Buddhism as Ultra-Atheism
Buddhism begins as a sort of cosmic version of Compensatory Atheism. The cosmos is meaningless and left to its own aimless drift it tends toward suffering. No one created it, no one controls it, and it leads to no good. Buddhism begins as a rebellion against this default condition, which by will and design and purposive practice devises a project and a program to shape these available materials toward our own sentient goal, the end of suffering, even though these materials were by no means designed or created to serve as tools in the quest to end suffering. The universe has no purpose, and thus is always undermining all our purposes, all our desires. In response, we set up a way to use our purposes to fulfill our goal of freeing ourselves from suffering.
But the specific way in which it conceives the only possible way to achieve that goal complicates the picture, introducing a dimension that begins to approach, initially in a rather ambiguous way, Emulative Atheism. For it turns out that the only way for us to attain our self-imposed purpose is, in a certain way, by coming to be more like the rest of the universe in its purposelessness, its non-unity, its desirelessness, its lack of a controller, to recognize that this is our own real condition as well. We must overcome attachment, desire, the attempt to be self as controller—just as the universe always has been free of attachment, desire, purpose, a controlling self. So on the one hand we are to become as unlike the purposeless suffering universe as possible, and in another sense we are to do so by becoming more like it. Not only that, but our very attainment of this overcoming cannot be done in the usual overcome-y way to which we are accustomed in our pursuit of purposes: Buddhism begins as the assertion that neither of the two extremes of indulgence of our desires nor suppression of our desires can ever work, these being the two extremes rejected by the Buddha in his discovery of the “Middle Way.” The second of these is precisely the direct control of desire, the desire to rule over our desires by making the end of desire and suffering a direct goal to be achieved by our own will and agency. We cannot even use our controlling self to overcome our controlling self. Rather, a complex indirect accomplishment of the purpose is prescribed, involving the Eightfold Noble Path of setting up various conditions and enhancing direct awareness of the uncontrollable without trying to control it, letting go by means of a middle mode between activity and passivity, detaching the cycle of purpose from its psychological fuel so that it gradually starves and fades away.
Thus does pre-Mahāyāna Buddhism occupy an interesting problematic that stands between Emulative and Compensatory atheism, or rather that combines them and works their tension in various ways. The ironic premise is that it is just by trying to be unlike the universe—to be completely personal, in-control, purposive—that causes our suffering. So we use a special subset of that purposivity—the Buddhist path with all its deliberate practices—to get from purposivity to the purposelessness of the cosmos. The Buddhist path is thus compared to a raft, used to get beyond the need for a raft: purpose is the means, purposelessness is the end. That purposelessness, it turns out, is only a problem when we are trying to force purpose upon it.
What is clear, however, is that both of these elements—the Compensatory and the Emulative–are deeply, radically atheist, and the manner in which they are combined here is even vociferously anti-theist. Our attempt to live as if the personal is the ultimate, that the purposive is the ultimate cause and end, what we’ve identified as the essence of monotheism, is the problem. Our use of purpose is a necessary evil to get beyond the purposive. The famous founding move of Buddhism, its unique contribution to world culture, is the shocking doctrine of Non-self (anattā), and its extension in the even more thoroughgoing doctrine of thoroughgoing universal Emptiness (śūnyatã). These are of course anti-foundationalist bombshells in the most straightforward sense, and it is obvious how they stand as radically challenges to the notion of God. Like the Daoist wuwei, they are ground zero for atheist religion: denials of the ultimacy of selfhood, of the ultimacy of the personal. These are radical rejections of the idea of the ultimacy of intention, will, purpose, the unity of the self, in principle and in every possible instance. Indeed, from the point of view of Non-self doctrine, the idea of God is a giant self, a giant error whereby, in denying the ultimacy of one’s personal self, acknowledging that one is neither the source nor the end of what happens, one instead affirms the ultimacy of the Big Self as the source and end of all that happens. As a projection of the suppressed selfhood of the individual, the big Self God unfortunately has all the problems of selfhood that were the basis of the Buddhist critique: attachment, greed, anger, delusion, selfishness, bias, power-hunger, systemic distortion of everything it touches. That’s just what selves do, whether the small self of a person or the Big Self of God.
