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Unusual Article on Buddhism and Cultural Ethical penetration

Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 3:45 pm
by Leo Rivers
This essay here:

http://www.crvp.org/book/Series01/I-39/ch22.htm is about how to increase mutual values recognition in Buddhism and cross-cultural communication.

Sample of essay from

CHAPTER XXII APPROPRIATING THE OTHER AND TRANSFORMING CONSCIOUSNESS INTO WISDOM: SOME PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS ON CHINESE BUDDHISM1 
Vincent SheN
 
In responding to today’s urgent situation full of conflicts created by the self-enclosure of different disciplines, cultures, political and religious groups, etc., we humans should be more concerned with one another and the possibility of mutual enrichment. In order to overcome antagonism by appealing to effective dialogue, in recent years I have proposed "strangification"2  and "language appropriation" as viable strategies. The term "strangification," a neologism that might appear odd in English, makes sense in Chinese; waitui ÍâÍÆ means, etymologically, an act of going outside of oneself to the other, or going outside of one’s familiarity to the strangeness, to the stranger. This act presupposes the appropriation of language by which we learn to express our ideas or values in the language either of others or understandable to others. "Strangification" and "language appropriation" presuppose an original generosity toward the other, without limiting oneself to the claim of reciprocity, quite often presupposed in social relationship and ethical golden rules.
Philosophically speaking, before we can establish a sort of reciprocity (emphasized for example in Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don) as the principle of human society, there must be a generous act of going outside of oneself to the other, so that a relation of reciprocity can be established accordingly. The new principles for society and ethics that we are looking for should be based on original generosity and strangification as the act of going outside of oneself to the other.
In this paper, I will provide some philosophical reflections on Chinese Buddhism based upon strangification, language appropriation, and generosity to the other. 3  I do not make the distinction, as Yu-lan Fung did, between "Chinese Buddhism" and "Buddhism in China." Rather, I use the term "Chinese Buddhism" to denote broadly those Buddhist tendencies introduced and developed in China without basing their "Chineseness" upon any criteria whatsoever.
Fung took Weishi Ψ×R, or the Conscious-Only School.
[this is just the intro] :namaste: