The Legacy of Ueda Shizuteru: A Zen Life of Dialogue in a Twofold World

Abstract

Ueda Shizuteru 上田閑照 (1926–2019) led a double life. And he taught us how we, too, can lead double lives. Or rather, he explained how we are already in fact doing so. It’s just that we don’t realize this. We are not awakened to, and thus do not fully actualize the fact that we always dwell, more or less, both within and beyond the linguistically constructed worlds of meaning that we co-create and that in turn co-create us. The more we become aware of this fact, the more capable we’ll become of creatively exiting and reentering these semantic spaces, and thus of living the kind of double life of dialogue that Ueda so well modeled in practice as well as mapped out in theory. Throughout his life, Ueda was devoted to engaging, primarily from the standpoint of Zen Buddhism, in interreligious as well as intercultural philosophical dialogue. In a retrospective essay written in 2004, Ueda wrote that his life and work took place within two kinds of “between spaces” (aida 間). He moved between “religious existence” (shūkyō-teki jitsuzon 宗教 的実存) and “philosophical thinking” (tetsugaku-teki shisaku 哲学的思索). And, for him, this entailed going between engaging with the spiritual traditions of East-Asia— the practice of Zen Buddhism in particular—and studying European traditions of philosophy and religion (Ueda 2005a, 18). No doubt Ueda was drawn to study Meister Eckhart—that unmatched medieval Meister of both life and letters—because he recognized a kindred attempt to live and think in between acute existential and intellectual demands. Sensing a similar combination of sincere spiritual practice and passionate scholarly thinking is probably also