Selfhood is viewed as thoroughly problematic, both an erroneous inference and a moral disaster, as well as the single biggest obstacle to true spiritual progress. This is because Self is defined here in terms of power: self means a single cause capable of bringing about an effect unassisted, and thus able to sustain its own existence over time independently of other conditions. This self Buddhism emphatically denies, stipulating instead that a single cause never produces a single effect, nor does a single cause produce multiple effects, nor do multiple causes produce a single effect, but rather that all that exists is causal in the specific sense of multiple causes producing multiple effects: dependent-co-arising (pratītyasamutpāda).[1] A “self,” as an agent capable of single-handedly producing any effects, as an independent causal power, is thus impossible. But all desire is really desire for selfhood in just this sense. Dependent co-arising means not only multiple causes for each effect, but multiple effects for each cause. Any desire that wants to make things be just one certain way, to the exclusion of other ways, is thus always going to be contravened by this inexorable involvement in otherness. Thus all desire is doomed, and suffering is the fate of every desire. The only escape from suffering, then, is the escape from this misguided desire, the desire for selfhood embodied in every particular desire for a definite single end. The denial of self is thus equivalent to Spinoza’s denial of free will, and as in Spinoza it goes hand in hand with a stipulation that purpose is a by-product of desire, and desire is an ephiphenomon of a prior purposelessness, and that our liberation—indeed, our freedom in a deeper sense—depends on getting back in touch with that purposelessness, that desirelessness, that lies at the bottom of our desires and purposes. The question for Buddhism becomes how this relation between desire and desirelessness, person and personlessness, samsara and nirvana, is to be understood. Is the former to be overcome and abandoned, redissolved into the latter? Or is to to be merely seen through, but allowed to continue? Or perhaps are the two finally to be seen as converging, as two sides of the same coin—perhaps even as one side of the same coin?
Early Buddhism allowed the desire for liberation to stand as a temporary exception to its stricture against desire; compared to a raft, it was a temporarily necessary means for transcending all other desires, and finally, in a kind of self-overcoming structure of planned obsolescence, a means of transcending and abandoning itself as well. This desire for liberation was the basis for commitment to the Buddhist path, which culminates in the practice of a contemplative method known as sati, mindfulness. The classical formulation of this practice is found in the “Four Foundations of Mindfulness”: mindfulness of body, of feelings, of mental states, and of mental objects. The procedure to be applied to these varied objects of experience is perhaps most pithily described in the words of the Buddha in the Udâna: “In the seen will be merely what is seen; in the heard will be merely what is heard; in the sensed will be merely what is sensed; in the cognised will be merely what is cognised.”[2] This means experiencing sense-data precisely as sense-data, rather than collating them with each other to form a concept of a reattainable object in the world—or rather, to also be aware of this thing-constituting act of cognition itself as another temporal and conditional event enacted by one’s own cognitive apparatus. What is left is a clear real-time awareness of the conditional arising and perishing of all experience as experience, thereby directly apprehending each experience’s (1) multiple causality, (2) lack of self, (3) not being under anyone’s or any single thing’s control, (4) saturation with the other-than-what-is-desired, (5) inherent suffering. By this kind of precise perception, particularly as applied to feelings (i.e., pain, pleasure, and hedonically neutral sensations), desire is disincentivized, and eventually withers away. A feeling of pleasure, which is what serves as an incentive for desire in ordinary inattentive experience, is noticed to be no more and no less than just a feeling of pleasure—it implies nothing about a thing that can single-handedly and unconditionally cause that pleasure, that could be reattained to the exclusion of other things and feelings. Indeed, if attended to closely enough, it is found to be always-already saturated with the feeling of displeasure that is intrinsic to it as a conditioned and impermanent sensation: the pleasure of gaining it is always pervaded by the necessarily concomitant and proportional pain of the prospect of losing that very gain. Feeling pleasure may still lead to a desire to feel it again, but that is a separate fact to be perceived, and no less automatic and conditional than the feeling itself.
