Existence is suffering. We don't have to look far to see the truth of this dictum: there's the news, of course, which is more often than not a litany of tragedies and atrocities. But even if we only look back on our own lives, suffering - both large and small - is ever-present. Partly, this is a function of how we remember. As etzsche said, "If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory."
存在就是苦难。我们不需要远离就可以看到这一格言的真理:当然,新闻更多地是一连串悲剧和暴行的诵读。但即使我们只回顾自己的生活,巨大和微小的苦难都无处不在。部分原因在于我们的记忆方式。正如尼采所说,"如果什么事物要留在记忆中,它必须被烧灼:唯有永远不会停止疼痛的东西才会留在记忆中。"

Of course, this formulation leaves open the possibility that the preponderance of suffering is only a trick of the memory. Perhaps suffering is only an accidental, contingent feature of existence, over-magnified by our minds?
当然,这种表述保留了苦难主导仅仅是记忆作 用的可能性。也许苦难只是存在的偶发性、偶然性特征,被我们的 大脑放大了?

Much philosophical thinking has been directed at some version of this question. Indeed, in the philosophical traditions of the West - that loosely connected set of diverse philosophies originating from (or claiming to originate from) the thinking of Ancient Greece - this is a central branch of enquiry: what form of being can overcome suffering, or at least make it bearable? For some thinkers, such as Marxists or utilitarians, the sources of suffering are external, and human flourishing can be achieved by changing those external conditions, whether that be along the lines of "to each according to their need", or "the greatest good for the greatest number". For others, suffering is a matter of the mind - we could think here of the Stoics, and their exhortation for us to free ourselves of our passions.
许多哲学思考都是围绕这个问题进行的。事实上,在西方哲学传统中 - 这个源于(或声称源于)古希腊思想的松散联系的各种不同哲学 - 这是一个核心的探索领域:什么形式的存在能够克服苦难,或至少使之可以承受?对于一些思想家,如马克思主义者或功利主义者,苦难的根源在于外部因素,人类的繁荣可以通过改变这些外部条件来实现,无论是按照"各尽所能,按需分配"还是"最大多数人的最大福利"。对于其他人来说,苦难是心智的问题 - 我们可以想到斯多葛派,他们劝告我们要摆脱自己的激情。

To speak of the 'West' is obviously crude; comparing it to the 'East' is all too often an exercise in cultural
西方'这个概念显然过于粗糙;将其与'东方'相比太常成为一种文化
chauvinism. Yet to collapse all of humanity together is no less reductive. There really are deep fault lines running between human cultures - different conceptualisations of suffering (and therefore, of how to flourish) is one of them. In other words, one of the ways in which 'western' and 'eastern' philosophies differ is where they locate the origins of suffering: in the 'East', suffering is neither external, nor is it a trick or mistake of the mind. Instead, suffering is the result of the mind as such - or at least, of the mind as it is conceived of by the 'West'.
沙文主义。但是将全人类归为一体也同样是简单化的做法。确实存在着深刻的分歧线贯穿于人类文化之间——不同的苦难概念化(从而也是不同的繁荣发展方式)就是其中之一。换句话说,「西方」和「东方」哲学之间的一个差异就在于,它们对苦难的源头有不同的看法:在「东方」,苦难既不是外部的,也不是心智的欺骗或错误。相反,苦难是由心智本身所致——至少是被「西方」概念化的心智。

We can see this difference in the thinking of Siddhartha Gautama better known to us as the Buddha who taught that suffering is caused by desire. Desire for wealth, for happiness, even for self-preservation. We might think that there is a correspondence here with the Stoics and their descendants, insofar as they too identified desire for what one does not have as the root cause of suffering. But this correspondence is only superficial. Beneath the surface, yawns a chasm.
我们可以在佛陀(即释迦牟尼)的思想中看到这种差异。佛陀教导说,痛苦源于欲望。欲望财富、幸福,甚至自我保护。我们可能会认为,这与斯多葛派及其后裔有所对应,因为他们也认定对自己所没有的事物的欲望是痛苦的根源。但这种对应性只是表面的。在表面之下,是一个深不可测的鸿沟。

At least, this was what an influential group of Japanese philosophers discovered when they tried to understand what Japan had to learn from western philosophy. Known as the Kyoto School, these thinkers, active in the first half of the twentieth century, were faced with a dilemma: over the 18th and 19th centuries, the West had flourished while the East including Japan - had stagnated. The Japanese Government had responded by aggressively modernising Japan's economy and military. In practice, modernisation meant westernisation. The same trajectory seemed to be in store for Japanese thought. Was there some core of Japanese philosophy that could - and should - be preserved, or was the future of Japanese thinking to be western?
至少,这是日本一群有影响力的哲学家在试图理解日本从西方哲学中学到了什么时发现的。这些被称为京都学派的思想家们在 20 世纪上半叶活跃,面临了一个困境:18 和 19 世纪,西方欣欣向荣而东方包括日本则陷入停滞。日本政府作出积极应对,开始着手现代化日本的经济和军事。实际上,现代化意味着西方化。同样的轨迹也似乎正在展现在日本思想的未来。是否有某种日本哲学的核心可以被保留下来,还是日本思想的未来必然是西方式的?

