Re: r/e deleuze + Buddhism

I think that "on the surface", zen might be considered a more deleuzian
buddhism, because of the stress on immanence in zen (which is indeed stressful)
and because zen minimalism can be and has been related to the minimalism
of existentialism.

In general, the austerity of various buddhisms, if separated from the buddhism
of negation, can be seen as deleuzian. Thus buddhism could produce a
body without organs. Tibetan and tantric buddhism, and tantra as a whole,
whether buddhist, hindu or taoist, resonate quite well with a thousand
plateaus. Think of the reference to taoist manuals in the BWO chapter of ATP,
or one of my favorite quotes in the book:

Why not walk on your hed, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin,
breathe with your belly: the simple Thing, the Entity, the fully Body, the
stationary Voyage, Anorexia, cutaneous Vision, Yoga, Krishna, Love,
Experimentation. (p. 151)

Becomings, in so far, as they pass through states, can be related to Bardos -
Bardos are planes of consistency, it's just that tibetan buddhism stresses
moving through the planes rather than remaining on them. D&G could be
interpreted as saying this also. And if imperceptibility is a goal, this
can surely be related to enlightenment.

I'm shooting from the hip with these comments, but the subject is a really
important one for me. Yoga, and buddhism in some of its manifestations,
is for me a very deleuzian space, and has provided one way (there are others)
to move beyond philosophies of negation. It provides manuals of
experimental (experiential) techniques to work with, a philosophy of caution
which relates very much to the warnings in ATP. Deleuze said somewhere
that he was attempting a classification of classifications in his work. I
take him to mean this as an open rather than closed endeavor. I think of
this as being eminently buddhist, and relateable to the tibetan practice
(as told to me by erik davis) of naming all the names of god.

Marcus Boon


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