All this is attractive to modern secular observers: it sounds a bit like psychological analysis, a bit like standard scientific reductionism in general. Would-be Buddhists in the West are often rather less friendly to ideas like karma and especially the proliferation of very godlike Bodhisattavas in the Mahāyāna, up to and including the final insult, the seemingly very monotheistic sounding “father of the world” and “possessor of the world,” the one Buddha of this world, the Ancient of Days, who suddenly is slipped to us in the Lotus Sūtra and Mahāparinirvāna Sūtra—superstitious unverifiable stuff, just the kind of stuff we were trying to get away with when we turned to this rational religion and away from those wacko religions of revelation and invisible deities. Superstitious and unverifiable they may or may not be. But be that as it may, I would like to establish here that in fact they are not just the kind of stuff we were trying to get away from if we were against the idea of God. They are still very much in line with the anti-God thrust of Non-Self and Emptiness. Let us take a look at them one by one.
Karma Versus God as Animistic Atavisms
At first blush, the Buddhist notion of karma appears to be just as problematic a notion as is the notion of God, judging by the standards we have laid out in this work. Not, that is, because it is empirically unverified and, by scientific standards, unlikely to be literally true, but rather, 1) because like the idea of Noûs as the only cause, intentional mentation as the real efficient cause of physical realities, which we located as the key idea of theism, is asserted here though in a radically different form, but still excluding the notion of purposeless physical causality, and 2) because this idea is emphatically linked to the idea of a moral interpretation of existence, to postmortem reward and punishment for intentional action. Indeed, the Buddhist version of the idea of karma seems especially susceptible to this charge, insofar as the Buddha famously restricted the idea of karmic efficacy specifically to intention (cetanā), in pointed contrast to, say, the Jain view of karma, where both intentional and unintentional acts have karmic effects. As in Anaxagoras, as in Socrates and Plato, as in monotheism, for Buddhism, it would seem, purposeful intention is what really makes things happen.
But granting that something of the same impulse, the same doubts, the same shortsightedness—the basic animistic idea– may have been behind this rash claim (and excluding for the sake of argument those few places in the Pali canon where the Buddha allows that there are also other forms of causality, for example, wind, rain, weather, etc.—and the emphatic disavowal of this idea in Mahāyāna texts like the Mahaparinirvana Sutra), we must note here that the monotheist and proto-monotheist versions of this claim have wildly different consequences from the Buddhist version. This is due to several differing parameters:
1) The one-many distinction: in the monotheist versions, the cause of all things is not just intentional purposes produced by mind, but a single unified mind’s intentional purposes; in the Buddhist version, it is any and every intentional purpose, of infinite diverse sentient beings, over infinite time that combine to produce any effect. That is, the cause of things is a hugely complex and diverse combination of a huge number of discrete, finite, desirous, even deluded intentional impulses, not unified into a master plan, not directed in a particular way.
2) the self-other distinction: what is of course most distinctive about the karma idea is that the intention that makes you the way you are is thought to be not the intention of another, whether a single all-ruling God or a particular spirit that happens to being holding sway, but yourself. That is, the main cause of you being one way or another, or encountering one or another event, even on the crudest and most literal-minded interpretation of this doctrine, is an intention that was formed in a mind that was in some sense yourself—strictly speaking, that bears the same relation to your present intentions as your own past intentions of a year ago bear to it. This means that any conflict between what you presently want and what you are getting is indeed to be interpreted as a conflict between two contrary intentions, but not between two conflictual beings or two conflictual wills; it is not God’s will versus my will, “thy will not mine be done,” but a self-conflict no different in kind from that which is happening at any moment of conscious life; a conflict of past and present intentions. The recalcitrance of reality against which my present will is butting its head is not intentionless matter, or chance, or chaos, or Dao, to be sure, but it is also not an alien will (divine or otherwise) opposing my own: it is merely an inner conflict among my own multifarious desires and intentions at different points in time.
