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Youru Wang
[王友如]
Professor, Youru (Charlie) Wang, Ph.D. Religion Studies,Temple University, Philadelphia.
Wang's research interests include the re-interpretation of Chinese Buddhist, especially Chan/Zen, thought and early Daoist thought in contemporary contexts, and the comparative study and dialogue between Western postmodern and Chinese thought. He is the author of Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and the editor of Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (Routledge 2007). His articles have appeared in journals such as International Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy East and West, Asian Philosophy, and Journal of Chinese Philosophy. He is a member of the editorial board for the Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy published by Springer. He teaches Religions of the World, Religions of Asia, Asian Thought, Introduction to Buddhism, Introduction to Daoism, and Select Topics in Philosophy and Religion Studies at Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey.
PDF: Historical Dictionary of Chan Buddhism
by Youru Wang
Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2017.
PDF: Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy 9
Edited by Youru Wang, Sandra A. Wawrytko, 2018.
Chater 16: Philosophical Interpretations of Hongzhou Chan Buddhist Thought
by Youru Wang
pp. 369-398.
PDF: Liberating Oneself from the Absolutized Boundary of Language:
A Liminological Approach to the Interplay of Speech and Silence in Chan Buddhism
by Youru Wang
Philosophy East and West, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 83-99
PDF: Reification and Deconstruction of Buddha Nature in Chinese Chan
by Youru Wang
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, December 2003, Vol. III, No.1, pp. 63-84.
PDF: Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking
by Youru Wang
London; New York : RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 251 p.
As the first systematic attempt to probe the linguistic strategies of Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism, this book investigates three areas: deconstructive strategy, liminology of language, and indirect original texts, placing them strictly within soteriological contexts. Whilst focusing on language use, the study also reveals some important truths about these two traditions and challenges many conventional understandings of them. Responding to recent critiques of Daoist and Chan Buddhist thought, it brings these two traditions into a constructive dialogue with contemporary philosophical reflection. It discovers Zhuangzian and Chan perspectives and sheds light on issues such as the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, de-reification of words, relativizing the limit of language, structure of indirect communication, and use of paradox, tautology and poetic language.
Book review:
Journal of Chinese Philosophy
Volume 32, Issue 4 (December 2005), 653-656Eric S. Nelson, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Lowell
[p. 653] Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The Other Way of Speaking. By Youru Wang. (London : Routledge, 2003. 251 Pages).
Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism are well known for their critique and creative exercise of language. Their use of indirect and paradoxical language reveals the paradox of a thinking that is simultaneously suspicious of language while richly employing it in manifold ways. Since this paradox of using language against language should not be ignored nor unquestioningly reproduced, Youru Wang carefully examines in this provocative and systematic work the variety of linguistic tactics involved in two ways of speaking that challenge conventional speech and understanding. Moving beyond the typical discussions of skepticism and mysticism, Wang demonstrates how they contest ordinary communication and, more intriguingly, their own status as discourses so as to evoke through the strangeness of language something other than language. Wang consequently questions recent postmodern and Derridean influenced critiques of Zhuangzi and Chan as logocentric by pursuing a two-fold project of (1) recontextualizing them in relation to the postmodern, the intertextuality of which suggests that these unique traditions can retell themselves and respond to criticism, and (2) articulating how they can contribute to the contemporary scene. This project entails that Daoism and Chan cannot avoid modern and postmodern Western discourses, yet responding to them discloses new possibilities for engaging Daoist and Chan questions concerning the contingency, interdependence, and uniqueness of things; multi-perspectivism and non-dualism; and the employment of negation and contradiction, paradox and irony, tautology and repetition, story telling and confrontational speech.
Wang unfolds in part one the deconstructive strategies found in Zhuangzi and Chan. They involve the situational self-subverting of oppositional hierarchies and identities seen in deconstruction and evoke contemporary anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, and anti-realism. However, these strategies cannot be reduced to their Western counterparts, since they are shaped by different practical [p. 654] concerns and challenge—by being oriented beyond—the constructed, the linguistic, and the textual. Zhuangzi does not emphasize doubt or intuition but the incessant transformation of things and perspectives. His linguistic strategies stress the soteriological and therapeutic motif of accommodating oneself to things and responding to them in their universal and infinite transformation, self-transformation, and dynamic interconnectedness and uniqueness. Zhuangzi does not only doubt the self and the dao but problematizes and overturns the closure and reification of the self and the dao as unity, monolithic oneness, or even non-being. The dao is not itself a thing or concept but an expedient. It is the interruptive absence of fixed distinctions indicating the partiality of arguments and perspectives in the mutual yet irreducible dependence of this and that . Zhuangzi's critical tactics do not only throw into question conventional and philosophical (including previous Daoist as well as Confucian-Mohist) arguments and positions for the sake of multi-perspectivism but also deconstructively upset the primary terms of his own discourse for therapeutic effect.
