Obedience to normalcy
is what lobotomies are for.

Someone sent me a link to Tricycle magazine’s “Daily Dharma” for February 3-10. My first response, when I get such links from the Buddhist glossies is to hit delete. Ready for some procrastination, though, I read this one.  The advice distilled in this “Wisdom Collection” confirmed a growing suspicion of mine:   meditation/mindfulness in present-day North America is hardly distinguishable from lobotomy.

Consider this. Among the “good results” of a prefrontal lobotomy are calming of obsessive-compulsive states; reduction of chronic anxiety; lessening of recursive introspection; amelioration of affective disorders; reduction of  feelings of inadequacy and self-consciousness; reduction of emotional tension. Sound familiar? Most significantly—Kabot-Zinnites take note!— prefrontal lobotomy

has also been used successfully to control pain secondary to organic lesions. In this case, the tendency has been to employ unilateral lobotomy, because of the evidence that a lobotomy extensive enough to reduce psychotic symptoms is not required to control pain. (My source for all of this is Leland E. Hinsie and Robert Jean Campbell [1970]. Psychiatric Dictionary. Fourth Edition. Oxford University Press.).

I am not saying that meditation has similar effects as a lobotomy. How could I? Pardon the pun, but “meditation” is nowhere near as cut and dry as “lobotomy.”  My point is that the contemporary western rhetoric of meditation/mindfulness suggests a similarity. In case you think my comparison of the two is overly cute (as opposed to merely cute), here are some pearls of wisdom from Tricycle’s “Daily Dharma.”

In “Finding Sense in Sensation,”  S. N. Goenka recommends that we attend to the “arising and passing” of sensation. Why? Well, precisely not to feel life more acutely; precisely not to be more alive to the rich, intricate textures of human existence. No. The “sense in sensation” is to “understand its flux,” in order to  “learn not to react to it.” Fuck that is my reaction.

Goenka’s is a rhetoric of control, of resisting the demands of unruly, hence dangerous, sensation. It repeats the tendency of contemporary x-buddhistic meditation rhetoric to condemn strong emotions. In employing such rhetoric, x-buddhism’s roots  show; and they have the fleshless hue of ascetic, world-renouncing moralizing.

Allan Lokos’s “Daily Dharma” of February 4 continues in this vein. The wisdom he imparts involves, as his title states, “Cooling Emotional Fires.” “Anger, annoyance, and impatience deplete energy,” he teaches.

So, what should we do to tame these quite natural and often exceptionally useful human responses to our environment? Well, first of all, we should just be patient, for “Patient effort strengthens our resources.” I find such tired x-buddhistic clichés exceedingly annoying. I suppose the protesters on Tahrir Square finally did, too. And they, alas, would not have cared for Lokos’s advice on what to do with their impatience and anger:

We need to practice cooling emotional fires and alleviating fierce disruptions from our lives.

Again, a crypto-ascetic rhetoric of human denial, emotional repression, and general lassitude. We don’t need no water—let the motherfucker burn is the  fierce disruption from my life.

Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein reinforce this emotion-phobic rhetoric of x-buddhism in their February 6 “Daily Dharma,” titled “Cutting Through Anger.” Their use of the word “cutting” also, of course, unintentionally creates a parallel to lobotomy. Like 1940s-era doctors, they, too, want to cut off vibrant, pulsing expressions of human being in the name of some utopian, and anodyne, “well-being.” They call their lobotomy “mental noting:”

 Mental noting takes us in a very different direction from getting lost in a story: “Oh, this anger is so miserable; I am such a terrible person because I’m always angry; this is just how I will always be,” and so on. Instead, we simply say to ourselves, “anger, anger”—and cut through all of that elaboration, the story, the judgment, the interpretation.

Sharon and Joseph, I have a question for you: how will you cut through all of that elaboration, through that story, through that judgment and that interpretation? Or are you two liberated from story?

Bullshit bullshit is the miserable story I’m getting lost in right now.

“Mental noting” is just another strategy of real-world renunciation; it is just more crypto-ascetic x-buddhistic rhetoric. Yet, no sooner do I say this than Clark Strand contradicts me in the very next “Daily Dharma,” titled “Living with the World.”

 We are not called upon as Buddhists to deny the world, and certainly not to escape from it. We are called to live with it, and to make our peace with all that is.

Well, wait a minute; I take that back. Making “our peace with all that is” is not the same thing as “living with the world.” In fact, it is just the opposite. It is not living at all. It is merely operating under the yoke of vacuous spiritualized prescription. Strand’s “called upon/to” is about as close to Althusser’s “hailing/interpellation” as I’ve heard an x-buddhist come to admitting the hidden ideological claws of x-buddhism.

Again, this is a rhetoric of renunciation that veers toward the human-hostile. Do you want the promise of Buddhism to manifest in your life? Then you must make peace with all that is, goddamit! Oh, yes, that promise. Let us bow our heads:

The world of worries we wish to escape from in the beginning of Buddhist practice is found to be enlightenment itself in the end.

The “world of worries” is not fucking “enlightenment.” It is the world of worries.

We continue to get lobotomy-like results and instruction in Jason Siff‘s “Gentle Meditation” (“try approaching [meditation practices] in a softer, gentler manner,” etc.), in Peter Doobinin‘s employment of the “just do it” rhetoric (“You’re just walking. This is a good instruction: just walk…sense the joy in simply walking”). Brad Warner tops it all off by reminding us that “there are no magic solutions.” Ironically, though, he sprinkles fairy dust on his “no magic” by claiming for it the “one lesson that runs through pretty much every Buddhist tradition.”

In “Axiomatic Heresy,” Ray Brassier comments that François Laruelle sees “a philosopher” as a person who never says what he is really doing, and never does what he is really saying. Can we say the same for those x-buddhists who prescribe, and subscribe to, the formulations of contemporary x-buddhist meditation/mindfulness rhetoric? In what sense could any of them really be doing what they claim here? And do you really believe that they are honestly saying what they do do? What would other guests at the Great Feast of Knowledge—biology, physics, gastronomy, literature, political science—have to say about their claims?

“Obedience to normalcy is what lobotomies are for,” barks Steve Ignorant. Is that what meditation/mindfulness is for, too? Reading Tricycle’s “Daily Dharma,” you really have to wonder.

***

Tricycallergic? Yea. Try this instead:

Or this:

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Tricycle’s “Wisdom Collection.”

Leland E. Hinsie and Robert Jean Campbell (1970). Psychiatric Dictionary. Fourth Edition. Oxford University Press (on Google books).

Get government out of our lives. Go libertarian…I see so many buddhists, secular and otherwise, claiming to be socialist and want social engineering (big government). Buddha taught individual responsibility for our own awakening. He advocated maximum individual freedom, a concept directly opposed to big government (right or left leaning).

Reading that comment, it occurred to me just how rare it is to encounter anything overtly political in Buddhist forums. To read western Buddhism-oriented magazines, blogs, and Facebook pages, you could easily get the impression that x-buddhism is, in fact, a wholly apolitical affair. Central features of x-buddhist rhetoric even seem to encourage the kind of  political complacency that Žižek accuses western Buddhism of when he contends that it “is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.” (Can “equanimity” be seen as a buddhacized “complacency”?) I’ll come back to that point in a moment.

To the “Libertarian” comment, someone else astutely noted:

Have you read the vinaya? I don’t think you would walk away from it thinking that Buddhism advocates “maximum individual freedom.”

That is an astute comment because, really, the Vinaya is the document to go to if you want to know what the early Buddhist community “advocated” about social organization. I thought, well, if everyone now pulls out his/her copy of the Vinaya, that’ll be the end of that discussion. For it is indeed difficult to name a more controlling, micro-managing, anti-individual-freedom-loving document than the Buddhist Vinaya. Like all codifications of behavior, the Vinaya is the very antithesis of contemporary libertarianism. It is, in fact, an exemplary guide to extreme group-think.

But then someone else objected to the first comment on different grounds:

Gotama set up a communal society and urged its members to look out for each other’s welfare. I don’t think he would be a Ron Paul supporter.

That comment made we wonder: what kind of political philosophy might we extrapolate from x-buddhist teachings? Now, an obvious follow-up question is: which teachings? Since one of the favorite activities of x-buddhists is the interminable interpretation cum exemplification of x-buddhism, that question will just send us around in circles, chasing our tails.

I am not sure what “set up” of Gotama’s that last commentator had in mind. It certainly was not the Vinaya. For that text offers up an unhealthy dose of misogyny, homophobia, bullying, paternalism, draconian punishment, and outright abuse. Looking out for one another’s welfare? Sure, there is some of that. But for God’s sake–at what cost! (Google is looking out for our welfare, too…right?)

In any case, what interests me here, as a critic of x-buddhism, is not really a theoretical Buddhist politics per se, as interesting as that question is. It is the practice of extrapolation itself that interests me. What might some of the ramifications of x-buddhist dispositions, values, and qualities be when pulled out of the warm nest of “the sangha” and brought into the furious sphere of real-life political action? Take the motto of “non-judgmental awareness.” What does it mean to be “non-judgmental” in real-life, political terms? I don’t mean, how can you use non-judgmentalism as an “antidote” to knee-jerk political thinking. X-buddhism is filled with techniques of emotional micro-management and OCD-like inventory-taking. I don’t mean that. I mean a pure extrapolation.

What about these other x-buddhist values: just doing it; equanimity; not-thinking; letting go; effortless effort; compassion; non-conceptual awareness; mirror-like mind; non-reactivity; tolerance; forbearance; stepping into groundlessness (the title of a Pema Chödrön interview I just–ahem–tried to read). Like the equanimity→complacency equation, what new values might the extrapolation produce?

Extrapolation as a thought-experiment is a valuable exercise. It is a way of taking sensible-sounding x-buddhist values (whether classical or contemporary) out of the x-buddhist sanghic vacuum, and handing them over to the crucible of thought.

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The Secular Buddhist Facebook page.

Image: from the Union Yes website.

"Keep on selling me my future and I'll keep on wearing my disguise."

Meditation lies at the root of the myth of Buddhist exceptionalism. The cataclysmic event known as “awakening” and its aftermath (liberation, the overcoming of suffering,  perfect peace of mind, etc.), was, we are asked to believe, ignited by the Buddha’s practice of sitting meditation.

A central concern of speculative non-buddhism is to explore the relationship between x-buddhist doctrine and its meditation practice. One impetus to this investigation is the curious fact that practice seems invariably to verify doctrine. That fact raises the suspicion that x-buddhistic practice is impotent to effect anything even remotely resembling “liberation,” and, on the contrary, functions as a tool that reinforces established x-buddhistic ideology.

Or is such hallucinatory coercion only the result of subsuming “meditation” under “Buddhism”?  I present you here an essay, “Meditation and Control,” by Matthias Steingass, that gives thought to what might happen if we invert this equation. Such a move is necessary, says Steingass, for, “meditation as a sub-set of x-buddhism is logically unable to see more than that which this framework and setting are able to reveal.”

Along the way, Steingass presents a provocative case for the vampiric demands of our technological society on our attention. In sum, he asks: (1)  “What is our situation; how is it influenced socially by technological-economic forces? (2) Can meditation be of help in our situation? (3) What might the nature of such a practice be?

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Meditation and Control

By Matthias Steingass

A distinguishing characteristic of the situation we live in is that our attention is very much in demand by media everywhere we go the better part of our waking time. The combined average time of media usage is over eight hours per day. TV-usage alone in Europe and the US is generally around four hours per day; advertising is literally everywhere our senses reach, and the content we are exposed to via this steady input does not seem to be a flow of information we process consciously as much as a stream in which we live with a lot of bait bobbing for our attention.