Indeed, this leads us to 3) the direct-indirect question. For though it is true that in the karma theory it is intention that really makes things happen, what it makes happen is not what is intended! That is, the efficacy of intention is not direct: what my intention brings about is not the thing it consciously conceived and desired and intended, but an undesired by-product. This is really due to the fact that the efficacious intentional purposes in this case are not infinite and omnipotent, as in the God/Noûs case, but finite and confused and not really in control: indeed, they most often backfire and produce the opposite of what they intended. No single cause is sufficient to cause an effect, and this applies to every particular act of intention as well. My desire to harm others (and the purposeful action of then going ahead and doing so) in a past life may be the cause of my being harmed in this life; but what I desired was not to be harmed, but rather to harm.
The upshot of all this is that the animism of the karma idea, the premise that purposive consciousness is the cause of all reality, has precisely the opposite effect of the animism of the God idea: it actually leads to a reconfiguration of the idea of purposive consciousness itself. That is, it requires us to feel and experience our own conscious purposes differently, and to reevaluate the very idea of having a purpose. Purposive consciousness is shown to be self-defeating! That is the upshot of the Buddhist theory of karma: it is not to celebrate the animistic power of intentional consciousness, karma, to serve as the cause of all outcomes; rather, the whole point is to escape the dominion of karma, the delusion that grounds the perpetuation of karma, by realizing that purposive intention is always self-defeating. This is precisely because of the multiplicity of causes that is the real matrix of all effectivity: what makes things happen is never any one thing, and hence never any one intention. Thus all intentions are doomed to be frustrated: none ever gets precisely what it wants. This is why conditionality as such is suffering, in spite of the animistic premise that purposive conscious is what really brings things about: because whatever kind of causality may be in question, whether unconscious material causes or mathematical groundings or formal causes or conscious intentions, dependent co-arising is the name of the game: multiple causes, multiple effects, always, everywhere, no exceptions. That is why all action is suffering, that is why the real root of the problem is desire itself, the insistence that one’s intentions be sufficient to bring about precisely what they intend—i.e., the problem is conscious intention itself. Buddhism is an attempt to escape the tyranny of purpose, rather than to consolidate or justify it.
This means that the moral implications of these two versions of animism are wildly different. First, and most obviously, the God idea means that moral retribution is really something that is Good, is justified. Indeed, monotheists actually worship and praise the agent, the enforcer, the legislator of their own punishment. They are asked to adore their own hangman, in the name of justice. The Buddhist case is the opposite: they are not singing hymns of praise to karma, but on the contrary urgently seeking to escape it. It is not an agent with whom one has an interpersonal relationship of any kind; one cannot even hate it, let alone love it. But one thing is perfectly clear: it is a drag, this “justice,” this constant inescapability of the consequences of intentions, and our whole endeavor has to be to get rid of it.
Further, the multiplicity of causes and infinite of past and future time means that any moral consequence is always in principle reversible, always part of a larger story—and hence that moral exhortation is always only provisionally valid, within some limited local context. This suffices to provide a handle to social morality (and we may assume that any doctrine that survives over a long period of time must have been perceived to have delivered something of the sort), but also undermines the possibility of any total control on the part of wielders of the karma doctrine. X may lead to consequence Y, but Y is also a cause which leads to consequence Z, which means X also in some way contributes to consequence Z. If X is an evil intention and Y is a painful consequence, but Z is a pleasant consequence, this means that it is true that there is karmic retribution of X, punished by bad result Y, but also that X was rewarded, when combined with other causes (as is always the case), by pleasant consequence Z. And so on ad infinitum. We see many many examples of this kind of moral complexity even at the most popular level of Buddhist lore, and we will see this idea deployed to great effect in texts like the Lotus Sutra below. We may note here how the diametrically opposed idea of a Last Judgment comes to fit so snugly into a monotheist picture of the world, almost inevitably: time may not go on forever, because consequences have to be given a single moral valence, and this requires a final point of adjudication. The oneness of God and the oneness of the final judgment go hand in hand.
