"Zen is a practice that transcends any religious form. It’s like an apple. You can eat it with any kind of religion." -Sawaki Roshi

Abandon your treasured delusions and hit the road with one of the most important Zen masters of twentieth-century Japan. Eschewing the entrapments of vanity, power, and money, "Homeless" Kodo Sawaki Roshi refused to accept a permanent position as a temple abbot, despite repeated offers. Instead, he lived a traveling, "homeless" life, going from temple to temple, student to student, teaching and instructing and never allowing himself to stray from his chosen path. He is responsible for making Soto Zen available to the common people outside of monasteries. His teachings are short, sharp, and powerful. Always clear, often funny, and sometimes uncomfortably close to home, they jolt us into awakening. Kosho Uchiyama expands and explains his teacher's wisdom with his commentary. Trained in Western philosophy, he draws parallels between Zen teachings and the Bible, Descartes, and Pascal. Shohaku Okumura has also added his own commentary, grounding his teachers’ power and sagacity for the contemporary, Western practitioner. Experience the timeless, practical wisdom of three generations of Zen masters.

books

Books

Kosho Uchiyama Roshi

Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

Will people fight for what is foundationally right or justice, or will people merely fight for themselves?

Universality

Can it be understood in this way that the politicians sell their agendas like a commodity to be consumed? What if we do not buy it

Asymmetrical

1. For Plato, language shows that the idea that there is only one thing is absurd (244c-d): “It makes no sense to say that there are two names, while also thinking that there is nothing more than One. […] In fact, the One, being One, is also the name of the One and of the name itself”. This passage is hard, but it means: If the One has a name, then there is not only the One, but at least three things: the One, the name “One” and the “unity” of the name, since the name is also “one”.

Plato against monism in the Sophist

2. Again (251b): “Following the same logic, we suggest that the other things are each one One, while, at the same time, we call it (i.e.: the “One”) many things by the many names”.

Unity in Diversity

3. For Plato, the idea that there is only one thing and the idea that there are many things that cannot mix are both false, so only discontinuism is true (252d-e): “Therefore, certainly only the third alternative remains. […] Indeed, only one of these three options would be the necessary one: either all things can mix, or none or some can while others cannot. […] To tell the truth, it was proven that the first two options are, in fact, impossible. […] Therefore, anyone who wants to answer correctly should choose the remaining option among these three”.

Discontinuism: The Only True Alternative

4. For Plato, the genders are discontinuous (254c-d): “Therefore, we admit that some of the genders can communicate with each other, while others can't do it […]”.
5. The idea that there are many things that cannot mix is against philosophy (259d-e): “Indeed, my friend, trying to separate everything from everything is not right and, moreover, it is typical of someone who is completely ignorant and not a lover of wisdom. […]. The total destruction of all reason is to separate each thing from all the others because, for us, reason was created by the interweaving of the forms with each other”.

Plato's Views on Discontinuous Genders and Unity in Philosophy

6. Plato, about the differences in the speech-reason, the “sixth gender”, which is also discontinuous (262a): “Therefore, there is no speech at all by saying only the names continuously nor, in turn, by saying verbs without names […] because the speech would not exist by saying these things continuously”.
7. Again (262e): “So, inasmuch as we agreed that some objects are adequate to each other, while others are not, with respect to the signs of the voice, clearly some cannot be adapted, while others can be adapted, so the discourse emerges thanks to these things.”.

Plato's Views on Discontinuous Speech and Discourse Emergence

A fluent and accurate new translation of the dialogue that, of all Plato's works, has seemed to speak most directly to the interests of contemporary and analytical philosophers. White's extensive introduction explores the dialogue's central themes, its connection with related discussions in other dialogues, and its implicaiton for the interpretation of Plato's metaphysics.

