Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism
This is a very timely collection of thirteen articles of intriguing philosophical
encounters that cross boundaries of time and traditional frameworks: Merleau-
Ponty and various Buddhist philosophers, classical and contemporary ones. The
comparative themes and methods running through the volume are neither philosophically
haphazard nor simply of historical interest, as is aptly emphasized by the
editors in their introduction chapter entitled “Philosophy, Nonphilosophy, and Comparative
Philosophy”: “This volume inherits Merleau-Ponty’s legacy of challenging
the border that compartmentalizes philosophy and groups it into different camps of
philosophy and nonphilosophy, Eastern andWestern philosophies…. To think ‘about’
philosophy and its outside, then, as Merleau-Ponty proves, is not one topic of
philosophy but directly related to philosophizing itself” (2).
The volume is divided into three parts: Part I “Body: Self in the Flesh of the
World,” Part II “Space: Thinking and Being in the Chiasm of Visibility,” and Part III
“The World: Ethics of Emptiness, Ethics of the Flesh.” Most of the contributions
agree that there are seminal similarities between Merleau-Ponty’s body-centered
philosophy as epitomized by the notion of the flesh of the world and the Buddhist
understanding of “dependent co-arising.”
Jin Y. Park sheds light on another significant point of encounter between Merleau-
Ponty and the Zen Buddhist strand of thought represented by the twelfth-century
Korean Zen Master Pojo Chinul (1158-1210). Park argues that “the familiarity of
commonsense logic, in which Chinul included the logical articulation of Buddhism as
represented by Huayan Buddhism, disables the subject’s capacity to see the cacophony
of existence.…Questioning, or interrogation, in this sense, is not just one method
for Merleau-Ponty and Chinul’s huatou meditation. It is the way one engages with the
world” (111).
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