Mahayana Bodhisattvas as Promethean Counter-Gods, Whether Real or Unreal
The superhuman bodhisattvas of Mahāyāna Buddhism, as objects of devotion, granters of prayers, and purveyors of supernormal salvific powers, raise many interesting questions in the philosophy of religion. Basic Buddhism had always unproblematically accepted the existence of all kinds of gods and spirits who were capable of influencing human affairs as part of the samsaric economy. It was in the saintly realms of so-called Nibbanic Buddhist practice—the mainly monastic practice of meditation and cultivation of wisdom for the sake of attaining Nirvana and transcending all karma and rebirth, rather than the much more widespread lay practices of seeking to improve karma and gain improved rebirths–where these gods and their supernatural powers became less directly relevant; the saints themselves neither depended on these gods nor aspired to become them. Whether the gods existed or not seemed to play no important role in the key mechanisms of the scheme of salvation—and perhaps this was part of the point of the indifferent attitude to either establishing or denying their existence.
The Bodhisattvas, however, are not gods. They are sentient beings who have given rise to bodhicitta, the aspiration for Buddhahood, as opposed to the aspiration merely for the end of suffering and of rebirth in Nirvana, the state known as Arhatship. That means they voluntarily stay in the world out of compassion for sentient beings, reborn again and again, through the accumulation of their practice and experience gradually gaining the power to assume whatever form is most beneficial for leading both themselves and other beings closer to achieving Arhatship or Buddhahood (depending on the aspirations of those beings). They were once deluded. They have their past, their karma. You can invoke them to help you. They are not omnipotent, but very powerful. They have effectively infinite time to deliver the promised help, so their help and non-help are empirically indistinguishable. Often and in general, they do not presume to provide their specific help if not asked for, certainly not to show themselves explicitly as the agents of the action, but their unconditional compassion extends to all. Invoking them alerts them that you are interested in being on the Buddhist path and acknowledge that Buddhist practice leads to extraordinary powers.
In most Mahāyāna sutras, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are (innumerably) many, not one, with particular elective affinities, and of course none of them are ultimate. As in a polytheism, they all revert to something beyond themselves, something non-personal and non-purposive, the Dharma-nature or Emptiness or Buddha-nature or Dharmakaya, of which these many personalities are alternate personal intentional expressions or realizers or aspects. Moreover, no one in the universe is a Buddha or a bodhisattva from the beginning; all begin as deluded, suffering sentient beings, and gradually gain the powers and virtues that make them fully supernormal bodhasattvas and Buddhas. In that sense, they are not even really thought of as supernatural: the whole idea is premised on the widespread ancient Indian belief that all living beings have extremely malleable limits to their potential abilities, and that certain practices—usually meditation and ascetic deeds of one kind or another—can produce huge changes in a human being, not only in his subjective experience of the world but also in his powers. It goes without saying that this seems quite fanciful and unlikely by modern standards, and at present could only be believed on the basis of wholly unsubstantiated faith—no less unsubstantiated than monotheist faith in God. But what matters for us here is not the basis but the consequences of this unsubstantiated belief. The extreme malleability and multiplicity of transformations of which a sentient being is capable is an idea that consorts nicely with the specifically Buddhist ideas of karma (“action”) as the determinant of what one is, and the further radicalization of this idea in the notion of Nonself, which suggests there is no central unchangeable core to any being: it is just the result of its prior actions, so it could eventually be anything. More to the point, for the purposes of our discussion here, is that in no way is the personal the ultimate, even when these deities intervene in very deliberate and providential-looking ways. Indeed, we may say that in the specifically Mahāyāna case, the assumptions that undergird the existence of these numberless bodhisattvas are the following very radically atheist premises:
- Infinite time and space. As we have seen repeatedly, the notion of limitless time and space is again and again pitted against the notion of God, which, as we’ve just noted, tends naturally to a belief in a creation and an end of the world—and even in the case of Aristotle, who argues forcefully for the eternity of the world (much to consternation of medieval monotheist theologians), this infinity requires the additional limitation in space to make teleological form necessary, as against the creative power of infinity itself as proposed by the Epicureans. Thus in Buddhism there is no loophole to the uncloseability of all being. Being can never arrive at a final state, and can never have had an initial state. As in Nietzsche, we have some idea here that if the universe as a whole could arrive at a final state, that state would already have arrived. Conversely, given the Buddhist premise that no single cause can produce an effect, if the universe as a whole could have an initial state that was in any sense a unity, i.e., in any way monolithic enough to count as “a state,” it could never have left that state.
