Dao (2016) 15:477–481

DOI 10.1007/s11712-016-9513-y

Liu, JeeLoo, and Douglas L. Berger, eds., Nothingness

in Asian Philosophy
New York: Routledge, 2014, xxx + 355 pages

Stephen C. Walker 1

Published online: 27 June 2016

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

In producing this volume, LIU JeeLoo and Douglas L. Berger coordinated the efforts of
twenty scholars at mapping out the articulations and applications of nonbeing, empti-
ness, and negation in South and East Asian philosophical systems. The resulting
anthology presents a mix of focused conceptual analyses, broad historical surveys,
and contributions to ongoing interpretive debates. As might be expected, the book as a
whole is somewhat overwhelming, and most readers will benefit from selective
attention to its various parts. The topics are seventeen premodern and three modern;
within the premodern, ten Buddhist or Buddhocentric, five Daoist, and two Brahman-
ical. From this array, the Buddhist claim that all (or at least many) things are “empty”
emerges as the most fertile and dynamic agenda in the history of Asian reflections upon
nonbeing, followed at some distance by the Daoist fascination with negative comple-
ments to the formed things of the world. In the playing-field established by this
collection, Brahmanical resistance and modern refashioning serve mainly to emphasize
the distinctive power and aesthetic depth of the classical Buddhist and Daoist concep-
tions—to illustrate their enduring vitality no matter the theoretical problems and
practical difficulties they may raise.
The first two papers, by Arindam Chakrabarti and Sthaneshwar Timalsina respec-
tively, leave the impression that nothingness was not a particularly powerful or central
idea for classical Brahmanical thinkers. Brahmanical metaphysics, epistemology, and
philosophy of language incorporate reflections on absence and negation but tend
toward viewing them as parasitic on (or at least correlative with) presence and
affirmation. In “The Unavoidable Void,” Chakrabarti distinguishes a given entity’s
unreality, its absence from a locus, and its emptiness in the technical Buddhist sense.
Unreal entities are present nowhere; real entities are typically present somewhere but
not everywhere; empty entities exist relationally. Chakrabarti spends most of his time

* Stephen C. Walker
scwalker@uchicago.edu

1
The University of Chicago Divinity School, 1025 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
478 Stephen C. Walker

on the first two, exploring the ontology of absences and disambiguating systems that
posit real absences from those that posit unreal things. He draws richly on the Nyāya-
Vaiśeṣika tradition (which posits real absences), and concludes that introspective
regimens purporting to culminate in cognition of the self as unreal actually culminate
in the cognition of various psychological contents as absent from some abiding locus.
Timalsina likewise implies the impossibility of a purely negative existence, this time
through an in-depth analysis of Bhartṛhari’s theory of negation. His “Semantics of
Nothingness” engages centuries of Sanskrit grammatical theory, toward the general
conclusion that negations function to limit things that are, not to posit things that are
not.
The next five essays treat the much-contested Mādhyamika doctrine of emptiness, as
it plays out in metaphysical, semantic, ethical, and logical domains. Jay L. Garfield’s
“Madhyamaka, Nihilism, and the Emptiness of Emptiness” argues against nihilistic
readings of Nāgārjuna—readings to the effect that Nāgārjuna declares all things
ultimately unreal. Ultimately, neither existence nor nonexistence obtains of anything:
both are conventional designations, and when dealing in conventional reality we may
legitimately affirm either, both, or neither given various parameters. For Nāgārjuna,
emptiness of intrinsic nature is the conditionality and relationality that things exempli-
fy; insight into the ultimate emptiness of a thing is at the same time insight into its
career as a conditional and relative existent. As TANAKA Koji points out, this ontolog-
ical doctrine poses problems for the referentialist semantics that prevailed in
Nāgārjuna’s philosophical environment. Tanaka’s “In Search of the Semantics of
Emptiness” offers several suggestions as to how Mādhyamikas could interpret the
meaningfulness of their own claims. In the absence of ultimately real or unreal objects
to which such claims could refer, Mādhyamikas might opt for a deflationary semantics;
Tanaka objects that this veers toward conflating the true with whatever happens to be
believed. He proposes fictionalist and ultimately pragmatist semantics as capturing the
Mādhyamika stance. Mark Siderits, meanwhile, considers analogous difficulties for
Buddhist ethics: if ultimately things are neither real nor unreal, then ultimately they are
neither good nor bad. This plays dissonant against the vibrancy of Buddhist ethical
discourse, and threatens to leave the latter as misleading and counterfactual as talk of
enduring selves. In “Madhyamaka Emptiness and Buddhist Ethics,” Siderits critiques
three proposed links between the metaphysics of emptiness and the imperative to
cultivate compassion, before settling on a fourth: the two discourses neither contradict
nor follow from one another, since each is optimized for a different pedagogical
context. LIN Chen-kuo’s “Emptiness and Violence: An Unexpected Encounter of
Nāgārjuna with Derrida and Levinas” explores the relationship between emptiness
and the nature of violence, harm, distortion, and other undesirables that cannot ulti-
mately obtain. Lin intriguingly suggests that Madhyamaka would identify conceptual
thinking and linguistic reference as the fundamental form of violence: none of the acts
conventionally deemed harmful or distortive could compare with the encompassing
fact of saṃsāra itself, institutionalized by our ongoing cognitive failures. Graham
Priest’s “Speaking of the Ineffable…” begins by rehearsing certain familiar difficulties
(recognized by Western and Asian thinkers alike) facing any attempt at referring to or
characterizing what cannot be referred to or characterized. Priest proposes that the
relative ease with which Buddhists discuss things avowedly undiscussable draws on
their comfort with a four-valued logic (catuṣkoṭi) whereon some contradictions are true.
Review of Nothingness in Asian Philosophy 479

