Her chapter explains how two nice Japanese Buddhist masters described their philosophies of kind.
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This month, Pamela D. Winfield revealed a chapter in “The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion” ed. Jennifer Hughes, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, and S. Brent Plate (Routledge Press, 2023).
“Material Theories in Japanese Buddhism: What Kūkai and Dōgen Thought About Things” seems within the first part of the amount devoted to the world’s various “Genealogies of Material Religion.” Her chapter explains how two nice Japanese Buddhist masters described their philosophies of kind. As against Greek and Christian neo-platonic cosmology that posits a vertically oriented emanation of kinds from an ineffable supply, these two Buddhist masters describe a radically immanent and horizontally-oriented dependent arising of kinds that manifest in and as vacancy. Kūkai describes kind and vacancy ontologically as mutually reflexive phrases, however Dōgen sees them epistemologically because the expertise of kind, then vacancy, then kind once more (albeit in a remodeled gentle). Her evaluation on this quantity thus contributes to our understanding of materiality each throughout and inside spiritual traditions.