Wow. Synchronicity.
MBOONE and I had been carrying on private conversations about Buddhism
and DG, then I go away to a conference on cyberspace, and I return to
find that the meme mirrored all over the list. Once again, a problem (for
in the end, the tensions between this lines of thought remain tangled)
that I associated "personally" (I was "struggling" between my attraction
to Buddhism and the Deleuzian voices in my head, splitting binaries
despite--because of?--"myself") is already a collective field, already
"outside."
"Ultimate bodhichitta [the will to enlightement for the sake of all
living beings] is similar to the absolute shunyata [emptiness] principle.
And whenever there is the absolute shunyata principle, we have to have a
basic understanding of absolute compassion at the same time. Shunyata
literally means "openness" of "emptiness." Shunyata is basically
understanding non-existence [the absence of any static "self nature" or
essence of a thing existing beyond a relation of perception or causal
phenomenon]. When you begin to realize nonexistence, then you can afford
to be more compassionate, more giving. A problem is that usually we would
like to hold on to our territory and fixate on that particular ground.
Once we begin to fixate on that ground, we have no way to give.
Understanding shunyata means that we begin to realize that there is no
ground to get, that we are ultimately free, nonagressive, open. We
realize that we are actually nonexistent ourselves. We are not--or rather
No!"
--Chogyam Trungpa, "Training the Mind"
One of the problems of addressing a connection between Deleuze and
Buddhism is the role of the negative, the "not", the No!. For Deleuze,
the negative is so infected by Hegelianism that you must look close to
find his own form of nondialectical negation. Check out the Nietzsche
book, for the transvaluation of all values begins with a colossal,
iconclastic resounding No!, a no that rends the phenomenal world.
Of course, there are many "Buddhisms"--more I would wager than there are
even Deleuzes! Whether or not Buddhist negation is dialectical, and
whether it uncovers a Body-w/out-organs (Tao, some form of differentiated
presence) depends on what "it" we're talking about. Within the classical
Indian tradition, as best as I can understand it, there is a heavy
emphasis on dialectical logic founded on the excluded middle. Nagarjuna's
Madhyamika in fact proceeds by the negative, achieving its most intense
form through the reductio ad absurdum of all opponents arguments without
erecting any postive characteristics of Buddhahood, enlightenment, etc.
at all. Yet, as R. Thurman writes in The Central Philosophy of Tibet, this
dialectic proceeds by transcendent critique, yet does not reify the
transcendent as a category truly distinct from phenomenon, and despite its
rigorously logical mechanics, it arrives where it began: here, in the
immanent field, though one no longer conditioned by the habit of grasping
things as if they had a self-nature. There is nowhere to go. I've read
one article that compares Nagarjuna's diamond-sharp analyses with Nietzsche.
For this is one of the fundamental drives of Deleuze: how to think
immanence, and I'd like to suggest that the "grain of Zen" in Deleuze
precisely answers the (frequently Derridean) critique of Deleuze as
abandoning the mechanism of critique in his avoidance of the negative and
his attempt to construct a field of immanence with positive qualities.
Let us not fool ourselves: it is very hard to think immanence, for we
find ourselves skirting black holes and transcendent hierarchies. This,
perhaps, is the "middle way," the Madhyahmaka, for us.
We see this tension in Buddhism itself. Within the Tibetan tradition,
which is philosophically pretty similar to the classical Indian
tradition, we have the tension between the analytic mechanism uncovered
through highly rigorous studies of the literature (exemplified most
intensely by the Gelukpa tradition of Tsong ka pa (and the Dalai Lama))
and the practice of tantra, the quick way which in many ways seems to
have a different valence than the study of the sutras. It is here that we
find the body-without-organs--literarlly. Check out Thurman's "Tibetan
Psychology: Sophisticated Software for the Human Brain" in <MindScience>
(wisdom books), in which the yogi transforms that yogic body which is
neither/both body and mind into channels and wheels of winds and flows.
