetime of study; this must be seen as only a preliminary foray.
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Buddhism argues that no single perspective should ever be privileged - including one's own perspective. But the difficulty of not giving greater credence to one's own perspective or relying more heavily on one's own experiences or memories or senses than other forms of knowledge is nearly impossible to do, and most Buddhists work their entire lives without achieving it (Hanh 141).
To get a better understanding of this state of enlightened consciousness that the Buddha urged his followers to pursue we may compare it to the Western philosophical concept of the tabula rasa ("blank slate") that some philosophers have argued is the state of the human mind (or soul). As Suzuki (p. 82) suggests the state of enlightened conscious for the Buddhist (which state he and others have referred to as the beginner's mind) is similar to that of the concept of the tabula rasa because both philosophical concepts imply that all humans at least at the moment of their birth have the ability to perceive and to understand the world around them (although the degree to which both perception and understanding may vary greatly from one individual to the next). This lack of experience and bias that we enter the world with combined with the potential that we h
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Approximate Word count = 1639
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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