ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I shall explore the ethical meaning, motif, and consequence of subverting conventional moral distinctions in the Hongzhou School of Chinese Chan Buddhism by examining the school’s deconstruction of the concept of karma. I shall attempt to reveal the paradoxical or aporetical relationship between deconstruction and the ethical, and to reach a better understanding of the Chan strategy and its ethicality in the context of Chan soteriological practice. These attempts will show the trace of certain influences received from the contemporary discussions of Derridean deconstruction and its ethic,1 although these influences are limited to their inspirations or the use of certain vocabularies. I am aware that since the 1990s, the study of Buddhist ethics has thrived in relative terms. A number of publications have contributed to a critical study of Chan/Zen ethic. However, none of them has utilized the most recent insights into the aporia of the ethical from the contemporary discussion of the Derridean ethic. Although Derridean and Chan Buddhist undertakings are deeply different, those contemporary insights, in my view, will offer us a new paradigm for the rethinking or reinterpreting of the ethical dimension of Chan. This attempt of reinterpretation will, in turn, illuminate our understanding of the Derridean ethic by probing the ethics of deconstruction in its other context or by articulating the other perspective on the same issue.
