About Face– Chapin
Well, my initial thought for this post was dealt with extensively in class. As I mentioned with my opening question, I was stuck on the first section, utterly bewitched by the complex web of ideas and various levels of meaning packed into only a handful of sentences. I am still rather puzzled, but now from a different level given what we discussed in class.
We talked quite a bit about difference, distinction, as well as sameness, unity and or oneness, even if only implicitly. What I wonder, though, is what is meant by difference, distinction, sameness and unity? We often take these kinds of terms for granted, thinking that we know already what they mean, and proceed to deploy them as such in trying to categorize, schematize or simply understand a given author or idea. However, it seems to me that there is a way in which these concepts are deeply problematic, and through thinking critically and sincerely about them, some irresolvable tensions manifest. What we have to do, then, is make an ‘about face’, that is, we must turn around and investigate those most fundamental concepts upon which our entire understanding is predicated. However, I do not just want to investigate them, but more specifically, read them against each other and themselves to reveal how they are not at all straightforwardly clear concepts, and then suggest what this might mean in the context of Dōgen (hence the use of the Zen symbol as a doubling back or turning around to investigate our presuppositions).
(A bit of a disclaimer: clearly I have bitten off a lot more than I can chew in the space here, so some short cuts and trap doors were used. I am certainly heavy handed in some places, and only whispering in the ear of what is explicitly said in the text in others. All of this is to set some expectations I suppose: this is more like a shotgun blast rather than a sniper shot, where I cover more ground and touch on more things, but lack some of the precision and rigor that such questions usually prompt. I do, however, feel somewhat justified in playing this a bit more ‘fast and loose’ as we are reading Dōgen after all.)
Let’s condense a bit, though, so we are not dealing with as many concepts. When we say unity and sameness, what do we mean? Don’t they share the common trait of an underlying sense of identity? For example, what else do we mean when we say sameness than some thing is identical with itself and or something else (i.e. it is the ‘same’)? With unity too, isn’t identity at the heart of this idea too? Otherwise, what does it mean for something to be unified if it is not in fact identical with itself, and more often than not, at the fundamental level (e.g. think of the idea in the Upanishads of ‘Tat Tvam Asi’, which describes the relationship of the individual to the absolute as, ‘you (individual) are that (absolute)’, or ‘you (individual) are identical with that’ (absolute)).
(There is an important digression we could take here where we apply identity at different levels, e.g. you and I are both identical in that we are both human beings, but are perhaps rather different when it comes to what we wear, how we talk, what we think so on and so on. We will leave this here, but remember that it is an important nuance to recognize.)
Great, so now we are only dealing with identity and difference.
One way to put the question is like this: What is the difference between difference and identity? Immediately we are confronted with the issue at hand: to answer the question, we would already need to know what difference is, but by all accounts, that is the precise answer we are seeking in asking what the difference is between difference and identity. Indeed, we are not asking about some particular difference in this question, but asking about difference as such, and hence, dealing with an entirely different question than if we were to ask about the difference of particular things. It is really abstract, I know, but it is imperative to track down this line. There seems to be no good way of trying to adjudicate this dispute, for on the one hand we run the risk of providing nothing but a tautology, and in the other, simply begging the question, neither of which provide a satisfying answer.
I would like to push even further, though, and ask if difference is identical with itself, and here we are in at least the same amount of trouble. On the one hand, we might admit that difference is indeed identical with itself, but then we have asserted that difference and identity are not in fact substantially different, but are rather fundamentally connected: identity is part of the very nature of difference and therefore not at all outside or foreign to it. On the other hand, we might say, no, difference is not identical with itself, which is to say that difference is different even to itself, and the ability to conceptualize this, let alone usefully deploy it in our investigations, takes a major blow. At the most, we would be doing nothing but equivocating, and at the worse, deploying a concept that is utterly meaningless, not even strictly speaking a concept if one of the requirements for a concept is that it is identical with itself.
