That which founds is the ordeal.

To think is always to follow the witch’s flight.

—Gilles Deleuze (respectively: What is Grounding? and What is Philosophy?)

I find the prevailing x-buddhist “image of thought” disturbingly conservative. Wherever it manifests, that image mimics society’s established values of conformity and order. The x-buddhist image of thought refracts a practitioner who is “well-adjusted,” regardless of the repressive (e.g., Thailand) or hedonist (e.g., the U.S.) climate of his or her state and society. Examining the American x-buddhist product, I find this judgment unavoidable: x-buddhist thought serves the prevailing political-cultural status quo, and, to that end, functions to bolster the mind of its subject against challenges to the comforts of convention.

An animating contention of this speculative non-buddhism project is that x-buddhism suffers from a pathological inability to unleash the force of its own thought. Whether oblique (going against the stream, home-leaving, not taking the bait of the world, abandoning the raft) or direct (no-self, causal contingency, emptiness, dissolution), x-buddhist ideas suggest lines of thought that are primed to subvert, or otherwise profoundly disrupt, contemporary modes of life. And yet, American x-buddhism, whether in religious or secular guise, panders to contemporary culture like a kowtowing sycophant.

Why is that? We can attempt to answer that question in several ways. Many currents of influence are involved. Historically, for instance, a pattern of symbiotic relationship between x-buddhist communities and the political status quo has been the norm. Economically, Buddhism has always depended on the patronage of the business class. Institutionally, forms of thought and types of individuals incline toward stability and conservation, and thus tend to reproduce themselves. Psychologically, people avoid the conditions of fundamental change, and seek those of ease and belonging. (Think Auden: We would rather be ruined than changed, etc.)

But I’ll leave that sort of sociological analysis to others. Here, I would like to consider the question based on what I referred to above as the prevailing American x-buddhist “image of thought.”

The Image of Thought

Briefly, “image of thought” is Deleuze’s term for the structure provided by a discipline or community to determine the contours that thinking is permitted to take therein. In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze says:

By this I mean not only that we think according to a given method, but also that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think. (xiv)

An image of thought has the basic form of “Everybody knows…” (DR, 129). In an x-buddhist community, for example, everybody knows that “suffering” is the primary human problematic, and everybody knows that craving is its cause. Everybody knows, furthermore, that there is an end to suffering, and everybody knows that The Dharma prescribes the way to that end. Such explicit propositions determine the basic lines of what, within an x-buddhist community, may legitimately be thought about and discussed.

Deleuze, however, says that images of thought contain elements that, unlike these x-buddhist postulates, are not explicitly stated. Such elements remain socially and doctrinally functional, yet personally unconscious. For example, the very assumption that “the four noble truths” are coherent, even practicable, is simply given in the x-buddhist image of thought. The assumption is thus operative within the community, but in a way that functions “all the more effectively in silence” (DR, 167). No committed “sangha member” questions the assumptions underlying the basic premises of x-buddhist thought. No x-buddhist has ever applied sustained thought to the prospect that, for example, eliminating craving is impossible or even undesirable, and, given our biology, an outright ludicrous notion—indeed, yet another desperate human attempt to overcome the irrevocably human. In other words, as Joshua Ramey says in The Hermetic Deleuze, “Under the auspices of the image of thought, what remains unasked are the truly critical questions…[U]nder this aegis, thought can never truly break with opinion (doxa)” (114).

Deleuze holds that the re-invigoration of thinking in western philosophy can “be reached only by putting into question the traditional image of thought” (DR, xiv). That image of thought, received, paradigmatically, from Plato and Descartes, naively takes for granted that the person doing the thinking (and by extension, legitimate thought itself) is possessed of such qualities as “good sense,” “common sense” (DR, 168), a “talent for the true and an affinity for the true” (DR, 166). What is thus required for thinking to be something other than the mere mimicry of received opinion (doxa, doctrine) is “to overturn Platonism” (DR, 71). Duly turned over—thinking untethered from the constraints and pre-determined goals of tradition-opinion—critical and creative force is restored to thought.

The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are one and the same: the destruction of the image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. (DR, 139)

In my experience, the x-buddhist image of thought is one that suffers a debilitation far, far graver than that diagnosed by Deleuze for western philosophy. X-buddhism does not even assume the good will and natural talent of its thinker. Unlike Plato, the x-buddhist teacher thus does not naively take for granted that thinking will result in clarity and truth. S/he assumes, rather, that it will result in confusion, in trouble of some sort. He or she assumes that the thinking practitioner possesses, in fact, a profound mental deficiency: the very capacity for individuated thinking. The generative myth of x-buddhism, after all, involves a cognitive cataclysm: Siddhartha Gautama awakened to—saw, understood, realized—the proper categories of salvific human wisdom. The task of the x-buddhist subject is to realize the same. This myth explains in part the fact that x-buddhism offers, at best, pseudo-thought, and, at worst, anti-thought. (Here are the first few examples that came up when I searched “Buddhism and non-thinking.” They cover the spectrum from Asian traditional to western quasi-traditional. I present them as being representative of the x-buddhist image of thought):

Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know. (Hsin Hsin Ming)

No thinking, no mind. No mind, no problem.  (Seung Sahn)

Names and forms are made by your thinking. If you are not thinking and have no attachment to name and form, then all substance is one. Your don’t know mind cuts off all thinking. This is your substance. The substance of this Zen stick and your own substance are the same. You are this stick; this stick is you.  (Seung Sahn)

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)

Mindfulness is not thinking. This is one of the reasons it is so powerful. (Trevor Leggett)

It’s like this. If you start really paying attention to your own thought process, you’ll notice that the thoughts themselves don’t go on continuously. . . . Most of us habitually fill these spaces with more thoughts as fast as we can. . . . Try to look at the natural spaces between your thoughts. Learn what it feels like to stop generating more and more stuff for your brain to chew on. Now see if you can do that for longer and longer periods. A couple of seconds is fine. Voilà! (Brad Warner)

Meditation is like a game of Simon Says with the most devious, misleading, and clever Simon ever — your mind. In absolute silence, with no distractions, and you focusing on only one thing, your mind can send you careening off of stillness in less than a single breath. (“The Secular Buddhist,” Ted Meissner)

As such commonplace statements demonstrate, a particularly noxious aspect of the x-buddhist image of thought is a paralyzing paranoia regarding thought’s labor. This is an aspect that makes it unlikely that x-buddhism, as it is currently conceived and organized, can ever break free of its orbit of faith.

The Banner of Faith’s Sufficiency

One of the most deeply hidden assumptions in any image of thought is that people are necessarily capable of thinking. Deleuze calls this assumption into question:

“Everybody” knows very well that in fact men think rarely, and more often under the impulse of a shock than in the excitement of a taste for thinking. (DR, 132)

Deleuze has a quite specific mode of thinking in mind here. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.) What he says, however, applies to the contemporary American x-buddhist scene generally.

Once again, I will invoke my own experience and offer the observation that x-buddhist communities are incapable of providing the conditions that satisfy the demands of both thinking and the thinking practitioner. And again I will offer that this failure is evidence of x-buddhism’s current status as what Laruelle calls “a faith, with the sufficiency of faith” (Dictionary of Non-Philosophy, 57). I have repeatedly witnessed a cycle whereby intelligent people are attracted to x-buddhism, only to become dissatisfied and abandon it. Why are they attracted in the first place? Like pseudoscience,* x-buddhism replicates the forms of genuine thought. It contains elements that look like philosophy (epistemology, ontology, ethics, etc.), depth psychology, cognitive science, literature, and other intellectual practices. On closer examination, however, the x-buddhist versions never rise to the level of genuine intellectual practice. Like the Buddha’s discussions with his interlocutors in the Pali suttas, the encounter is never really meant to be robust. It is unvarying: in every x-buddhist community, book, dharma talk, and interview, the banner of faith’s sufficiency is ultimately raised, and thought comes to an end.

One explanation for the paucity of thought among x-buddhists is that this cycle is perpetuated via self-selection. As Nietzsche puts it: “Not suitable as a party member: Whoever thinks much is not suitable as a party member: he soon thinks himself right out of the party.” What does this logic say about those who not only persist as suitable x-buddhist party members, but who become conspicuous figures within the party—teachers, leaders, apologetic authors, internet gurus, and so on? Whatever else it may suggest about such figures, it says that under their aegis thinking beyond the constraints of pre-established x-buddhist opinion is not going to happen. Thinking is simply too dangerous.

Another explanation, of course, is that not everyone can think.

“That which founds is the ordeal”

I want to suggest two lines of thought here that can lead us out of the current x-buddhist no-thought morass. I will sketch these lines briefly for now, and will develop them more fully in another post.

Despite x-buddhism’s anxiety toward thinking, despite its substitution of vacuous platitudes for sustained thought, despite its moralism and pathological do-goodism, despite all of this: a “subversive and profound notion of thought lies in wait” in the x-buddhist corpus (THD, 115).

We can recover this notion of thought by revisiting the locus of the founding x-buddhist myth, the seat of awakening. This myth is one of overwhelming elemental power: Trees, water, sky, fire, earth, bodies beautiful and decaying, lust, passion, storms, death, cosmos, occult powers, animals, sprites, spirits, gods. Sitting against the trunk of a massive ficus, the Buddha, as Deleuze says of writers, uses all the resources of his athleticism (THD, 23) to “dip into a chaos, into a movement that goes to the infinite” (What is Philosophy?, 172). Having rejected the lighted paths of his day, the myth’s protagonist has no recourse but to abandon himself to dark experimentation. At several junctures he nearly dies. At the culmination, under the tree, he risks death again. He is taking this risk in order to see once and for all, and completely for himself, reality, things as they are. Let’s take that for now as a reference to something like Laruelle’s real or Deleuze’s plane of immanence, as, that is, a form of immanent thought. For Deleuze “immanent thought is involved with an exploration of extremes, and with abyssal adventures of great risk and tremendous ordeal” (THD, 23). By engaging in such extreme experimentation, the protagonist has entered into a “Dionysian space of undoing” within which he enacts “not a system of demonstration, but an ordeal in which the mind is given new eyes” (THD, 23, 22).

