Speculative Non-Buddhism

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Un-Mindful Collusion

Posted by Glenn Wallis on May 17, 2012

I want to ask a simple question: Are contemporary western Buddhists complicit in what is arguably a rabid capitalistic system?  I don’t just mean the conservative western traditionalists, like the Zennites, Theravadins, Vipassanins, Tibetophiles, etc. I mean those communities that modify “Buddhism” with words that are meant to impress you with their enlightened advancement over such regressive and irrational religionists. Modifiers like Secular-, Atheist-, Progressive-, Post-traditional-, Agnostic-, Existentialist-, Naturalist-, Insight-, Non-sectarian, and Postmodern-. And we certainly can’t leave out the Mindfulnistas.

Are these communities unwitting agents helping to extend our predatory social, cultural, financial, and political status quo? And, if so, do they give a shit? In Marxist terms, which comes first for an x-buddhist: private profit or social need? Please pause and think before those bodhisattva buddhemes start booming in your brain.

We may have to pose an even graver question: do western Buddhist communities and media actively aid in the creation of a person who is incapable of the passionate, risky, and sustained commitment that is perhaps the first condition of real change? Is the contemporary Buddhist person-subject just too nice, mindful, and equanimous to be anything but a dupe to Exxon and J.P. Morgan? I cannot tell you how many times I have seen an x-buddhist douse himself/herself with a debilitating dollop of “non-reactivity” or “non-judgmentalism” in the face of genuine passion.  Well, why should I be surprised? After all, the  roots of x-buddhism lie deep in the yearnings of world-renouncing ascetics.

At some point, I want to return to an earlier post on this blog, called “Slavoj Žižek: From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism.” That post presented Žižek’s controversial essay contending that western Buddhism “is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.” Indeed, thumbing through the latest slew of western Buddhist propaganda organs–Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, Mindful, The Mindfulness Bell –and checking my Google blog aggregator for x-buddhisty headlines, it is difficult to argue against Žižek’s claim that although “’Western Buddhism’ presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement.” More Žižek at another time.

For your present consideration, I would like to present to you a fragment of a comment that TOM PEPPER made on the preceding thread.(For the entire comment in its original context, go here, #7; edited to stand alone.) Pepper makes a crucially important assertion here. It is one, moreover, that will be pressed with increasing fervor on this blog. For, unlike x-buddhists, some of us at this blog still believe in the possibility of human liberation. Tom Pepper:

I want to point out what I think is the core article of faith of Secular Buddhism: the unquestioning belief in the ideology of capitalism. Badiou defines this very succinctly: the belief that “there are bodies and there are languages.” That is, we are bodily, biological organisms, seeking pleasure for our bodies (including our brains), and we do this by adopting the most convenient language/culture at will. There are no constraints to the culture we can adopt, and no truth content to it: we need only adopt the one that maximizes our bodily pleasure—what Batchelor calls “moment-to-moment flourishing.” This is why in his first paragraph [of his statement “A Secular Buddhist"] he can refer to “biological evolution,” “self-awareness and language,” the “brain” and our “fragile biosphere,” but it would never occur to him to mention our humanly constructed social formations as a source of suffering that we CAN ACTUALLY CHANGE!! This is why Secular Buddhists always seek to limit the discussion of suffering to sickness, death, loss, etc.—to those things that we certainly must learn to accept because they will doubtless always be with us. Passive acceptance of the inevitable, and maximization of bodily contentment, is the goal of Secular Buddhism AND of global capitalist ideology. This is why we accept the “scientific” research on mindfulness that operationally defines the successful achievement of “happiness” as the ability to remain undistracted by external stimuli; we achieve mindful bliss, it seems, as the ability to remain completely Unmindful of the world around us, and never let it disturb our brain/body comfort.