I'd also like to emphasize the crucial passage already alluded to by the
nameless node known as Greg Polly, where Deleuze discusses the radical
distinction between desire and pleasure and seems to be explictly alluding
to the tantric practice (in its more sexualized, Indian forms) of
withholdhing jouissance as a necessary element of the construction of the
field of immanence. Deleuze uses the more explicit example of the courtly
lover who performed an act of ascesis vis-a-vis his love. Without going
into the shadowy historical origins of troubador love (via Sufi
hermeneutics and the Manichean dimensions of the Cathars, and hence with
the whole tradition of "western tantra"), this passage is crucial, for
there is a pervasive tendency in critical theory to sexualize "desire."
For obviously the category of "desire" is one of the real rubs in
comparing Deleuze and Buddhism--on the surface, we have a total opposite
approach. But this passage already alerts us that Deleuze's "desire" is
not only not explicity sexual or personalized, but that it can run
<counter> to the habits of human lust as already constructed. I'm not
trying to reinstate ascesis as a moral position, but to suggest that
discipline, the breaking of an apparent flow, is a necessary dimension of
Deleuzian ethics, and discipline is allied with the Buddhist emphasis on
practice--tantric or otherwise.
Perhaps as Deleuze seems to suggest, desire is always already part of an
apparatus, a machine. But on the level of the ordinary Oedipalized ego we
all want to dissovle without going mad, desire is part of a particulalry
tedius apparatus--binarized, plugged into rotten social forms and
capitalist networks designed to manipulate those forces. Desire then
appears as a monstrous nexus of habit, and one of the principle Deleuzian
/Buddhist moves, is the dismantling of habit. Deleuzian desire, I'd like
to suggest (or rather, "make happen"--isnt that what we're doing, not
"comparing" Deleuze and Buddhism, but creating a Deleuzian Dharma, a
mutant we feel growing in our bones?) corresponds with the mode of
compassion described by Trungpa: raw and open-ended, always already
outside, collective, but <positive> without reference to a transcendental
ground.
MBOONE is right: the more East we go, the more Buddhist philosophy makes
certain moves against the "heights" of classical Buddhism. Not only is
there the mingling of Taoism, most notably in Zen, but there is a much
more widespread emphasis on the positive characteristic of the
Buddha-mind, the tathagatagarbha or the dharmakaya. True, these trends
exist in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Ningma and Kagyu traditions and
especially Dzogchen, but they seem to characterize east Asian Buddhism more.
These streams emphasis the already-pure nature of the Buddhamind that all
sentient beings (even sometimes plants and minerals), already possess.
The paradox is, put most crudely, that we are already enlightenened, that
the undefiled clear Buddha-mind already exists within. Yet, as Dogen,
working with a related Zen intuition, emphasizes, practice is still
necessary, yet a practice that has no goal, that is alread enlightened.
(From Dialogues: "We would have to say simultaneously not only: 'You've
already go it [the plane of consistency], you do not feel desire without
its being already there, without its being mapped out at the same time as
your desire,' but also: 'You haven't got it, and you don't desire it if
you can't manage to construct it, if you don't know how to, by finding
your places, your assemblages, your particles and fluxes.'" Hmmm)
For the nameless node from Wales who makes his Deleuzian Dharma through
Spinoza, I'd like to not only applaud that rigorous intuition, but to
point out a possible zone on the itinerary: the Hua-Yen or "Flower
Garden" school. This Chinese Buddhist school based itself on an
incredible visionary, wacked-out multidimensional SF sutra known as the
Avatamsaka Sutra (now fully translated by Cleary, Shamballah). I've just
read descriptions of it in larger books on Mahayana philosophy, and on
the surface at least, there are intense resonances with Spinoza and
Leibniz, though less "rational." The world is marked by absolute
interpenetration, almost a holographic vision without hard edges, of
total flows:
"They perceive that the fields full of assemblies, the beings and aeons
which are as many asl all the dust particles, are all present in every
particle of dust. They perceive that the many fields and assemblies and
the beings and the aeons are all reflected in each particle of dust."