If x-buddhists can re-imagine their mythical progenitor’s awakening as a cognitive event, an event in which the mind as social-symbolic-personal nexus and not some other faculty is given new eyes, they may be able to transform their attitude to the very nature of thought itself. But that transformation will come at great cost. Unlike the current x-buddhist project, this is not a practice that serves ease and control. It points, rather, toward “unexpected relations, uncanny mediations, and unforeseen creations” (THD, 214). It is, in other words, to follow the witch’s flight.

“To think is always to follow the witch’s flight”

I can see no way to break the obstinate hypnotic spell of x-buddhism’s sufficiency of faith with anything less than what Deleuze calls the “trespass and violence” of thought (DR, 139). And by “thought” here, I remind you that we have long put away the obsequiously civil, pseudo, and quasi forms of thinking that count as such in the universal x-buddhist sangha. The form of thought that the mythic protagonist engages in, and thus endorses, is abnormal. It is rooted as deeply in nightmare as it is in reason.

In the spirit of reverie and uncharted thought, I will leave you with this very real possibility:

Precisely because the [human truth sought by x-buddhism is pre-buddhist] and does not immediately take effect with [x-buddhist] concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess…To think is always to follow the witch’s flight. (WP?, p. 41)

____________

References

Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition (1968). Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Colombia University Press, 1994. (DR)

__. What is Philosophy (1991). Trans. Hugh Tomlinson Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. (WP?)

Joshua Ramey. The Hermetic Deleuze. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. (THD)

* See Maarten Boudry on pseudoscience.

Image: “A Hallucination of Salty Trees.”

[Meditation] is a faith, with the sufficiency of faith, intended by necessity to remain empty but which necessarily evades this void by its repopulation with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history, language, etc. Through its style of communication and “knowing” it is a rumor—the [Asian] rumor—which is transmitted by hearsay, imitation, specularity and repetition.¹

That passage came to mind while reading texts and watching video on the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website.² Laruelle is talking about philosophy, but the statement works equally well for meditation (and its varieties: contemplation, mindfulness, centering prayer, even yoga, tai chi, and so on). Much of what I read and heard about contemplation on the Center’s website struck me as reasonable enough. A typical example:

Contemplative Practices cultivate a critical, first-person focus, sometimes with direct experience as the object, while at other times concentrating on complex ideas or situations. Incorporated into daily life, they act as a reminder to connect to what we find most meaningful.

That’s reasonable—as an opening. An awful lot of questions would have to be asked about the statement, though. What, for instance, is this “first-person focus” of direct experience? What, for that matter, is “direct experience”? Anyone who has been reading this blog knows how attuned some of us are to the machinations of unacknowledged ideology. For instance, concerning this overlap between first-person accounts and experience, a reader recently wrote to me:

[T]here is a built in petitio principii that makes the viewpoint unfalsifiable. The ideology includes a meta-message regarding the autonomy of (meditative) experience as a veridical source of knowledge. This seems to be what [B. Alan] Wallace is up to with his emphasis on “first-person” experience, arguing from an assumption that such experience is autonomous and not already formed by ideology.

I agree with that assessment. It succinctly identifies the big question for meditation: is it a vessel for ideology or a science of ideology?³ Does the practice, in fact, produce new knowledge, about, say, subjective experience or the intransitive world, or does it merely reinforce the views provided by doctrine? I’m still holding out for the former (barely). So, I’d want to ask the people at the Center why, if they believe that meditation-contemplation holds such natural human promise (as the director says, in effect, on a video), do they incessantly populate it “with objects and foreign goals provided by experience, culture, history, language, etc.”? Why not let the practice do its work, unencumbered by over-determining doctrine? I am not going to offer a critique of the Center’s site here. I am more interested in the wide-spread x-buddhist phenomenon of what Laruelle calls here “re-population.”

“Re-population” is, of course, a somewhat polemical term. It assumes that the objects and goals that constitute the re-population are, in fact, “foreign,” or merely inserted. Such outcomes and goals, then, have the status not of knowledge but of “a rumor.” Re-population is what occurs when a form of thought or practice which is “intended by necessity to remain empty…necessarily evades this void.” That is the question: is meditation-contemplation a practice that to do its work (whatever that may be) must remain empty of, for instance, ideas about the practice? However you might answer that question, you would be hard pressed to find an account of meditation-contemplation that differs from other forms of faith. And, like all self-sufficient faiths, x-buddhist meditation, as it is invariably presented in the West “is transmitted by hearsay, imitation, specularity and repetition.” But is that, as Laruelle insists is the case for philosophy, necessarily so?

When I read sites like the  Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website, I can’t help but wonder if meditation has become irretrievably bound up in the peculiarly North American search for the Great Cure. I have come to expect that kind of utopian rhetoric from the x-buddhist industry, but the Center is, as their mission statement says, “working to transform higher education with contemplative practices and perspectives” (emphasis added). Convincing leaders of higher education will take a great deal of critical sophistication. As far as I can see, no such critical sophistication is on the x-buddhist horizon. So, I have to wonder whether x-buddhism is doomed to go the way of psychoanalysis—from Freud to Dr. Phil.

X-buddhism itself, of course, offers the Great Cure; so, it’s at the very root of the sprawling tree of tradition. The traditional Cure comes in numerous forms: nirvana, cessation of suffering, uprooting of craving, return to pristine consciousness, equanimity, being just this moment, and on and on. Many varieties of the Cure are born of the contact between x-buddhism and its new-found cultural environment. Medieval Japanese samurai culture, for example, required a particular inflection of “no-self” to accommodate its martial needs. And Buddhism was happy to concoct a fitting Cure–in the form of Zen. Can you imagine an American Buddhism that did not fulfill our demands for stress relief, better concentration, lower blood pressure, and all-around general giddy goodness? Part of the success that x-buddhism is enjoying in the West has much to do with its easy grafting onto our insatiable pursuit of health and happiness. X-buddhism seems to have a deeply-rooted need to please.

Non-buddhism aims to de-populate x-buddhist terms of their dharmic static. It aims to transmute the consummate, closed doctrine into conceptual chora, “the chaos of the unorganized transcendental material.”⁴ Dharmic static constitutes the subjugating vibrato provided by other people’s experience, by the needs of culture, the formations of history, and the demands of language. Again: is that necessarily so?

***

Neurosurgeon, novelist, poet, activist, and friend of Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Shainberg, wrote a prize-winning account of Samuel Beckett’s quasi-encounter with Zen for The Paris Review.⁵ The following excerpt in particular offers rich raw material for a re-conceptualization of meditation. I present it here without commentary. If you’d like to write a commentary on the piece in relation to speculative non-buddhism, let me know. I may do so myself in a future post.

As it happened, the puppeteer’s wife was a Buddhist, a follower of the path to which Beckett himself paid homage in his early book on Proust when he wrote, “the wisdom of all the sages, from Brahma to Leopardi … consists not in the satisfaction but the ablation of desire.” As a devotee and a Beckett admirer, this woman was understandably anxious to confirm what she, like many people, took to be his sympathies with her religion. In fact, not a few critical opinions had been mustered over the years concerning his debt to Buddhism, Taoism, Zen and the Noh theatre, all of it received — as it was now received from the puppeteer’s wife — with curiosity and appreciation and absolute denial by the man it presumed to explain. “I know nothing about Buddhism,” he said. “If it’s present in the play, it is unbeknownst to me.” Once this had been asserted, however, there remained the possibility of unconscious predilection, innate Buddhism, so to speak. So the woman had another question which had stirred in her mind, she said, since the first time she’d seen the play. “When all is said and done, isn’t this man, having given up hope, finally liberated?” Beckett looked at her with a pained expression. He’d had his share of drink that night, but not enough to make him forget his vision or push him beyond his profound distaste for hurting anyone’s feelings. “Oh, no,” he said quietly. “He’s finished.”

I don’t want to dwell on it, but I had a personal stake in this exchange. For years I’d been studying Zen and its particular form of sitting meditation, and I’d always been struck by the parallels between its practice and Beckett’s work. In fact to me, as to the woman who questioned him that evening, it seemed quite impossible that he didn’t have some explicit knowledge, perhaps even direct experience, of Zen, and I had asked him about it that very first night at his hotel. He answered me as he answered her: he knew nothing of Zen at all. Of course, he said, he’d heard Zen stories and loved them for their “concreteness,” but other than that he was ignorant on the subject. Ignorant, but not uninterested. “What do you do in such places?” he asked. I told him that mostly we looked at the wall. “Oh,” he said, “you don’t have to know anything about Zen to do that. I’ve been doing it for fifty years.” (When Hamm asks Clov what he does in his kitchen, Clov replies: “I look at the wall.” “The wall!” snaps Hamm. “And what do you see on your wall? … naked bodies?” Replies Clov, “I see my light dying.”) For all his experience with wall-gazing, however, Beckett found it extraordinary that people would seek it out of their own free will. Why, he asked, did people do it? Were they seeking tranquility? Solutions? And finally, as with neurosurgery: “Does it hurt?” I answered with growing discomfort. Even though I remained convinced that the concerns of his work were identical with those of Zen, there was something embarrassing about discussing it with him, bringing self-consciousness to bear, I mean, where its absence was the point. This is not the place for a discussion of Zen but since it deals, as Beckett does, with the separation of subject and object (“No direct contact is possible between subject and object,” he wrote in his book on Proust, “because they are automatically separated by the subject’s consciousness of perception. . .”), the problems of Self, of Being and Non-being, of consciousness and perception, all the means by which one is distanced or removed from the present tense, it finds in Beckett’s work a mirror as perfect as any in its own sphere of literature or scripture.

This in itself is no great revelation. It’s not terribly difficult to find Zen in almost any great work of art. The particular problem, however, and what made my questions seem — to me at least — especially absurd, is that such points — like many where Beckett is concerned — lose more than they gain in the course of articulation. To point out the Zen in Beckett is to make him seem didactic or, even worse, therapeutic, and nothing could betray his vision more. For that matter, the converse is also true. Remarking the Beckett in Zen betrays Zen to the same extent and for the same reasons. It is there that their true commonality lies, their mutual devotion to the immediate and the concrete, the Truth which becomes less True if made an object of description, the Being which form excludes. As Beckett once put it in responding to one of the endless interpretations his work has inspired, “My work is a matter of fundamental sounds. Hamm as stated, Clov as stated … That’s all I can manage, more than I could. If people get headaches among the overtones, they’ll have to furnish their own aspirin.”

