Mana Vijnana Saves the World

1) Via Negativa :: Not That! Not That!

Here's a quote from Slavoj Zizek's Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism  He's considering Buddhism as a way to escape from the problems of the 'Big Other'.

"[The point is] ...not to criticise Buddhism, but merely to emphasise the irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one's false self and yet still commit horrible crimes - and vice versa... This is why all the desperate attempts by Buddhists to demonstrate how respect and care for others are necessary steps to (and conditions of) enlightenment misfire: Suzuki himself was much more more honest in this regard when he pointed out that Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance - in his political life a Zen Buddhist may be a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist. Again, the two vacuums never coincide: in order to be fully engaged politically, it is necessary to exit the 'inner peace' of one's authentic self." p135


This is the type of dross that passes for philosophy these days. It relies on a pop-cultural  parody of Zen Buddhism, as much as Zizek's dismissal of Reichian theory relies on a parody of Reich. This particular parody has its roots in the Beat poets, and other hippie heroes like Alan Watts. Watts famously alleged that Californian Buddhist 'Converts' in the Sixties who objected to his drunkenness were just 'crypto-protestants', who carried the baggage of the Calvinist ethics under their eastern robes. The Beats (par excellence, Kerouac) studied the Theravada Buddhist tradition to an extent, and no doubt hung out at the odd Zendo, but they can hardly be classed as experts on Zen philosophy. The whole category of 'Dharma Bums', 'Drunken Zen-men', 'Zig-Zag Zen' (ie finding enlightenment while up on large doses of hallucinogens), etc. ,  was spawned from shallow readings of Buddhism. No doubt this was rooted in the notion of Buddhism as ontological nihilism that was casually held in the West, at least from the time of Schopenhauer.


Obviously [to me, lol! ;)] this interpretation of Buddhism (and of Dhyana/Ch'an/Zen) is a dried shit stick. The summation of the Northern (Mahayana) School's belief system - to which Zen adheres as tight as dried shit to a stick - can be found in that marvellous phrase from the Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra: "Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form". For the sake of clarity, let's add a few more of these funky identifications:

Being is Nothingness;

Nirvana is Samsara;

Eros is Agape;

Dharma is Karma [maybe... that one's mine... I may well re-incarnate as a toilet brush for saying that, but what the heck];

Body is Mind.

In fact, all dualities are exploded in Zen (and of course put back together again... like Humpty Dumpty in a rhyme free of the laws of thermodynamics). The point is that the world of non-discrimination IS the world of discrimination: it is the very concept of a 'self' that warps our perception. A person stuck in a depressive worldview (Athur Schopenhauer, I'm a-lookin' at you), reads that "Everything is Void" and says, "Hey, I knew that all along. It's all pointless, I'm gonna smoke a lot of weed and watch bizarre pornos for the rest of the month". What that person can't/won't see is that the converse also holds: "Void is Everything" ... the only place where suffering can be escaped is in the suffering world. In the parlance of Zen teachers, the guy is Attached to Emptiness.

So this idea of Zizek's, that someone has to leave the 'inner peace of one's authentic self' in order to engage politically is bunkum. There is no reality to 'inner' and 'outer' in this sense - there is no 'self' authentic or otherwise [at least not a 'self' that can be equated with the psychoanalytic ego, which is what Zizek is referring to here].

Video interlude... Here's a documentary about Seung Sahn. I love the way he sums it all up so beautifully: "NO I. NO PWOBWEM!" (There are several parts on youtube, I recommend watching them all in order).

2) Via Positiva :: Tat Tvam Asi!

OK, so Zen is experiential rather than rational. Subjectivity is also experiential, rather than rational: now there's a statement that should really be too obvious to ever be stated, but it seems to have escaped the great minds of the West for the past three millenia, with few exceptions.The few exceptions - Duns Scotus, Sartre, and so on, go too far in the opposite direction. The legacy of Classical Hellenistic thought is the belief that everything must be either rational or chaotic - everything of the mind, the body and the cosmos must be logically ordered, law-following and utterly predictable: otherwise it is chaotic, primal, terrifying and destructive. Jean Paul Sartre rightly notes that experience is Absurd (in the logical sense of absurd: it just IS, can't be deduced from any premise, there is no reason why I don't turn into a giant lobster at 5pm today, for example). His direct experience of this absurdity came after shooting himself full of mescaline, and and then being followed round Venice by a giant crayfish for six months. The poor guy then went to see Jacques Lacan for advice. Lacan persuaded him that the visions were due to his fear of being forced to live the formalised life of a teacher... maybe he thought Sartre's subconscious was symbolising l'angoisse - anguish/angst - as a crayfish - langouste. Sartre based his enormously influential existentialist philosophy on his interpretation of this bizarre peyote trip. Experience is absurd - therefore there no way of choosing an objectively correct course of action - therefore every person is absolutely free in each moment - this freedom fills us with enormous anxiety - which we spend our lives trying to ignore. Life is absurd, we have nothing to depend upon: so we must swim forever in a simmering pot of terror, anguish, nausea and hallucinated crustaceans.

Zen too admits this fundamental freedom, and the undependable fact of stark reality - with all it's one-handed-clappingness. But you don't often hear zen masters prattling on about anguish.

There's an old Zen Koan, goes something like this: A Zen abbot, let's call him Maureen, walks past one of his novices - Violet - who's crying. "Wherefore dost thou weep?", asks Maureen (he's been learning English). "I have nothing to depend upon", says Violet. "I too have nothing to depend upon. That is why I laugh". At which point, we infer, Violet becomes enlightened.

Now, how is the Zen Master's absolute freedom so much more mirthsome  than Jean-Paul Sartre's absolute freedom? Both have nothing to depend upon in each moment. One possible explanation would be that the Zen Master is indifferent to Karmic consequences or determinants of his actions... at least in the sense that he has no preference for himself over another... after all, he has nothing which may be called a 'self'.  But we should be careful with such verbal analyses of enlightenment: I'll leave it to you to consider the implications of another koan - Pai Chang's fox


0) !

Sartre's existential angst seems to me to be more to do with a fear of inconsistent biography than anything else. Indeed Sartre was not keen on psychology, preferring to "improve the biography of the person". Anxiety at being completely free in each moment makes sense only if one is attached to one's personal history: identified with it even.

For the Zen Buddhist, personal history is a lighter load. Right Action is right only in the moment of its acting: Zen equals answering in each moment of ever-changing life the koan "The World is vast and wide. Why do you put on your robe when you hear the sound of the bell". The answer may be to dress each time the bell rings for a thousand lifetimes, and then once to run naked because the robe is on fire. There is no more merit, no more freedom in consistency than in inconsistency -  no merit in inconsistency.

At last we can return to Zizek, and to DT Suzuki: 'Zen is a meditation technique which requires no particular ethico-political stance', we are told. Correct, in a sense - no pre-existent stance is required to begin the activity of meditating. However meditation is itself a stance, a posture with respect to the world, like all human action it is political. To say that 'social responsibility' is equivalent to 'being' 'a Liberal, a Fascist or a Communist' would be more of a fallacy: social responsibility must surely be an action, or sequence of actions carried out with compassion and presence - not payment of lip-service to some worldview. The biography of a Zen practitioner might say "Hakuin then joined the Hitler Youth", or "Bodhidharma stood as Conservative candidate for Slough in the 1997 General Election", or (more plausibly) Thich Nhat Hanh addressed the UN. But it is acceptance of the very absurdity of biography that characterises Zen. The Buddha can dress as a giant lobster, but can he ever taste like one?