I am not concerned here with promoted products—with the ads and fads washed around in this hotchpotch. Rather, I am interested in the values which are transmitted to us through this multiple media frenzy. That the definition of beauty for example is inscribed into the consumer via this steady infusion is a more obvious case; but what about more subtle messages concerning, for example, moral values, what to expect from life, what goals to accomplish and how to reach them, notions of fairness in interacting with my partner, neighbors, colleagues, competitors or even with somebody hostile and hateful? Another question: how does this steady stream of media input influence our consciousness on even more basic levels? Does it do so; and, if it does, how does it alter our capacity for deep thinking, how does it affect attention span, and what is its influence on the  synaptogenetic level (neuronal development in childhood)—on a child not even two or three years old, exposed to this never sleeping, maniacally colorful maelstrom, moving, shifting, whispering, magically conjuring I-want-everything-and-I-want-it-now? If you’ve ever seen a child in front of a TV, you know how completely attention can get hooked.

My question is, can meditation be—together, perhaps, with other practices—a form of attention-control? And if this is indeed possible, can such a practice have some kind of impact on hooked attention?

In my view, the situation is very problematic. It is not only that attention is hooked and we are manipulated at a very basic level of our being. It is that attention is a scarce commodity over which the fight is on, and that we as living beings are the one‘s producing this raw material around which our society in the age of information is revolving. This is not a paranoid fantasy about some Matrix in which we live (that film anyway is a false metaphor with that pill Morpheus gives Neo in order to see real reality). One can make a compelling case about how certain forms of reality and social norms are generated, and how these realities and norms we fill with life are destroying basic, essential forms of interaction.

The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler analyses the situation in depth in his book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. He cites Primo Levi in his introduction: “Not to consider human beings as things is to escape the total humiliation and demoralization which leads to spiritual ruin.“ It is an inadequate understanding of the technological thrust of our culture which leads to the conception of the human as just another thing, and, with this, to the destruction of spirituality—or to name it more fitting to the situation now in which spirituality is also a commodity: Responsibility!

Can meditation do something about this situation? If one has learned about meditation in a Buddhist context one would think it necessary to put this question to Buddhism itself. Is Buddhism able to see this problem of attention as raw material which is produced by humans who are treated as things? Buddhism declares itself to be a soteriological problem-solver which knows all about the human situation. From this point of view it seems logical that Buddhism is a solution in this situation and that meditation then is part of the solution.

But is this so? Is meditation a sub-set of Buddhism? I don‘t think so. In a certain sense, I would put it the other way around: Buddhism is a sub-set of Meditation. Buddhism is a multifaceted patchwork of theories about mind, social behavior, the meaning of life, speculations about the from and where-to of Dasein. As such, it is just another culturally conditioned answer to the question that the ape who has to confront seeing his own death must ask himself. In contrast to this conditioned answer, meditation, as a „natural“ ability to think in a certain way, is a given to this ape. It is a present of life —or seen from the theory of evolution, it is the developed ability to be present with the representation of parts of the environment in a mode of nowness, while this representational nowness-system is transparent to itself.

Buddhism in this context is, like many other known, unknown, long forgotten and yet to come cultural developments, inventions, innovations and creative solutions of the Homo sapiens, just one answer—an answer, furthermore, that has to compete with all other answers. It is in no way a superior answer; and as Glenn Wallis’s article on this blog, “Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism,” shows [link below], it is more likely caught in a circularity of defining reality and giving answers to this defined/constructed reality without being conscious of the act of definition, which rather invents a certain reality, while stipulating that this definition/construction is the last and ultimate answer. Buddhism is unaware of the fact that it is in itself a representational act. The inability to see this is partly due, I think, to the transparency of consciousness as an island of nowness, an island which cannot see, or only to a limited extent, its foundational structures—which, as far as it concerns moral values, are to a good extent, or maybe for the most part, built by the attention-harvesting culture industries. Seen from this angle, with Buddhism being unaware of the situation and being itself a product sold to the consumer, it is part of the problem, not of the solution. If the Buddhism in question is a x-buddhism as seen from non-buddhism then by definition it is unable to to do something about the social situation in which the human as such is raw material with his attention as his central organ to be exploited. “The Dalai Lama MasterChef” ” [link below], seen in this light, is an example par excellence of how Buddhism is put to work to exploit consumer attention.

Meditation as a sub-set of x-buddhism is logically unable to see more than that which this framework and setting are able to reveal.

Contrary to this, meditation as an ability of consciousness for  introspection, to look for the limits of introspection and to think about representations as representations is part of the becoming aware of the possibilities and limitations of consciousness.

Seen from this angle meditation must also examine buddhistic postulations about meditation and its object. For example in Tibetan Buddhism, the so called luminous or space-like mind or mind-itself is seen as an immortal entity. Does this  impression hold? In light of what we know today, the impression of immortality might simply be a misinterpretation of the transparency of consciousness. If consciousness is limited in its ability to see its own foundational structures and if it calms down enough, while staying alert, to contemplate awareness as such, then it very well might regard this seemingly unborn, deathless, sky-like crystal clear space as immortal—simply because it cannot see the mortality of its foundational structure.

Furthermore, while some forms of meditation might, as is claimed, have positive effects on personal health, on interpersonal interaction, on sociality, etc. (and while this might have to do with learning to dissociate from compulsive behavior), there is on the other side no source for knowledge down there in this clear cool well of calm abiding. The Buddha certainly did not find knowledge about quantum physics sitting under the bodhi-tree. If sitting in calm awareness, in relaxed dissociation from content is of value, then as the foundation of knowledge in the sense of Thomas Metzinger’s phenomenal self-model and not as knowledge itself or as a channel which leads to knowledge somewhere in a mystical way without simple learning. Perhaps the direction is of importance here. To dig deeper is impossible. The bare, utter, naked awareness is the invisible concrete wall which is permeable only in deep sleep and death—in the sense that the self-model there, hereafter, does not exist, is unthinkable. In the opposite direction, mind unfolds in myriad strategies because of the need to ask questions.

So the answer to the initial question seems to be: Yes, meditation can be of support for a better life in terms of health and sociality; but with consciousness transparent to itself it cannot, out of itself, gather knowledge about itself. As Thomas Metzinger puts it: “From the structure of our own inner experience, epistemological claims are not yet deducible.” With this conclusion one can say meditation alone is unable to see the problem situation sketched above.

This has far reaching consequences not only with view on the immortal Buddhist mind but also in view of our own socially contingent character structures. If we want to become better beings, more tolerant, politically aware, morally grown-up, less addicted to a surrogate-life full of tomorrows which never come; and if we must doubt at the same time the ability of introspection to reveal the formative powers of our value-systems, then the very important question arises: how can we judge the quality of our knowledge?  I think non-buddhism tries to give an answer here.

Meditation as relaxed and calm dissociation from content might contribute to this if it establishes a calm base from which the search does not try to reach ever more further inwardly but from where it reaches out to the other. In the problem situation Bernard Stiegler sketches in the book mentioned above, this other is in danger of disappearing. He or she, the being we live with, disappears behind a smoke screen of fake sociality. Disappearing —and this is the main point—because we loose control of our own attention. The situation we live in is a situation in which our attention is the commodity which really counts as economic fuel, a commodity which is of crucial importance for the market. It is not, of course, a commodity that is physically traded at the CME (the Chicago Mercantile Exchange), but it is one which is nonetheless at the heart of our being and therefore at the heart of being with our fellow human beings. If we switch on the TV, then a feature film, a soap, reality-TV, a cooking show with some celebrity shaman as guest—these are nothing more than the tools to lead our attention to its maximum alertness when the next commercial starts. What the TV-company sells to the advertising company, and further, to the producer of bliss and happiness forever, is our attention. It is brain time—literally— on which they trade. Our brain time.

In a sense the price per minute payed for a commercial is the market quotation for attention. This is one of the defining features of control-society. Attention is its main commodity. The term „control-society“ should not be confused with “surveillance-society.“ The latter situation is the one which, especially after 9/11, is in full bloom. Data-scanning and gathering in every manner here and data protection, privacy, the fight for the right of anonymity there, are the two antipodes fighting. Control-society is a much less debated item. It is by definition much more difficult to discern because it is the entity which controls the individual by bringing him to the point where he willingly and joyfully consents to the norms governing his society. It is a control which is not experienced as control. The term stems from Gilles Deleuze, who coined it more than twenty years ago in an astonishingly farsighted text entitled “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés du contrôle.“ In this short text, Deleuze develops further Foucault‘s historical analysis of the disciplinary-society and the sovereignty-society. The latter, being the oldest form, is typical for the feudal state in which the sovereign is in full charge over life and death of the individual. From this form in Europe with Napoleon the change to the disciplinary-society was completed. This is the society in which the individual is disciplined via family, school, barracks, factory, and so on. A highly hierarchical social order is typical here, while the following control-society which is our home now, developing strongly since the second world war and especially since the roaring sixties, is a relatively flat hierarchy in comparison. A further distinctive feature here is that this (information) society shifts its main emphasis from workforce to brainpower whereby the exploitation shifts to the attention which is produced by the brains. One could say the consumer is the new proletarian, and that it is no longer his workforce that is exploited but his attention.

The analysis Bernard Stiegler offers shows in detail that the way the attention of the citizen is harvested and strained is destroying the possibility of individuation, and with this, responsibility on every plane of society from the most basic—the love of two as “an atom of transindividual universality, as the first degree of the individual‘s passage to an immediate beyond“ (Badiou)—to the most general—the question how life in this civilization will go on. Control-society, not as an entity controlled by a secret organization like the Illuminati or a hidden agenda of the government ,but as an autopoietic institution, is deaf to this. It has by the very nature of its being no possibility of gathering knowledge about itself with the tool of simple introspection. So if one wants to understand the social fundamentals of our irresponsibility, of our moral failure, it is not enough to sit down and train in meditation. Meditation as attention-control from and for the individual can be  part of the solution if it is accompanied by learning and the widening of the horizon of knowledge in unforeseen directions—directions that are not, and cannot be, redacted by institutions mostly busy supporting themselves instead of engaging in real, risky interaction.

In this context here I want to propose meditation as a tool of gaining control of our own attention. In the freed space which can develop in this way there must then be learning. The free space itself is not enough and can, as every pharmakon, become poisonous. A cleared space within as a result of meditation can only be understood as a basis and not as an ultimate aim. It would be a base in which one would refuse to let one‘s attention be exploited and it would be the basis from which a new learning could develop, a learning that would try to understand the situation of the human in relation to technology and program industries and the relation of these forces vis-a-vis  attention and responsibility. Meditation as a clearing becomes a weapon against the parasitic forces of attention exploitation—and it protects and supports thinking as the original capability of the Homo sapiens.

This all is very cursory. The main questions again are: 1) What is our situation, how is it influenced socially by technological-economic forces? 2) Can meditation be of help in our situation?  (3) What might the nature of such a practice be?

To develop this case further, there is some reading to do: Bernard Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations is the main reference point to deal with the question of our situation. Thomas Metzinger‘s Being No One, or the summary of this in his “Grundkurs Philosophie des Geistes, Band I,” is a first approach to deal with the question of consciousness and to look from here—not vice versa —on older discussions about this phenomenon, and, specifically, to assess what is in general usage fuzzily called “meditation.“ Regarding the latter, I would suggest  a look at  Longchen Rabjams A Treasure Trove of Scriptural Transmission (Chapters 9 and 10) in Richard Barron‘s translation. Longchen Rabjams “natural meditative stability“ (tib: bsam gtan) is an important term here that needs to be looked at. What is left of “natural meditative stability“ when it is shorn of its transcendental ornamentations remains to be seen.

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Matthias Steingass is the founder of the German-English language blog Der Unbuddhist. Matthias studied math and economics. He has worked in the financial markets for the past seventeen years. Matthias has also worked as a musician (bass and sampling). In addition to his career, Matthias is currently pursuing his interests in philosophy while at the same time pursing music again, this time as a songwriter.

Matthias can be reached at: matthias.steingass@web.de

Links

“Meditation and Control” pdf file (Articles page)

“Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism“

“The Dalai Lama MasterChef“

Photograph: From an advertisement for Philips Aurea flat screen TVs.

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!

Photograph: Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, “After the Feast.”
A pdf file of Pepper’s review essay is available on the “Articles” page.