More soberly, the Shamballah Dictionary says: "This school teaches the
equality of all things and the dependence of all tings on one
another...all things participate in a unity and this unity divides itself
into the many, so that the manifold is unifed in this one...everything in
the universe arises simultaneously out of itself...All dharmas [entities,
laws, things] are empty: both aspects of this emptiness, the static
(absolute) and the active (phenomena) interpenetrate each other
unobstructedly; every phenomenon is identical to every other...The school
distinguishes itself from the other Mahayana schools in an important
point. It concentrates of the relationship between phenomena and
phenomena and not on that between phenomena and the absolute. All things
are in complete harmony with one another, since they are all
manifestations of one principle. They are like individual waves of the
same sea."
This seems to be another approach into D&G's famous magic formula:
PLURALISM = MONISM.
Well, much more to say, about Zen and Buddhamind, but I'll end this with
why I think this discussion is more than a compare/contrast paper.
Practice. Practice not just as some notion of "social action," but an
open-ended discipline (for all their wildness, nomads are disciplined,
they <practice>) that effects desired Deleuzian shifts on more than the
conceptual plane of books and etext. Of course art and performance are
the privileged field in the West, but I'd like to suggest that elements
of Buddhism (I didn't even get to the Francisco
Varella/autopoesis/dissipative sturcture stuff, my my) present a
remarkable site for a becoming that is at once science, philosophy and
art, and none of these. And it begins (and ends? and middles?) with the
immense unfolding of practice. Breathing "inside," then breathing "out,"
until the self is just, as Shunryu Suzuki, a swinging door, creaking in
the wind. No more inside and outside, just a wandering without goal,
already clear.
I saw a Japanese garden and
exclaimed: Quelle machine!!!
[__]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ \ / ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[__]
[] Erik Davis (oo) Cernunnos sez (cribbing the Fall): The only []
[] erikd@xxxxxxxxx __ thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes. []
[__]==================== ww ==============================================[__]
------------------
MBOONE and I had been carrying on private conversations about Buddhism
and DG, then I go away to a conference on cyberspace, and I return to
find that the meme mirrored all over the list. Once again, a problem (for
in the end, the tensions between this lines of thought remain tangled)
that I associated "personally" (I was "struggling" between my attraction
to Buddhism and the Deleuzian voices in my head, splitting binaries
despite--because of?--"myself") is already a collective field, already
"outside."
"Ultimate bodhichitta [the will to enlightement for the sake of all
living beings] is similar to the absolute shunyata [emptiness] principle.
And whenever there is the absolute shunyata principle, we have to have a
basic understanding of absolute compassion at the same time. Shunyata
literally means "openness" of "emptiness." Shunyata is basically
understanding non-existence [the absence of any static "self nature" or
essence of a thing existing beyond a relation of perception or causal
phenomenon]. When you begin to realize nonexistence, then you can afford
to be more compassionate, more giving. A problem is that usually we would
like to hold on to our territory and fixate on that particular ground.
Once we begin to fixate on that ground, we have no way to give.
Understanding shunyata means that we begin to realize that there is no
ground to get, that we are ultimately free, nonagressive, open. We
realize that we are actually nonexistent ourselves. We are not--or rather
No!"
--Chogyam Trungpa, "Training the Mind"
One of the problems of addressing a connection between Deleuze and
Buddhism is the role of the negative, the "not", the No!. For Deleuze,
the negative is so infected by Hegelianism that you must look close to
find his own form of nondialectical negation. Check out the Nietzsche
book, for the transvaluation of all values begins with a colossal,
iconclastic resounding No!, a no that rends the phenomenal world.
