Nothing

Three Inquiries in Buddhism

Marcus Boon, Eric Cazdyn, Timothy Morton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226233437
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism—a surprising lack, given Buddhism's global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on "nothing"—essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Through an elaboration of emptiness in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an examination of the problem of praxis in Buddhism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis; and an explication of a "Buddhaphobia" that is rooted in modern anxieties about nothingness, Nothing opens up new spaces in which the radical cores of Buddhism and critical theory are renewed and revealed.

BUDDHAPHOBIA

NOTHINGNESS AND THE FEAR OF THINGS

Timothy Morton

It’s awfully considerate of you to think of me here

And I’m most obliged to you for making it clear

That I’m not here

Syd Barrett

From 1962 to 1963 Jacques Lacan gave his tenth seminar. Its final hours are preoccupied with a rather searching and sensitive assessment of Buddhism. Lacan had recently returned from Japan, where he visited a Buddhist shrine. It is illuminating to observe Lacan translate Buddhism into his own terms. From the standpoint of someone who has studied and practiced Buddhism extensively, Lacan is at the very least generous and illuminating.

Lacan takes the attitude of a careful guide. He explains how Buddhist practitioners go through a number of phases of study and practice. He distinguishes concepts such as emptiness from Western mistranslations such as nothingness. (His discussion of the Zen kōan on Joshu’s Mu, for instance, is particularly attentive.) He teases out distinctions between Buddhism and the mindset that divides the world into monotheism and polytheism. He thinks aloud about the multiplicity of Buddhas as manifestations of enlightenment—why this infinite mirroring? He knows fairly well what a bodhisattva is—a being who has taken on relieving all sentient beings of their suffering until they attain ultimate Buddhahood. He discusses his colleague Paul Demiéville’s work on sudden versus gradual enlightenment.1

Then Lacan settles on an episode in the Japanese shrine concerning a Buddha statue:

I enter the little hall where this statue is and I find there on his knees a man of thirty to thirty-five years old, a sort of very low-grade employee, perhaps a craftsman, already really very worn out by existence. He was on his knees before this statue and obviously he was praying . . . after having prayed, he came very close to the statue . . . he looked at it in this way for a time that I could not measure, I did not really see the end of it, it was superimposed itself on the time of my own look. It was obviously an overflowing look whose character was all the more extraordinary because it was a matter there, not I would say of an ordinary man—because a man who behaves in this way could not be such—but of someone that nothing seemed to predestine, if only because of the evident burden that he was carrying on this shoulders from his work, for this sort of artistic communion.

You have seen the statue [Lacan is showing slides], its face, this expression which is absolutely astonishing because of the fact that it is impossible to read in it whether it is completely for you or completely inward looking. I did not know then that it was a Nio-i-yin, Kan-ze-non but I had heard tell for a long time of the Kuan-yin. I asked in connection with this statue and in connection with others also, “Is it a man or a woman?” I will skip over the debates, the detours of what happened around this question which is full of meaning, I repeat, in Japan, given that the Kannon are not all in a univocal fashion in a female form. And it is there that I can say that what I collected is a little bit like a survey at the level of the Kinsey Report, the fact is that I acquired the certainty that, for this cultured young man . . . the question before a statue of this kind, as to whether it is male or female, never arose for them.2

This is a very rich narrative on the significance of the experience of beauty: on the look of statues, and the look of people who look at statues—and the voyeurism of people looking at people looking at statues, in particular from the sidelong, distorted (anamorphic) position of Lacan, and the paradox thereof: is the voyeur inside or outside the scene? Narrative form necessarily invites identification, fantasy, a certain sliding of anticipation and memory: the play of desire. And a certain gap between the subject of enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, a gap that Lacan detects in what is known as the Liar sentence: This sentence is false.3

Of particular note is Lacan’s astonishment at the gaze of a Buddha statue: is it inward or outward? More pointedly, is it “for you” or “completely inward looking”? And further—is this a female or a male? There appear to be wavering ambiguities, even contradictions. Lacan sees the statue as a Rorschach test or even as a Kinsey Report on gender. Notice that the Kinsey Report reference turns the seeing of a man or a woman—or a gay man or a straight man?—in the statue into a test for queerness. And notice that despite Lacan’s insistent questioning, no one seems concerned. There is something ambiguous, something queer about the statue—something that might awaken anxiety, but in the Buddhist context in which the statue is viewed, no one seems anxious. As I shall argue here, this queerness is precisely correlated to the irrational fear of Buddhism.

Indeed, many of the coordinates of what is here called Buddhaphobia overlap with those of homophobia: a fear of intimacy, a fear of ambiguity, a fear of inwardness and introversion, a fear of theory rather than praxis.4 This is a fear that ultimately affects even those Marxian schools that most frequently correlate theory and praxis. Some kind of phobia certainly seems to affect the intellectualist and scientistic “non-Buddhism” that claims to be above (and superior to) the sectarianism of what it patronizes as “X-buddhism.” Indeed, the stance of non-Buddhism is quite sectarian in an unconscious manner, as it implies dismissing what in several esoteric schools is the most important cognitive state: devotion. For these schools, devotion is not simply devotion to a particular (human) person who transmits the teachings, though it may start there. Devotion is a nonconceptual intimacy of mind with itself. Heaven forbid that one have nonconceptual intimacy! It would ruin the sense of intellectual superiority.