Badiou explains: “the modern name for necessity is, as everyone knows, ‘economics,’ which should be called by its name: the logic of Capital.” The one unchangeable truth is the ineffable uncontrollability of the capitalist economy, and we must all simply adjust our languages and medicate our brains/bodies to maximize our bliss in the face of this inexorable truth. Secular Buddhism seeks to become the ideology of this power, which forces us to participate in the production of oppression, poverty, and suffering for the majority of the world population. We focus on being nice and accepting sickness and death, and believe if those poor folks in the southern hemisphere would only become secular Buddhists too, they’d be fine. Their suffering isn’t the result of economic and political oppression; it results only from their inability to become oblivious to the world around them! Be mindful, and enjoy your poverty!

Posted in Critics, Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: , , , | 118 Comments »

Anicca as the Truth of Extinction

Posted by Glenn Wallis on April 28, 2012

Never mind that, in the end, all of human life will have amounted to an infinitesimal flash of dull, vaporous light, wholly inconsequential to the cosmic whole. Never mind that all evidence—biological, geological, cosmological, even historical—betrays processes that are as blind and indiscriminate as they are relentless and ruthless.

Once upon a time, in some remote corner of that universe which is effused into numberless glimmering solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. It was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history;” but, of course, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled, and the clever beasts had to die.—One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how pathetic, how shadowy and evanescent, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.(1)

Two claims.

  • X-buddhist meditation dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their rhetoric of practice hooks chaotic modes of human being together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras.
  • As long as you live under the compulsion of x-buddhist decision or the principle of sufficient buddhism, you live also within an impotence of thought and within an infinite culpability.

That first claim is a bastardized version of a statement made by Theodor Adorno concerning punctuation marks.(2) The second is a rewording of François Laruelle’s “Theorem 00000000000: On the Advent of Impotence.”(3) (See notes for original wording). I’d like to explore them in answer to a question recently posed on this blog. Doing so will allow me to review some features of non-buddhism (as I am conceiving it).

The question arose from claims that I made in an earlier post on meditation:

(1)   Speculative non-buddhism is deeply curious about the role that meditation practice might play in transcending the division between ideology and self-reflective critique. The raw remarks that I present [in that post (4)] stem from a re-reading, and hence a re-commissioning, of primary classical-buddhist postulates; namely, disenchantment, ancestral anamnesis, vanishing, phenomenal identity, nihility, conceptual proliferation, contingency, world, surface, perspicuity, unbinding-extinction (my translations of, respectively: nibbida, sati, anicca, anattā, suññtā, papañca, paticcasamuppāda, loka, sabba, paññā, nibbāna/nirvāṇa). My, still speculative, contention is three-fold: (i) these postulates can be (re-)read to constitute the Protagonist’s (i.e., Gotama’s, the Buddha’s) calculus, understood here as the qualification of real-world limits; (ii) the calculus, thus re-commissioned, subsumes nihilism, and (iii) meditation is, for the practitioner, an organon of nihilistic dissolution.

(2)   Non-buddhism is a theoretical practice proceeding by way of classical-buddhist axioms yet producing theorems which are buddhistically uninterpretable.

(3)   “Senselessness and purposelessness are not merely privative; they represent a gain in intelligibility. The cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility marks the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible.”(5)

The question put to me was this:

“What is the ultimate aim of this speculative trajectory that starts with your preliminary ‘zombification’ [of the original x-buddhist terminology], your potent ‘substitute’ of the desired dharmic good, a.k.a. ‘deep joy’? I gather…that if meditation is, as you say, an organon of nihilistic dissolution, then might it be that what you desire by gaining in intelligibility, is something that Brassier also calls ‘the truth of extinction’?(6)

Yes. I want to say that such intelligibility is something that I, as clever homo sapiens beast must come to “desire.” But Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: | 22 Comments »

Samsara as the Realm of Ideology

Posted by Glenn Wallis on March 27, 2012

Speculative non-buddhism is way of thinking and seeing that takes as its raw material x-buddhism. It is a thought-experiment that poses the question: shorn of its transcendental representations, what might x-buddhism offer us?

Matthias Steingass’s last essay on the prospects of a reconfigured “meditation” (or, perhaps, non-meditation?), exemplifies both the spirit and method of this theoretical aim. His subject, “meditation,” is, moreover, one of the three central, and recurring, recipients of speculative non-buddhist analysis.