He offers a contemporary, rigorously formal interpretation of how thinkers versed in the

catuṣkoṭi might construct valid arguments about ineffable states of affairs.
HO Chien-hsing turns to Madhyamaka’s early reception in China; his “Emptiness as
Subject-Object Unity” presents Sengzhao 僧肇, a foundational Chinese Buddhist think-
er whose articulation of emptiness borrows heavily from the Daoist discourse of
undifferentiated totality. As Ho relates them, Sengzhao’s arguments for emptiness focus
on the failure of referring expressions to fully or uniquely express the natures of their
referents: that referents discernibly have some nature of their own, which necessarily
outruns conceptual specification, implies the possibility of nonconceptual engagement
with them. Ho concludes by arguing for the contemporary viability of Sengzhao’s
position, particularly as against the view that all experience is conceptually structured.
Rajam Raghunathan’s “On Nothing in Particular” draws from Parmenides and his
successors a four-way division of ontological space. A thing may be either determi-
nately or indeterminately predicable; it may also be either definitely or indefinitely real.
The domain of determinately predicable and definitely real objects poses the least
ontological difficulty, that of the indeterminately predicable and indefinitely real the
most. Raghunathan suggests that we can sharpen our picture of both Nāgārjuna and
Sengzhao by placing these alongside the two further domains of the determinate but
indefinite (e.g., fictitious particulars) and the indeterminate but definite (e.g.,
Abhidharmic conventional realities). YAO Zhihua rounds off the anthology’s
indocentric first half by examining the controversy over nonexistent intentional objects
in the Yogācārabhūmi. His “The Cognition of Nonexistent Objects” helpfully demon-
strates connections between emergent Buddhist idealism and such corollary commit-
ments as presentism in the philosophy of time, the unrestricted scope of mental
perception, and the irreducibility of negative to positive judgments.
In “The Notion of Wu or Nonbeing as the Root of the Universe and a Guide for
Life,” LIU Xiaogan distinguishes three roles that the concept of wu 無 plays in the
Daodejing 道德經. In some passages, wu grounds all things; in others, dao 道 grounds
all things and wu is one of its aspects; in still others, wu is merely the “absence” that
complements “presence” (you 有) in the empirical world. Liu argues that WANG Bi 王弼
fused all three of these roles in his influential commentary, equating wu with dao and
interpreting empirical remarks in a metaphysical key. According to Liu, whatever the
theoretical tensions within and between Wang and the Daodejing, they agree in
foregrounding wu’s supreme utility as a negative means toward positive ends. Douglas
L. Berger’s “The Relation of Nothing and Something” joins Liu in problematizing
Wang’s synthetic metaphysical development of his base-text’s more piecemeal and
ambiguous observations. Berger argues that Wang’s identification of wu as foundation-
al makes less sense of a key Daodejing passage than does the competing reading of
ZHONG Hui 鍾會, which treats presence and absence as complementary in accounting
for the utility of things. Despite their differences, Zhong and Wang both link wu with
spatiality, and their shared interest in the empty spaces that permit action resonates with
conspicuously three-dimensional portraits of excellence from the Zhuangzi 莊子. In
“Was There Something in Nothingness?”, LIU JeeLoo contends that Wang’s reification
of wu not only fails to persuade philosophically—it has also hampered the Chinese
metaphysical tradition’s efforts at understanding its own history. As Liu reconstructs
them, the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi ultimately agree with Neo-Confucians that the
ground of things, while indeterminate, is hardly “nothing” and resembles rather a
480 Stephen C. Walker