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Atman, Aporia, and Atomism: A Review of B. Alan Wallace’s Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

By Tom Pepper

By any measure, we would have to acknowledge that B. Alan Wallace is a major player in Western Buddhism. In the last eight years he started the Santa Barbara Institute of Consciousness Studies, published nine books, and is engaged in the International Shamatha Project. He has impressive credentials, with a Ph.D. from Stanford and a stint as a Tibetan monk ordained by the Dalai Lama. He has created himself as the leading authority on the relationship between Western science and Buddhism. His latest book, Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic (a title that would seem to have been chosen to invite comparison with Stephen Batchelor’s Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist) is subtitled “A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice.” The book sets out to argue that Buddhist contemplative practices can contribute to the scientific study of the mind, which is currently running hard down a dead-end in its attempts to map the mind onto neural activity. Along the way, Wallace argues against a reductive, materialist philosophy of science, and for a particular version of Tibetan Buddhism, as the correct way to finally understand human consciousness.

I first came across Wallace’s work many years ago, with a book called Choosing Reality: A Contemplative View of Physics and the Mind (the word “contemplative” was changed to “Buddhist” in later editions, apparently for marketing purposes). I picked up the book because as a Buddhist who is also interested in philosophy of science, I thought perhaps Wallace was going to get beyond the popular misrepresentation of quantum theory that says that we “create” a particle by observing it. I was hoping he might be trying to demonstrate that both Buddhism and quantum physics could be understood from a realist perspective. That is, I thought he was going to choose reality; instead, his book made a case for idealism, and argued that we choose reality. In the process, he misrepresented contemporary physics and showed a startling lack of knowledge of recent developments in the philosophy of science. I didn’t pay him much attention after that, but given his flurry of recent books, I thought it might be worth reconsidering exactly what his project really is.

In responding to this book, then, I have no intention of debating his take on Buddhism. I intend to take a thoroughly exterior, non-buddhist approach in responding to Wallace’s presentation of Buddhism. I do, in fact, disagree with some of his statements about Buddhism generally, but I am not interested in seeking the “true” Buddhism here. I know very little about Tibetan Buddhism, and I am confident that Wallace knows quite a bit about it. I will assume that his representation of Tibetan Buddhism is accurate. What I am interested in here is simply considering, from a non-buddhist perspective, the social and ideological implications of Wallace’s version of Buddhism. If we all accepted this version of Buddhism as true, and all began practicing it, what would that mean for us?

I will not give Wallace the same benefit of the doubt when it comes to his discussions of Western science and philosophy. In this realm, I will point out the errors and misrepresentations, the sophistries and false dilemmas, and the false conclusions resulting from his limited knowledge of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science. My aim here, however, is the same: my interest is again in considering the social and ideological project he has marshaled this wealth of pseudo-science and sophistry to promote.

I also want to begin with a few points on which I absolutely agree with Wallace. I point these out to make it clear that I think his goals are often (not always) goals that I share; it is my argument, however, that his ideas on how to reach these goals are terribly problematic, and that his philosophical assumptions can only hinder his project.

For one thing, it would be wonderful if more people understood, as Wallace points out quite clearly (pp. 177-179), that mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition is not at all the same thing as mindfulness in the Western mental-health industry. Despite the frequent claims that it is a concept adopted from Buddhism, mindfulness in the various “mindfulness-based” therapies has little to do with the concept of sati. Wallace also makes clear that absolute acceptance of whatever comes into our minds is not the typical Buddhist approach; instead, Buddhist have traditionally been very keen on controlling what goes on in the mind, to eliminate the afflictions of attachment, aversion, and ignorance. Vipashyana (vipassana) does not mean, Wallace reminds us (pp. 204-206), accepting the mind as it is, but learning to shape it into something better.

Finally, and most importantly, I absolutely agree with Wallace that the reductive materialist attempts to map the mind onto the neurological activity of the brain is a mistake, a dead end, that will prevent any real progress both in philosophical considerations of consciousness and in psychology. The mind, I will argue, is neither concomitant with the brain, nor is it an epiphenomenon. However, I will completely disagree with how he seeks to avoid reductive materialism. To adumbrate my conclusions here, I will briefly discuss the problem of free will, and Wallace’s solution to this seemingly endless debate.

At first it seemed puzzling to me that Wallace would end the first part of his book with a chapter on “achieving free will,” as the Western concept of “will” has always seemed to be irrelevant to Buddhist thought. However, this chapter reveals the reason for Wallace’s appeal to the radical empiricism of William James, for his overly simplistic version of modern philosophy of science, and shows us what the goal of his version of Buddhism ultimately will turn out to be.  Wallace presents us with a version of Buddhism that seeks to uncover, through spiritual practice, a “brightly shining mind” that is unborn, eternal, and exists “in every being,” although “veiled by adventitious defilements” (115). The “conceptual mind,” which is conventional and impermanent, cannot access this “realm of consciousness,” but the “brightly shining mind” can “influence the minds of ordinary sentient beings” (115) in ways that are “beyond the realm of philosophy” (116). Our greater freedom, it seems, is achieved by removing the defilements, conventional accretions inhibiting the ability of the pure consciousness to subtly and imperceptibly influence the conventional mind. He presents us, then, with the very definition of an atman: an abiding deep self, uncreated by causes and conditions, permanently existing, unchangeable, and alone capable of true and complete bliss.  (Of course, Wallace says this is not an atman at all, but simply asserting that it is not an atman does not make it any less of one.)  My argument will be that Wallace’s attempt to resuscitate James’s radical empiricism, his misrepresentation of quantum theory, and his implication that reductive materialism is the only existent, and only possible, philosophy of science, all serve to produce his subtle atman as the one remaining conceivable explanation for the existence of consciousness; furthermore, the social and political implications of this version of Buddhism are horrendously elitist and oppressive. I will then suggest one other possible explanation for the existence of consciousness, which I believe is more in agreement with the basic concept of Buddhism, and could possibly make Wallace’s ostensible project more likely to succeed—and without the negative social and political implications.

The Quantum Myth and a Scientific Straw Man

Wallace has gotten quite a bit of mileage over the years out of the popular mythos of quantum theory, and he hits that note several times in this book. It enables him to give a “scientific” argument against what he repeatedly calls “materialistic” science; on Wallace’s version, quantum physics demonstrates that the universe “requires for its existence the participation of an observer” (84). I’m sure we’re all familiar with the version of quantum theory that tells us that the particle doesn’t exist until we measure it, so consciousness ultimately produces reality. When physicists insist that this is an exaggerated claim, that quantum theory “does not imply that reality is no more than a pure subjective human construct,” Wallace simply insists that they are unwilling to accept the implications of their own theory. He quotes Brukner and Zeilinger who argue that from multiple observations it is possible to “build up objects with a set of properties that do not change under variations of modes of observation or description” (84); essentially, what they suggest is that once we become aware of the influence of measurement, we can determine the level of consistent reality existing independent from our conscious observation. On one reading of Vasubandhu’s writing, this is the point of Yogacara Buddhism: that we can study the mind not because it is the only reality, but because then we can become aware of how it distorts reality, essentially learning to correct for error. Wallace is very attached to what we might call a consciousness-only school of physics because it enables him to “open the door to the possibility of nonphysical influences on the material world” (99), producing a radical duality of atman and conventional samsara, with only a one-way possibility of influence. There are, of course, many ways to understand the quantum theory, and Wallace’s consciousness-only physics is not the only option. As Christopher Norris has pointed out in a very interesting book on the subject, “it is preposterous in the strict sense of that term—an inversion of the rational order of priorities—when thinkers claim to draw far-reaching ontological or epistemological lessons from a field of thought so rife with paradox and lacking (as yet) any adequate grasp of its own operative concepts” (5).  Norris demonstrates that Bohm, who literally wrote the book on quantum theory, always held that there were alternative, realist models capable of explaining all of the quantum “facts.” This alternative was ignored largely for ideological, extra-scientific reasons (See Norris, especially p. 144).  In the case of Wallace’s argument, it seems the “orthodox” quantum interpretation has continued to serve its ideological purpose.

Wallace’s main scientific target is the biological reductionism that would assert that the mind is nothing more than neural activity.  He also wants to reject what he calls “metaphysical realism” (28). By this, he means the “scientific worldview” that insists that the only things that are real and can produce effects are physical things, and that physical is equivalent to matter. Of course, not even the most reductive of empiricists would actually deny the existence of energy in the universe, so Wallace’s argument involves a bit of sleight of hand, as he elides everything but material “entities,” and then denies their reality. This sophistry is fascinating:

According to metaphysical realism, the entire objective universe consists of physical entities that produce the effects measured by human beings; however, we can never perceive these entities, as they exist independently of all measurement.  Therefore, we can never infer the contents of the absolutely objective world on the basis of observations, which always arise relative to systems of measurement. (28)

This passage is worth close attention, because it is essentially this peculiar logic on which Wallace’s entire argument depends. For Wallace, something is only real in the objective sense if it is a discrete entity; then, that entity is completely invisible since it must be “measured” instead of “perceived;” therefore, we can never know what is actually in the objective world at all; from here, it is a short step to the assumption that no objective world even exists: “all observations of the physical world are illusory”(29). This argument depends on many philosophical errors, but the three most important here are: (1) the belief that “physically real” can only mean a discrete material entity whose only properties are mass and location; (2) the assumption that perception is not itself a form of “measurement;” and (3) the assumption that because any specific measurements of the objective world are limited to certain attributes, we cannot infer anything from them. Of course, as Brukner and Zeilinger indicate in the passage quoted above, it is exactly because we can be aware or our systems of measurement, including perceptual ones, that we can make reasonably correct inferences about the objective world.

Wallace’s reductive, straw-man version of the “scientific worldview” is essential, however, in supporting his central claim about the radical duality of reality. He spells this out for us right in the first chapter. “[T]he illusion of knowledge that the mind is physical has delayed the revolutionary development of the mind sciences” he tells us, and this has occurred largely because “the scientific establishment exerts . . . pressure on its members to reject all forms of mind-body dualism in favor of an antiquated monism”(14). Wallace says he wants to “think outside the box—outside the familiar dualities of dualism and monism” (14), but he rejects the “familiar” Cartesian dualism only to replace it with a more radical dualism, in which an absolute atman, which he refers to at times as “substrate consciousness,” is the deepest and most permanent level of reality, influencing but unaffected by the physical realm. The existence of philosophies of science other than reductive materialist monism has apparently conveniently escaped Wallace’s notice.  Roy Bhaskar’s realist theory of science, for instance, completely avoids the problems Wallace finds with the “scientific worldview” without requiring some non-natural, other-worldly power to fill in the gaps. Bhaskar’s philosophy of science includes distinctions between intransitive and transitive objects of science; that is, between the objective reality and the object of thought produced by a science. It includes the possibility that reality is stratified, with different levels of causal mechanisms, and therefore accepts the possibility of emergence. Emergent powers cannot be reduced to more “basic” strata on which they depend; so we cannot explain the mind by studying the brain any more than we could expect to derive the laws of baseball from the laws of physics, despite the fact that it would be impossible to play the game if those laws ceased to operate.

The false philosophical dilemma Wallace sets up requires absolute ignorance of serious philosophical thought about science, and so a misunderstanding of how science operates. Wallace assumes that there must be final, complete answers, or there are no answers at all—and therefore science fails. This assumption depends upon an ontology that is both materially monist and non-stratified; these are not assumptions that are required for a realist ontology. In the words of Andrew Collier, from a critical realist perspective “we never reach rock-bottom—so the prejudice that only rock-bottom explanations are real ones would leave us forever without real explanations” (110). Wallace demands of science that it jump immediately to the rock-bottom answer, rejecting the possibility of stratification, and the transitive nature of explanatory mechanisms. This enables him to make the claim that from a scientific perspective “matter—as it exists in and of itself, independent of measurement—is as unknowable to the human intellect as God” (234).  And, when he comes across a poll which suggests that the majority of physicists are undecided about the best interpretation of quantum mechanics, he can only conclude that the “real implications of quantum physics seem to be hidden in a cloud of uncertainty” (236), and the only solution is to conclude that consciousness creates the world. He is incapable of seeing that physicists may be less likely than he is to reify their transitive objects of knowledge; for the best physicists, the interpretations we produce in concepts are what we argue about, because they are always constructs designed to move us toward better descriptions and explanations of the intransitive object. We may never reach rock-bottom, probably won’t, but that doesn’t require us to abandon science and resign the field to the supernatural. Wallace claims that modern science “is incompatible with the Middle Way school of Buddhist philosophy” (29). I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether Wallace’s atman or Bhaskar’s version of realism is closer to Nagarjuna’s epistemology and ontology.