- No creator God, no single controller of the world. There is a Promethean dimension of the Mahāyāna, considered as a form of Compensatory Atheism. We are going against the grain of what the universe does when left to its own devices. It has no purpose, but we set up a purpose for ourselves. Because there is no God, there is no one to stop us. Since ancient times, the gods have generally been the limiters, the one’s who punish hubris, the ones who set the measures beyond which man cannot go, who want to enforce the division between humans and gods. We see this in both pagan and monotheist myth, e.g., in the stories of Prometheus and of the Tower of Babel. In a universe with no God, anything is possible—a prospect noted with horror by Dostoyevsky, deeply steeped in monotheist sensibility: if there is no God, everything is permitted. Is an evil superpower also possible? So we keep at our infinite task. Both bodhicitta (the aspiration for enlightenment) or the infinite malicious will are possible, and either one will, given infinite time, lead to acquisitions of the powers to carry it out in some cases. The only truth is impermanence, atheism: no victory can be final, not even that of evil. The will to finish the world, to reach an eschaton, is the only thing that we can exclude a priori. So there will always be room for this task, and for the increase of powers to accomplish this task. But the task itself will never be complete. (Can we construct from this an ontological proof for the existence of Bodhisattvas? It would be the flipside of an ontological proof for the nonexistence of God, ala Spinoza.)
- Compassion as an epistemological category: I have had the thought of bodhicitta—the determination to become a fully-fledged bodhisattva, to do whatever it takes to acquire the necessary superpowers, and to bring liberation to all sentient beings without exception, to become a Buddha and allow all of them also to become Buddhas. If I can have this thought, however it may have come about, it stands proved that it is possible for it to occur. Given infinite time and space, then, I can assume that others have had it too. If others can have had it, given infinite time and space and no God, then infinite beings have had it. Since there is no God, there is no way to limit what is possible throughout all time. Thus, given the intention to discover a way to save all beings and acquire the necessary superpowers to do so, sometime someone will discover a way to do so. Those beings must exist. But since there can be no end, they will keep coming into existence eternally, and there will always be infinite numbers of them alive and working for the benefit of all sentient beings with all their supernormal powers at any given moment, and in every conceivable way.