Tom Pepper, in the current essay, “Naturalizing Buddhism Without Being Reductive,” continues a discussion on the second recurring concern of non-buddhist analysis: ideology. In short, he asks: if, as it seems, we are ideological creatures by nature, might we still be creatures that are capable of gaining conscious awareness of our ideologies?  And if that is the case, might certain reconfigured forms of x-buddhism offer us methods with which we can do so?

It may be that such reconfigured x-buddhist postulates are unrecognizable to traditional practitioners. But, if this small act of destruction enables us to produce more effective ideologies and—who knows—a better world, surely no one will object, will they?

Please note Tom’s questions at the end of the essay: “Is this coherent?  Where are the obscurities, aporias, and just plain conceptual blunders?  Does there seem any possibility of such a practice ever existing?”

________________

Naturalizing Buddhism Without Being Reductive

a radical, and ridiculously arrogant, reinvention of Buddhist thought

 Tom Pepper

It’s almost a commonplace in academic thought that it is impossible to accept all of the core teachings of Buddhism without accepting contradiction.  We cannot, it is assumed, take seriously both the teaching of non-self, and belief in rebirth; either one, taken to its logical conclusion, would necessarily preclude the other.  What I am going to present here is a redefinition of the core terms of Buddhism which allows all of them to be accepted without requiring any contradiction, without the need to choose which concepts to accept and which to reject, and without any hidden acceptance of a world-transcendent atman.

I am writing this to ask for criticism, to ask for any response that can point out errors or blind spots.  That said, I am going to insist on a few provisos.  First, I am not willing to engage with disagreements which depend on the insistence that there is in fact an atman, soul, or world-transcendent consciousness; I will offer, here, no argument against such beliefs and do not expect to persuade anyone out of these beliefs with this essay.  Second, I am not willing to engage the debate the I use too many hard words or ask to much mental effort of my audience; I intend, in this essay, to be fairly accessible and clear, but if you don’t know the meanings of the terms I use go look them up.  Finally, I am especially not interested, for reasons that I hope I will be able to make clear, in any citations from specific sutras which contradict my reconstrual of terms; my interest is not in the academic attempt to determine how exactly a term was used, or what exactly a concept meant, to a particular school of Buddhism at a particular time.  I think this is an incredibly valuable kind of work to do, but it is not what I am doing here; instead, I am trying to construct a possible construal of Buddhist concepts which would allow them all to cohere, and allow them to be of use for us today. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Constructivists, Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: , | 115 Comments »

Come On, X-Buddhists, Pump Up The Polemos!

Posted by Glenn Wallis on March 1, 2012

Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. —Walter Benjamin

Is there any such thing as x-buddhistic polemics? Or are x-buddhists too busy primming themselves with right speech, loving kindness, and equanimity to consider such nastiness? I can imagine my x-buddhist friends asking how I can even suggest that the perpetually-grinning paragons of compassion that are their beloved teachers would even want to engage in something as “un-buddhist” as polemics.

Come to think of it, I have to ask them a question right back: Is it conceivable that your myriad x-buddhist values (compassion, right speech, renunciation, loving-kindness, forbearance, right thought, etc., etc., etc.) are precisely a passive form of polemics? In “cultivating compassion,” for instance, are you, as x-buddhist, arming yourself for the fight?

Consider this. When asked why he does not engage in polemics, Michel Foucault answered as follows.

The polemicist . . . proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question…. [T]he person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

To my non-buddhist ears, this description of a polemicist astutely, if unintentionally, describes the contemporary western x-buddhist. This is because, from a non-buddhist perspective, an x-buddhist is nothing if not a person “encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question,” and  someone who “relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.” This legitimacy, this privilege, is, of course, The Dharma. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Critics, Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: | 143 Comments »

Feast, Interrupted

Posted by Glenn Wallis on December 27, 2011

A Review of B. Alan Wallace’s Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

In the following essay, Tom Pepper escorts B. Alan Wallace to The Great Feast of Knowledge. The Great Feast of Knowledge is a speculative non-buddhist trope intended to capture a scene where Buddhism’s representatives discuss their views and theories alongside of physics, art, philosophy, literature, biology, psychology, and other disciplines of knowledge. A central contention of speculative non-buddhism, of course, is that all forms of x-buddhism confuse knowledge of the world with discourses on knowledge of the world; and that we need a critical practice like The Great Feast to help us discern the difference. In such an exchange, Buddhism loses all status as specular authority. That loss is significant because it permits a consideration of Buddhism’s views on equal footing with the feast’s other participants.

