DO VAZIO DE UM SATORI: A TÉCNICA DO HAICAI NOS POEMAS NIRVANA DE ADRIANA LISBOA E ANIMAL DE INVIERNO DE JOSÉ WATANABE

presente trabalho pretende discutir acerca das técnicas do haicai nos poemas Nirvana de Adriana Lisboa e Animal de Invierno do poeta peruano José Watanabe, ambos possuem uma construção estética do vazio, através da presença de técnicas do haicai e de conceitos budistas que demonstram uma incorporação do olhar contemplativo perante a realidade. Neste sentido, a técnica do karumi (かるみ) utilizado por Bashō Matsuo (1644 – 1694) serve, em ambos os poemas, para um diálogo entre corpo, leveza e vazio. Para uma reflexão teórica sobre a significação na linguagem poética, serão utilizados autores como Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980), Nishitani Keiji (1900 – 1990), Shirane Haruo (1950), Italo Calvino (1923 – 1985), Mutlu Konuk Blasing (1944) cujas obras são importantes para explorarmos diversos aspectos do diálogo entre leveza, peso e vazio na linguagem.

Nishitani Keiji (1900–90)

Nishitani Keiji is generally regarded as the leading light of the ‘second generation’ Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy. Influenced by Zen thinkers from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism as well as by figures from the Western mystical and existential traditions, he is a pre-eminent voice in East–West comparative philosophy and late twentieth-century Buddhist–Christian dialogue. Primarily a philosopher of religion, Nishitani strove throughout his career to formulate existential responses to the problem of nihilism.

Dōgen (1200–53)

Dōgen Kigen, the founder of Japanese Sōtō Zen Buddhism, is most noted for his argument that meditation is the expression or enactment of enlightenment, not the means to attaining it. Dōgen believed that even a novice might achieve insight, however fleeting. The difficulty, however, is in expressing that insight in one’s daily acts, both linguistic and non-linguistic. In developing his position, Dōgen articulated a phenomenology of incarnate consciousness and a sophisticated analysis of meaning. His theories of mind–body unity, contextualized meaning, temporality and theory–praxis influenced many prominent modern Japanese philosophers such as Watsuji Tetsurō, Tanabe Hajime and Nishitani Keiji.

Kyoto School

The Kyoto school of philosophy pivots around three twentieth-century Japanese thinkers who held chairs of philosophy or religion at Kyoto University: Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962) and Nishitani Keiji (1900–91). Its principal living representatives, who also held chairs at Kyoto until their retirement, are Takeuchi Yoshinori (1913–) and Ueda Shizuteru (1926–). The keynote of the school was struck by Nishida in his attempt, on the one hand, to offer a distinctively Eastern contribution to the Western philosophical tradition by bringing key Buddhist concepts to bear on traditional philosophical questions, and on the other, to enrich Buddhist self-understanding by submitting it to the rigours of European philosophy. The name ‘Kyoto school’ was coined in 1932 by the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun (1900–45) to denounce what he saw as a bourgeois ideology – which he characterized as ‘hermeneutical, transhistorical, formalistic, romantic, and phenomenological’ – that had grown up around Nishida, Tanabe and their immediate disciples at the time. These latter included Miki Kiyoshi (1897–1945), Kosaka Masaaki (1900–69) and Koyama Iwao (1905–93) as well as the young Nishitani. At the time the Japanese state had taken its first definitive steps in the direction of a militaristic nationalism that would involve it in the ‘fifteen-year war’ with Asia and finally the West over the period 1930–45. As the leading philosophical movement in Japan, the Kyoto school was caught up in this history, although there was little unanimity among the responses of the principal figures. Postwar criticisms and purges of the Japanese intelligentsia attached a certain stigma to the school’s name, but later and more studied examination of those events, as well as the enthusiastic reception of translations of their works into Western languages, has done much to ensure a more balanced appraisal. Today, the philosophy of the Kyoto-school thinkers is recognized as an important contribution to the history of world philosophy whose ‘nationalistic’ elements are best recognized as secondary, or at least as an unnecessary trivialization of its fundamental inspirations. As a school of thought, the common defining characteristics of the Kyoto school may be seen in an overlap of four nodal concerns: self-awareness, the logic of affirmation-in-negation, absolute nothingness and historicity.

Blindness, Blinking and Boredom: Seeing and Being in Buddhism and Film

This essay takes up a paradoxical problem articulated by Buddhist philosopher, Nishitani Keiji: the eye does not see the eye itself. It argues that film has a therapeutic function by virtue of its ability to draw our attention to this precise aspect of our existential situation; namely, that we alternate between being in our experience and perceiving ourselves in our experience. Or, to borrow Nishitani’s terms, we alternate between the act of seeing and the quest to see the eye itself. The essay explores this theme with reference to specific elements of formal cinematic language. Rather than focus on a particular film or set of films for analysis, we focus instead on how the grammar of cinematic language draws our attention to aspects of our existential situation that ordinarily escape our awareness. Insofar as this may also be a goal of Buddhist practice—that is, to expand one’s ability to perceive reality for what it is, beginning with one’s own experience of it—this essay highlights a few of the salient ways that perennial aspects of the human condition have been articulated through the languages of both Buddhism and film.