So even if we take the Bodhisattvas in their most literal sense, as fully real beings in the world, functioning in realtime, we are dealing with a further advance of atheist premises, not at all a capitulation back into a modified form of theism. They remain part of the Compensatory Atheist project, as part of its paradoxical approach to eventual Emulative Atheism. But it is just in those forms of Buddhism where the relatively realist Abidhammic ontology was being replaced with a more thoroughgoingly anti-realist ontological position, usually associated with the Nagarjunian and Prajñāpāramitā motif of śūnyatā (“Emptiness”), that specifically Buddhist figures of supernatural power, the Bodhisattvas, begin to assume a much more prominent place in Buddhist thought and practice. This is surprising only if we assume that deities are conceived of as more real than ordinary reality, as having something to do with ens realissimum and even as guarantor of epistemological realness, on some sort of vaguely Platonic-Christian-Cartesian model. This would lead us to expect that that ontological skepticism and anti-realism would entail the rejection of gods and all other non-empirical realities, just as it rejects the reality of empirical presences that seem to be but are not realities, like tables and chairs and momentary dhammas, all of which are shown in this Buddhist context to be mere abstractions, mere conventional designations. Because we associate skepticism with Humean empiricism and reductive ideology-critique, we think of the deconstruction of selves and universals as inevitably related to the deconstruction of religious mythologies, above all a deconstruction of belief in unseen gods. But in Buddhist contexts, the linkage of an expanded cypto-theistic palette and a seemingly nihilistic rejection of all reality is not surprising. The Abidhammic realism was a realism of momentary non-personal events, which was decidedly hostile to the ultimate reality of persons, whether mundane or supermundane. In this sense, the realism of Abidhamma actually militated against the equal status of persons and gods, since they were looked on as more illusory than something else: i.e., persons were more illusory than the momentary impersonal dhammas. Once the Madhyamaka critique of the ultimate reality of dhammas is in place, however, the dhammas are put on equal footing with persons. Neither the person nor the impersonal elements into which personality can be exhaustively reduced through analysis is more ultimately real. Personhood is made just as ultimately real as anything else—which is to say, not at all real, but this loses its bite if there is literally no exception: in the absence of a real, “illusory” ceases to be a pejorative. By pushing the Abidhammic derealization all the way to the dhammas themselves, space was opened for a stronger role for personal beings. Do gods exist? Do persons exist? Do miraculous wish-granting bodhisattvas exist? Prima facie, just as much as anything else does and doesn’t. Previously, a table was less real than the dhammas that composed it, and a person likewise. Now, table, dhammas, person, gods, bodhisattvas are all equally real—that is, not ultimately real at all.
This move goes hand in hand, in Indian Madhyamaka, with the Two Truths doctrines, which consolidates the same result. For though the bodhisattvas are not ultimately real, they are as real as tables and chairs and you and me, and all those momentary dhammas into which they can be analyzed: they are conventionally real. In most forms of Two Truths theory, this applies to some but not all possible entities, and we end up with a relatively commonsensical notion of what counts as conventional truths. To some extent, this is a merely empirical question: tables and chairs are actual terms used by language communities, agreed upon and serving to facilitate communication, whereas perpetual motion machines and unicorns are not. In principle, the judgment on what does or does not count as real in the conventional sense is rooted in a pragmatic criterion concerning what does and does not facilitate liberation or serve as a means to reaching Ultimate Truth, which is to say, serve to reach beyond conventional truth. Conventional Truth is to be like a raft: it is a good raft if it makes rafts unnecessary. Similarly, a good and valid Conventional Truth is one which makes Conventional Truth no longer necessary. It must lead beyond itself. So tables and chairs and you and me count, since we need these ideas to communicate about Buddhism and get beyond all conventional truth. These things have actual efficacy, precisely as attributed to them, within the schema of conventional truth. The same must be true of the superpowered bodhisattvas: they must be in the world in exactly the same way as tables and chairs—not in the same way as unicorns and the ether and Atlantis and atoms and creator Gods are in the world (i.e., as mere false imaginings), for in Indian Madhyamaka, these are not even conventionally real. In this sense, there is a relatively strong claim about the bodhisattvas: they exist in a way Yahweh and Allah and Zeus do not, just as chairs and tables exist in a way a perpetual-motion-machine and Atlantis do not. The bodhisattvas are really there and can really help you, while Zeus is not, just as you can really sit on a chair, but cannot really operate a perpetual-motion-machine or rent an apartment in Atlantis. Why? Because the Bodhisattvas are conventional truths that lead beyond conventional truth, that are useful in the project of realizing the non-attachment to purpose and person entailed in ultimate anti-realism and atheism, while Zeus and Yahweh and Atlantis are not. Here too we are situated in the same basic model paradoxically combining Compensatory and Emulative Atheism. The universe itself is deeply unowned, non-self, non-purposive, non-controlled. We mistakenly think otherwise, like a Compensatory or Emulative Theist, or a non-paradoxical Compensatory Atheist, and this is the cause of all our suffering—either because we ourselves are trying to achieve purposes of our own, or are projecting ultimate purpose onto the cosmos, or are seeing our own purposes as reflections of purposes built into the cosmos. We use Conventional Truth, including things like Bodhisattvahood and its elevation of purpose and Vow, to dispel that pernicious illustion, to be more like the godless universe, which frees us of our suffering and our purpose-obsessed delusions. The Two Truths is simply a clarified expansion of the Raft model that combined Compensatory and Emulative Atheism as means and paradoxical end.