William James, Shangri-La, and Reactionary Ideology

One of the reasons I was initially prompted to read this book was my surprise at Wallace’s call to return to James’s radical empiricism. The stupid insistence of psychology and “mind sciences” on a naïve and reductive empiricism that has never really been the underlying philosophy of any real scientific progress is certainly frustrating. But there are so many alternative scientific epistemologies, I could not imagine why Wallace would pick up on this glaringly reactionary, elitist, and theistic form of capitalist ideology and mistake it for a philosophy of science.

Even if he were reluctant to engage the more radically realist philosophies of science, there have certainly been more philosophically sophisticated versions of radical empiricism advanced in the past century. Quine, Kitcher, and Kornblith come immediately to mind; and I’m sure a philosopher could easily add to the list. What, I wondered, is the ideological value of James’s particular version of radical empiricism?

James’s psychology was begun as an ideological project, intended to defend the existence of the soul against the rampant materialism gaining popularity in academic circles (see Leary). In The Principles of Psychology, James makes no bones about it: “I confess, therefore, that to posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-states and responding to them by conscious affections of its own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as we yet have attained” (181). His argument is that the conceptual puzzles and paradoxes of psychology can only, finally, be resolved by either admitting a soul, or resigning some problems to “nature in her unfathomable designs” which “no mortal may ever know” (182). It should be clear why James appeals to Wallace: a reductive version of science leading to aporia which can only be resolved by appeal to a transcendent soul.

James’s positivism is also quite explicit, and nowhere more so than in a passage Wallace cites in an earlier book, The Taboo of Subjectivity: “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, p. 26). This may seem obvious, but the problem is that for radical empiricism the only things that count as “real” (in a physical, objective sense) are those that can be experienced, and all experiences are real in exactly the same way. There is no room for theoretical causal mechanisms, and no way to distinguish between the kinds of reality that obtain in a thought and in a bomb. Just as importantly, there is no way to think about what Bhaskar calls the “metacritical dimension,” which “aims to identify the presence of causally significant absences in thought, seeking to elicit . . . what cannot be said or done . . . in a particular language or conceptual system” (Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, p. 25). The rejection of such dimensions of thought in positivist philosophies is always in the service of conservatism. Pragmatism is, as James insists, only interested in “practical” results, and particularly interested in insisting that these results can only be produced from within the current, existing, system—of thought, language, politics, economics.

The political conservatism of this can perhaps be made clear by mentioning Wallace’s dismissal of his own ridiculously incorrect understanding of Freud. From his positivist perspective, Wallace can only misunderstand Freud, and can only think of the unconscious as “the subtlest discursive thoughts, mental dialogues, images, memories, desire, and emotions,” which “Freud discovered centuries after Buddhist contemplatives” (188). That this is not what Freud meant by the unconscious should be clear to anybody who is familiar with serious psychoanalytic thought. Suffice it to say that the dynamic unconscious, for Freud, is not subtle and unnoticed but positively existing mental activity; rather, the unconscious is precisely what is unthinkable or unspeakable within a specific conceptual system. The reason for this persistent misreading of Freud is perhaps clearest when Wallace trots out once again the most often quoted and least often understood passage in all of Freud’s writings. I’ll quote it here at some length:

When I promised my patients help and relief through the cathartic method, I was often obliged to hear the following objections, “You say, yourself, that my suffering has probably much to do with my own relation and destinies. You cannot change any of that. In what manner, then, can you help me?” To this I could always answer: “I do not doubt at all that it would be easier for fate than for me to remove your sufferings, but you will be convinced that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness, against which you will be better able to defend yourself with a restored nervous system.” (Studies in Hysteria, p. 232)

This is the source of the most common quip about psychoanalysis: that it can only convert misery into ordinary unhappiness. The point Freud is making, however, is much different. For Freud, it is imperative to accept that much of our human unhappiness is because of our social environment, and that is beyond the reach of psychoanalysis; the really useful benefit of uncovering what is unconscious, what is invisible within our construal of the world, is that it might leave us “better able to defend” ourselves—to make real changes in those “relations and destinies” causing our “everyday unhappiness.”  Pragmatism would prefer we remain resigned to the positivity of its conceptual construal of the world, to eliminate the threat of any demand for social change. James’s radical empiricism was always meant to cut off any consideration of the social production of our mental experience. In fact, Wallace quotes Kurt Danziger in support of his claim that abandonment of the introspective method occurred for “ideological rather than pragmatic” reasons (173). In fact, that is Danziger’s point, but the ideological reason is not what Wallace implies; instead, the reason for the abandonment of introspection was that it “demonstrated that the nature of the object of psychological investigation was linked to the social structure of the investigative situation” (Danziger, p. 48). The problem wasn’t materialist ideology, but the possibility that the contents of the psyche were produced by social structures; and so it would require social change to improve or cure the mind. Interdependence, it seems, was more troubling than the possibility of a soul.

And now I come to what will undoubtedly be the most controversial claim I will make in this essay: that the extreme conservatism of Wallace’s philosophical approach is directly connected to the particular kind of Buddhism he is proposing. That is, I will dare to say what is unspeakable in Western Buddhist circles: that Tibetan Buddhism functioned as the ideological support of one of the most undemocratic, oppressive, and elitist social systems to endure into the twentieth century. What could be a better justification for inherited aristocracy than the belief that they have earned their wealth and power by meritorious actions in past lives? A couple hundred aristocratic families lived in opulence, while Buddhist monastics sought meditative bliss in idle luxury, all supported by the labor of an uneducated and economically oppressed hereditary peasant cast, who apparently had some bad karma to work off. This is the Shangri-La whose loss brings tears to the eyes of Hollywood celebrities. Somehow it has come to seem a horrible injustice that an oppressive oligarchy was deposed. It may, of course, be argued that it is a terrible injustice that this deposition did not lead to terribly much improvement in the lives of the peasants, but Wallace’s frequent cold-war anti-communist rhetoric just rings hollow for me.

An elite class, however, turns out to be essential to the kind of Buddhism Wallace is presenting. He repeatedly emphasizes the rarity of achieving the first dhyana, citing a Sri Lankan monk who says there are fewer than five people in Sri Lanka who have achieved it, and assuring us that even in Tibet, where the higher form of Buddhism is supposedly practiced, it is rare (p. 148). Besides the rarity of qualified teachers, there is the need for “a quiet, healthy, pleasant environment where one’s material needs are easily met,” so that one can practice continuously (although the truly dedicated might need as little as “six hours each day” and “even engage with others between sessions” (155-156). Still, he quotes Atisha: “If you lack the prerequisites of shamatha, you will not achieve samadhi even in thousands of years, regardless of how diligently you practice” (155).  Such long stretches of idle time (Wallace reminds us that it took even Buddha six years), and the provision of all material comforts, is clearly the privilege of only an elite class of people with good karma. The vast majority of people would simply remain karmically incapable of such spiritual progress in this lifetime.

The rarity of achieving these advanced meditative states also calls attention to Wallace’s odd definition of “skeptic.” Apparently, for him it means absolute unquestioning blind faith in something we can never see any evidence of or hope to even approach in our lifetimes. Not a definition of skeptic I have ever heard before. Wallace’s skepticism is apparently limited to skepticism about a naïve philosophy of science that few people ever accepted; when it comes to Buddhism, his appeals to authority abound. He repeatedly cites “authoritative accounts” (182) or truth “revealed” to an “eminent master” (214), to support claims about the achievement of a stable “pristine awareness” or state of “bliss” that cannot be verified by our own “radical empirical” endeavors, since it is achievable only rarely, by those with the right karma.

Although Wallace does assert that “no autonomous, controlling self can be found,” and that this is what is meant by the Buddhist term anatman (110), it is hard to see in what sense the “timeless, ‘nonmanifesting’ consciousness that experiences” nirvana (209) is anything but an atman. He claims that the “mind when it has settled in its natural state, beyond the disturbing influences of conscious and unconscious mental activity” (69) can experience the “quality of bliss” that “does not arise in response to any sensory stimulus”(68). I have no idea whether this is standard Tibetan Buddhism or not—I can only assume Wallace knows of what he speaks. If it is, I can only say I would have no interest in it. It isn’t hard to see, however, why this kind of Buddhism might appeal to an economic elite in the west; there is no need to worry about the suffering of others, just seek your own bliss in idle luxury. And we can rest assured that our eternal atman-that-is-not-one will dwell in bliss, without having to make any change whatsoever in our current ideology: Wallace assures us that “both religious and non-religious people can embrace this ideal of genuine happiness, with specific attributes defined by each one in terms of his or her own worldview”(172). As long as you have the right karma to be born rich, you’re all set. To the privileged elite, Wallace’s comfort-Buddhism says “we are home at last” (85). Enjoy your bliss!

Escaping Atomism

In conclusion, I would like to suggest one possible alternative to Wallace’s response to reductive materialism. The problems that James saw as “unfathomable” unless we accepted the existence of a soul, and that Wallace sees as insoluble in “mind sciences” unless we accept an atman, might turn out not to be problems at all if we could simply abandon philosophical atomism.  Wallace uses the term “mind” in two ways, usually without clarifying which use he intends: the mind is both the “conceptual thought” that exists at the conventional level, and the eternal “substrate consciousness.” In both cases, however, it is clear that for Wallace each mind is individual, either eternally separated from all others in the case of the substrate consciousness, or individually arising from the interactions of a brain and its environment in the case of the conventionally existent mind.  Introspection, for Wallace, is compared to an “inwardly focused telescope,” that examines an “individual mind stream” (24). For both James and Wallace, and indeed for much of Western thought, the insistence on discrete, individual consciousnesses has lead to endless paradoxes, aporia, and irresolvable problems—from free will to solipsism, from the status of knowledge to the existence of a mind, there are a host of problems that cannot be solved unless we abandon the notion of consciousness or mind existing individually, the depths of a mind.

Eighty years ago, V. N. Volosinov proposed that we drop this line of pursuit. “Consciousness,” he suggested, “becomes consciousness only once it has been filled with ideological (semiotic) content, consequently, only in the process of social interaction” (11). Psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud and most thoroughly with Lacan, presented a radically empty subject, arising not from deep within but from without, in a socially produced symbolic network. Alain Badiou has suggested a theory of the subject that accepts all of the most radical implications of Lacan’s thought: as individual organisms, we are nothing but automatons; it is only as socially engaged subjects to a truth that we gain any agency. To become subjects with true agency, we must participate in a truth procedure, a practice which functions to extend our capacity to interact with reality beyond what is possible within a given system of knowledge—the subject is not an individual, but a social entity. As such, it may very well transcend the limits of an individual organism’s life, and experience the future effects of our present day actions. We will never find consciousness in the firing of neurons, because it exists only in the symbolic social interaction of multiple individuals.

I would suggest that this line of thought is much more compatible with the Buddhist concepts of pratityasamutpada, sunyata, and anatman than any other form of Western philosophical thought. Further, I would suggest that this line of thought could learn a great deal from Buddhist thinkers of the past couple thousand years—not all of them, but certainly Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, and Candrakirti at the very least could help teach us to think the radical implications of a non-atomist subject.