So I did finally give up the questions, and though he always asked me about Zen when we met —”Are you still looking at the wall?” — I don’t think he held it against me. His last word on the matter came by mail, and maybe it was the best. In a fit of despair I had written him once about what seemed to me an absolute, insoluble conflict between meditation and writing. “What is it about looking at the wall that makes the writing seem obsolete?” Two weeks later, when I’d almost forgotten my question, I received this reply, which I quote in its entirety:

Dear Larry,

When I start looking at walls, I begin to see the writing. From which even my own is a relief.

As ever,

Sam

__________________
¹ François Laruelle. Dictionary of Non-Philosophy. Trans. Taylor Adkins. Paris: Editions Kime, 1998, 57-58.

² Center for Contemplative Mind in Society website

³ This issue has been addressed in numerous posts and comments on this blog. See, for instance, the earliest instance, “Raw Remarks on Meditation, Ideology, and Nihilism,” and the latest, “The Epistemic Meditator.”

⁴ Laruelle, in Katerina Kolozova. “Theories of the Immanent Rebellion: Non-Marxism and Non-Christianity.” Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 214.

⁵ Lawrence Shainberg, “Exorcising Beckett.” The Paris Review, no. 104, fall 1987.

Here, mute world.
There, dharmic tale.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

Terrence Malick’s film The Tree of Life is, by nearly every account that I have heard or read, painful to watch. It is frustrating, boring, uninteresting. Nothing happens.  No story is told. Imagine—a movie without a story!

These are curious reactions to a film that enables us to be present at the creation of the universe, watch dinosaurs fighting in pristine forests and frolicking on the shore, be voyeurs of a darkly suffering family in 1950s suburban Texas, and witness the stellar conflagration that ends it all.

Yet, it is true: no story is told. In this lack, the film shows us a way to exorcise the enchanters haunting x-buddhist meditation.

Exorcise it of what, exactly? First of all, of the controlling narratives which invariably cleave to it. I mean the heroic narratives about its origin, value, use, benefit, purpose. Once we evacuate the narrative from the practice, we can exorcise it of the subordinate grammar that supports the narrative. What is left is a form of severe parataxis. Severe, but just. It is an existential grammar without coordinating or subordinating connectives. It’s this next to that. No hierarchy. No and, for, with, because. No therefore, since, and then, as, if. No essential sense or meaning—the fires that fuel the narrative juggernaut.

Malick’s paratactic cinematic grammar is a model for our meditation grammar. Although all of life, from creation to destruction, is swirling and humming around him, Malick, as filmmaker, simply makes himself present. He is present, moreover, alongside of the life, not above it or below. From above, as omniscient narrator, he could connect disjunctions, reveal patterns, intimate meanings, announce conclusions. From below, he could expose the organic viscera that propel life’s relentless torrent. He doesn’t.

He stays right here, on the surface, alongside of the life unfolding. In remaining parallel and present, he does not so much refuse to tell a story as to render himself incapable of crafting a narrative whole. He simply cannot explain the life that he is present to. Explanation is the fata morgana that rises on the horizon of our cognitive-linguistic connectives—and, and then, then, so, therefore, but, or. Explanation hallucinates a reality hidden beneath the brute discontinuity of life. As Malick’s temporal trajectory shows, life persists, yes. But it does so mutely. It tells no story.

That is severe. That is just.

In “The Justice of Non-Philosophy,” Joshua Ramey says that in persisting in this manner, in abstaining from representing that which cannot be represented, Malick:

does an almost unconceivable justice to human life. If human life is a story, then each life is its own story. Thus every telling of that tale is an abstraction, perhaps a kind of distortion. But what kind of story is a life? The discontinuities in life—including violence, suffering and death itself—seem either ineffable or patently betrayed by narration…What any narrative must do, but seems incapable of doing in good faith, is to deal with discontinuity. For living—in pain or pleasure through loss or ecstasy, and with the constant burden of the past—is different from narrating that living, and it is difficult to see how narration could fail to fail existence, to merely pretend to keep the secret of life by telling it.¹

If life, the lived, is foreclosed to narration, we, the living, are wholly prone to it. We, in fact, require narratives. They give shape to experience. They create cohesion.  They provide an explanation. They help us make decisions and predict outcomes. Apparently, they are also inevitable. So, two important questions become: what is the source of our narrative, and are we aware of it as narrative?

Here, mute world.
There, dharmic tale.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

Why “persecuted”? A defining characteristic of an x-buddhist is that s/he looks to The Dharma for narrative cues. “The Dharma” is the x-buddhist “big other.” In Lacan’s terms, the big other provides the symbolic apparatus for negotiating the base material real. It also serves to regulate the community’s social interactions while the community enacts its symbolic apparatus. A symptom that some x-buddhist is in thrall to the dharmic big other is that in “seeing” a direct correlation between the words of the narrative and material reality, he is self-evidently, and of his own free will, “seeing things as they are.” In other words, the symbolic-fictional nature of The Dharma is wholly opaque to him. This spell is difficult to break, for a further function of the specifically x-buddhist big other is, in Zizek’s words, to mask the “intricate cobweb of unwritten implicit rules.” These rules:

are never explicitly stated. If you state them explicitly you even usually commit some kind of crime or violation. This is what always interests me: how what holds communities together are not explicit rules but the unwritten rules which are even prohibited to be announced publicly… My point is that the appearance of a free choice [has] to be sustained.²

The Dharma as x-buddhist big other is a topic for another day. I am bringing it up here in the hopes of catalyzing some consideration of an obviously unbearable thought: The Dharma as persecutor. Is it conceivable to think The Dharma as yet another human-obliterating narrative that harasses, coaxes, seduces, negates, and incessantly nags the practitioner to do this, think that? Among x-buddhists, the very possibility of examining the ways in which this may or may not be the case is implicitly prohibited from even being broached.³ Acceptance of The Dharma as an overarching, cosmically anchored narrative which “provides a safe haven in the flurry of contemporary confusion of roles and identities,” as Zizek says of the “new age” versions of the big other, is non-negotiable.⁴

Meditation as existential parataxis, however, can break the spell. For, when sitting in still, silent, present attentiveness, the dharmic narrative, and with it, its persecution, is erased.

Here, mute world.
There, dharmic narration.
Near here, inching ever closer,
the persecuted human.

That does not mean that the intransitive truths cataloged in the dharmic inventory are invalidated.⁵ It means that once their exalted warrant is cancelled, their magisterial vibrato silenced, and their network of voltaic postulation disabled, they became raw, unprocessed chora–chora borne, or not, in the immanence of the mute world.

[Materials for Practice 2]

___________________

Image: See the discussion on this image at Language Log.

¹  Joshua Ramey “The Justice of Non-Philosophy.” Laruelle and Non-Philosophy. Eds. John Mullarkey and Anthony Paul Smith. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. 80-99.

² http://slought.org/content/11236/

³ Zizek’s example, in the talked linked above, of the requirement that the prohibition be implicit is illuminating:

Imagine a session of the central committee where someone stands up and starts to criticize Stalin. Now, everyone knows this was prohibited. But that’s the catch. Imagine someone else standing up and saying: “But listen, are you crazy? Don’t you know that it’s prohibited to criticize comrade Stalin?” I claim the second one would be arrested earlier than the first one. Because although everybody knew that it’s prohibited to criticize Stalin, this prohibition itself was prohibited. The appearance had to be unconditionally maintained that it is allowed to criticize Stalin, but simply why criticize him since he’s so good. My point it that the appearance of a free choice had to be sustained.

⁴ Slovoj Zizek. “The Big Other Doesn’t Exist.” Journal of European Psychoanalysis. Spring – Fall 1997. http://www.lacan.com/zizekother.htm

⁵ See “Radical Potential.” On the intransitive, see Roy Bhaskar. A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Routledge, 1998. p. 22:

[Th]e intransitive objects of knowledge are in general invariant to our knowledge of them: they are the real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events and possibilities of the world; and for the most part they are quite independent of us. They are not unknowable, because as a matter of fact quite a bit is known about them… But neither are they in any way dependent upon our knowledge, let alone perception, of them.

Can meditation produce knowledge?

The latter is without question the case. How else should we understand the perfect confluence of some x-community’s practice with its doctrine? It never fails. It appears to be as inevitable as it is complete. Whether Trappist, Quaker, Zen, TM, Shamanic, Wiccan, Vipassana, MBSR or any other form, what happens in meditation never fails to validate the claims of doctrine. Let me converse for five minutes with any meditator, and I can tell you to what system of thought he or she subscribes. Meditation, it seems, is a potent tool for inculcating ideology. And the meditator, as good subject of that ideology, cannot hide the fact. S/he cannot but expressively ventriloquize the terms and beliefs that populate the practice.

If it is demonstrably the case that meditation can be employed as a tool for indoctrination, is it necessarily so? Can the term “meditation” be used to designate a human practice that produces knowledge? If so, what conditions might be required?

On the back cover of her new book, In-Cite: Epistemologies of Creative Writing, Camelia Elias, writes:

The epistemic creative writer is not merely an expressive writer, a writer who writes for creative writing programs at diverse university colleges. Rather, the epistemic creative writer is the writer who understands that in order to say something useful you must step out of the space that engages your ego. Awareness of what really matters comes from the contemplation of the futility of words. Before the word there is silence. After the word there is silence. But during the word there is knowledge that can be made crystal clear. [Links at bottom.]