Of course, there are many "Buddhisms"--more I would wager than there are
even Deleuzes! Whether or not Buddhist negation is dialectical, and
whether it uncovers a Body-w/out-organs (Tao, some form of differentiated
presence) depends on what "it" we're talking about. Within the classical
Indian tradition, as best as I can understand it, there is a heavy
emphasis on dialectical logic founded on the excluded middle. Nagarjuna's
Madhyamika in fact proceeds by the negative, achieving its most intense
form through the reductio ad absurdum of all opponents arguments without
erecting any postive characteristics of Buddhahood, enlightenment, etc.
at all. Yet, as R. Thurman writes in The Central Philosophy of Tibet, this
dialectic proceeds by transcendent critique, yet does not reify the
transcendent as a category truly distinct from phenomenon, and despite its
rigorously logical mechanics, it arrives where it began: here, in the
immanent field, though one no longer conditioned by the habit of grasping
things as if they had a self-nature. There is nowhere to go. I've read
one article that compares Nagarjuna's diamond-sharp analyses with Nietzsche.
For this is one of the fundamental drives of Deleuze: how to think
immanence, and I'd like to suggest that the "grain of Zen" in Deleuze
precisely answers the (frequently Derridean) critique of Deleuze as
abandoning the mechanism of critique in his avoidance of the negative and
his attempt to construct a field of immanence with positive qualities.
Let us not fool ourselves: it is very hard to think immanence, for we
find ourselves skirting black holes and transcendent hierarchies. This,
perhaps, is the "middle way," the Madhyahmaka, for us.
We see this tension in Buddhism itself. Within the Tibetan tradition,
which is philosophically pretty similar to the classical Indian
tradition, we have the tension between the analytic mechanism uncovered
through highly rigorous studies of the literature (exemplified most
intensely by the Gelukpa tradition of Tsong ka pa (and the Dalai Lama))
and the practice of tantra, the quick way which in many ways seems to
have a different valence than the study of the sutras. It is here that we
find the body-without-organs--literarlly. Check out Thurman's "Tibetan
Psychology: Sophisticated Software for the Human Brain" in <MindScience>
(wisdom books), in which the yogi transforms that yogic body which is
neither/both body and mind into channels and wheels of winds and flows.
I'd also like to emphasize the crucial passage already alluded to by the
nameless node known as Greg Polly, where Deleuze discusses the radical
distinction between desire and pleasure and seems to be explictly alluding
to the tantric practice (in its more sexualized, Indian forms) of
withholdhing jouissance as a necessary element of the construction of the
field of immanence. Deleuze uses the more explicit example of the courtly
lover who performed an act of ascesis vis-a-vis his love. Without going
into the shadowy historical origins of troubador love (via Sufi
hermeneutics and the Manichean dimensions of the Cathars, and hence with
the whole tradition of "western tantra"), this passage is crucial, for
there is a pervasive tendency in critical theory to sexualize "desire."
For obviously the category of "desire" is one of the real rubs in
comparing Deleuze and Buddhism--on the surface, we have a total opposite
approach. But this passage already alerts us that Deleuze's "desire" is
not only not explicity sexual or personalized, but that it can run
<counter> to the habits of human lust as already constructed. I'm not
trying to reinstate ascesis as a moral position, but to suggest that
discipline, the breaking of an apparent flow, is a necessary dimension of
Deleuzian ethics, and discipline is allied with the Buddhist emphasis on
practice--tantric or otherwise.
Perhaps as Deleuze seems to suggest, desire is always already part of an
apparatus, a machine. But on the level of the ordinary Oedipalized ego we
all want to dissovle without going mad, desire is part of a particulalry
tedius apparatus--binarized, plugged into rotten social forms and
capitalist networks designed to manipulate those forces. Desire then
appears as a monstrous nexus of habit, and one of the principle Deleuzian
/Buddhist moves, is the dismantling of habit. Deleuzian desire, I'd like
to suggest (or rather, "make happen"--isnt that what we're doing, not
"comparing" Deleuze and Buddhism, but creating a Deleuzian Dharma, a
mutant we feel growing in our bones?) corresponds with the mode of
compassion described by Trungpa: raw and open-ended, always already
outside, collective, but <positive> without reference to a transcendental
ground.