One could also ask about identity in a similar way. In doing so, we find that we cannot help falling into the same trap: we would have to assert that identity is not difference, or put another way, identity is different than difference, which renders an essential feature of identity’s identity as difference itself. Again, we have done the very same thing as above: identity and difference are shown to be much more intimately connected, so much so that finding the fundamental difference between the two does nothing but turn us back into the very concepts we are trying to distinguish in order to do so. Something about circles here, which might be a hint…
Now, one might be tempted to say that I have done nothing but a bit of childish sophistry or useless word play, a cheap parlor trick of sorts, and that the questions are themselves misleading if not entirely meaningless. I suppose this is a response, and perhaps even a rather good one, but I would be interested to see how one would work out a justification for why asking these kinds of questions is a non-starter prima facie. You might also ask, “okay, what’s your point, and what does it have to do with Dōgen?” Here I am going to provide a rather speculative interpretation of the first section in the reading on rice cakes. The hypothesis here is that Dōgen is a bit of a joker or jester; he is teasing us a bit in this first section, pushing us to go to the logical extreme in investigating such concepts and seeing what happens when we do. What I am suggesting happens is that language more or less breaks down or shorts out: when we proceed as I have above, language becomes strange, and unable to fulfill the role we usually except of it. Indeed, if our most important concepts (in this case, identity and difference) become so troublesome when investigated in such a way, it might suggest that there is a necessary stopping point to their deployment, indeed, a point at which language must cease altogether, even if only momentarily. This is also to suggest that language is not the same as reality or experience, or put another way, we can experience reality outside of or without linguistic thought. In many cases, it seems that this is our default experience of the world, through our words and concepts. It is how we communicate with each other, how we share our thoughts and desires. But it is, in large part, if not totally, an abstract symbolic system that our experience is filtered through. In other words, our seamless experience of reality is fed through a linguist domain, and from there emerges distinct objects, ideas, actions and so on. The thought is that maybe this is not necessary; maybe it is possible to have direct experience of reality, not filtered through language, and the inevitable and necessary distinguishing it does. After all, is not language’s most primary function to distinguish this from that? We might even go so far as to say that ‘reality’ is not something that is to be categorized, stratified or even understood, but is something that is supposed to be experienced, and for Dōgen, without the inevitable limitations of language.
So in having this section right at the front of the chapter, what Dōgen might be suggesting is, on my reading, that we should sincerely hear what he is saying, and consider it thoroughly, but that we should do so very lightly, not taking the distinctions and such too seriously. Which isn’t to say that he has nothing to say about images and reality, and the way we traditionally make this distinction, but that even the conclusions he reaches here must eventually be left behind too. Even his ideas and work is no place to stand, not something to cling to and evangelize, but rather sign posts or road markers that are always and already pointing outside of themselves towards something else. We could indeed become stuck, staring at the sign and miss the fact that it is pointing us towards something else, but this would be to mistake the symbolic world with what we might call 'reality' outside of or alongside the symbolic domain. To put it another way, I am reading this first section as a playful introduction to language for Dōgen: we can and should use language for the practical things that it is useful for, e.g. communication, after all, we are human beings, but at some point, we must, like Zhuangzi says, leave the fish trap and the rabbit snare behind. In which case, the suggestion is that we can use language effectively, but that we should not cling to it: we should know when to hold-'em, and more importantly, know when to fold-'em, know when to walk away… In leaving it behind, even if only momentarily, we might be said to have a direct experience of reality, one that is not filtered through a linguistic apparatus (by the way, what do we mean by ‘reality’?). Periodically moving beyond it would allow us to come back into it with softer hands and lighter feet. We would not take our linguistic distinctions so seriously, cling to them so tightly, and thus the direct experience would be a kind of ophthalmology, correcting our lenses in such a way that an entirely different way of being in the world arises, but this is only possible if we go beyond language from time to time. This is why it makes sense that silence plays such a substantial role in Buddhism more generally, but perhaps even more so in the Chan and Zen line. Indeed, if you ask a Zen master what Zen is, they may very well do nothing but smack you on the mouth and walk away.
UPDATED:
There is a sense in which I want to repudiate everything that I have written above after yesterday’s conversation. What became clear to me was that I have very little idea what is happening in the most important places of the text. My mind was spinning trying to make sense of what we were reading, and I was desperately trying to smash it into the categories and schemas that I am already familiar with, which didn't work so well. I still maintain that the concepts I outlined remain problematic for the reasons I stated, but maybe one of the insights I missed was how identity and difference, as presented above, can be thought of as mutually constitutive, or dependently arising. Indeed, it seems that this is the only option we have left. At which point, we would be saying that identity and difference are not separate or independent ideas or concepts, but rather only manifest in relation to each other, i.e. they are dependently arisen. This is certainly true in a conceptual sense, as it is with other terms like good and bad, right and wrong, back and front etc. What still remains an open question, though, is whether this is only a conceptual truth or whether, in being a conceptual truth, it also reveals some kind of truth about 'reality' too. This is a question about the relationship between language and reality, one that manifests in nearly all of the texts we read in the program. Maybe I am still clinging too tightly to the distinction between language and reality, as if there it is in fact a real distinction, but now I am confusing myself by using the term 'real' in such a manner.