Speculative non-buddhism is an attempt to think x-buddhism via radical concepts

And yet I claim that the brutal failure of x-buddhism throughout its entire history has been its inability (or refusal?) to unleash the revolutionary potential of its thought. I further claim that what has filled the space of this failure/refusal is not a merely quasi-revolutionary force-of-x-buddhism; it is, rather, an impotent collusion. Contemporary x-buddhism’s impotence makes it easy prey to the very status quo its calculus is, arguably, designed to upset. Do we need any further evidence of this than the smooth grafting of x-buddhism onto the western marketplace? In fact, this is an old pattern. Everywhere Buddhism has been brought–Tibet, China, Japan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, etc.–it has been co-opted by the ruling power structures, and thereby seduced away from its revolutionary designs.  It is fair to ask whether today, in Europe and North America, x-buddhism is not just another product that enables its consumer merely to retreat and  refresh before the next day’s onslaught. That would certainly fit the ancient pattern. Chinese Chan, for example, was a mix of agrarianism, Daoism, and Indian Buddhism bound tightly with the heavy chains of Confucianism. In the West, we have a mix of feel-good pop psychology, Hallmark Card-like positive affirmation, and world-buddhism trapped in the bloated cage of consumer capitalism.

That unfortunate, recurring fate of x-buddhism is an issue for historians. Speculative non-buddhism is practical theory. It is concerned with the inherent, present conditions of x-buddhism. Because the radical concepts that speculative non-buddhism works with are derived from x-buddhist thought itself, speculative non-buddhism may be viewed as a form of immanent critique: It considers its subject while immersed in its subject; it remains open to and curious about its subject’s premises and postulates; it follows, in the first instance, the contours of thought drawn by its subject. But it does so not in order to validate the structure of that thought, but to expose the fault lines where x-buddhism’s governing principles break apart.

As a simple example of the confluence of some of these issues, let’s look at the following comment from another blog. The writer is lamenting the tendency of x-buddhist teachers to lure people into their groups with sensible talk sprinkled with a things as they are naturalism, pragmatism, and so on, and then eventually springing religious dogma on them. In other words, the old bait and switch of the peddler.

I saw Ajahn Sumedho give a talk on his way to retirement in Thailand where he pronounced the good news that there is more than this life! So I asked him what experience he had that he based this knowledge on, and did it occur in a meditative state. He ignored the question, like a slick lying politician, and gave me a basic dharma instruction. This is one example of that duplicity in action.

Sumedho was not being duplicitous. He was being consistent. As a bona fide peddler of x-buddhist wares, Sumedho was simply offering up the goods at his disposal. Those goods are that which is indexed by the term “basic dharma.” “The Dharma,” is a non-radical concept. It is, in fact, the polar opposite: a wholly or absolutely transcendental concept. A radical concept stems from a question, one, crucially, posed by the human in and as human, one rooted in our immanent situation. The Dharma, by contrast, constitutes a complex of prescribed answers. Like all wholly transcendental structures, The Dharma’s answers are static and inert. They are not born of the demands of our primitive situation, a situation that alters over time and that science can chart. The Dharma’s answers are born of the demands–logical, emotional, cultural–of a differential, one, moreover, of its own creation, unavailable to science or any other local knowledge.

In his essay “What Kind of Buddhist are You?,” Tom Pepper presents a valuable typology (borrowing from Alain Badiou). In the terms of that typology, Ajahn Sumedho is performing as an “obscurantist” subject (link at bottom).

The obscurantist subject is that subject who [quoting Badiou from Logics of Worlds] “systematically resorts to the invocation of a full and pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-evental body” which “has the power to reduce to silence that which affirms the event, thus forbidding the real body from existing”(59-60).  The obscurantist subject appeals to some ineffable truth beyond words, which science threatens to destroy, the “truly human” that escapes reason, and can only be found in miraculous revelations and is always hidden in obscure origins.  We see this in x-buddhism whenever there is an insistence that awakening is beyond language, that Buddha never used language to teach, that we must never think if we hope to become enlightened, or that the ultimate goal is some full and pure “substrate consciousness,” Buddha-nature, or “true self.”  We see this subject whenever argument is squashed with appeals to tradition or sutra-quoting or lineages.

The person asking Ajahn Sumedho the question seems be prepared to follow the obscurantist line. For, what if Sumedho had replied, “yes, I attained this knowledge of future births in deep, non-conceptual meditation.” Would that claim have been enough to satisfy the query? If not, the questioner may be approaching the status of a “faithful” subject.

The faithful subject is the one that notices the truth event and tries to force its acceptance in the World. “Forcing” is a term borrowed from set theory, and refers to the attempt to transform the discursive practices and institutions of the World in such a way that the truth becomes demonstrable, is able to appear and be spoken of; in a sense, it is offering a “proof” of a truth that it as yet only “intuitively” grasped. Until it is “forced” into appearing, a truth is indeterminate, it does not seem to belong to the World, and is on the fringes of the discourses and institutions—it exists, but it does not officially appear (Badiou uses the example of undocumented workers in France).  The faithful subject notices the truth event, the occurrence in a World of something that seems a contradiction, an excess, something that cannot be accounted for, and this subject struggles to remake the World to bring this truth into appearance. As Badiou puts it, the faithful subject “engenders the expansion of the present and exposes, fragment by fragment, a truth”(53).

In the terms I am using, a faithful subject thinks x-buddhism via its own radical concepts. What happens to the traditionalist’s “rebirth” and “awakening” or, for that matter, the “non-reactivity” and “present moment” of the post-traditionalist, when forced to reckon with fading (anicca), radical contingency (paticcipasamuppada), and nihility (suññatā)?

What happens, in other words, when we take x-buddhism at its own, radical, word?

____________

Link: Tom Pepper, “What Kind of Buddhist are You?“

Image: Kazimir Malevich (Russian. 1879-1935), Suprematist Composition: White On White, 1918, Museum of Modern Art New York.

I will continue to present my finely-wrought wares here.

The work I want to get back to requires concentration. In order to do it, I will be disabling discussion here. I will allow ping backs. They will show up to the left there, where the commentators do now.

Thank you for your participation. Thank you for all your comments.

As many of you know, thoughtfully writing and responding to comments can be extremely time-consuming. On many days over the last two years I have spent several hours responding to comments. I can tell from many of yours, too, that you must spend a great deal of time crafting your comments. I also happen to be conscientious about getting back to readers when they make an interesting critical point or ask a valuable question. So, I am not the kind of blogger who can post something and then turn away. Sometimes I lose sleep over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you do, too.

I have learned a great deal from many of you. Thank you.

I will leave the comments open on the previous posts for a couple of days, or until I can reconfigure the blog a bit. That way, you can finish up whatever conversations you were having. Who knows, maybe we’ll have a forum for exchange again someday. Better yet, maybe one of you will create one somewhere else.

It’s been a fun experiment. Now, where did I leave that old slack tub…?

I am always receiving advice on how to conduct this project of non-buddhist criticism. Nearly all of it  misses the point.  Nearly all of it is nonetheless worth considering. I would like to take a pause, and share some of that advice with you. I will also say what I will do about it.

Advice #1: Remain substantive
Advice #2: No naming
Advice #3: Stop trolling
Advice #4: Address alternatives
Advice #5: Moderate comments
Advice #6: Stop Tom Pepper!
Advice #7: Be more self-critical
Advice #8: Stop already! The blog has run its course

Matthew O’Connell’s recent comment is representative of the first four kinds of advice. He offers this:

I’m much more interested in that discussion [i.e., something more substantive] than bashing the likes of Lodro [Rinzler], which is kind of easy at the end of the day and gets tiresome. Aren’t you guys tired of it yet? Instead of trolling, I think it timely to invest energy and thought in considering alternatives and means for addressing what Buddhism had been considered as being able to do in the past and yet which obviously fails to do in the majority of cases today. I am extremely interested in that question. It seems to me that it’s time to move on. Expecting others to do it is a waste of time and cursing them for their inability to live up to your expectation, or desired mode of engagement is pointless…Disruption can be a powerful wake up call, but only if people are willing to engage and play the game. The opposite effect of course is the one Glenn has experienced: refusal and/or indifference. I feel like the force of your arguments, insights and understanding are more than sufficient without the trolling to eventually sway those who have taking a comfortable position within contemporary western Buddhism. If you bash them on the head with it though, the refusal is more likely to become permanent.

#4 is expressed in pithy terms by JRC:

And now moving on to the praxis of the “subject” … onward ho …

My response to # 1: Remain substantive. Agreed. I would like to hew closely to substantive analysis. Many of the posts here do that. So, maybe the advice is to do so exclusively. The implicit criticism seems to be that the substantive work is diminished by other kinds of posts (see #2 and #3). I am constantly inviting people to write up analyses of what I call x-buddhist rhetorics of display–some text, ritual, website, dharma talk, clothing style, and so on. I would like to make this site more of a workshop for that kind of work. So, agreed.

My response to #2: No naming. (Matthew doesn’t go so far as no naming, but it’s a good place to mention it.) It is impossible to analyze specific instances of x-buddhist rhetorics without naming people and organizations. But I agree that the naming should always be tied to a substantive case analysis. So, instead of just throwing it out there that Lodro Rinzler strikes me as an x-buddhist buffoon, I will, in the future, detail my reasons for saying so, and explain why I see such buffoonery as counter-productive or even harmful. I know that naming can be hurtful. I find doing so the most distasteful part of this work. I really hate it. I gives me a stomachache. But I also think it is important to be pointed and specific. Let’s also not forget that the people I mention are not innocent x-buddhist by-standers, seeking a little peace in the midst of a painful world: they are self-professed gurus of one variety or another. They are public figures who offer advice on the most serious life issues. Some of them are trying to make a living doing so.

This points to a more serious issue. When someone says that there are more important things to be doing “than bashing the likes of Lodro, which is kind of easy at the end of the day and gets tiresome,” we have before us several interesting data to be analyzed. For example, what is it about a Lodro that gives the impression that he is an easy target for criticism? Is it possible that whatever it is is itself deserving of criticism precisely because it comes across that way? What if we view “easiness” as a rhetorical ploy, and all its various features as the sum of a strategy, the strategy of “easy”? What would it look like? To me, to name just one example, it looks exactly what we should expect from the confluence of North American Buddhism and North American capitalism, where easily digestible comfort-food-buddhism is just what the market demands. In other words, that contemporary western x-buddhism looks “kind of easy” to “bash” is not a reason to leave it alone, it is a reason to go after it. The obviousness of the facile nature of our x-buddhism is a crucial datum for analysis. X-buddhism could take on many shapes and forms. So, why is it so enmeshed in the market of comforting panaceas? Why does it so easily graft onto the marketplace? Why does it produce figures like______? How many contemporary x-buddhist figures, whether a traditional rinpoche or roshi or a less traditional non-denominational one, can you name who would not be “kind of easy” to expose as either reactionary of obscurantist? The advent of Tutteji Wachtmeister should prove illuminating in this regard. So, in short: We must not take for granted that x-buddhism has to be the way that it currently is. We do not have to play with the loaded dice that our  x-buddhist figures hand us. That is tiresome.