As we proceed we shall find that the kind of syndrome exemplified here is not accidental. Indeed, François Laruelle, the avatar of non-Buddhism, provides a way of asserting that one’s assertions are not philosophical, the sort of paradox that Lacan himself swept away in his critique of metalanguage. Non-philosophy provides non-Buddhism with a way of being above (meta) Buddhism while still making Buddhist assertions that claim to be more correct than what it calls “X-buddhism.” How this fails to be a “decision” (a philosophical truth claim, in effect) eludes this author. It is patent enough that this decision about decision accepts uncritically the Western appropriation of Buddhadharma as an ism among isms, and reduces whatever Buddhism might be to a style (an ism) of thought, allowing non-Buddhism the typically modern consumerist gesture of disavowing consumerism, of trying to find an ism beyond ism. The decision of no decision ignores the symbiotic relationship between meditation experience and institutionalization: yogis and yoginis and the monasteries that spring up around the shrines that spring up around the caves or other spaces in which they have practiced. Siddhārtha Gautama was, it should be remembered, a heretical Hindu yogi.

Alongside predictable fascination-anger with the language of addiction (because it short circuits the idea of a subject being able to jump outside its phenomenological system), a symptom of the “anything you can do, I can do meta” of non-Buddhism is the pervasive critique of mindfulness, whose contemporary Western practice non-Buddhism denigrates as “relaxationism” and which Žižek denigrates as “Western Buddhism.” Naturally the critique of mindfulness is not surprising to an “X-buddhist”: Buddhist texts are full of critiques of mindfulness. Moreover mindfulness, calm attention on something or other (breath, statue, a chicken one is murdering), is not in fact Buddhist, but rather common to numerous spiritual practices. The fatuous reduction of Buddhism, even New Age Buddhisms, to “relaxationism” is less intelligent than . . . Buddhisms as such, which in none of their forms claim that calm attention is the point. Awareness might be the point, or a point—but it’s what one is aware of that is the real point: impermanence, suffering, emptiness. Mindfulness might be a way to achieve awareness, or not.

The critique of mindfulness is immanent to Buddhisms. So much so that one might say that to critique mindfulness is . . . to be a Buddhist. Indeed, the Buddhist critique is far more searching, insofar as it does not suggest that mindfulness is evil or complicit with oppression, as if running around screaming and hitting one another were a path to realization (how’s that been working out?). Rather, Buddhisms suggest that mindfulness is a helpful way to induce a state of relaxed attentiveness necessary for most people to notice some basic facts.

Queerness is, in Buddhaphobia at any rate, predicated on a fear of things, or of a certain feature of thingness, conjured up in the idea of fetishism, which has long been associated with homosexuality since the inception of the term in the later nineteenth century. That is to say, queerness has to do with what Judith Halberstam examines as an inverted fear of being buried alive—that something, some thing, is buried in me.5 There is an entity in me that is not me. As we shall see, this idea compresses a central tenet of Mahāyāna Buddhism concerning Buddha nature—it is an entity in me that is more than me. For specific forms of Western thought, this entity has an intolerable object-like quality. Buddhaphobia assumes the form of an allergic reaction to this quality. The allergic reaction maps onto the always-already presence of Buddhism, and of what we shall call nothingness, within Western thinking.

I shall call it nothingness here, despite Lacan’s careful parsing of nothingness versus emptiness. The term nothingness is pervasive. Furthermore, it cuts to the heart of the matter—it is a term with feet in Western and Eastern thought. Indeed, philosophers such as Nishitani, inspired by Buddhism and Western philosophy in equal measure, deploy the term. And, perhaps most significantly, nothingness evokes the specter of nihilism, the specter that haunts modernity.

In what follows, I shall be following the viewpoint of what in the esoteric Buddhism called Mahamudra is known as “the analytic meditation of a pandita.”6 I use this approach because as a proud “X-buddhist” member of the Drupka Kagyü sect of Tibetan Buddhism, I am most familiar with it. This sect regards the teachings of Mahamudra (“Great Symbol”) and Dzogchen (“Great Perfection”) to be practically identical. In those teachings, the Buddha nature is not to be sought anywhere outside of one’s regular mentations (philosophizing, asserting, loving, hoping, hating, fearing, desiring, and so on). It is not to be striven for at all, but rather appreciated for what it already is—the essence of one’s mind. And yet there is a sharp difference between such mentations, which are confused, and the basic default state, which manifests all the aspects of Buddha mind: unchanging, open, lucid, compassionate, suffused with renunciation and devotion. It is just that the Buddha mind is discovered to be the default state of mind as such. The analytic meditation of a pandita is intended not to produce concepts but to allow one to appreciate the default state.

Yet some reckoning with concepts must happen in a scholarly essay. The intellectual approach I adopt in this case is that favored by Mahamudra and Dzogchen, namely that of the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka exemplified by Chandrakīrti.7 This approach is most similar to the destructuring of thought common to Heidegger and Derrida. In this thought, nothing (reified or conceptual) is posited. Instead, all reified positions are deconstructed until their inherent paradoxes and aporias are unloosened. Thus Prāsaṅgika is used as a tool to exhaust conceptual mind, allowing the default state (known in Dzogchen as rigpa) to become obvious. This default state knows itself as such as a possibility condition for its existence. We shall return to this idea of self-knowing as not outside and “meta” but as inherent to what mind is. This is because it is the grounding feature of the default state that I claim Buddhaphobia finds so uncomfortable.

In short, the goal is to appreciate what is already the case (Buddha mind), rather than to produce axioms, which non-Buddhism appears to be doing a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• TO LIVE IN A GLASS HOUSE IS A REVOLUTIONARY VIRTUE PAR EXCELLENCE
• ENLIGHTENMENT, REVOLUTION, CURE
• BUDDHAPHOBIA
• Glossary