On the surface of things, Pepper and Wallace seem to have much in common intellectually. Pepper, after all, is a literary scholar who characterizes himself as “a Buddhist who is also interested in philosophy of science.” Anyone who has read Wallace knows of his training in physics, philosophy, and religion. Indeed, as he writes on his website, Wallace sees himself as a “progressive scholar” who “seeks innovative ways to integrate Buddhist contemplative practices with Western science to advance the study of the mind.”

But the two thinkers, to my mind, could not be any more different. From a speculative non-buddhist view, the difference between them lies in their respective willingness and reluctance to engage thought in the service not of tradition’s validation, but of knowledge itself—even if, as Pepper points out, knowledge itself may have no discernible terminus.

But that’s just my view. Please, pull up a seat, and enjoy the feast!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Speculative Non-Buddhist, True Believers | Tagged: , | 91 Comments »

Ghost Buddha

Posted by Glenn Wallis on December 4, 2011

Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?

Haul in the chains. Let the carcase go astern… It is still colossal.*

Reading Toni Bernhard‘s article recounting the life story of the Buddha on the recent Psychology Today blog (link at bottom), together with some comments about it on the Secular Buddhist Facebook page,  brought back a memory. Several years ago an editor at Routledge Press asked me to write a new biography of the Buddha. I discussed the idea with my agent, who thought it was something worth exploring. Little did I know at the time that this “exploration” would bind me to the mast of the Pali canon as it plowed unrelentingly through the ocean of the dispensation. Like Ahab, I single-mindedly searched and searched for that elusive object of desire: flesh and blood of the living Buddha. But unlike Ahab, after three years immersed in the search I found not so much as a scrap of flesh or a trace of blood of any historical being. For all literary presentations of the Buddha, man, are but as pasteboard masks.**

In a post here called “Nostalgia for the Buddha,” I worked up some of my notes from that doomed project.  Bernhard’s article, though, makes me wonder anew: Why, why do x-buddhists continue to embrace this Sunday-school fable of the Buddha? It is particularly curious that the scientifically-allied, ostensibly de-mythologized modern variety of x-buddhists do, isn’t it? Why this recurring, and seemingly unacknowledged (by x-buddhists, at least), argument from authority? And why this dishonesty about the lack of reliable data for the so-desired Authority? Or is it ignorance rather than dishonesty? And if ignorance, is it the dark unknowing kind or the willful variety? I admit that, in past writings, I myself have done some damage in arguing for the reconstruction of a recoverable historical figure named “Gotama.”

Let me repent.  My several years’ effort of searching for a reliable historical basis for a biography of Siddhattha Gotama can be summed up as this: Gotama is a ghost. He is a non-entity. Let me elaborate (from “Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism“):

Protagonist, The. The progenitor of the Buddhist dispensation. He is referred to by various names, such as “The Buddha,” “Gotama,” “The Blessed One,” etc. Speculative non-buddhism’s designation “The Protagonist” is intended to indicate the irrefutable fact that “the Buddha” is a historical figure entirely overwritten by a literary one. Not the slightest wisp of evidence has survived that sheds light on the historical progenitor. Any reliable historical evidence that once existed has been reduced to caricature by the machinations of internecine Buddhist institutional shenanigans and the stratagems of ideological dupery. The figure of the Buddha in the classical Pali texts is a concoction of the collective imaginations of the numerous communities that, over several centuries, had a hand in the formation of the canon. Add to this imaginative mélange the imaginings—cultural, political, fantastic, ignorant—of all the iterations of all forms of x-buddhism, and the result is Buddha as Cosmic Magic Mirror, reflecting all things to all people. A viable composite human figure “The Buddha” can be salvaged from this protean symbol of buddhistic vanity only with force of the darkest, most atavistic yearning of puerile nostalgia for The Great Father.