So, partially agreed: no more easy, unsubstantiated shots, and more thorough case studies. And my apologies to those who have been negatively named without an explanation. I won’t do it again.

My response to #3: Stop trolling. This one is related to #2. I looked up several definitions of “trolling.” I get that word thrown my way almost daily. Sometimes it’s directed at me, sometimes at commenters on this blog. The Wikipedia definition is the most useful one I found because it leaves open the possibility that trolling can be valuable.

[1] someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, [2] with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise [3] disrupting normal on-topic discussion.The noun troll may also refer to the provocative message itself, as in:  [4] “That was an excellent troll you posted.”

By this definition, trolling has several features, which I’ve numbered 1-4.  The biggest question I have is: how do you determine whether  1-3  lead to a shut-down in communication, as Matthew says, and are thus counter-productive, or actually serve to advance things? The latter may be long-term. It’s long-term value may be wholly opaque in the short-term precisely because of the emotionalism and disruption involved. How can we know? The fact that people are disturbed can’t be an indication, can it? The point is to disturb. An unavoidable aspect of this work is disruption. In fact, it may be the very first task. I agree with Zizek’s comment from the previous post that the shift of perspective forced by truths such as non-self and perpetual dissolution “involves great pain; it is not merely a liberation [...]; it is also the violent experience of losing the ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one’s being.” Let this statement by Thomas Szasz sum up my feelings about this issue of “trolling:” “Men are afraid to rock the boat in which they hope to drift safely through life’s currents, when, actually, the boat is stuck on a sandbar. They would be better off to rock the boat and try to shake it loose, or, better still, jump in the water and swim for the shore.” Maybe a good troll can convince you to jump.

My response to #4: Address alternatives. Partially agreed. It is always great advice to make suggestions for how things might be different. Several of our discussions have generated many, many comments on practical matters, such as what a non-buddhism-inspired practice group might look like. Maybe the suggestions in these comments can be collected. Some of them are quite concrete. But I would want to be careful not to get prescriptive. I don’t want to create more x-buddhism. That danger is never far away. Having said that. maybe it would be useful to have a page sharing ideas about practice (or praxis or whatever it should be called). A couple of readers of this blog and I are going to sit down soon and try to re-configure our own practice. As I have mentioned in several comments, our practice went from more or less traditional (western) Soto Zen to non-denominational x-buddhist to unformed, dark, ideologically-hesitant sitting and dialogue. But then everyone stopped coming! So, yes, we can share ideas on “praxis.”

My response to #5: Moderate comments. I don’t want to go down the slippery slope of “right speech.” I really feel that “right speech” is just a convenient way to maintain control, and to prevent real change from occurring. Neither do I want to cut off dialogue, and make this a one-directional information site. But I do want to stream-line the discussions some. I want to keep the comments somewhat on topic. Even here, though, I am a bit hesitant. You never know what direction a discussion will take. Unlike my undergrad students, I don’t believe there are “tangents” in dialogue, just explorations. Or maybe there are tangents, and I just happen to value them. Some of the most insightful, creative ideas come from seemingly off-topic remarks. And, true, sometimes they just steer the thing into quicksand. So what can we do? A good solution might be to disallow certain comments, but email the person and explain why. Maybe I can even suggest some edits to make the comment more relevant, then post it. That may get tedious real fast. So, I don’t know. Suggestions?

My response to #6: Stop Tom Pepper! This advice comes in several varieties, spanning calls for an outright ban to asking him to be more polite. By way of explaining why I will just ignore this advice, a comment by Matthias Steingass is helpful.

Glenn recently said, without any apparent irony, as far as I see it (Glenn you might correct me), that Tom is some kind of Rinzai and that we should be thankful for Tom’s compassion for us. Craig also mentioned, without any irony, that we should be thankful for Tom’s compassionate teachings. Tom himself seems to find this title – the new Rinzai – right to the point for him.

My response: There was some irony, of course. But it was mixed with sincerity. What I am about to say does not, I imagine, apply to some readers. But the point is still not entirely moot. It applies generally, to x-buddhism across the board. One feature of x-buddhism is its ability to romanticize its potentially destructive elements. Think of all the tropes in x-buddhist literature that open up the possibility of a radical break with tradition: kill the Buddha; abandon the raft; leave the collapsed house in shambles; the finger pointing to the moon, and so forth. Yet, the radical break never occurs. Or perhaps it does occur, but the preservationist/conservative leaders of x-buddhism quickly and deftly deny the force of that break through various forms of reaction and obfuscation. So, even a Nagarjuna, who pushes rationality so far as to show the contradictions in the very ideas of the four noble truths and the tathagata, becomes yet another defanged, wise and kind x-buddhist bodhisattva. Same with destructive iconoclasts like Rinzai and Bodhidharma. I see “Tom Pepper” as a living, breathing demonstration of this crucial aspect of x-buddhism, the dialectic of radicality and its denial.

This explanation will not be helpful to some readers. Some of you wouldn’t accept a Rinzai as your companion, much less as your teacher. You want an exchange that assumes equality, and that exhibits all the proper decorum of mutual respect. That is understandable. But what will you do when your interlocutor refuses you that? In that case, can’t you just bypass the person? If you can’t, why not? That’s a real question. I should quickly add that I hope you’ll carefully consider engaging even the most difficult of interlocutors, at least until you’re certain there’s no room for growth. And, as we’ve already seen, growth can at times involve “the violent experience of losing the ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one’s being.”

I think that it is valuable to have a full range of flavors, tones, and emotions in play in dialogue. One of my major criticisms of the contemporary right-speech ethos is that it drastically reduces the range of expression. This blog exhibits a broad range of expression, from warm-hearted gentleness and agreement to ferocity and adamant disagreement. I want to keep it that way.

What I will do from now on, though, is take to heart some advice that I received by email: “In short, maybe, as opposed to censoring anyone, stop encouraging and defending Tom.” So please don’t ask me explain Tom Pepper. Both Tom Pepper and “Tom Pepper” can speak for themselves.

My response to #7: Be more self-critical. Another of Matthias Steingass’s recent comments is a good representation of this advice/criticism:

What we have seen here since summer 2011 is a group process without any reflection about the process itself. Like in any other sangha. The process has been more or less with out any rules. What is typical of such processes, is that a social configuration emerges which reflects unconscious power structures. In this regard we are here now at a point many other internet forums come to sooner or later. This is not to say that this blog hasn’t its own qualities. It definitely has! What it lacks is a reflection about its power structure.

I agree, but I think it is the job of an observer to offer such reflections. I consider it a form of generosity to reflect on some group’s power structures. It’s hard work to do so.  So, I would like to see someone else do the work. Seth Segall posted a critique on his blog “The Existential Buddhist” a while ago (link at bottom). It received 97 comments. Stephen Schettini write a post called “So What?” for the Secular Buddhist Association. If I remember correctly, there were hundreds of comments. (I can’t provide the link here because I am 403 Forbidden to enter that site.) Maybe you could use those as starting points. Having said that, I think that we have in fact produced a good deal of process-reflective text here. The pages themselves are really process-oriented. Tacit predictions about power dynamics permeate the pages. Most visitors to the site probably don’t read them, though. In any case, power structures are unavoidable, as far as I can tell. As soon as there are two people engaged with one another a power dynamic emerges. Is that not the case? I’ve never been in a situation without a power dynamic. How could this blog be an exception? If I were commenting on a philosophy site, I would be pretty low in the power rankings. I could improve my power relationship to other commenters through study, hard thought, better thinking and expression, perseverance, and so on. I don’t know of any other way. Do any of you?

My response to #8: Stop already! The blog has run its course. I’d say we are just getting started. Tom Pepper, Matthias Steingass, and I have a book coming out soon. That should inaugurate a new phase of the project. Hopefully, it will help us get back to the concerns of Advice #1. For this project to work, though, its ideas and tools have to be used by others, by you. Like I’ve suggested many times before, why not take one of the ideas given in virtually any of the posts here, and see how it functions in some dharma talk or Shambhala Sun article. If it does function, how, and to what end? The point of this project is to produce tools for you to use in performing your own analysis and producing your own insights. I’ll do my analysis and share my insights, and others will do and share theirs. You have to do yours yourself. And you are always welcome to share them with the rest of us. I hope you will.

The day will come when this blog does run its course. But it won’t be because all the critical work has been done. It will be because I personally am sick and tired of dealing with x-buddhism and x-buddhists. I often think about turning my attention exclusively to music, creative writing, and (non)philosophy. I will. It’s just a matter of time.

So, as with all things, time is running out here. Let’s get to work. 

In the meantime–any advice?

_____________

Link: Seth Segall, “About ‘Speculative Non-Buddhism,‘” at The Existential Buddhist blog.

Image:  Michael Endlicher. Contemporary German artist. Text reads: I remain silent/I speak. Next to the image, he writes: Unentschieden existieren? Entschieden leben! Entscheiden Sie selbst. Two possible translations: (1) Existing ambivalently? Live definitively? Decide for yourself. (2) Undecided how to exist? Decide how to live! Decide it for yourself.

Žižek v. Buddhism: who’s the subject?

By Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This started out as a response to Slavoj Žižek’s recent talk at the University of Vermont on “Buddhism Naturalized,” but evolved into a consideration of subjectivity, which happened to be the topic of my next post in the pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series. [Links at bottom.] So this can be considered part 1 of a 2-part series.

