This paper is about different types of silence, and about differing processes of philosophical investigation and sagely illumination. It is argued that the sagely Dao of wu wei leads to silence in the sense of no spoken words, and the philosophical way of proof leads to silence in the sense of no spoken words. So both proof and wu wei both lead to silence in the sense of no spoken words. Accordingly there is a type of silence that results from (...) the explosive process of philosophical argumentation and reduction to no spoken words because of undecidability, and there is also a type of silence that results from the implosive process of sagely silence and reversion to silent illumination with no spoken words. However, the silence of explosion and the silence of implosion differ as regards processes of reduction and reversion respectively. Therefore, proof and wu wei both lead to silence in the sense of no spoken words, but the type of silence resulting from the explosive process of philosophical argumentation and reduction to no spoken words because of undecidability and the type of silence resulting from the implosive process of sagely silence and reversion to silent illumination because of the incommunicability of Dao differ. (shrink)
The thesis of this paper is that the question of whether and how statements of the form 'p and not-p' can have religious meaning in Buddhism can be answered in the affirmative and how in terms of a movement from pre-meditative to meditative state to a post-meditative state in life. The paper focuses on the Diamond Sutra in light of Shigenori Nagatomo's study (Asian Philosophy Vol. 10, No. 3, 2000) and advances an additional line of inquiry. This view emphasises the (...) process in the meditation learning curve from pre-meditative to meditative to post-meditative states that provides the personal religious significance (but not ordinary factual meaning) when the phrase 'A is not A, therefore it is A' is used in the Diamond Sutra. (shrink)