If Wallace’s ultimate goal is a political or economic one, propping up a privileged elite or garnering financial support from wealthy Westerners, then I would suppose he would have little interest in the criticism I have offered here. If, on the other hand, his interest is truly in exploring the nature of human consciousness, he might want to do a little reading, and catch up on the advances made in the philosophy of science by Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism, and explore the theory of the subject advanced by Lacan and Badiou.  I’m not so optimistic as to hope that will happen, but I am just optimistic enough to hope that a few of those interested in the possibilities of Buddhist thought and practice might realize that we do not have to choose between Wallace’s Tibetan atman and the kind of reductive “naturalizing” of Buddhism advanced by Owen Flanagan, who want to “tame” Buddhism by jettisoning anything that doesn’t fit with a reductive, empiricist philosophy of science, keeping only its useful tendency to teach people to be nice. As Alain Badiou has put it, the enemy of thought today is “a sort of scientism stipulating the mind must be naturalized and studied according to the experimental protocols of neurology, reinforced, as always, by an inane moralism with a religious tinge—in substance: one has to be nice” (118). Wallace’s version of Buddhism would simply abandon the field to this enemy, and retreat to the solitary pursuit of bliss.

From a non-buddhist perspective, the decisional structure of Wallace’s brand of Buddhism is quite clear. As I understand Laruelle’s concept, the decisional structure is the fundamental construal of the world which enables a particular project in thought, but which remains invisible from within that thought. That Wallace cannot see his decisional structure is evident from his ostensible rejection of it: he claims he wants to reject Cartesian dualism and accept the Buddhist concept of anatman, and he cannot see that he is producing both an absolute dualism and the ultimate atman. His reductive understanding of science and epistemology and absolute faith in the authority of the Buddhist tradition would leave us no choice but to accept the existence of an atman that he simply insists is not one. From within his decisional structure, no argument could defeat Buddhist authority; since none of us can achieve the transcendent meditative states of the masters, we can neither debate their existence and value nor even hope to comprehend what such states actually are. No alternative version of science is possible, since for Wallace only rock-bottom (positivist) answers can count as scientific. This combination produces a self-replicating hermetic system designed to perpetuate inequality with the promise of future bliss.

References

Badioiu, A. Second Manifesto for Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity, 2009.

Bhaskar, R. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Collier, A. Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy. London: Verso, 1994.

Danziger, K. Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Freud, S. & Breur, J. Studies in Hysteria. Trans. A.A. Brill.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1937.

James, W. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1950.

James, W. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902

Norris, C. Quantum Theory and the Flight from Realism: Philosophical Responses to Quantum Mechanics. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Volosinov, V.N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. L. Matejka  I.R. Titunuk.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Wallace, A.B. Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Miind Sciences and Contemplative Practice.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Wallace, A.B. The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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.”

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?—Françoise 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? Speculative non-buddhism is thus a critical practice. Conceivably, a critical-constructive methodology could emerge from its ideas. Its way, its practice, its ideas, though, render Buddhism unrecognizable to itself. Speculative non-buddhism is an approach to analyzing and interpreting Buddhist teachings. But, again, it results in buddhistically untenable, indeed, buddhistically uninterpretable, theorems. While this process results in a re-description of Buddhism, speculative non-buddhism is not an attempt to reformulate or reform (in any sense of the term) Buddhism. Neither is it concerned with ameliorating Buddhism’s relationship with contemporary western secular values. It is designed with three primary functions in mind: to uncover Buddhism’s syntactical structure (unacknowledged even by—especially by—Buddhists themselves); to serve as a means of inquiry into the sense and viability of Buddhist propositions; and to operate as a check on the tendency of all contemporary formulations of Buddhism—whether of the traditional, religious, progressive or secular variety—toward ideological excess.

Middle (from the heuristic):

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.

End:

Finally, if I may press Nick Land into service and butcher (with apologies), to suit my needs, a comment he made about literature in The Thirst for Annihilation (p. xix.):

Speculative non-buddhism is a transgression against buddhistic transcendence—the dark concealment of an atavistic yearning to rise above the status of homo sapiens ape and to escape, unscathed, from empty reality. Speculative non-buddhism permits an understanding of Buddhism more basic than the pseudo-understanding of Dharma-infused buddhistic discourse. The life of speculative non-buddhism is the death of buddhistic pretension to specular oracularity. It thrives on the violent absence of the dharmic good, and thus of everything that protects, consolidates, or guarantees the interests of the individual personality. The death of this transcendent pretension is the ultimate transgression, the release of narcissistic humanity from itself, back into the blind infernal extravagance of the sun.

The Article: Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism.

New page. I have added a page called “Articles” on the top bar. Many of the pieces on this blog are really more like essays or articles than blog posts. So, I will package them nicely and create pdf files that you can download and print out. Now, light your pipe, and read at leisure.

New Tagline. I’ve changed the blog tagline to “creative criticism” to better capture what I am up to here. The basic  idea of creative criticism is summed up by Camelia Elias* at EyeCorner Press, who speaks of “promoting … writing with an edge,” and  encouraging “works that engage with rigorous thinking, but which are yet informed by a creative style, and irreverent approaches to literature, culture, and philosophy.” (And, need I add, buddhism?)

e-journal. Speaking of creative criticism, I am creating a new e-journal with the aim of fostering and disseminating  creative writing that uses buddhist materials. I need your support and input. Here’s the idea. Then, what you can do.

Idea. When people hear the term “creative writing,” they typically think of poems and short stories and novels. That’s not what I mean. I mean word blood. I mean injecting vitalizing language into anemic buddhistic discourse. The main concern of the e-journal is to explore the subject in fresh terms. And that can be done—indeed, is often best done—without (necessarily) following the conventions of “good” writing. Unlike its well-behaved brethren—academic books and journals and informed blogs—the e-journal will host writing that is not afraid to hiss and spit.

Creative writing—word blood—plunges deeply into the well of human being.  Bile of enmity rouses it no less than ecstasy of love.  It says, along with Terence (the second-century Roman playwright): “I am a human being; nothing human can be alien to me.” Another goal of the e-journal: broaden the spectrum of permissible emotion in buddhistic discourse.

What you can do. During this phase of conception, you can give me your feedback and ideas. What should the e-journal be called? Is it something you’d like to get involved with? In what capacity? Most importantly, you can begin to submit your writing. Remember, there are no rules. Forget about “genre.” Length is immaterial. A paragraph can be as rich as a book.  Better yet, how about a fragment? Something broken? Or a stammer? Make up a critiku (critical haiku) or critiverse. Rewrite a sutta/sutra/tantra. Make one up. Be shamelessly autobiographical. Have the Buddha do stand-up. Let loose the howl of an unshackled x-buddhist/non-buddhist/unbuddhist/anti-buddhist. Unbind, goddamit.

Oh, better yet! Err. Be a fool. Make a spectacle of yourself. Dance. Sing. Gurgle. Yowl.

Wondering about topics? Imagine the Great Feast of Knowledge. Escort Buddhism there, if you like. Sit down and allow tradition to converse with whomever you fancy—poetry, culinary arts, philosophy, biology; schizoanalysis, anarchism, punk, death. It really doesn’t matter, as long as you’re lost in the conversation. Write it up in whatever form you see fit. It really doesn’t matter, as long as it lives, breathes, shits—and bleeds.

Anyone who would like to contribute, please either respond directly as a comment (=preferred, since it’s shared) or by email: gw@glennwallis.com

* For inspiration and some guidance, I can think of no better words than Camelia Elias’s interview on Biblioklept.

Painting: Mark Rothko (1903-1970), “Red-Orange,” 1968. Source.

Why is that? Why allow the intellect to do only so much work, and then show it the door? X-Buddhists of all varieties invoke the sciences and humanities as allies in their search for knowledge—only to retreat back into the sureness of doctrine and, as Tom Pepper puts it, “down into the thought-free depths of the body.” Why? One reason: anti-intellectualism.

Anti-intellectualism? Consider this statement by a figure who has exerted an exorbitant influence on the shape of Buddhism—and not just Zen—in the modern West:

“Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis;” sutras are “mere waste paper whose utility consist in wiping off the dirt of the intellect and nothing more” (D.T. Suzuki, in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, 8-9).

In this post, I present to you an essay by Tom Pepper that explores the nature of this tendency of contemporary western Buddhists to “reject the demands of rigorous thought.” From the perspective of Speculative non-Buddhism, Pepper’s essay is a valuable instance of escorting Buddhism to the Great Feast of Knowledge.

___________________

On Buddhist Anti-Intellectualism and the Limits of Conceptual Thought

By Tom Pepper

For several years now I have been puzzled, sometimes troubled, by the determined and occasionally virulent anti-intellectualism of Western Buddhism. The pervasive hostility to philosophical thought, at Buddhist retreats, in popular Buddhist books and magazines, and sometimes even in scholarly works, is particularly puzzling in light of the long tradition of sophisticated and rigorous Buddhist philosophy. In the last couple thousand years, there has been enormous intellectual work in many different schools of Buddhism, but American Buddhists are adamant that any such efforts be labeled “clinging to views” or “ego.” Why, I have often wondered, adopt Buddhism at all if one is so opposed to rigorous thought? Of course, there are some easy answers about the myth of the exotic east and spiritual snobbery; however, I have come to think that there is a more subtle, and less dismissive, answer to this puzzle. Perhaps instead of just putting this down to the general American stupidity, we can explore why this anti-intellectualism is so compelling, and what, exactly, is so terribly anxiety-producing about thought?

I will briefly adumbrate my conclusion here, although it will likely be unconvincing at this point: I would suggest that the particular kind of anti-intellectualism found among Buddhists (who are often more educated and intelligent than average) is a reaction to the desolate landscape of post-modern thought; it is, I will suggest, not the only possible reaction, and there is another alternative, which I think is more in line with the history of Buddhist thought.  That alternative is not a retreat from thought into pure experience, but the willingness to think our way out of this bleak intellectual wasteland.  In short, while many Buddhists have been trying to escape the trap of post-modernity by retreating down into the thought-free depths of the body, a more useful (and, I will argue, more Buddhist) response is to escape up, into the limits of philosophical rigor.

To begin, I want to delineate the particular kind of anti-intellectualism that has permeated popular forms of Western Buddhism.  Now, in mentioning only a handful of Buddhist teachers, I don’t want to suggest that they are solely responsible for this anti-intellectualism, or that this represents the entire function of their work as a whole. I am simply picking a few examples, to clarify the kind of resistance to thought I see as being most prevalent; these example are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they the entire story of Western Buddhism. There are some Buddhist thinkers today (I will mention only a few of them, as well) who are very explicitly not in the anti-intellectual camp. My goal here is simply to account for one reason why anti-intellectualism is so popular a position for a group of people who are, more often than not, well-educated, intelligent, and politically progressive—all descriptors with which the term “anti-intellectual” would not seem to pair well.

I have often heard it suggested that the suspicion of thought results from the influence of Zen being the first form of Buddhism widely introduced to Western audiences. I wonder, however, if it might have been the other way around—that Zen was attractive because it is so easy to portray it as eschewing thought. In fact, it is also possible to see the practice of koans as exactly demanding that the practitioner take his conceptual framework to the limits and transcend it, not escaping to pure thoughtless sensation but advancing the possibilities of thought.  I’ll come back to this suggestion later. For now, I want to start with some popular presentations of Zen, and their rejection of conceptual or philosophical thought.

D.T. Suzuki, in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, declared that “Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis,” and that the sutras are “mere waste paper whose utility consist in wiping off the dirt of the intellect and nothing more” (8-9). The goal is “absolute peace of mind,” and this is only attained by eliminating the “reasoning faculty,” which only “hinders the mind from coming into the directest communication with itself” (14). We must seek a state in which we eliminate logic and even words from our minds, and live in direct, sensory experience, understood to be the deepest truth. On this understanding, our senses are a pure apprehension of a primal reality, which have been screened from us by thought; now, I’ll set aside critiquing this position for the time being, and simply note that it would strike most philosophers today, and I believe many Buddhists throughout history, as startlingly naive to think that our sense perceptions aren’t always already structured by culture and language.