There are Western philosophers with a good understanding of Buddhism. Some of them are Buddhologists: longtime scholars of Buddhism, like Herbert Güenther, Jay Garfield, Kenneth Inada, Jin Park (the definition of “Western” gets a little blurry here), Brook Ziporyn, Stephen Batchelor, and others who are philosophers in their own right (if not necessarily academically sanctioned ones), and who have cut their teeth interpreting original Asian Buddhist texts.

Others have come to Buddhism through a side door: either by accident or through a logical extension of their own interests. Owen Flanagan is one of these, and his recent book The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized provides a model for how an established analytic philosopher can develop a critical dialogue with a philosophical tradition that is foreign yet ancient, complex, and clearly worthy of comparative assessment.

Then there are those whose writing about Buddhism extends somewhat beyond what they know about it. In the past, this was excusable by the dearth of material for western commentators. Buddhist literature is voluminous — one might say it’s Himalayan in its voluminousness — and the fraction of what’s been translated into European languages is still comparatively small. But there is enough now to support full-time positions in Western universities for those who specialize in refined sub-areas of Buddhist studies. And with Buddhism alive and well now in the West and in the East, there is no end to what a Buddhist scholar can do.

Where does Slavoj Žižek fit into this continuum? The title of his talk, given here at the University of Vermont some weeks ago, was “Buddhism Naturalized.” In his opening remarks, Film and Television Studies professor Todd McGowan mentioned that his guest had originally planned a response to the Dalai Lama, but that after the latter spoke in nearby Middlebury a few days earlier, Žižek was so taken by the Dalai Lama’s comments that he changed his plans. This, McGowan intimated, would be the new “Buddhist Slavoj.”

With that friendly gesture, Žižek opened a talk that was all Žižek — ranging widely and freely over the terrain of popular culture, politics, and Western (and this time also Eastern) philosophy — but that spent a good half of its time discussing Buddhism.

In the end, however, it was the same old Slavoj, with a few (welcome) conciliatory gestures added. I’ve written about Žižek’s Buddhism before, notably after his last talk  here three years ago, but in the intervening time he’s expanded on the topic in his monumental recent volume Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism.

This post will summarize Žižek’s argument against Buddhism, presented in that book and in his recent talk, to make the case that while his conciliatory gestures show an advance toward a genuine engagement with Buddhism today, his critique remains a static and abstract one that is unfair to a tradition as complex as Buddhism. It is not so much a misreading as a partial and selective reading, which, for a tradition as large as Buddhism, shouldn’t be surprising. But it is primarily an abstraction intended to prop up his own case for his own philosophical perspective.

Fortunately, Žižek’s philosophical perspective is one that deserves its own hearing, and I’ll try to summarize the contrast, as I see it, between the two below. More importantly, I’ll try to show how the difference between the two raises interesting questions about subjectivity that deserve a deeper probing than Žižek has given them.

As I’ve argued before, Buddhism and Žižek’s Lacanianism are, in crucial respects, philosophical kindred spirits. Both posit an emptiness or gap at the center of us humans, which we are always striving to fill with whatever’s available: objects and possessions, self/identity projects, community/nation projects (both with their enemy “others”), and so on.

And both posit that only by facing this gap directly can genuine love become possible. Or something like that: Buddhism speaks little of love and more of compassion and enlightenment, and it’s difficult to say exactly what Lacan is aiming for. But both aim to help us cope with suffering, and their strategies share a large terrain of potential overlap.

Žižek admits more or less this general point in Less Than Nothing, where he writes:

The only other school of thought that fully accepts the inexistence of the big Other is Buddhism. Is the solution then to be found in Buddhist ethics? There are reasons to consider this option. Does not Buddhism lead us to “traverse the fantasy:’ overcoming the illusions on which our desires are based and confronting the void beneath each object of desire? Furthermore, psychoanalysis shares with Buddhism the insistence that there is no Self as a substantive agent of psychic life [. . .]: the Self is the fetishized illusion of a substantial core of subjectivity where, in reality, there is nothing. This is why, for Buddhism, the point is not to discover one’s “true Self;’ but to accept that there is no such thing, that the “Self” as such is an illusion, an imposture. [p. 129]

Deepening his analysis, he continues:

Crucial to Buddhism is the reflexive change from the object to the thinker himself: first, we isolate the thing that bothers us, the cause of our suffering; then we change not the object but ourselves, the way we relate to (what appears to us as) the cause of our suffering [...]. This shift involves great pain; it is not merely a liberation [...]; it is also the violent experience of losing the ground under one’s feet, of being deprived of the most familiar stage of one’s being.

But in the end, for Žižek, Buddhists

do not repair the damage; rather, [they] gain the insight into the illusory nature of that which appears to need repair. [p. 130]

The difference between Buddhism and psychoanalysis, then, is that

for Buddhism, after Enlightenment (or “traversing the fantasy”), the Wheel no longer turns, the subject de-subjectivizes itself and finds peace; for psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the wheel continues to turn, and this continued turning-of-the-wheel is the drive [...]. [131]

Or, put differently:

Far from being the same as [Buddhism's] nirvana principle (the striving towards the dissolution of all tension, the longing for a return to original nothingness), the death drive is the tension which persists and insists beyond and against the nirvana principle. In other words, far from being opposed to the pleasure principle [which Žižek had earlier critiqued], the nirvana principle is its highest and most radical expression. In this precise sense, the death drive stands for its exact opposite, for the dimension of the “undead;’ of a spectral life which insists beyond (biological) death. [. . .]

Even if the object of desire is illusory, there is a real in this illusion: the object of desire in its positive content is vain, but not the place it occupies, the place of the Real; which is why there is more truth in the unconditional fidelity to one’s desire than in the resigned insight into the vanity of one’s striving. [132-3, emphasis added]

This last passage is a crucial one: instead of recognizing “the vanity of one’s striving” and opting for inner peace instead, Žižek seeks an “unconditional fidelity to one’s desire.” That desire, for Žižek, arises out of the tensions in the (Freudian) drives, generating the subject and making us human. (Lacanians and Žižekians can correct me if I haven’t quite gotten that right. From reading a fair bit of Žižek and some other commentators, like Adrian Johnston, I’m still not entirely sure.)

Ironically, this “unconditional fidelity to one’s desire” sounds not so different from what some forms of (Tibetan) Vajrayana Buddhism aspire to. In Vajrayana, what the practitioner should aim for is not extinction in the blissful passivity of Nirvana, but rather the following of desire in order to unite with the deities that are its emanations — which, since those deities are themselves “empty,” means a union with Desire itself.

Žižek, however, dispenses with Vajrayana by caricaturing it as one of the most “ridiculously ritualized” religious forms. As Žižek put it in his talk, it was Tibetan Buddhists who invented what we now know as television’s canned laughter; their version of it was the prayer wheel. (That is funny. Back to it in a minute.)

But the difference can be specified more precisely. In Žižek’s Lacano-Hegelian understanding, it is the empty subject that we need to retain. For Buddhism, on the other hand, it is emptiness itself, which Buddhism takes to be an open, cognizant awareness that is empty of all reifications, all stillings of the flow, yet which nevertheless consists of an irrepressible flow. (I’m drawing more on the Dzogchen tradition here than on others, and Dzogchen is admittedly not representative of all Buddhism, but I think the general point holds for many other strands of Buddhism.)

The difference, then, is this: what counts for Žižek is subjectivity at the point of its (individual) creation; for Buddhists, it is subjectless subjectivity.

Understanding this distinction requires asking not only what subjectivity is, but also what the nature of reality is. If reality is inert substance, mute matter, or mere existence without subjectivation, and if the human subject is the one thing that transcends that mere matter, then there is nothing more significant than human subjectivity at the point of its origins. Žižek would, in this case, be absolutely right about what needs to be protected, defended, and cultivated: the human subject as willful decider and actor. The only alternative would be passivity (of the sort that Žižek ends up ascribing to Buddhism).

But if reality — not just human but all reality — is the ongoing production of subjectless subjectivity, or what, in process-relational terms I have calledsubjectivation-objectivation, then subjectless subjectivity is always already active, not merely passive.

In this sense, Buddhist prayer wheels are not exactly identical to sitcom laugh tracks, but they operate on the same principle. Both acknowledge that the world is always already in (affective-semiotic) motion, and that we, moving beings, are affected on a preconscious level by the in-motionness that is always at work around us.

With its mantras, prayer wheels, and other habit-forming practices,  Buddhism attempts to shift that motion into a movement toward liberation. Sitcom laugh tracks, on the other hand, attempt to shift that motion into laughter and distraction. Each pursues a different goal. If Žižek dislikes both equally, it is because he values willful subjectivity — the kind that speaks “I” into the void of its own creation — at the expense of the affective but subjectless subjectivity that a more processual (and process-relational) ontology would ascribe to humans and to the world.

Concluding his brief foray into Buddhism in Less Than Nothing, Žižek refers to a paradox, whose formal structure is that of the “double vacuum” of a Higgs Boson field. This double vacuum

appears in the guise of the irreducible gap between ethics (understood as the care of the self, as striving towards authentic being) and morality (understood as the care for others, responding to their call).

For Žižek, “the authenticity of the Self is taken to the extreme in Buddhist meditation, whose goal is precisely to enable the subject to overcome (or, rather, suspend) its Self and enter the vacuum of nirvana” [134].

To which I would say: yes, this is part of Buddhism, but it is not the whole of it, at least not in the Mahayana tradition where care for others — or for the liberation of others — is equally, if not supremely, important.

(Žižek acknowledged, in his talk, that there is more than just this one Buddhism: Buddhism, as he put it, oscillates between two goals, a minimal and a maximal one. The minimal one is the “spiritual shift” that occurs “within”; the maximal one is a more radical ontic reading for which the global goal is to liberate everything from suffering.)

But let him have the point, which, he concludes,

is not to criticize Buddhism, but merely to emphasize [this] irreducible gap between subjective authenticity and moral goodness (in the sense of social responsibility): the difficult thing to accept is that one can be totally authentic in overcoming one’s false Self and yet still commit horrible crimes — and vice versa, of course: one can be a caring subject, morally committed to the full, while existing in an inauthentic world of illusion with regard to oneself.

