언어도단(言語道斷)의 길1

Abstract

Buddhist meditation (also known as‘seon’or‘zen’) aims at enlightenment; enlightenment could be defined as a state of mind in which you have reached ultimate truth, the truth about the universe and our life and death. In terms of Seon Buddhism, it means that you see Buddha nature and become Buddha (見 性成佛). All the scriptures, i.e. the so-called Eighty Thousands Buddhist Sutras and all the sermons that your‘sunim’delivers to you are concerned with enlightenment: they are all purported to explain what Buddha nature is and how you get there. But one of the basic tenets of Seon Buddhism is that there is no way of characterizing what Seon is: no words and expressions can capture the truth. Truth and words are incompatible. In spite of this dilemma, however, Seon masters and students never stop trying to describe or explain it with words. Human language seems to be a kind of necessary evil. In this regard, Wonhyo(617~686), the great Buddhist priest in the Shilla period, has pointed out that“no matter how deep truth may be, how can it escape from the appearances of things? No matter how still it may be, it is nonetheless just in the (quarrelsome) discourse of all sects”and so you can“get away from language only by language”. Wonhyo’s idea of this, known as Theory of Reconciliation (和爭思想), is an attempt to show that the incompatibility (or paradox or contradiction) between truth and language can be overcome or transcended. This discussion inevitably leads us to one of the most controversial psycholinguistic questions in the modern studies of language and mind: how language and thought are connected or even whether they are indeed connected or not. A well-known modern version of the attempts to answer the question was made by the two American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the early twentieth century. Their idea is summed up as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which holds that language and thought are closely connected with each other to the extent that the structure of a language affects (or determines or influences) its speakers’cognition or world view. The hypothesis is also known as “linguistic relativity principle” or “linguistic determinism.” Instead of climbing the bandwagon in support of the generally unfavorable criticisms of the hypothesis by the main stream linguistics community today, I think we should choose to learn from the insight hidden in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and we can reexamine the hypothesis in terms of Wonhyo’s Theory of Reconciliation. I believe that it will shed new light on the understanding of human mind and language.