More recently, Thich Nhat Hanh has followed a similar approach. One could almost open any of his books and find a statement about the futility of thought, or the vanity of “philosophy,” or a statement that true enlightenment is full enjoyment of a cup of tea or the beauty of a flower. We must never examine the history of imperialism that is the condition of our enjoying this cup of tea, or the cultural privileging of the temporary, of the extravagant ability to devote resources to the useless, which are the cause of our pleasure in the flower.  That would be thought, and so delusion: enlightenment is just insisting that the culturally produced experiences we enjoy the most are a contact with the timeless reality of “interbeing.”  In Understanding Our Mind, perhaps Thich Nhat Hanh’s most explicitly anti-intellectual book, he explains that in the first stage of the bodhisattva path, the bodhisattva must remove the “obstacles of knowledge and affliction,” and then “experience” reality directly as a “state of being refreshed”(117). Note that these are not obstacles to knowledge—knowledge itself is the obstacle to experiencing reality: “Before ideation, before the mind begins to construct, the mind touches the ultimate dimension, the realm of suchness” (128). The only way back to this mystical suchness is eliminating thought and fully enjoying our sensory present.

It is not only the Zen Buddhists in the West who have embraced this belief in an experiential truth to be found beneath the layers of conceptual thought. Stephen Batchelor is but one example of a Buddhist trained in the Tibetan tradition who has become quite popular by teaching this understanding of Buddhism. Nearly thirty years ago, in his book Alone With Others, he presented his “existential approach to Buddhism” as a rejection of the Mahayana “preoccupation with speculative metaphysics” (125), which led,  in his view, to a neglect of the “existential experience,” which is alone what can lead us to see through the attachments produced in reaction to our primal anxiety in the face of emptiness.  In Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, he explains how he became dissatisfied with his Buddhist teachers once he discovered Heidegger, as a reaction to the abstraction of philosophical thought: “Heidegger believed that the entire project of Western thought that began with Plato had come to an end.  It was necessary to start all over again, to embark on a new way of thinking, which he called besinnliches Denken: contemplative thinking” (51). This “contemplative thinking,” according to a common reading of Heidegger which Batchelor seems to have accepted, is a form of access to the autochthonous, the primitive and primal experience before rational and scientific thought separated us from this deep reality, and is, for Heidegger, accessible in the authentic purity of the true German language, and in the timeless greatness of the true German poets. The alienation of modernity is seen as the result, not of capitalism, industrialism, fascism, but of too much abstract thought and too much scientific progress.  The return to the primitive experience of Dasein can restore us to “authenticity.” Among self-styled “secular Buddhists,” this justification for rejecting the demands of rigorous thought seems to be very appealing; it might be worth remembering where it led Heidegger.

In the period between the two World Wars, in the great capitalist crisis of the twentieth century, when the bourgeoisie was stuck in its attempt to throw off the yoke of the ancien régime without accidentally launching a world-wide communist revolution, this Heideggerian retreat from thought perhaps makes some sense. Modernity was sapping the meaning from the world, and it was either make a bid for the imaginary plenitude of Dasein while sitting on a cushion, or goose-step in line. Or, of course, to do the unthinkable: turn Red.  In our time, the meaninglessness of the world is supplemented by the meaninglessness of thought, with philosophy reduced to a post-modern language game. Accepting the radical division between the meaningless material world accessible to science and the thoroughly relativist world of humanity which no scientific thought can reach, a view most commonly going by the name of Rorty, the postmodern world is left with only two choices: accept the absolute reduction of all human experience to the working of the neurons in the brain, or retreat into a mystical ideal of pure experience, with the (misguided) belief that we can access perceptions that are not tainted by the world of language and conceptual thought.  Thought becomes “fixed views” or “intellectualizing” because in the present tyranny of absolute freedom of opinion, no position can be argued for; to make an argument is to deny that all opinions are equally valid in the purely relativist world of human thought.  In this extreme relativism, we have reached the absurd state in which at least one popular Buddhist teacher, with the proper credentials of years spent in the exotic East, can quite seriously suggest that we could even walk up wall if we just believed that we could!

The anti-intellectualism is perhaps understandable, then, as a retreat from the arrant nonsense of so much popular postmodernism. One way of understanding the history of philosophy is as a series of containments of radicalism. There is a sense in which Kantian transcendental idealism contains the radical potential of the enlightenment, and a sense in which Hiedeggerian phenomenology contains the radical potential of Neitzsche, Marx and Freud, and today the postmodern “linguistic turn” can contain any potential for radical thought by simply insisting that all thought is a language game that constructs the reality it purports to describe. In the current state of Western culture, it is perhaps understandable that when people are dissatisfied, when they have a felt sense that there are things excluded, left unthinkable in the language games of philosophy and the tyranny of free opinion, they look to find that excluded something in an experience that they are told is “purified” of all thought, a return to the primal unity with “suchness.” That they don’t find it there is perhaps the reason that so many Western Buddhists move on, after a year or two, to the next New Age fad.

There is however, an alternative to this defeat of thought.  And, what is most important, it is one that is more compatible with the history of Buddhist philosophy than the attempt to retreat into mindless experience of a cup of tea or a flower. For if Buddhism has always insisted on the limitations of conceptual thought, it has also always insisted that our experience is never free of those very same limitations. Every gut-level intuition is shot through with the structure of ideology; our very sensory perceptions are active structuring of the world, not passive reception of stimuli. When we stop thinking, we do not escape ideology, but become fully enslaved by it at the level of the body.

We can seek the limitations of thought not by sinking down into the realm of the purely physical, but by accepting the challenge of rigorous thought. In the words of Alain Badiou:

in order to think, always take as your starting point the restrictive exception of truths and not the freedom of opinion. This is a worker’s principle in the sense that thought is here a matter of labour and not of self-expression. Process, production, constraint and discipline are what it seeks; not nonchalant consent to what a world proposes. (25)

Badiou is only one example, but I think a very good one, of what thought could do if we accept realism, instead of either a relativist idealism in which consciousness creates the world or a reductive materialism in which thought becomes a useless epiphenomenon. For Badiou, as I understand him, there is a truth external to anything we may think, a reality which is true whether we know of it or not—Badiou makes a distinction, then, between truth and knowledge. Our thought will always run up against the limits of what our conceptual system cannot include, what is unthinkable. This aporia produces the potential for rigorous thought, for the insistence on including what we can think as true but which cannot be proven or formalized in any existing paradigm of knowledge. And it is in this excess of truth over knowledge that the subject arises, as the embodiment of an idea that is produced by the network of causes and conditions having pushed the current paradigm of thought to its limits; it is not the subject, as individual genius, that produces the idea, but the new idea that produces a subject. Badiou’s term for this is “ideation:” “that which, in the individual undergoing incorporation within the process of a truth, is responsible for binding together the component of this trajectory… it is that through which a human life is universalized” (115-116). For Badiou, thought does not endlessly reach the same inevitable impasse, because the subject is not an autonomous, atomistic self in dualistic relation to an objective world; instead, the subject is purely an effect of a structure, of a set of discourses and knowledge practices that are an endless dialectical process of excess and containment. This structure is not fixed and limited, but can endlessly gain more and better knowledge, can endlessly decrease the realm of what must be excluded from the symbolic order.

It can do so, for Badiou, because of his theory of the subject—a theory that has interesting affinities with the Buddhist concept of anatman. The subject is not to be located in the concrete individual, but in the socially produced structure that individual inhabits. As a result, the true subject, like the Bodhisattva, cannot reach full enlightenment until all sentient beings do—until the entire conceptual system does. Moreover, this is not even a matter of choice: we could not choose to ignore the symbolic network which constructs us, and leave the rest of humanity behind in the dust of ignorance, because we are all part of the same network of thought. We must (on my understanding of Badiou) insist on a transformation of the existing state of Being, and extension of the existing limits to the possibility of thought, because no individual subject can increase its freedom unless the entire network of thought transforms—because no individual subject exists, only the structure of which it is an effect is real, in the sense of having causal powers.

To try to clarify this, let’s consider Zizek’s critique of Badiou. Zizek argues, following Lacan, that “the ultimate authentic experience” is “nothing more than that of fully confronting the fundamental impasse of the symbolic order” (171). There is always, for Lacan, an aporia in language and thought, a “leftover of the Real,” which can be confronted, but never overcome—any attempt to change the symbolic system to include this obscene and terrifying leftover simply shifts it to another location. For Zizek, Badiou is stuck in his inability to recognize that this traumatic kernel of the Real will always exist, and must be accepted, never subsumed. However, in Badiou’s theory of the subject, the Lacanian leftover of the Real can be increasingly subsumed, because the subject is ultimately not an atomistic individual separated by an unbridgeable gap from the noumenal, and so endlessly coming up against the exact same (biological/natural) limit of thought. The a priori (for Badiou, mathematical) truth that the subject already contains is not in the “transcendental” mind, but is in the socially constructed symbolic system itself; and because it is socially constructed, the content of a priori knowledge can expand.  To use a mathematical example, then, Fermat’s last theorem was not finally proven because of one genius’s ability, but because the a priori content of the entire structure producing subjects has undergone profound expansion and transformation. We can transcend the limits of thought, but not by some force of individual intellectual genius; instead, it is the participation in a socially constructed practice of demanding, rigorous thought that can take us beyond the Lacanian terror of the Real.

To return, then, to the world of Buddhism: I would like to simply suggest that there is a long tradition in Buddhism of attempting to transcend thought in this way. That enlightenment demands that we pursue thought to its (upward) limits is at least one possible reading of Nagarjuna.  Instead of seeing Nagarjuna as a sophist, as Richard Hayes does, who conflates two meanings of the term svabhava and so produces an illogical argument, we can see him as a thinker who pushes to the limit the conceptual network of his time, a conceptual system in which it is not yet possible to think the distinctions between the two meanings of svabhava that Hayes argues are conflated (“identity” and “causal independence”). We can see Nagarjuna as a philosopher who, in the words of Jay Garfield and Graham Priest, “does not try to avoid the contradiction at the limit of thought” (4), and whose “extirpation of the myth of the deep” may turn out to be his “greatest contribution to Western philosophy” (16).  Similarly, on one way of understanding Vasubandhu’s Yogacarin thought, what is most important is that it is not a form of idealism in which the mind creates reality, but an attempt to understand the causes and conditions of the mind itself. As Dan Lusthaus puts it, for Yogacara “mind is not the solution but the problem,” and every attempt to escape consciousness is itself “nothing but a projection of consciousness” (5-6). Vasubandhu’s way of practicing Buddhism is to discover, in rigorous philosophical thought, in what way and to what ends our mind produces phenomena from an actually existing reality external to it. Like  Spinoza (but unlike many phenomenologists) the Yogacarins believed this knowledge was obtainable, and could enable better and more complete ideas of reality. In Spinozist terms, we are only as free as our ideas of reality are correct and complete; if our ideas are inherently incomplete, we can only pursue liberation if we pursue liberation of all sentient beings—because each individual subject is no more than an effect of the entirety of sentience

My argument, then, is that Western Buddhist anti-intellectualism is perhaps understandable, given the current state of the situation.  If thought demands of us hard work, a kind of faithful labor, but we are constantly told that there is no point in it because there is no “correct” thought, there is just the majority opinion, well, then of course we may be reluctant to put in the effort. This rejection of the rigors of thought has not been the response of Buddhism for most of its history, and is not the only possible response to the dismal failure of Western intellectual activity. If we find that the work of intellectuals is beating a reactionary retreat at a time of crisis, and giving us no help at all, we don’t need to return to our teacups and flower gardens. We can find what the present limits of thought leaves as unthinkable, not in our pure experience, but in thinking the limits of emptiness.