However, I think there are some things that I would still advocate for, specifically that this chapter is about language too, or can be read as such, and that a fundamental thing we must do is make an 'about face' to see where we are beginning, where we are standing before we proceed. In the phrase, ‘a painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger', I am thinking we could also read this as saying, ‘the word rice cake does not satisfy hunger’. In this sense, the words and a painting can occupy the same domain, primarily as symbols, and neither of which can literally be eaten to satiate physical hunger. In this sense, then, I was too heavy handed in thinking that Dōgen was dismissing language in the way I thought, and instead, it would seem to be on the same level as a painting, and all of the things Dōgen has to say about a painting and or images. Language, then, does not simply obscure things as I was thinking, but in some sense captures them in the same way that a painting captures what is painted.
I would still advocate that Dōgen thinks that language is not the totality of experience, and that we do (and not must in a prescriptive sense) move outside of this domain of experience. In other words, experiencing through language is not the only way to experience, and there are times in which we are not experiencing in this sense. It might then be more like other transient experiences that come and go, which is ‘just how it is’ so to speak. The one important thing that is different, though, is that that there is no ‘real’ reality that we can have a direct experience of that would have this kind of cathartic effect on us, but that experience not mediated through language is always and already another way to experience on the same level as any other (i.e. real is real is real is real). In a certain sense, then, there is no difference between the direct experience outside of language and a direct experience through language: they are both direct experiences. I have to wonder, then, what is different about direct experience that I am missing, because I cannot imagine that he would think my everyday experience could be thought of as such, or at least not the way I perceive or interpret that experience. Maybe all experience is direct experience, as otherwise we cannot help but posit something behind experience that we would call ‘direct experience’, and it is rather about us trying to recognize this fact as it is. At which point, there is no where else to go, we are already there doing it, it is maybe just a matter of shifting the way we are thinking about it that makes the difference.
Would the value of the linguistic, conceptual experience, or any other kind of experience, change without reference to an ultimate emptiness - if the experience either 1.) were no longer ultimately empty itself or 2.) no longer contributed to revealing the ultimate emptiness of all things, including itself, or both?
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good question, and one that I do not have a direct or concise response to. I am tempted to say, ‘it depends’, but that is utterly vague and not at all satisfying. I can only really speculate as to some possible answers, and even those possible answers are ones that I am not at all confident would easily apply to Dōgen.
DeleteFor fear of totally misunderstanding the question, though, I want to ask a few clarifying ones of my own so I know we are on the same page and I am actually responding to your question.
Are you asking if the value of certain kinds of experiences would necessarily change if they are not tethered to some kind of metaphysical ‘thing’ that does not itself change, in this case, ‘ultimate emptiness’, or are you asking if the value of certain experiences would change if they were no longer empty themselves (e.g. if we ‘filled them’ with an essence or nature) or did not contribute to the process of revealing or realizing the ultimate emptiness of all things (e.g. if they became misleading or a sticking point that we fixate on)? In other words, would they lose their value if they no longer served the purpose they were supposed to, e.g. if we mistake the sign (language) for the thing it is gesturing at (… ‘reality’?)? One more stab at it: are you asking a metaphysical question about the relation between value, change and ultimate emptiness, or are you asking about value (or maybe use) as it relates to the functionality of certain kinds of experiences in the process of ‘realizing’ or ‘recognizing’ ultimate emptiness? Or maybe both?
I had composed a long, confusing, and perhaps too specific response to your original post. I deleted it because I wanted to hear your general thoughts on the relationship between emptiness and experience. Let me try to condense what I was thinking.
DeleteIt seems that Dogen’s judgment of the relative value, or usefulness, of different kinds of experience must be based on the conviction of the ultimate emptiness of all things. The sutras and commentaries, and more generally the linguistic, conceptual experience, have value for him only insofar as they strengthen this conviction, while those against whom he argues reject in effect even this possibility. Dogen’s stance on the teaching of buddha dharma, which is prominently linguistic, is not unlike Vimalakirti’s on the secular life, which I guess consists largely of experience not mediated through language.