MBOONE is right: the more East we go, the more Buddhist philosophy makes
certain moves against the "heights" of classical Buddhism. Not only is
there the mingling of Taoism, most notably in Zen, but there is a much
more widespread emphasis on the positive characteristic of the
Buddha-mind, the tathagatagarbha or the dharmakaya. True, these trends
exist in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Ningma and Kagyu traditions and
especially Dzogchen, but they seem to characterize east Asian Buddhism more.
These streams emphasis the already-pure nature of the Buddhamind that all
sentient beings (even sometimes plants and minerals), already possess.
The paradox is, put most crudely, that we are already enlightenened, that
the undefiled clear Buddha-mind already exists within. Yet, as Dogen,
working with a related Zen intuition, emphasizes, practice is still
necessary, yet a practice that has no goal, that is alread enlightened.
(From Dialogues: "We would have to say simultaneously not only: 'You've
already go it [the plane of consistency], you do not feel desire without
its being already there, without its being mapped out at the same time as
your desire,' but also: 'You haven't got it, and you don't desire it if
you can't manage to construct it, if you don't know how to, by finding
your places, your assemblages, your particles and fluxes.'" Hmmm)
For the nameless node from Wales who makes his Deleuzian Dharma through
Spinoza, I'd like to not only applaud that rigorous intuition, but to
point out a possible zone on the itinerary: the Hua-Yen or "Flower
Garden" school. This Chinese Buddhist school based itself on an
incredible visionary, wacked-out multidimensional SF sutra known as the
Avatamsaka Sutra (now fully translated by Cleary, Shamballah). I've just
read descriptions of it in larger books on Mahayana philosophy, and on
the surface at least, there are intense resonances with Spinoza and
Leibniz, though less "rational." The world is marked by absolute
interpenetration, almost a holographic vision without hard edges, of
total flows:
"They perceive that the fields full of assemblies, the beings and aeons
which are as many asl all the dust particles, are all present in every
particle of dust. They perceive that the many fields and assemblies and
the beings and the aeons are all reflected in each particle of dust."
More soberly, the Shamballah Dictionary says: "This school teaches the
equality of all things and the dependence of all tings on one
another...all things participate in a unity and this unity divides itself
into the many, so that the manifold is unifed in this one...everything in
the universe arises simultaneously out of itself...All dharmas [entities,
laws, things] are empty: both aspects of this emptiness, the static
(absolute) and the active (phenomena) interpenetrate each other
unobstructedly; every phenomenon is identical to every other...The school
distinguishes itself from the other Mahayana schools in an important
point. It concentrates of the relationship between phenomena and
phenomena and not on that between phenomena and the absolute. All things
are in complete harmony with one another, since they are all
manifestations of one principle. They are like individual waves of the
same sea."
This seems to be another approach into D&G's famous magic formula:
PLURALISM = MONISM.
Well, much more to say, about Zen and Buddhamind, but I'll end this with
why I think this discussion is more than a compare/contrast paper.
Practice. Practice not just as some notion of "social action," but an
open-ended discipline (for all their wildness, nomads are disciplined,
they <practice>) that effects desired Deleuzian shifts on more than the
conceptual plane of books and etext. Of course art and performance are
the privileged field in the West, but I'd like to suggest that elements
of Buddhism (I didn't even get to the Francisco
Varella/autopoesis/dissipative sturcture stuff, my my) present a
remarkable site for a becoming that is at once science, philosophy and
art, and none of these. And it begins (and ends? and middles?) with the
immense unfolding of practice. Breathing "inside," then breathing "out,"
until the self is just, as Shunryu Suzuki, a swinging door, creaking in
the wind. No more inside and outside, just a wandering without goal,
already clear.
I saw a Japanese garden and
exclaimed: Quelle machine!!!
[__]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ \ / ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~[__]
[] Erik Davis (oo) Cernunnos sez (cribbing the Fall): The only []
[] erikd@xxxxxxxxx __ thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes. []
[__]==================== ww ==============================================[__]
------------------