This study was born during a stay as Numata Visiting Professor in the fall semester of 2015 at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I want to thank the Numata Foundation for providing the funds, Victor Hori for inviting me and hosting me, and Lara Braitstein and Dan Ceres for supporting me. I taught the class “Issues in Buddhist Studies,” in which I read Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age with the students in light of the encounter of Zen with the West. I want to thank Matthew Southey, Matthieu Clochard, Jingjing Li, Isabel Essebag, Devni Walpola for their critical input during those classes. Thanks to Charles Taylor for coming to give a guest lecture for the course, and for being very supportive of this comparative project involving his work.
During the past few years I have lectured on this manuscript during various courses at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Thanks to my students Babette Maman, Esra van Schaik, Rob Frank and Bastiaan Musch for their contributions to the discussions. Thanks to Edward Zhang for critically evaluating this manuscript as part of his research internship assignment. Thanks to Anne-wieke Vroom, Lourens Minnema, Christa Anbeek, Daan Oostveen and Ursula Baatz, for reading the manuscript and offering helpful suggestions. Thanks to Marianne Moyaert, editor of the Currents of Encounter book series, for her continuous support and encouragement. And finally, I want to thank my Zen teacher Ton Lathouwers for his dharma teachings and his faith in me throughout the years.
Earlier versions of some of the material in this book have appeared, as indicated in the footnotes in the text, in the following publications.
- – “Enlightenment Revisited: Romantic, Historicist, Hermeneutic and Comparative Perspectives on Zen.” Acta Comparanda XIX (2008): 87–97.
- – “Zen Spirituality in a Secular Age I.” Studies in Spirituality 18 (2008): 39–60. Republished in Transforming Spirituality, edited by R. Zas Fris de Col, 637–658. Leuven: Peeters, 2016.
- – “Zen Spirituality in a Secular Age II.” Studies in Spirituality 19 (2009): 227–247. Republished in Transforming Spirituality, edited by R. Zas Fris de Col, 659–680. Leuven: Peeters, 2016.
- – “Nietzsche and Japanese Buddhism on the Cultivation of the Body: To What Extent does Truth Bear Incorporation?,” Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Vol. 1.2 (2009): 223–251.
- – “Towards a Philosophy of Chan Enlightenment: Linji’s Anti-enlightenment Rhetoric.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37/2 (2010): 231–247.
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– Nietzsche and Zen: Self-overcoming without a Self (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2011), parts of Chapters 6, 7 and 10. - – “The Mystical Hermeneutics of Eckhart and Dōgen: The Continuous Self-Revelation of Buddha Nature.” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue 21/2 (2011): 151–169.
- – “Zen-Christian Dual Belonging and the Practice of Apophasis: Strategies of Meeting Rose Drew’s Theological Challenge.” Open Theology 3 (2017): 434–446.
- – “Hisamatsu Shin’ichi: Oriental Nothingness.” In The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy, edited by Gereon Kopf, 635–647. Dordrecht: Springer, 2019.