To answer that question, the Kyoto School returned to beginnings. Western philosophy, they said, begins with an ontological question: what is being? Plato, for instance, regarded as real that which has form and determination. Meanwhile, Judeo-Christian philosophy was concerned with understanding being through a higher or perfect form of being: God. If we return to the Stoics, we can see that their ethics have a similar focus on being: the point of controlling one's passions is to achieve a self-contained happiness. In modern terms, we could say that these philosophies aim not so much at doing away with the ego, but with finding its true, undistorted form.
为了回答这个问题，京都学派回到了起点。西方哲学，他们说，始于一个本体论问题：什么是存在?例如，柏拉图认为真实存在是拥有形式和定性的事物。与此同时,犹太-基督教哲学关注通过更高或完美形式的存在,即上帝,来理解存在。如果我们回到斯多噶派,我们可以看到他们的伦理学着重于存在:控制自己的情感是为了达到自我封闭的幸福。用现代术语来说,这些哲学并非旨在消除自我,而是寻找其真实、未扭曲的形式。
In contrast, the Kyoto School argued that eastern philosophy begins with a meontological question: what is nothingness? Kitaro Nishida, widely considered the founder of the school, wrote that while there was much to admire in the "impressive achievements of western culture, which thought form as being and the giving of form as good", there lay "hidden at the base of our eastern culture, preserved and passed down by our ancestors for several thousand years, something which sees the form of the formless and hears the voice of the voiceless... Our hearts and minds endlessly seek this something; and it is my wish to provide this quest with a philosophical foundation."
相比之下，京都学派认为东方哲学始于一个有关虚无的问题：什么是虚无？被广泛视为该学派创始人的西田几多郎写道，虽然西方文化有许多值得钦佩的"引人注目的成就，它们将形视为存在,并将形式赋予善"，但是"在我们东方文化的基础之下,隐藏着我们祖先几千年来保护和传承下来的东西,这种东西能看到无形之形,听到无声之声...我们的内心和思想不断寻求这种东西;而我的愿望就是为这种追求提供一个哲学基础。"

For Keiji Nishitani, one of Nishida's disciples, this quest for the formless, or 'absolute nothingness', led to a critique of modern - that is to say, western - subjectivity. Nishitani said that subjectivity is defined by a false dualism between the self and the world. The consequence of this dualism is a reifying attachment to the ego and to things - reifying because it is precisely through our attachment to the two sides of the dualistic coin that we give them a reality they would not otherwise have. Importantly, Nishitani's argument wasn't that there is
对于西田几三的弟子西谷敬二来说,这种对无形或"绝对虚无"的追求导致了对现代—即西方—主观性的批评。西谷说,主观性是由自我与世界之间的错误二元论所定义的。这种二元论的后果是对自我和事物的实体化依恋—实体化,因为正是通过我们对这双重硬币的两面的依恋,我们才赋予了它们原本不具有的现实性。重要的是,西谷的论点并非是存在任何之物。

no self at all; in fact, he argued that a simple negation of self or being - e.g. nihilism - counter-intuitively leads back to a philosophy of being, as the self that is negated is understood as a veil masking some truer, higher self or form of being. Instead, he countered the false dualism of self and world by drawing on the Mahāyāna Buddhist teaching of súnyatā, the idea that all things come into being in "interdependent origination" and are therefore empty of any independent, substantial self or being. This led Nishitani to posit a "self that is not a self".
没有真正的自我;事实上,他认为简单否定自我或存在——例如虚无主义——反直觉地导致回到一种存在的哲学,因为被否定的自我被理解为掩盖某种更真实、更高级的自我或存在形式的面纱。相反,他以大乘佛教的"空性"教义为基础,反驳了自我和世界的错误二元论,即所有事物都是在"相互依存的起源"中产生的,因此都是空无任何独立的、实体性的自我或存在。这使西谷得出"不是自我的自我"的概念。

The 'I'writing these words is an artificial separation of an ego from the universe of which 'I' am inextricably a part. The realisation that this ' I ' is an illusion is not nihilistic. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the emptiness of that ' ', in the sense that the pronoun refers to nothing real, just as 'chair' and 'you' are empty of real meaning. Far from being a negation of the world, this is an awakening to its true nature - captured beautifully in the Mahāyāna Buddhist saying, "true emptiness, marvellous being".
撰写这些词语的"我"是一种人为的将自我从"我"不可分割地属于的宇宙中分离出来的方式。认识到这个"我"是一种幻觉并非是虚无主义。相反,这是对这个" "的空性的认识,因为这个代词并不指向任何真实的东西,就像"椅子"和"你"也没有真实的意义。这并非是对世界的否定,而是对其真实本质的觉醒——正如大乘佛教的一句话所说:"真正的空性,奇妙的存在"。

There is surely some solace to be found in learning to dissolve our desiring, suffering egos into the wider world. But there is also, I suspect, danger too. That danger is well-illustrated by the political trajectory of the Kyoto School: too many of its members became, at best, impotent bystanders to, and at worst, fellow travellers of Japanese fascism before and during World War II. For is that not the precise appeal of fascism - that one might lose oneself in the awesome power of the crowd?
在学会将我们渴望的、受苦的自我融入更广阔的世界中找到某种安慰。但我怀疑,也存在危险。这种危险很好地说明了京都学派的政治轨迹:许多成员在二战前后成为了无能的旁观者,甚至是日本法西斯主义的同路人。因为法西斯主义的吸引力难道不正在于此吗——即可以将自我融入大众的强大力量之中？