Plato

Sophist

“I have always assumed that the user of any medium is the content. The person who turns on the electric light is the content of the electric light, just as the reader of a book is the content of the book. This is standard Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrine, that the cognitive agent is himself thing and content.” ▪Marshall McLuhan

Container Among The Thing Contained

In Architecture as Metaphor, Kojin Karatani detects a recurrent "will to architecture" that he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking, traversing architecture, philosophy, literature, linguistics, city planning, anthropology, political economics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics.Kojin Karatani, Japan's leading literary critic, is perhaps best known for his imaginative readings of Shakespeare, Soseki, Marx, Wittgenstein, and most recently Kant. His works, of which Origins of Modern Japanese Literature is the only one previously translated into English, are the generic equivalent to what in America is called "theory." Karatani's writings are important not only for the insights they offer on the various topics under discussion, but also as an example of a distinctly non-Western critical intervention. In Architecture as Metaphor, Karatani detects a recurrent "will to architecture" that he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking, traversing architecture, philosophy, literature, linguistics, city planning, anthropology, political economics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. In the three parts of the book, he analyzes the complex bonds between construction and deconstruction, thereby pointing to an alternative model of "secular criticism," but in the domain of philosophy rather than literary or cultural criticism. As Karatani claims in his introduction, because the will to architecture is practically nonoexistent in Japan, he must first assume a dual role: one that affirms the architectonic (by scrutinizing the suppressed function of form) and one that pushes formalism to its collapse (by invoking Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem). His subsequent discussions trace a path through the work of Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Finally, amidst the drive that motivates all formalization, he confronts an unbridgeable gap, an uncontrollable event encountered in the exchange with the other; thus his speculation turns toward global capital movement. While in the present volume he mainly analyzes familiar Western texts, it is precisely for this reason that his voice discloses a distance that will add a new dimension to our English-language discourse.

Kojin Karatani

Architecture as Metaphor

Objective Truth is not some external factors out there. Truth can only happens where there is a subjective involvement.In order to choose, you have to be chosen.Freedom is a contingency made universal or necessity.

Truth

The animal, therefore, is not naked because it is naked. It doesn't feel its own nudity. There is no nudity 'in nature. There is only the sentiment, the affect, the (conscious or unconscious) experience of existing in nakedness. Because it *is* naked, without *existing* in nakedness, the animal neither feels nor sees itself naked. And it, therefore, is not naked. At least that is what is thought. For man, it would be the opposite, and clothing derives from technics. We would therefore have to think shame and technicity together, as the same 'subject'.

And evil and history, and work, and so many other things that go along with it. Man would be the only one to have invented a garment to cover his sex. He would only be a man to the extent that he was able to be naked, that is to say to be ashamed, to know himself to be ashamed because he is no longer naked. And knowing *himself* would mean knowing himself to be ashamed. On the other hand, because the animal is naked without consciousness of being naked, modesty would remain as foreign to it as would immodesty. As would the knowledge of self that is involved in that.(Excerpt from the text)

The translated, complete text of Derrida’s 1997 ten-hour address, “The Autobiographical Animal,” focusing on the industrialized treatment of animals. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida’s work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction?dating from Descartes?between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single “the animal.” Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book’s autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida’s experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of “man’s dominion over the beasts” and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of “life” to which he returned in much of his later work.

philosophy

Philosophy

The translated, complete text of Derrida’s 1997 ten-hour address, “The Autobiographical Animal,” focusing on the industrialized treatment of animals. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida’s work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction?dating from Descartes?between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single “the animal.” Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them. The book’s autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida’s experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of “man’s dominion over the beasts” and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of “life” to which he returned in much of his later work.

Jacques Derrida

The Animal That Therefore I Am

Parmenides proclaimed the One is Being, All is One. But in situations, we find that there are multiples! How are we to reconcile the gap between the One and the Multiples/Many? If then that the One participate in the Many, the One cannot be One but contains it’s own multiple other. The One is not properly One but many. Therefore the One is Not, but the Many is. However, there is Oneness. If the many or multiple is, how can the many give rise to Oneness? Either the One as such is an Operation or the Many have qualities, virtual intensities which exhibits the operation of Oneness.

Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

Universality

Asymmetrical

Sophist

Architecture as Metaphor

Michael Neihsial