It is not western philosophy that has come in. The word noumenon is used to translate the relationship between "body" and "use" in Buddhist scriptures. Because Buddhist thought entered China, people in ancient China had to translate Buddhist scriptures. There were a lot of concepts expressed in Sanskrit in Buddhist scriptures, but there were no ready-made words expressed in Chinese, indicating that China lacked this piece in his thoughts at that time.
What shall we do? The serious way is not far-fetched, but phonetic translation. Even today, we will find that many words in a large number of Chinese-translated Buddhist scriptures are transliterated, such as Prajna, Paramita, Araya, Samadhi and so on, which are all translated with the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
At the same time, we have made great efforts, and some translations are successful, such as "eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body", which is called the first of the five senses. The sixth cognition is consciousness-translation success. The seventh consciousness doesn't know what he is talking about, but it can only be transliterated as "eschatological knowledge", but it still doesn't understand, and the eighth consciousness can't be translated casually, so it is called "Araille knowledge". The word "consciousness" appears in Chinese, and so does the word "thinking". Consciousness, thinking, truth, realm and destiny all appear in Chinese because of the translation of Buddhist scriptures. And the word "ontology" has come.
China people studied Buddhism and were inspired by Buddhism, which promoted China's thought to a higher level. In fact, it is necessary for us to study western philosophy in the future. Buddhist philosophy is between China's philosophy and western philosophy, and it has reached a certain ontological level.
Regarding the existence of things, Buddhist thought is a discussion about emptiness, and "emptiness" is the noumenon of things.
Now let's talk about western philosophy. Ontology is such a science, and it is the most basic and core part of the most western philosophy.
The formation of this ontology really surprises us-how can people ask themselves such a difficult question? The question is: What is existence? Ontology is to answer the question of what existence is. What is existence? This sentence is absolutely ridiculous.
For example, say whatisbeing in English and what is existence. When you say "what", "yes" has put existence in it, and then "yes" is nominalized as "yes". If translated into Chinese, this sentence is: What is existence? This is the absurdity of it.
Parmenides grasped the thinking category of "being" and nominalized it. In English, tobe becomes being. Since it is nominalized, he can also add s to become plural, being, which refers to all beings.
Parmenides paved the way for ontology, which was realized by nominalizing ontology and transforming ontology into ontology. About existence, that is, about the reason why existence exists, if we want to study it, it is ontology.
Ontology is the most difficult knowledge, and we all know that the most difficult thing in mathematics is number theory. You see, Chen Jingrun spent his whole life. As for the proof of Goldbach's conjecture, he only got 1+2, which was not easy.
You should know that knowledge that is more difficult than number theory is ontology, ontology. Why is it difficult? Do we know it exists? You all said you knew. Then we have to ask: how do humans know about existence? This is strange, because the premise of knowing existence is knowing that it doesn't exist, just like you want to know red and you want to see non-red.
If there is only one color in the world that is red, you can't know red, and red will be discovered by you, provided that you find a non-red color. Similarly, existence needs you to know, and at the same time, you need to find non-existence and compare existence through non-existence.
What do you mean it doesn't exist? If it doesn't exist, it is nothing.
You have to know nothingness at the same time, so you can know existence.
Just like if you want to know non-red, you will know red. But each of us is clearly alive and existing. How do we know it doesn't exist? There is such a verb in human language: tobe in English and yes in Chinese.
This is strange-humans shouldn't say this word.
For example, we take fish as an analogy. A fish is in the water. It can know everything in the water, its food and its enemies. It can know everything in the water, but it can't know the water. If you want a fish to know water, the premise is to take it out of the water and enter a non-water state, but when you take it out, you will know that the non-water thing is dead, while people actually know that it does not exist.
So we thought, how do we say this word? It shows that human beings know existence, and knowing existence means that human beings know that there is no existence, but how can human beings know that there is no existence when they clearly exist?
Forming a knowledge about this matter is called ontology. This is very difficult. This explains ontology-knowledge about the existence of existence.
This science began in parmenides, and later Plato put forward the first ontology in western history-idealism.
Let's talk about it now. Idealism means: philosophical speculation about an existence.
You will find that the existence of this kind of speculation is something grasped by human thinking. Plato tells us that everything in the realistic perceptual world exists as things because they have thoughts.
If a thing has no idea, it cannot exist as a thing.
For example, Huang Ma is a concrete thing because it exists because it has the concept of a horse. We can also say that there is imitation, and the existence of everything is an imitation of ideas, of course, it is an imperfect imitation.
When I read Plato's theory, I felt very confused. I really felt everything in front of me emotionally. How to imitate this thing?
Plato tells us that it is presented to you as something that exists because it imitates the idea itself. This is arbitrary, you would say so.
We even think that Plato gave a system called objective idealism. When I see idealism, I feel superior. Because we are materialists, we can directly criticize Plato.
We easily dismiss Plato's idealism, and this matter is over. We continue to study western philosophical theories. In fact, before we criticize Plato, you should know him first, instead of dismissing him with an idealistic label. Now we ask: Where is the truth of Plato's theory?