This need not be as terrifying as many Western Buddhists might think.  It does not necessarily mean that Buddhism would be reserved for those with the greatest capacity for abstract or philosophical thought. Anyone can make the attempt to transcend the limits of their own conceptual framework. Indeed, until everyone does, there will be no single subject capable of moving forward beyond an outer limit, because every subject is an effect of the structure of all subject positions. To put this somewhat more concretely, when the calculus was discovered, very few could grasp it; to reach the stage at which the subject had sufficient a priori knowledge for Fermat’s last theorem to be solved, we had to reach the stage at which an understanding of calculus could be expected of school children. For any of us to make progress toward awakening, the entire structure which produces our subjective “mind” must move beyond the current limitations of conceptual thought. There is no elite, there is only a structure, so there is no value in leaving anybody behind. In what is perhaps one of the most radical transformations of Buddhism in its history, Shinran Shonin brought Buddhism to the uneducated masses. His method, as explained by Dennis Hirota in his book Asura’s Harp, was to meet his students where they were: “For Shinran truth might be characterized as a fundamental shift in stance, a transformative event in which the self is dislodged from an absolute standpoint and made aware of its conditionedness” (63). By his strategy in responding to questions, Shinran attempted to have his followers realize the social construction and conceptual limits of their thought, to open up the possibility of a greater understanding of Truth that exceeds present forms of knowledge. Shinran’s movement was, of course, first forbidden and then contained, eventually transformed into a worship of the Japanese state. But for that moment, in the transition from the Heian to the Kamakura period, there appeared one of the radical excesses of Buddhism: the attempt to allow all people to think the limits of their thought.

My argument is that if Buddhism would follow this line of the tradition, it would never become a site of the production of ideology, and would never need a non-Buddhism to break it free. In the current conjuncture, however, it seems to me that this retreat from thought is a kind of “mindful” reveling in pure ideology. If we want to escape the limitations of conceptual thought, as so many Western Buddhists say they do, we cannot accomplish this by retreating into an experiential realm that is always completely constructed exactly by the current structure of thought. Our very sense perceptions are informed by the constructions of language, whether we choose to become aware of this or not; there is no escape to be found in the world of pure Being.

I would suggest we think again.

References

Badiou, A. (2011) Second Manifesto For Philosophy. Louise Burchill, Trans.  Malden, Ma.: Polity Press.

Batchelor, S. (1983) Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism.  New York: Grove Press, Inc.

Batchelor, S. (2010) Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

Garfield, J & Priest,  G.  (2003) “Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought.”  Philosophy East  West, 53(1): 1-21.

Hirota, D. (2006). Asura’s Harp: Engagement with Language as Buddhist Path.  Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter Heidelberg.

Lusthaus, D. (2002) Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogacara Buddhism and the Ch’eng Wei-shih lun.  New York: RoutlegeCurzon.

Nhât Hanh, T. (2006) Understanding Our Mind.  Berkeley: Parallax Press.

Suzuki, D.T. (1964) An Introduction to Zen Buddhism.  New York: Grove Press, Inc.

Zizek, S. (2004) “ From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real.”  In Think Again,  Peter Hallward, Ed. 165-181.

Links

Tom Pepper

Facebook page

Painting: “The Thinker,” by Louis Vuittonet. Website.

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. Gross’s body of work is a model of erudite sophistication combined with real-world urgency. She is the rare scholar who is willing to “lower” herself to the Buddhist hoi polloi. And she is the rare practitioner who has the courage to explore tradition’s terrain well beyond the prescribed boundaries.

Gross’s major point is this: “Modern historical studies challenge assumptions commonly held in Buddhist traditions.” A fuller version of that premise:

Modern historical studies show the contingency and historicity of developments in religions, something that traditional religions dislike intensely. Historical study of religion undercuts the claim that any specific form, any practice or verbal doctrine, could be unmediated, completely definitive, and one hundred percent an absolute truth. Instead, it fosters the view that all religious expressions and forms are relative, that is to say, they are partially the result of specific causes and conditions found in their specific environments. Even a religion such as Buddhism, which affirms impermanence as completely central, doesn’t really like to hear that its core teachings and institutions have changed over the years.

That premise is irrefutable. Historical study of, say, Pali canonical literature, obliterates the notion that it contains “the teachings of the Buddha.” Indeed, such study undermines the very notion of “the Buddha” as a historically recoverable figure. What we find instead of “sacred scripture” is a hodge podge of teachings that are more easily traceable to the machinations of various, and often vying, Buddhist communities. (That is why Speculative non-Buddhism refers to the Buddha as “the protagonist:” he is a historical figure entirely overwritten by a literary one.) The extent of damage that historical analysis can do to Buddhism’s self-understanding is literally limitless. In fact, a genuine dialogue between Buddhism and historical method could conceivably leave Buddhism so stunted and disfigured that no Buddhist would recognize it. So, you may be wondering, what demonic genie has Gross cast loose from the flagon of history; and what destruction has that genie of history wrought on Buddhism’s self-understanding?

None, and none, whatsoever. Gross’s major conclusion is given in her first sentence: “I am convinced that an accurate, nonsectarian study of Buddhist history can be of great benefit to dharma practitioners.” She states a fuller version of this conclusion at the end of the article:

Rather than being something that detracts from our commitment to Buddhadharma, to some almost a heresy, an accurate, nonsectarian history of Buddhism can enrich and improve one’s dharma practice immensely. This alone is a sufficient recommendation for such study. But the study of Buddhist history brings other benefits as well, such as providing tools to appreciate Buddhist internal diversity and thus promote greater communication within the greater Buddhist community. Perhaps most important, it allows us to develop a seamless account of Buddhism and modernity. For nothing is sadder than a religion’s demand that we turn off our critical intelligence when its traditions conflict with well-established results of modern science and history. The depth of Buddhadharma does not need such mindless acquiescence to convention.

From the perspective of Speculative non-Buddhism, this conclusion is wholly predictable. It is also disingenuous. The reason I say it is disingenuous is because it refuses to allow historical study to do its work. And it does so in the name of historical study. This work is given in Gross’s premise: historical method reveals “contingency and historicity;” it “undercuts” traditional and sectarian claims; it illuminates “relativity;” it produces results that tradition “intensely dislikes.” Gross’s conclusion usurps the power of historical method, and places that method in the service of preservation of the Buddhist status quo—indeed, even elevates Buddhism well beyond its current status. Historical study, she says, need not “detract from our commitment to Buddhadharma.” On the contrary, it “can enrich and improve one’s dharma practice immensely.” It can increase inter-sectarian understanding. Most importantly, it “allows us to develop a seamless account of Buddhism and modernity.”

Gross’s conclusion has made a mockery of her very premise, and worse: it has rendered historical study barren. In all honesty, Rita Gross cannot predict the outcome of subjecting tradition to historical methodology. Her own premise holds that the result might be (should be?) as devastating as it is unpredictable. Her conclusion, then, is really not a conclusion at all. It is the type of kindly inducement we get in dharma sermons: programmatic, encouraging, hopeful. Gross flinches. She not only leaves the historical genie in the bottle; she rubs it, closes her eyes, and makes a nice wish.

The greatest irony of Gross’s article comes at the very end: “For nothing is sadder than a religion’s demand that we turn off our critical intelligence when its traditions conflict with well-established results of modern science and history.” Like so many others, Gross earlier quotes the Dalai Lama’s contention that “if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” Can anyone—anyone—provide a single instance where “Buddhism” has altered one jot of its precious belief system in light of scientific findings? How would that even be possible? The Dalai Lama is able to rewire peoples’ thinking processes and alter the canonical texts? Contra the Dalai Lama and Rita Gross, from a Speculative non-Buddhism perspective scientific method and historical study cannot possibly change anything at all in Buddhism or in Buddhists. Why? Gross gives the reason—again, ironically, in my reading—in her very last sentence: “The depth of Buddhadharma does not need such mindless acquiescence to convention.” The irony is this: Yes, it does. The “depth of Buddhadharma”—as article of faith, as belief, as ideological game-piece, not self-evident fact—requires precisely “acquiescence to convention”—to Buddhist conventions of agreement.

From the Speculative non-Buddhism perspective none of this is new, and it is all wholly predictable. Gross is, after all, a “dharma teacher” (website link below). Buddhism, I contend, is utterly incapable of genuinely conversing with the sciences and the humanities. It is, furthermore, unable to comprehend itself. All Buddhism can ever achieve is a Narcissus-like self-referential iteration of its self-given image. It must at all costs preserve “the depth of the Buddhadharma.” And it can only achieve this by feigning—or outright forfeiting—genuine dialogue with other disciplines. Gross’s article is just the latest example of buddhistic flinching before reality. Gross, as a Buddhist, like all true-believers in transcendental norms, must insist that there is “no radical disjunction between traditional Buddhism and the results of modern scholarship,” and that “traditional Buddhism and the results of modern historical scholarship are deeply consonant.” Such insistence is the price of admittance to the Buddhist vallation.

Why not truly unleash historical method—remove the dharma-preserving constraints—and see what happens? What’s there to lose?

Heuristics

With this example before you, I would like to present some (abbreviated) related Speculative non-Buddhist postulates and theorems. You might want, then, to apply these to a re-reading of Gross’s article—or any Buddhist writing. In that way, you can begin to see the kind of heuristic work that Speculative non-Buddhist postulates and theorems can do. The overarching postulate of Speculative non-Buddhism is decision. Gross’s article is predicated on decision. Decision was discussed in depth in the previous post. The first postulate discussed here, reflexivity, ensues from decision.

Reflexivity. Performing, like an athlete, moves in the buddhistic arena (i.e., in “the world”–the buddhistic thought-world shaped by decision). Reflexivity is the automatic and habitual reaching toward the X-Buddhist dispensation as providing necessarily adequate explanatory terms and efficacious practices. X-buddhistic reflexivity is the diminishment of the capacity for Keats’s negative capability: “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The X-Buddhist practitioner is reflexive in direct proportion to his/her loss of negative capability. Reflexivity constitutes the practitioner’s achievement of dharmic specularity, wherein all terms and conditions are seen from above. Reflexivity is thus commensurate with affiliation in the X-Buddhist community: the more instinctive the reflex toward the X-buddhistic dipensation, the more assured is affiliation. Optimally, Buddhism, like all ideological systems, aims for hyper-reflexivity. To whatever degree it is present, furthermore, reflexivity disables the Buddhist qua Buddhist from discerning the decisional structure that informs his affiliation. It is in this regard that reflexivity constitutes a blinding condition.

Buddhist. A person reflexively beholden to the structural syntax of buddhistic decision. The embodiment of (“the shape of”), hence the central agent in, the buddhistic thought-world. A person whose speech concerning exigent matters is constructed from buddhemes (derived, in turn, from the fecund font of The Dharma). Given the radically protean nature of decisional adaptation, the possible modifications (X-) of the abstract noun “Buddhist” are illimitable.

The Dharma. The specular omen pontificator of samsaric contingency. Like God, Justice, Logos, Rta, The Dao, and so on, The Dharma (English: The Norm as buddhistic trinity of dispensation, truth, and cosmic structure) is the architect of the cosmic vault and the keeper of its inventory. As such, The Dharma is the buddhistic hallucination of reality. In its decisional function, The Dharma is the transcendent-immanent operator that synthesizes the purely immanent dyad of spatiotemporal vicissitude (samsara) and contingency (paticcasamuppada). The hallucinatory quality results from the fact that The Dharma is a function of a purely idealized (transcendent) grammar that produces oracular statements infinitum concerning the finite world (immanence). The Dharma is the buddhistic gathering together (under the authority of The Dharma) of reality’s posited (by The Dharma) splintered whole, which splintering is exhibited by the (dharmically indexed) world condition articulated (by The Dharma) as spatiotemporal vicissitude-contingency.