All this however proceeds from the conviction of ultimate emptiness. Personally I agree that both types of experience may at times reveal and at times obfuscate this emptiness, but since I don’t yet have the conviction, I can’t possibly seek to strengthen it by valuing the kind of experience which I consider, rightly or wrongly, more conducive to this purpose.
I realize this might be a very limited view. What do you think? Could Dogen grant experience another kind of value, some other kind of directness/authenticity, that doesn’t have to do with the doctrine of emptiness (0), or even of non-duality (0 or 1)? Or might he, in the unlikely event, be questioning the doctrine of emptiness itself?
Ah, I see, okay, I am glad I asked for clarification! This is great. Once again, though, I can only speculate (as if I could ever do anything else), but hopefully in the right direction.
DeleteI find it difficult to formulate an insightful and precise answer to the question of the relation between emptiness and experience. There are at least two ways I suppose it could be understood: first, we might ask about experiencing emptiness, and second, we might ask if experience itself is empty. The first one makes some sense to me initially, as I could think of it like experiencing the emptiness of my cup, or the emptiness of my gas tank. However, it is important to notice that in both cases, the emptiness is only experienced relationally, that is, through its relation to some other object (e.g. my cup or gas tank), and this is not what I take to be the idea of Buddhist emptiness. At least in Nagarjuna (and it seems also in Dōgen), emptiness is totalizing, that is, there is nothing outside of it to relate to, and hence, the common sense idea of experiencing emptiness doesn't seem like it works so well. Oddly enough, perhaps even paradoxically, emptiness gestures at utter relationality through dependent arising, but in that case it seems like we would be experiencing dependent arising and not experiencing emptiness itself, unless this is all we mean by emptiness, which might turn out to be the case. I am not at all sure about this line of thought though, and am certainly open to rebuttals here.
The other way of phrasing it, that is, that experience itself is empty, makes a bit more sense to me, and would be summarized as follows: although we tend to think that we are experiencing distinct and separate ‘things’ or ‘objects’, the actual state of affairs is such that there are no distinct or separate ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (that is, there are no essences or substances), and so we are not experiencing ‘things’, but rather simply experiencing (the ‘we’ here makes it difficult because it still implies a subject that has experience or is experiencing, and therefore reifying a kind of dualism between experience and that which experiences), which seems like a reasonable way of translating the ‘emptiness of experience’. It does not, however, square very well with our everyday experiences, does it? Even now, I am experiencing my laptop in front of me as something distinct and separate from me, the couch beneath my bum, my coffee to the left of me, so on and so on. In this sense, I wonder if the idea of the emptiness of experience is a gesture towards a different way of thinking or perceiving, maybe even simply being, so the idea that we could or could not verify its validity through our common sense experience is off the table. It would be something like this: ifwe (here is this pesky ‘we’ again) were to have a different perception or orientation, then experience would be empty, that is, we would not experience difference and distinction, at least not as we do in our everyday orientations. I have no idea if this speaks to your question, but it was what came to mind…
One thing that I am still tripped up on, though, is trying to decide what kind of claim or position ‘emptiness’ is. I cannot help but think it could (and maybe even should) be read as a metaphysical position, that is, it is a claim about ‘reality’, specifically that it is empty of what we traditionally call essences or substances (so not dualism (two essences or substances), not pluralism (many essences or substances), and not monism (one essence or substance)). But I also think it could be read as a kind of psychological or phenomenological position, which is suggesting that we correct the way we are seeing and experiencing in order that we might recognize the emptiness of experience. But then again I think of a story I heard of a Zen students, whose enlightenment happened when they realized that there was nothing to realize, that is, that they were already enlightened. Perhaps it is both, or neither. I really don't know, but it seems like an imperative question to try and sort out, as it would change the kind of analysis we would apply, and the conclusions we would draw.
DeleteNow to the heart of your question, which I take to be this: does the value of certain experiences (in this case specifically the linguistic or conceptual experiences) rely on an underlying conviction of ultimate emptiness? In other words, do we first have to have the conviction that this is so for the relative value of certain kinds of experiences to arise in order to strengthen this conviction? The short answer is that, if this is in fact your question, I don’t really know. I think it is a really good question, but I had not considered this line before. I do, however, have a few thoughts about it.