Although expressions such as "Buddha nature" and "original mind" might seem intrinsically more metaphysical than deconstructive, Wang makes evident the contested character of these terms in Buddhism by tracing the struggle between their reification and deconstruction from Indian tath_gatagarbha thought to the Platform Sutra in which Huineng challenges Shenxiu's reification of the pure mind through emphasizing the free-flowing character of both thoughts and things. Huineng playfully opens up zixing (self-nature) in order to undermine the possibility of fixing it such that his no-thought resists being reduced to either the presence or absence of thought or mind. Likewise, according to Wang, Hongzhou Chan's relational and pragmatic deployment of apophatic and kataphatic language deconstructs Shenhui's reification so as to responsively follow the movement of things ( renyun ). The self-destructuring of the awakening mind is illustrated in Mazu Daoyi's neither mind nor Buddha ; Huangbo Xiyun's articulation of the fluid play and mutuality of originary and ordinary mind; and Linji Yixuan's ironic self-erasure of the primary terms of his discourse such as the authentic person without rank, mind, and the Buddha.
In part two, Wang explores the liminology of language interpreted as (1) problematizing the limit of language; (2) the interconnected and transitional character between the two sides of this boundary, such as speaking and non-speaking; and (3) the play and transgression occurring in this border region. Both Zhuangzi and Chan liquefy the limit through speaking otherwise. Zhuangzi's speaking non-speaking ( yan [p. 655] wuyan ) is not a negation of language in silence but its transformation through challenging its rigidity and reification. Zhuangzi's creative, playful, and productive linguistic practices reveal that the transformation of language is the most appropriate response to the transformation of things. Words still signify even if their meaning is not fixed. Transformative speaking involves the recognition of the mutual relation, separation, and transitions between speaking and non- speaking in the playful crossing of boundaries of a discourse that remains in the margins and indirect. Zhuangzi's language is not so much about an objective meaning—or even its skeptical negation— as it is its own enactment and performance. Zhuangzi speaks non-speaking in utilizing goblet words (zhiyan) and strategies of denegation, paradox, and irony. Likewise the notorious Chan focus on "not relying on words" is not the abandonment but the transformation of language through relativizing its limits. The questionability of conventional cognitive referential language is opened up in the nonduality of speaking and non-speaking, in the play of both in the skillful, flexible, creative, and challenging uses of self-erasing "living words."
Wang deepens this analysis of the performative and pragmatic dimensions of language in the third part on indirect communication. Zhuangzi's words do not convey information or propose a thesis but edify and challenge the reader to enact their significance. His deliberately evocative language awakens the reader's participation just as the author himself disappears in the shifting and irreducible multiplicity and singularity of meanings and perspectives. Rather than being a direct linguistic—much less an intuitive mystical— communication, Wang describes how Chan Buddhism's "mind to mind transmission" reveals the necessity of speaking otherwise. The free, flexible, and creative use of indirect language is one of the primary characteristics of Chan. The richness and variety of Chan ways of speaking are not due to duplicity but to the communicative and self-deconstructing character of Chan awakening. If enlightenment is situational, and consequently irreducible to a formula or rule, if it requires one's own enactment of it, then another cannot give it. The master can only evoke and inspire it through a flexible intrigue of words and gestures. As Huangbo pointed out, the other's enlightenment is on each occasion the other's own. Thus there is no "transmission" of mind, or any other content, but a provocation to a mutual enactment of the event of enlightenment. Enlightenment can accordingly neither be given nor imposed. Awakening requires a resourceful engagement and appropriation that calls for emptying and letting go in order to be responsive to the very suchness of things. This is [p. 656] provoked through speaking otherwise, that is, through the living words ( shengyu ) of the abusive, paradoxical, poetic, shocking, and tautological strategies unfolded in Chan Buddhism.
Journal of Chinese Philosophy
Volume 32, Issue 4 (December 2005), 653-656
