Book Reviews

Dao, Sep 2007

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Book Reviews

Dao 0 Ellen Y. Zhang , Hong Kong Baptist University 1 Philip J. Ivanhoe, City University of Hong Kong - Growing numbers of individuals representing a range of fields and viewpoints have attempted to bridge the gap between Buddhism and Western psychology. In his stimulating new work, Contexts and Dialogue, JIANG Tao acknowledges the tremendous value of these groundbreaking efforts, but he sees a persistent problem: thus far, to one degree or another, all such efforts have suffered from the shortcoming of reading Buddhism through the lens of modern psychology and hence, frequently reconcile the two in ways that use psychology as the norm. According to Jiang, this is particularly evident in those cases that interpret the Yogācāra Buddhist ālayavijñāna (store consciousness) as a form of Buddhist “unconscious.” Jiang’s work attempts to rectify this problem and provide a bit of balance in the dialogue. To that end he asks, “What do the differences between ālayavijñāna and the unconscious tell us about the presuppositions of the modern psychological notion of the unconscious and the Yogācāra notion of the ālayavijñāna?” (13). In answering this question, Jiang does not seek to reconcile the two, or privilege one over the other, but rather to further clarify their respective views. He does this by carefully explaining them in their own contexts and then, from those contexts, brings them together so that they might set each other in greater relief. The result may be a bit startling for some, especially those who have tended to see in Buddhism certain views that mirror those of psychology. It is amply clear by the end of Jiang’s important work that there are deep differences here. In fact, the differences raise questions about whether these two views can ever be reconciled without fundamentally changing one or the other. Jiang divides the book into five chapters. He begins with the history of the ālayavijñāna theory and sets his discussion of that historical development within the framework of a set of metaphysical questions driving Buddhist thought. As Jiang details it, the key lies in a tension that exists between Abhidharma Buddhist views of no self and momentariness. As soon as the radical momentariness of the various early Abhidharma thinkers naturally emerged from considerations of the no-self doctrine, they faced the difficulty of explaining continuity without reintroducing some sort of an enduring and/or essentially existent self nature. Jiang refers to this as the “problematic of continuity” and as he shows, this problem eventually led to the Yogācāra School’s ālayavijñāna concept. Jiang’s summary of these issues in light of key questions provides a perspective from which the various viewpoints flow quite naturally one to another. Readers unfamiliar with this material should find the explanation clear and straightforward. Following this summary of the history of the ālayavijñāna, Jiang’s second chapter then moves into a specific consideration of this concept in Xuanzang’s 玄藏 Treatise on the Establishment of the Doctrine of Consciousness-Only (Cheng Weishi Lun ). There has been little work to date in English on this important topic and Jiang’s presentation is a welcome addition to those efforts. Here Jiang details the ways in which Xuanzang first seeks to establish the primacy of consciousness through an analysis of subject and object as two (falsely) differentiated aspects of the same cognitive event. Of course, this begs questions about the ontological status of the apparent object, as well as the awareness of such objects, and Jiang clearly explains Xuanzang’s views on these matters. Following this, Jiang presents Xuanzang’s arguments for the continuity of consciousness as momentary phenomena with structural coherence. A key to this effort by Xuanzang is the functioning of the ālayavijñāna’s bîja (seeds) as a necessity for the perception of both change and structural continuity. In the end then, according to Jiang, Xuanzang’s view finds a way to explain continuity (both objective and subjective) without sacrificing momentariness or the key Buddhist doctrine of no self. The third chapter leaves Buddhism to focus on Freud’s and Jung’s notions of the unconscious. Jiang devotes relatively less space to their views than to the ālayavijñāna above. The decision to be brief here is driven by the probably accurate assumption that most readers of this work will already know more about Freud and Jung than about Xuanzang and the ālayavijñāna. Fair enough. However, for those of us who are coming at this with more knowledge of Buddhist views than of Freud’s or Jung’s, an expanded explanation equivalent to his discussion of the ālayavijñāna would be much appreciated. That said, the information is clearly presented and tightly focused on points that are essential to Jiang’s later analysis. The fourth and fifth chapters bring the three theories together and compare them on their own terms in light of several key are (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11712-007-9018-9.pdf

Book Reviews, Dao, 2007, pp. 301-323, Volume 6, Issue 3, DOI: 10.1007/s11712-007-9018-9