My initial impression, and the one I tried to outline in the post, was that we could utilize a critical discourse on language and concepts in order to realize emptiness, specifically in seeing that our most basic words and concepts are inherently interconnected in such a way that none of them exist independent of their co-constitutive partner, and from this insight, we might also think that this might be the case with ‘reality’ more generally. However, this seems to be just the opposite of what you are suggesting, and now I don’t really know which way to lean. If it is like you suggest, I would have to wonder how we arrive at the idea of emptiness without going through some kind of critical thinking or discourse. Perhaps if we grew up in a Zen monastery we would have less to sift through and deconstruct. But for those of us who are not born and raised in such an environment, it seems like we are always fighting our enculturation, specifically that there are ‘things’ (that is, essences or substances), and one of the most effective means for doing so is thinking very critically about language and conceptual thinking, and watching as they inevitably collapses into themselves. All of this is to say I don't know, but I would love to hear how you think such a conviction arises in the first place if it is not through some kind of reactionary deployment of critical engagement with our common sense orientation to the world…
Just a few more thoughts that your question has prompted: when we say conviction, what do we mean? Is it like saying that we believe that ‘reality’ is ultimately empty, or put another way, ultimate emptiness is reality? What I am trying to key in on here is if thinking about ultimate emptiness as something someone believes or has a conviction about is justifiable, that is, is ultimate emptiness even something amenable to be believed in or to have a conviction about? For example, I have heard certain atheists explain their position as a lack of belief in a theistic god. They say, as far as I can tell, that the belief that God exists (and is good, benevolent, all knowing, all powerful etc.) is not one that they hold, in short, they reject that belief. So in this sense it is not a belief in the same way that someone who is a theist believes in or has a conviction about theism or God (i.e. the difference between a positive statement and the rejection of a positive statement). It is, as far as I can tell, a relational position, or as I think you mentioned in our Chinese tutorial, a reactionary one, where first there is a position that espouses a certain set of doctrines, ideas so on and so on, and then something like Buddhism (or Daoism) arises and essentially says, ‘nah’ or ‘nu uh’. In this case, it is more of a negation or a rejection of a certain set of ideas or positions, or maybe even beliefs or convictions, specifically with regard to essence or substance. I am not able to articulate why I think this distinction matters at the moment, but I cannot help thinking that there is a decided difference between the belief or conviction in, say, monism (or God), and the position of emptiness, which I take to be a rejection of that (and other) positions like it. Sure, we could colloquially say that I believe ultimate emptiness is the state of affairs, but I wonder if what that actually means is that one does not think that there are no essences or substances, which seems different to me than the belief or conviction that there are. Something about the emptiness of emptiness here… What do you think? Is that a real distinction, and one that is helpful, or am I confused here, and there is no difference in belief or conviction no matter if it is a positive (essence(s) exists) or negative (essence(s) does not exist) statement?
DeleteAs for your last question, I have to say again that I simply don't know. However, it is a really good question, and one that I will keep in mind as we continue to work through Dōgen. Maybe this is something to come back to, because if he is taking a critical stance to emptiness, this seems to be a really big shift, and one that should be tracked carefully.
Your distinction between a positive statement and the rejection of a positive statement is very helpful. I think I have so far made the mistake of thinking about Buddhism as something more or less constructive. If however I consider it as a kind of removal, particularly of our habitual granting essence to things around us and to our experience of them, then it is treating us exactly as we are. And perhaps we don’t have to have the “conviction,” as indeed no Buddhist can positively assert of themselves, before initiating the removal.
DeleteAs for the relationship between experience and emptiness, let me first say that I do find experience of all kinds revealing a kind of “emptiness.” It could be in seeing an empty cup, in reflecting on the limitations of language, in reading Nagarjuna, in an depressive episode due to some imbalance of brain chemicals, or in any kind of disappointment in life - Vimalakirti evidently thinks losses at the gaming table very enlightening for the gambler. These revelations may be ordinary and partial, and some only analogical, but they are “expedient,” and perhaps as close as we can get to the "ultimate emptiness." Now I’m thinking that maybe encouraging certain kinds of experience isn’t really the point, because emptiness, a negation and removal, isn’t something to be “achieved.”
All this is of course largely base on our readings of other texts. I look forward to Dogen’s discussion of these central ideals.
One last thought. Would it be right to equate emptiness to impermanence? The impermanence of at least most things is something I can readily get behind, and considering experience with regard to it I think would be much easier. But I hesitate to make the move;
"experience not mediated through language"
ReplyDeleteHere's Nietzsche from "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense: "The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happiness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemption—in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries aloud and will not be consoled."
I think Nietzsche still prefers the intuitive man.