boundless fund of potential. Wang’s interpretation obscured this commonality,

prompting Neo-Confucians to suppose that they disagreed with the Daodejing itself
rather than with him. I came away from these three essays feeling that Anglophone
readers could benefit deeply from more published work on WANG Bi, who emerges
here as a kind of antihero and shadow-counselor to China’s entire speculative tradition.
Chris Fraser’s contribution further analyzes the Zhuangist “eudaimonism” that he
has explored in several recent papers. On Fraser’s reading, numerous Zhuangzi pas-
sages sketch a virtuoso mode of activity characterized by fluid adaptation to whatever
needs and opportunities happen to present themselves. His “Heart-Fasting, Forgetting,
and Using the Heart Like a Mirror” enlists Foucault’s concept of “ethical work” to
clarify and critically assess the means by which Zhuangist adepts attain their empty (xu
虛) states of self-loss, creativity, and effective engagement. Fraser concludes with an
intriguing contrast between this mode of activity and the more assertive “flow” state
with which it is sometimes identified. Alan K. L. Chan’s “Embodying Nothingness and
the Ideal of the Affectless Sage in Daoist Philosophy” traces debates about emotionless
and desireless exemplars from the pre-Qin 秦 to the late imperial era. If sages imitate or
embody the ground of things, and that ground is indistinct or empty, what does this
imply for the sage’s affective capacities and dispositions? Does a sage have no affective
responses at all, or are his responses in perfect accord with a given normative order?
Can only some people attain the optimal affective state, or is it open to everyone—and
by what means? Like several other essays in this collection, Chan’s underlines the
central importance of Wei-Jin 魏晉 philosophers in shaping the ongoing reception of
pre-imperial thought.
Halla Kim’s “Nothingness in Korean Buddhism” surveys three seminal figures in
the Korean Buddhist tradition, aiming in part to exonerate them from the charge of
“nihilism” that Neo-Confucians wielded against their opponents; in this respect, Kim’s
paper resonates with LIU JeeLoo’s. Compared with the Buddhisms surveyed in the
anthology’s first half, these Buddhisms vest far more of their rhetoric in reassurances of
an ultimate foundation—when emptiness is not just the nature of things but also their
(marvelous) ground, we move in a discursive space that is hard to frame without both
Buddhist and Daoist resources. Gereon Kopf’s piece, “Zen, Philosophy, and Empti-
ness,” complements Kim’s in its historical and textual scope. Kopf centers his narrative
on Dōgen’s 道元 work, finding in it a particularly thoroughgoing and challenging
system for the realization of emptiness. As Kopf presents him, Dōgen appears to
embody a point made by the volume’s editors in their introduction (xxi): that in looking
from South to East Asian materials, we loosen our focus on theoretical problems and
redirect it toward practical difficulties. Dōgen emerges a master technocrat, a surgeon at
severing attachments.
The final three essays deal with leading figures of the Kyoto School. If, as the editors
state (xxvii), Buddho-Daoist conceptions of nothingness were still alive in the 20th
century, then it seems they spoke mainly in Japonic dialects of philosophical German.
John W. M. Krummel’s “Anontology and the Issue of Being and Nothing in Kitarō
Nishida” tracks NISHIDA Kitarō’s 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) evolving philosophy of
nonbeing across more than thirty years of publication. The sheer variety of thinkers
from which Nishida draws is dazzling in itself, making his work an object lesson in
philosophizing globally. Given the recurrent anxiety about “nihilism” that animates
other papers in this collection, it is interesting to watch Nishida and Krummel deal with
Review of Nothingness in Asian Philosophy 481

charges of “substantialism”—suggesting ways in which fruitful discussions about

nothingness should begin by rejecting ontology as the default conceptual framework.
In “Tanabe’s Dialectic of Species as Absolute Nothingness,” OZAKI Makoto shows
TANABE Hajime 田辺元 (1885–1962) plumbing the political and religious implications
of the anontological inquiry that he inherits from Nishida. Tanabe’s work provides
intriguing counterpoint to typical Anglo-American strategies for engaging classical
Asian ideas, as it engages them in a conversation centered on the legacy of Kant and
Hegel. DEGUCHI Yasuo concludes the volume by reflecting on the tension between
emptiness (kū 空) and nothingness (mu 無) in the thought of NISHITANI Keiji 西谷啓治
(1900–1990). “Nishitani on Emptiness and Nothingness” suggests a fruitful avenue for
extending the anthology’s overall project, by emphasizing the role that imagery played
in shaping one thinker’s struggles to conceptualize nonbeing. It is symbols above all (in
Nishitani’s case, the open sky) that convey nonbeing’s “amicable meaninglessness”
(323), and this points to the specifically aesthetic power of Buddhist and Daoist
traditions that the anthology has been able to address only indirectly.
With its ambitious scope, rewarding detail, and keen attention to current debates, this
volume ably summarizes the state of its field—and will doubtless provide a key
reference point as those debates develop further.