This is why all the desperate attempts by Buddhists to demonstrate how respect and care for others are necessary steps towards (and conditions of) Enlightenment misfire: [D. T.] Suzuki himself was much more honest in this regard when he pointed out that Zen is a meditation technique which implies no particular ethico-political stance — in his political life, a Zen Buddhist may be a liberal, a fascist, or a communist.

Again, the two vacuums never coincide: in order to be fully engaged ethico-politically, it is necessary to exit the “inner peace” of one’s subjective authenticity. [135; paragraph breaks and emphases added]

Žižek’s account of the “desperate attempts by Buddhists to demonstrate how respect and care for others are necessary steps” may ring true, again, for someone steeped in Vajrayana. These “desperate attempts” are guideposts — “Careful here, don’t tread further unless you’ve already gone through the preliminaries and quashed your egoic defilements and stupidities!” — that are easy to ignore in a world of total availability (the practices, the rituals) where the rewards (Tantric Enlightenment!) are too compelling for the avaricious spiritual seeker. Repeated incessantly by the carriers of the traditions and lineages, they may start to sound a little desperate.

Ultimately, though, Žižek’s critique sounds to me not so much as a critique of Buddhism’s philosophical core, which I think he hasn’t adequately grasped, than a critique of one of the main tropes and vehicles by which that philosophical core has so often been adumbrated. This is the trope of inner peace and happiness — the cessation of suffering and attainment of bliss through the elimination of ignorance.

Toward the end of his talk, Žižek revealed that he sees “only two [!!] serious ethics” in the world: the Buddhist and the Judeo-Christian. The latter, for him, is an ethic of external encounter, an ethic of the Fall, of falling in love, the traumatic encounter. The former, it seems, is the smiley face of inner peace that, in Žižek’s view, makes Buddhism a perfect handmaiden to global capitalism.

The virtue of Žižek’s critique of Buddhism is in the value he places on suffering and on choice. Subjectivity is only possible because of our condition of separation, the very gap that underlies our suffering. Eliminating that gap should not be the point of a spiritual or philosophical practice; what should be is recognizing that the gap is one we share will all manner of other gapped, broken, suffering (because groundless yet ground-seeking) others.

A Buddhist who works only to eradicate suffering in him or herself is, I agree, a Buddhist that does little for a world full of suffering. (But is such a person really practicing Buddhism?)

Analogously, a philosophy that values the arising of subjectivity out of the drives (or wherever subjectivity comes from) without recognizing the fundamental entanglement of those drives with everything else that lives, that moves, that suffers, that dies, is a philosophy that privileges will without offering a means for deciding how that will should act.

That, perhaps, is why Žižek needs his Marxism: it provides him with an ethical foundation for action. To the extent that it offers an understanding of our relations with all beings who suffer, Buddhism may be more inclusive in this respect: it provides a wider vision for justice and solidarity than Marxism, even at its humanistic best, has ever provided.

But that’s a debate for another day.

____________________________________

This essay was re-blogged from Adrian J. Ivakhiv’s blog immanence:Thinking the Form, Flesh, and Flow of the World: Ecoculture, Geophilosophy, Mediapolitics. Originally posted December 11, 2012.

LINKS.

pre-G (process-relational ecosophy-G) series
Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized
Slovoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
Adrian Johnston,Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity
subjectivation-objectivation

Adrian J. Ivakhiv is an Associate Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont with a joint appointment in the Environmental Program and the Rubenstein School of Environment & Natural Resources. He regularly teaches the core courses Nature and Culture and Research Methods in Environmental Studies, as well as electives including Ecopolitics and the Cinema, Environmental Ethics, The Culture of Nature, and the graduate-level Environmental Thought & Culture Research Seminar. He coordinates the Rubenstein School’s graduate concentration in Environmental Thought and Culture. For more information, visit here.

IMAGE.

Lacan’s Venn diagram showing the union and intersection of classes. In Stephen Heath, “Notes on Suture.”

[UPDATE: Ted Meissner immediately wrote me to say that it's a technical problem. I wish I could give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the post still stands as a general reflection on a real phenomenon in the x-buddhist internet world, including the Secular Buddhist Association. I stand by the post. Also, I want to make it clear that I did NOT receive the usual message you get when a site has trouble loading, the one about technical difficulties. The message I got read:]

YOU ARE BANNED.

That’s the message I get when I try to access the Secular Buddhist site (links at bottom). I checked: it’s a blanket IP ban.  You may wonder: what does it take to get banned from a Buddhist site? I wonder the same thing. After all, aren’t x-buddhists always telling us how they embody compassion, mindfulness, and equanimity? These values, you would think, serve even the most discordant conversations. Couldn’t banning someone just be an admission that your claims to (ostensibly) pro-social dispositions like “non-reactivity” and “non-judgmentalism” are a bit shabby?

Ted Meissner, the founder of the Secular Buddhist Association and its Facebook page, generously sprinkles his sites with words that, I suppose, are designed to signal serious thought and a willingness to engage others with dialogical vigor, words like critical (critical thinking, critical eye, critical examination, etc.) naturalism, pragmatism, science, secularism, evidence, and so forth. Meissner adds to such good habits of thought a rigorous ethics of engagement. We can glean his ethics from such recent Facebook nuggets as the following (Meissner signs all of his sayings “TSB.” TSB = The Secular Buddhist = Ted Meissner. Why does he use quotation marks to quote himself? Does it makes what he says appear more important?):

“I would rather be shown wrong and have the opportunity to correct my understanding, than maintain a comforting delusion.”

“Our practice is neither avoidance nor suppression of suffering, but direct and sincere engagement.”

“Today — respond with a heart of friendliness, rather than react with a knee of jerkiness.”

*Today* — Decide to be an enthusiastic participant in this moment, every moment.

“Only a weak faith is intolerant of questioning. A strong faith encourages it, sincerely, without an underlying requirement that you find their own answers.”

*Today* — That lightness of heart you may have after meditation? Bring that with you as you encounter the very next person.

“To question is to demonstrate a desire to find the truth. And that quest can only strengthen *us*, however much it may weaken our cherished *views*.”

Meissner does not practice what he is preaching here. He is in fact very quick to cut off critical discussion. He does in fact react to “questioning” “with a knee of jerkiness.” I don’t know why. Is he really unaware of the gulf between what he says and what he does? Is he insecure? Paranoid–a for/against mentality? Is he protecting his readers? Or is it a case of blatant hypocrisy–of purposefully saying the “right” thing but just as purposefully doing the opposite? It often looks to me like hypocrisy. But maybe I am wrong. Perhaps the problem is even more serious than I believe it is. Maybe Meissner genuinely believes that he is engaging others in the way he says he is. Maybe it’s really an issue of tolerance. Is it possible that he just cannot tolerate the degree of robustness, vigor, and critical dialogue that some of us bring to the table? If that is the case, his failing is not hypocrisy. It is egoism. Egoism is “the habit of valuing everything only in reference to one’s personal interest.” The logic of egoism is straight-forward: if being “shown wrong” risks your personal interest, just hit the YOU ARE BANNED button. Just shut out the self-interest-conflicting voices. Now, you are once again free to bask in your comforting post-meditation delusion–you know, “that lightness of heart.”

Ted Meissner is not alone in this failure. It is endemic to the entire group of current x-buddhist internet gurus. I mean people like Vincent Horn and his Buddhist Geeks, Kenneth Folk, Ken McLeod, Stephen Schettini, Brad Warner, Lodro Rinzler, and Noah Levine. God knows I could mention so many more. At the core of their egoism is the fact that they have product to sell, whether literally, for good ol’ Amerikkkan $$$, or figuratively, for community building or a seat at the Feast of Latter Day Buddhism.

But these individuals, too, are not alone in their ego-driven quest. In fact, they are just the most recent players in the great American x-buddhist I-help-you-help-yourself game. Contrary to their claims of innovation and post-traditionalism, every single one of them is locked onto the tracks forged by the x-buddhist thaumaturges of old. The failure, in short, is structural. Self-serving egoism is at the core of the contemporary x-buddhist system. Anyone who comes even close to pointing out that fact will be banned from the discussion. But please don’t take my word for this. I am speaking from my own experience. Visit their sites, ask your hard questions, make your pointed criticism, point out the contradictions you see, be irreverent, and watch what happens.

The system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms. –Noam Chomsky

Or it just bans you.

As disheartening as the current crop of x-buddhist figures are, I recently saw a sign of promise. The site of Tutteji Wachtmeister is a beacon of light in the platitudinous murkiness of the bodhiblogosphere. Tutteji’s x-buddhist/neo-Vedantin atmanistic transparency illuminates the others’ opacity. I hope you’ll visit this great guru’s site (link below). And then, maybe, go to, say, Lodro Rinzler’s site, and compare. That should be fun and edifying!

Anyway, I look forward to the day when the strategy of avoidance that is increasingly practiced by x-buddhist figures today is seen for what it is: evidence of a bogus product.

I look forward to the day when intelligence and integrity are valued–no, insisted on–in x-buddhist communities.

I look forward to the day when x-buddhist figures like Ted Meissner have the courage to practice what they preach.

____________

UPDATE. For the record. Ted and Dana of the Secular Buddhist Association, like all good business people and politicians, admit to banning while not admitting to banning. Ted’s two Facebook posts following this post:

“Accepting the Buddha as a human being means accepting the possibility of his fallibility. That’s part of being human.” — TSB

*Today* — Take a moment to embed yourself in gratitude for the good friends who help us up when we stumble.

Then Dana Nourie adds these remarks:

Yes, sorry to those who received the You are Banned when using the url with the www. That issue is resolved, and all urls are in working order.

There is civil disagreement, and healthy two-way conversations, where people don’t agree but varying opinions are offered. There there are people who defend their view obnoxiously, with insults, and anger. The latter does not help move dialogue or enrich thinking. And lastly there is obvious trolling, where people are just being a**holes because they enjoy it. Banning is justified in the last two cases. To foster and help a healthy community grow, we can’t have people who just want to be jerks and spoil conversation for those who truly want to share and understand.

___________

Secular Buddhist Association

Tutteji Wachtmeister

Lodro Rinzler

See also Patricia Ivan’s post “Tweet your own Horn.”

