Rethinking Transcendence: The Role of Language in Zen Experience

TLDR

The essay does not rely on East Asian textual claims about the relationship between language and experience. The essay aims to offer an alternative to the Western-language view that experience is pure and unshaped by language. It interprets Zen practice by recognizing how language and socially articulated practices shape Zen experience, and it critically examines the normative status of the Western claim that experience transcends language. The essay concludes that we cannot justify the view that religious experience, including enlightenment, stands entirely beyond the shaping power of language and culture.

Abstract

The object of this essay is to present an alternative to what I take to be a fundamental component of Western-language interpretations of experience-the idea that is an undistorted, pure of things as they beyond the shaping power of language. This alternative will consist in an interpretation of practice and that acknowledges numerous ways in which language and linguistically articulated social practice have shaped and made possible distinctively Zen modes of experience. The essay's critical focus will be restricted to the normative status of our (Westernlanguage) claim that experience transcends language, a position either developed or assumed, so far as I can see, in all English language works on that attempt to articulate what enlightenment is. The essay is not, therefore, grounded in a text-based descriptive claim about what East Asians have thought or said about the relation between language and experience. Instead it asserts that regardless of how East Asians have understood the role of language in experience, we are no longer justified in thinking that this kind of religious experience (or any other) stands altogether beyond the shaping power of language and culture.