ABSTRACT
Having dialogued Zen Buddhist ideas on selfhood and temporality with their twentieth century phenomenological counterparts in Part Two, I would like to dedicate the remaining chapters to develop a Zen alternative to the notion of personal identity. To be sure, Zen Buddhism never explicitly explores the questions “What is a person? What is a human being?” (King 1991, 137) per se; even Nishida never directly asks the questions characteristic of the Euro-American quest for the self, such as the question of personal identity and the articulation of the mind-body problem. However, as Sally B. King observes, “the question of the human being is the question par excellence with which the Buddhist tradition as a whole struggles” (King 1991, 137). As it has become clear over the preceding four chapters, Zen Buddhism does have a vested, albeit predominantly soteriological and, in Nishida’s case, epistemological, interest in the issues of selfhood and temporality. Furthermore, Nishida’s terminology of the continuity of discontinuity and “mind-body-oneness” seems, at times, to reflect the conceptual problematic framed as the problem of personal identity and the mind- body problem. For this reason, it is justified to explore the conceptual ramifications of the Zen Buddhist concept of presencing for the philosophical stratification of an alternative model of personhood.