Yesterday I received the latest issue of Adbusters.

On page thirteen we find a citation of Sogyal Rinpoche. It is superimposed on a two-page reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. The citation begins:

Because in our culture we overvalue the intellect, we imagine that to become enlightened demands extraordinary intelligence.

And it ends with an alleged Tibetan proverb:

Theories are like patches on a coat, one day they just wear off.

I was shocked to read a citation of Sogyal Rinpoche in Adbusters. If there is one big liar in Tibetan Buddhism, it is this man. I wrote a comment at the Adbusters site at once, formulating my objection, but it didn’t go through and wasn’t published. Strange.

The citation is a case of the typical anti intellectual stance x-buddhists take as their savoir vivre.

The logical mind seems interesting, but it is the seed of delusion.

Such a “logic” (also from the citation) is enough for the x-buddhist to disparage thinking once and for all. But this is not the point here. The point is that Adbusters, a magazine that is the self-declared front of the revolutionary meme-war against the dead dog of capitalism is falling prey here to their very enemy. For Sogyal Rinpoche offers nothing whatsoever that can lead us out of the dystopian waste land of capitalism which is unfolding right before our eyes. In terms of spirituality, Sogyal Rinpoche is one of the many incarnations of what we can call an invisible power structure, one that is forcefully normalizing society and the individual without being known as the normalizing power it effectively is. Or in plain words: The “meditation” people like Sogyal Rinpoche are teaching is used only to get exploited, stressed out and depressed people ready for another work day.

Sogyal Rinpoche is the author of a famous book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. This book is influencing the picture of contemporary Buddhism to a large extent. A lot has already been said about this book (cf. for example Donald Lopez’ Prisoners of Shangri-La, p. 78-80). Here, it should suffice to relate a few facts to the people publishing and reading Adbusters about this “Rinpoche” – the latter, by the way, being a Tibetan honorific title that in no way can be claimed by this man. The man should be called simply Sogyal from Lakhar.

Sogyal from Lakhar is the typical Tibetan teller of fairy tales who paints a rosy picture of the oh so holy Tibetan Buddhism. He is good friend of another well-known famous story teller of the Shangri-La myth: Robert Thurman. Both are backed up by the one man nobody should dare say a bad word about, the Dalai Lama – of course. What story do these people propagate?

The myth of the holy land and perennial philosophy

In the first pages of his book, Sogyal from Lakhar paints the well-known rosy picture of his native land Tibet. It is a child’s dream, a fairy tail (remember Tolkine’s Shire?). Everything is good, and every other monk is enlightened. Europe is the opposite. Soygal’s vision of Europe is about a land in which only zombies live. It’s the typical black and white picture esoteric Buddhism paints: the good Shangri-La and the bad West that is devoid of any spiritual life. And our problem, of course, is that we think too much. At no point does Sogyal from Lakhar go beyond this simplistic and infantile picture.

If we turn the page of Adbusters on which the ignorant anti-intellectual and, in fact, kind of racist sermon by the holy Sogyal is printed, we see what there was in Europe when he came there. We see a big picture of a laughing and cheerful Michel Foucault.

I think nothing could illustrate better the mistaken view of Adbusters on Sogyal from Lakhar then putting these two people in such close context.

The black and white picture of Europe vs. Shangri-La Sogyal uses is nothing but a selling scoop to make big money with a commodity x-buddhists dream about so urgently: Enlightenment. In the case of Soygal, this commodity is called Rigpa. Clever as he is – he comes from a very rich Tibetan family of merchants – he founded an enterprise called Rigpa. There you can buy every other hour of hogwash he presents when, for example, his so called Holiness, the unsurpassable Dalai Lama, comes to preach in a sold out stadium. An hour of verbiage you get for $30. Cheap, isn’t it?

By the way. It should be mentioned that the book wasn’t written at all by our clever friend from Lakhar. At least we should be very skeptical about the authorship. It is doubtable that our rigpa merchant really read all those famous names he cites: Montaigne, Blake, Rilke, Henry Ford, Voltaire, Origen, Shelly, Mozart, Balzac, Einstein, Rumi, Wordsworth etc. (cf. Lopez, p. 79). It is much more plausible that his two ghost writers looked up citations from these Westerners to support the claim that what comes from Tibet is, of course, some kind of universal human knowledge about all and everything that everybody knew in the good old times, things the Buddha knew, and which was lost in the bad bad West when it began to think a bit beyond God the Almighty. The two men who most probably wrote the book are well-known for their fantasy literature books and rosy esoteric pseudo-lore: Andrew Harvey and Patrick Gaffney.

What we are speaking here about – this is a point Adbusters must think about – is “perennial philosophy.” Ask Žižek about it. He is mentioned below the photo of Foucault. Sogyal is selling a universal remedy to people we call x-buddhists because they believe in such a universal – and, let’s not forget, who pay for it too. But the universal truth of Buddhism, the Dharma doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, it is the perfect product: It is Putting Nothing in Boxes and selling it. That is what capitalism is all about. Selling nothing for a lot of money. And Sogyal is just doing this.

It is weird that a magazine  setting out to do something against the frantic devastation of our world by capitalism is mentioning such a person. Obviously there is a misconception what this guy is about. Adbusters must educate itself about x-buddhism and its propagators of intentional dementia. Sogyal from Lakhar, Robert Thurman and the Dalai Lama are the main protagonists here. But other people should be scrutinized too. The critique presented at this website about the so called Secular Buddhism by Stephen Batchelor will help. Or see Thích Nhất Hạnh walking mindfully in circles, contemplating how to save the world while it goes to hell. Interrogate all those Buddhist geeks out there: Noah Levine, Brad Warner, Ted Meissner, Vincent Horn, or any other x-buddhist putting up shop in the mindful business. Apart from general remarks about how bad it really is they will have no clue about the situation our world is in and how we got there.

Self control and the ethnographic gaze

From these people we never will learn how society functions and how the structures come to life that govern it. Foucault is a good starter, but forget x-buddhism. In fact, in what Gilles Deleuze called Society of Control, in following Foucault’s historical analysis, we find the subject that internalized control. Control that was executed in the 18th and 19th century by a discipline that had to be learned and fulfilled, is now self control. Meditation is part of this self control. Every little rule how to live today we follow voluntarily. Nobody has to tell us any more what to do. We do it in a seemingly spontaneous way. It seems natural to us. It seems natural to us, for example, to begin to meditate, that is, to look inside for the ultimate remedy. Meditation is the one big hype. Jon Kabat-Zinn makes big money with his MBSR. Just relax, and everything will be ok again. Who told us this? Who told us to look inside for a solution? Yes, Sogyal from Lakhar and the Dalai Lama tell us, and it seems so obvious, so natural, to find peace within, the shelter, ultimate  refuge. But who tells us that this is true? Where can this truth from within come from?

If we want insight into the functioning of our world we have to turn to people like the thinkers mentioned in the opening citation of the text by Hamid Dabashi. That text immediately follows the picture section in the beginning the current issue of Adbusters. But Dabashi rightly asks if also these European thinkers have the “ethnographic gaze.” He mentions, too, many thinkers from all over the world whom we should consider as comrades in thinking new thought. That’s good. Very good. But skip the x-buddhists. They sell their perennial philosophy without knowing that they themselves are deeply infected with the “ethnographic gaze.” Turn to Donald Lopez’s book to get a picture of how, in fact, Tibetan Buddhism, and indeed all Western Buddhism, is the dream the West has about Buddhism – a hallucination to ward of the off the reality of the waste land that is our lives.

There is a direct and unmitigated structural link between an imperial frame of reference, and the presumed universality of a thinker thinking in the bosoms of that empire.

That’s from p. 17 of the text that directly follows the Sogyal from Lakhar citation. x-buddhism as represented by a “thinker” like Sogyal from Lakhar is exactly this imperial thinking. Jacques Derrida, featured prominently on p. 17, told us that there is no original. Imperial x-buddhist thinking will always tell us that there is, in fact, one. All x-buddhists mentioned so far believe, in one way or another, in this original: the Buddha. People like Derrida are light years from this childish dream… although, and that’s where Hamid Dabashi is right, there is residual eurocentrism in Derrida. But that is no excuse to go back to something like x-buddhism.

Spiritual Insurrection

There is a meme used sometimes by Adbusters: Spiritual Insurrection. What kind of spirituality are we talking about here? Certainly not about the imperial x-buddhist thought of enlightenment that we can buy at Sogyal from Lakhar’s rigpa shop. What we can say for sure is that the-Buddha-will-save-us-all-thought will not do.

We have to get a clear picture of how spirituality today is a feature, a component of capitalism, one that functions as a tranquilizer instead of as a wake up-call.

We have to ask what spiritual traditions can legitimately offer – whether we can, for instance, get beyond our inherited “ethnographic gaze.” If at all they have to offer something…

But of course, we have to realize somehow the ”ethnographic gaze”? How do we do this?

Can we think out of the box at all? That is a question asked by Foucault. Is there an outside from which to intervene? That is a very spiritual question? What if not?

What kind of resistance is possible if there is no outside of power, no outside of ideology? The fact is that every kind of resistance in the last forty years has been incorporated, used, recycled, and resold to the consumer – in short: has been transformed into a commodity by capitalism. Our protest will be sold to the public.

What can we really do in this situation? That is a truly spiritual question in the sense that it is asking for something really new. Something our spirit will generate without us knowing it yet.

Overvaluing intellect?

Certainly not. We are undervaluing our ability to learn how to think intelligently. We will not learn anything from contemporary Buddhism – from x-buddhism – because this kind of spirituality takes it as a given that the way we think is the only one. True spirituality is to skip every adopted spirituality. The fantasies of enlightenment transported by the references to Buddhism in this edition of Adbusters are not the way to go. That is a dead end. It is not about overvaluing intellect. We are undervaluing it. We are undervaluing intellect in that we don’t ask who taught us to think the way we do. And we are undervaluing it in that we do not try to develop a true spirituality, one that ignites our thinking and pushes it to the edge.

Spiritual Insurrection? Yes: But skip Buddhism.