Buddhism. An explicit world-representation or thought-world founded on a universally accepted syntax, or decisional structure. As the history of the tradition exemplifies, this structure permits perpetual mutation, wherein decision is re-inscribed in ever-developing expressions of “X-Buddhism.” Doctrinally: a specular, ideological system founded on teachings given canonically to a literary protagonist named “the Buddha.” Aesthetically: a consistently recognizable rhetorics of display (texts, costumes, names, statuary, hair styles, painting, ritual artifacts, architecture, etc.). Institutionally: the manufacturer and conservatory of buddhistic charism. In the terms of its own rhetorics, “Buddhism” names the principal and superior representer of exigent human knowledge. Yet, as mentioned earlier, given the inexhaustible inventory of reality engendered by buddhistic decision—indeed, given the very syntax of decision itself—Buddhism can be formulated and arranged in innumerable guises. The word “Buddhism” thus indexes a consistent multiplicity: consistent, given its omnipresent decisional syntax; multiple, given its protean adaptability. The history of Buddhism shows it to be, to cite Laruelle, “the articulation of a universal market where the concepts are exchanged according to specific rules to each system, and from an authority with two sides: one of the [buddhistic] division of work, the other of the appropriation of part of what the market of the concepts produces”—for instance, morphological innovations, such as MBSR, Soto Zen, or Secular Buddhism.

Devitalization of charism. The Buddhist vallation is sealed by charism. Buddhistic charismata are the incalculable averred “gifts” of wisdom, knowledge, community, teacher-student relationship, healing, and so forth, that cascade out of the dharmic dispensation. Such gifts exert a binding influence on the Buddhist. One result of charismatic influence is the blinding of the Buddhist to decisional structure and decisional commitment. Enactment of Speculative non-Buddhist heuristics enables the Buddhist to unbind and unblind from the coercive yet largely unconscious effects of the charism. Imaginative curvature—speculative applied reconfiguration—is impossible until this charism is quelled.

Cancellation of warrant. A major consequence of applying Speculative non-Buddhist heuristics: the comprehensive withdrawal of buddhistic verity. [In the article above, Rita Gross expressed this verity as given in “the depth of the Buddhadharma.”] Indeed, given the coercive function of decision, the work of Speculative non-Buddhism cannot proceed until cancellation of warrant occurs. Cancellation is not an intentional act. It is the sudden dissipation—affective and cognitive—of a fata morgana (warrant).

Links

Rita Gross website

Tricycle article sited here: “Buddhist History for Buddhist Practitioners,” by Rita M. Gross

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.

____________

The purpose of this blog is to work toward a new critical theory of Buddhism. The theory, “Speculative non-Buddhism,” is emphatically not yet another iteration of Buddhism. And the purpose of the theory is not to move cumbersomely through the morass of Buddhist canonical and secondary literature making proclamations apropos of this or that doctrine.

My ambition here is both more limited and farther reaching than that. The theory that I am developing is concerned with western cultural criticism in the present. My proximate “problem situation” is the urgent issue that is unfolding in the English-speaking world and Europe; namely, what form contemporary reconfigurations of Buddhism might or should take. Certain directions have been gaining traction, such as those that style themselves secular-, progressive-, atheist-, agnostic-, liberal-, and post-traditional-Buddhist. Another aspect of this problem situation is this: as these secular, etc., groups gain adherents in the West, traditional organizations, such as the various Zens, Tibetans, Theravadins, Vipassanas, etc., are stating their claim to “Buddhism” with increasingly vehement proprietorship. A forthcoming special edition on so-called “Secular Buddhism” in the international Journal of Global Buddhism testifies to the critical mass that this issue has accrued.

As a critical theory of the main term of all of these emerging Buddhisms, Speculative non-Buddhism can contribute to this contemporary discourse. But it can do much more as well. Speculative non-Buddhism is a thought-experiment that poses primarily one question: shorn of its transcendental representations, what, if anything, might Buddhism offer us? That very formulation, however, makes an assumption that is not shared by most of the X-Buddhisms, ancient and modern. Indeed, from its earliest days down to the latest Existentialist Buddhist or whatever blog post, Buddhists have taken as their very reason for being precisely the necessity of an anti-foundational or anti-metaphysical account of human existence. Many, if not all, of the new forms of X-Buddhism pride themselves on their empirical, phenomenologically-oriented, scientifically-allied approaches to “the Dharma.” An animating contention of speculative non-Buddhism is that every single form of X-Buddhism—from the most scientistically covert and the most secularly liberal to the most religiously overt and most conservatively orthodox—is founded on an identical transcendental syntax. This shared feature renders every single form of X-Buddhism without remainder indistinguishable from every other form of X-Buddhism. Given Buddhism’s self-presentation as organon of radical immanence, this fact is as insidious as it is ironic.

Overview

In this post, I will give a very brief overview of the three primary functions of Speculative non-Buddhist critical practice. The first step in considering what Buddhism may offer us once it is shorn of its transcendental representations is, of course, to show that it is indeed laden with such representations. So, the first aim of the theory is to uncover Buddhism’s syntactical structure (unacknowledged even by—especially by—Buddhists themselves). The second aim is to serve as a means of inquiry into the sense and viability of Buddhist propositions. And the third, is to operate as a check on the tendency of all contemporary formulations of Buddhism—whether of the traditional, religious, progressive or secular variety—toward ideological excess.

(i) Decision. The first aim of the theory is to uncover Buddhism’s syntactical structure. I claim, furthermore, that this structure is unacknowledged by Buddhists themselves. What would be gained in such a syntactical “uncovering,” one that is, moreover, ostensibly unavailable to those most beholden to it?

My original impetus for Speculative non-Buddhism came from reading Françoise Laruelle’s work on non-philosophy. Given the Buddhist terrain, however, something more than a mere transplanting of non-philosophy on to non-Buddhism is required. That fact first became apparent to me when considering how Laruelle’s notion of “Decision” applied to my subject, Buddhism.  Laruelle’s notion turns on a cognitive maneuver; I add to that an affective one. Here is Laruelle’s definition of the decisional structure of philosophy (via non-philosophy’s operation thereon):

Non-philosophy typically operates in the following way: everything is processed through a duality (of problems) which does not constitute a Two or a pair, and through an identity (of problems, and hence of solution) which does not constitute a Unity or synthesis. (“A Summary of Non-Philosophy:” ¶2.1.2).

Buddhistic decision has both an affective and cognitive dimension. Affectively, the word “Buddhist” names a person who has performed a psychologically charged determination that Buddhism provides thaumaturgical refuge from life’s contingencies. In this sense, decision is an emotional reliance on or hopefulness for the veracity of Buddhist teachings. The reason that I contend that both aspects of decision are occluded from the Buddhist stems from this affective quality. Admittance to buddhistic affiliation, namely, ensues from a necessarily blinding condition: affective reflexivity. Indeed, reflexivity appears to be commensurate with affiliation, for the more instinctive the former, the more assured the latter. (In the extensive version of this idea, I explore the analogy to linguistic reflexivity, which is measured in degrees of fluency and, hence, automaticity.)

Cognitively, decision is the mixing of the immanently given world, namely, empty reality (the world of flesh and blood, of timber and stone) as, in Buddhist terminology, spatiotemporal vicissitude (samsara) and causal contingency (paticcasamuppada), with its transcendently given warrant, The Dharma (the norm: the author and protector of the vault of cosmic wisdom). Buddhism claims to offer exigent, superior knowledge concerning human being (i.e., of the immanently given). To do so in the terms that it advocates (exigency, superiority, etc.), however, Buddhism must intermix its essential “identity” (The Dharma) with its own description of “difference” (spatiotemporal vicissitude/causal contingency). This operation constitutes an inescapable circularity. The premise (The Dharma is the case), is contained in the conclusion (thus spatiotemporal vicissitude-contingency), and the conclusion, in the premise. In other words, the entire decisional structure of Buddhism amounts to an explanans (The Norm: The Dharma), that is always and already present in every instance of the very explanandum (phenomenal manifestation: spatiotemporal vicissitude-contingency), and an explanandum, every instance of which always and already attests to the truth of the explanans.

Buddhistic syntax, I contend, is a fecund supposition of uncircumventable validity that manifests as infinite iterations of “X-Buddhism.” Again , I welcome counter-examples to the claim: all X-Buddhisms, without a single exception, operate via decision.

(ii) Heuristics. The second aim of the critical practice is to serve as a means of inquiry into the sense and viability of Buddhist propositions. Speculative non-Buddhism aims to suspend the machinations of Buddhism’s structural schemes, rhetorical tropes, and decisional strategies so that the investigator may gain a fresh perspective on Buddhist thought and practice. Toward this end, I am creating an extensive heuristic. The heuristic consists of numerous exploratory postulates. These postulates, moreover, are being designed to be operational: any non-Buddhism investigator may apply them to his or her Buddhist data. At present, I envision the heuristic as taking the form of a glossary. Examples of terms that I am developing as postulates are: Aporetic dissonance; Buddhemes; Curvature, Disruption; Devitalization of charism; Principle of sufficient Buddhism; and Ventriloquism. As a fuller example, the definition of “Buddhism:”

Buddhism. An explicit representation or thought-world founded on a universally accepted syntax, or decisional structure. As the history of the tradition exemplifies, this structure permits perpetual mutation, wherein decision is re-inscribed in ever-developing expressions of “X-Buddhism.” Doctrinally: a specular, ideological system founded on teachings given canonically to a literary protagonist named “the Buddha.” Aesthetically: a consistently recognizable rhetorics of display (texts, costumes, names, statuary, hair styles, painting, ritual artifacts, architecture, etc.). Institutionally: the manufacturer and conservatory of buddhistic charism. In the terms of its own rhetorics, “Buddhism” names the principal and superior representer of exigent human knowledge. Yet, as mentioned earlier, given the inexhaustible inventory of reality engendered by buddhistic decision—indeed, given the very syntax of decision itself—Buddhism can be formulated and arranged in innumerable guises. The word “Buddhism” thus indexes a consistent multiplicity: consistent, given its omnipresent decisional syntax; multiple, given its protean adaptability. The history of Buddhism shows it to be, to cite Laruelle, “the articulation of a universal market where the concepts are exchanged according to specific rules to each system, and from an authority with two sides: one of the [buddhistic] division of work, the other of the appropriation of part of what the market of the concepts produces”—for instance, morphological innovations, such as MBSR, Soto Zen, or Secular Buddhism.

The investigator may choose to perform a critical-constructive dialogue with Buddhism on the basis of discoveries made via the heuristic—articulating, for instance, what a “Secular Buddhism” might look like given the operation of  Speculative non-Buddhism postulates. As stated before, however, Speculative non-Buddhism itself is wholly disinterested in any reformulation of Buddhism.

(iii) Ideology. The final task of my theory is to operate as a check on the tendency of all contemporary formulations of Buddhism—whether of the traditional, religious, progressive or secular variety—toward ideological excess.

On its own account, Buddhism is a systematic program of personal transformation and social reproduction whose ideas—beliefs, goals, actions—derive not from individual agents, but from a pre-established putative norm, in this case: The Dharma. Buddhism is thus nothing if not a vortex of participation and identity. It aims, both explicitly and implicitly, to form particular types of subjects, and to do so in its own image. The basis of it transformational program is, furthermore, its own prescribed practices (social, linguistic; devotional, contemplative, etc.). All of this is, finally, accompanied by robust institutional commitment (what I called hyper-reflexivity). In the future, I will use Speculative non-Buddhism heuristics to explore to what extent such features describe not a contestable program of knowledge or skill acquisition, but rather an ideological system of indoctrination.

Speculative non-Buddhism postulates permit the investigator to be constantly alert to any signs in buddhistic decree that indicate a comprehensive view of self, society, and cosmos. Indeed, the very fact that, unmolested by the kinds of methodological moves that Speculative non-Buddhism makes, The Dharma operates unseen (it’s just “how things are”), may be evidence of the ideological machination of Buddhism.

In sum

A crucial fact, easily forgotten, devoid of which my critical practice 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 timber, shit, and stone, 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.The purpose of this blog is to work toward a new critical theory of Buddhism. The theory, “Speculative non-Buddhism,” is emphatically not yet another iteration of Buddhism. And the purpose of the theory is not to move cumbersomely through the morass of Buddhist canonical and secondary literature making proclamations apropos of this or that doctrine.

Image source.