So, here’s my question: Why, given their ostensible sophistication, do contemporary x-buddhists cling so stubbornly (ignorantly? something else?) to a naïve understanding of the very nature of the texts and teachings from which they derive so much authority for their lives?

Another question (added 12-5-11): How would your reception of Buddhism be affected if you saw it as a hodge-podge of often disconnected ideas and theories about human being (which it is)?

What are your thoughts?

___________________

* Herman Melville, Moby Dick, chapter sixty-nine.

** Ibid., chapter thirty-six: “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks.”

Toni Bernhard’s article, “Who was the Buddha?”

Image by Patrick Trotter, “Ghost Dance.”

Posted in Interpreters, Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: , | 77 Comments »

Nascent Non-Buddhism

Posted by Glenn Wallis on November 18, 2011

“Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism,” the article presented in this post (pdf at bottom and on articles page), represents the fullest formulation of non-buddhism so far. The paper presents a heuristic which, if applied to your reading of Buddhist material and to your listening to Buddhist discussions, will, I am certain, prove revealing. As the title indicates, speculative non-buddhism is just beginning its life. A great deal of work needs to be done on both the theoretical and interpretive sides.

For those of you who will read no further than this post, I give you here the beginning, middle, and end.

Beginning:

“What is true cannot change; what changes is not true”— is this not the miserable dream in which too many have diffused their cleverness?—François Laruelle

Speculative non-buddhism is way of thinking and seeing that takes as its raw material Buddhism. It is a thought-experiment that poses the question: shorn of its transcendental representations, what might Buddhism offer us? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: | 18 Comments »

Fanged Dialogue

Posted by Glenn Wallis on October 13, 2011

In sum

All X-Buddhisms are incapable of genuinely conversing with the sciences and the humanities. They are, furthermore, unable to comprehend themselves. For both, we need Speculative non-Buddhism (or something like it). All Buddhism can ever achieve is a Narcissus-like self-referential iteration of its self-given image—as this or that X-Buddhism. For Buddhism must at all costs preserve its majestic omen pontificator: “The Dharma,” Architect of the Cosmic Vault and the Keeper of its Inventory. Only by feigning dialogue at the Feast of Knowledge can Buddhism preserve itself. This is fanged dialogue.

*       *      *

In this post, I want to continue articulating the procedures of Speculative non-Buddhism. Because my method can appear abstract, it may help if I use a concrete example to get some traction. To that end, I want to refer to a recent article by Rita Gross called “Buddhist History for Buddhist Practitioners” (links at bottom).

Rita Gross is an exemplary Buddhist studies and feminist scholar. She is also a senior teacher in Shambhala Buddhism. I am not critiquing her article point by point here. What I am doing is extracting the major premise and the major conclusion, and then analyzing these to illuminate Speculative non-Buddhist theorems. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Accommodationists, Constructivists, Speculative Non-Buddhist, Traditionalists, True Believers | Tagged: , | 42 Comments »

X-Buddhistic Hallucination

Posted by Glenn Wallis on September 22, 2011

In sum

A crucial fact, easily forgotten, devoid of which my critical practice of speculative non-buddhism would be just one more of the infinite iterations of x-buddhism: speculative non-buddhism is concerned with reclaiming from x-buddhism the person of flesh and blood, who lives in the world of stone and shit, emptied, that is to say, of the dharmic dream.

“X-buddhism” indexes a sacrificial rending from reality. Its rhetorics of display, whether secular or religious or anything else, constitute an act of high pageantry, whereby empty reality is both ruptured and repaired. But the sacrifice and its sacrament are confined entirely to a circle of x-buddhism’s own creation. Reality remains untouched. X-buddhism does not offer up knowledge. It is a matrix of hallucinatory desire—the manufactured desire of the x-buddhist for realization of x-buddhism’s self-created world-reparation. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Speculative Non-Buddhist | Tagged: , | 22 Comments »

 
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