Being Born On Purpose in an Atheist Universe
Buddhism can thus initially be categorized as a Compensatory Atheism designed to transcend itself into Emulative Atheism. This comes to play out in the Mahāyāna in the idea that there are indeed certain beings who are created by a single purpose, who are born because of someone’s specific design for them to be born, whose creation as this or that entity is determined by a single specific prior intention, and whose existence is thus entirely rooted in and beholden to this single pre-conceived purpose. Bodhisattvas choose to be born in such and such a form: they are born in a particular body because they themselves intended to be so born. Moreover, Mahāyāna sūtras are not shy about saying that some of their readers might be precisely these Bodhisattvas—and that this is demonstrated by the very fact that they are reading that sutra! And in some cases, that this was precisely the reason, the purpose, that got them born here: so as to re-encounter and help transmit the Mahāyāna as depicted in the sutra they are reading right now. The Lotus Sutra, of which much more below, after disclosing the idea that one might be a bodhisattva without knowing it, then floats the idea that anyone who gets involved with the Lotus Sutra in certain ways is in fact already from long ago one of these bodhisattvas who, although already having reached a stage of cultivation that would allow them to be born in various more glorious forms, or to be beyond rebirth altogether, have instead chosen pre-natally to be born as this lowly ordinary being, i.e., you who are reading this text, in order to practice and promulgate it in the world now. You were born with this purpose, which you yourself vowed to work toward before your own present birth, which is existentially fundamental, the actual ground of your being, the cause of your present body and circumstance and life, and which you can now discover after the fact and live in accordance with. To a very significant extent, such a conception overlaps functionally with the idea of purposive existence that might be entertained by a monotheist: you were born for a reason, for a purpose, and that purpose was the key factor in making you just as you are: to live a good and happy and “meaningful” life, what you must do is discover and fulfill this purpose that made you. In each of these instances, monotheist and Mahāyāna, there is perhaps at once something creepy and manipulative and something powerfully transporting and energizing—the very essence of religion as self-perpetuating ideological brainwashing, for better and for worse.
However, what is most notable here is how completely different the implications are in the monotheist case and the Buddhist case, simply due to their radically different premises. First, most obviously, in the monotheist case, the intention and purpose that created you, and that you must discover and live up to, are God’s intention and purpose, not your own. You were created to serve someone else’s aims—someone who is by definition “else” to you, someone who must be other than you in the strongest possible ontological sense, because the abyss between creator and created must be absolute. In the Buddhist version, on the contrary, the intention that created a pre-natal vow made by someone who is as much you and as much not you as the you of ten years ago: another version of the general neither-self-nor-different structure of causality and self-creation that Buddhism sees going on at every moment of existence. One is always creating oneself, becoming other, becoming an other who is also causally continuous to varying degrees with one’s present and past selves of yesterday and a trillion years ago, a continuity that is neither complete sameness nor complete difference (these two ontological conceptions of pure sameness and difference, construed as dichotomous, being precisely the deepest ignorance which all of Buddhism is aimed at overcoming). But the purpose that creates you as bodhisattva is not that of the ruler of the universe, but rather that of that constantly self-modifying stream of causal process that you are currently calling “you.” You are asked to recognize yourself in it in the same way as you may recognize yourself in a forgotten diary from your youth: that was me, that was how I thought then, that is how I got here. I wanted to be born here as this person to take up this Buddhism again. That is what I’m here for. This obviously has some overlap with the “you were destined to this” form of recruitment that would apply also in the monotheist case, perhaps in a slightly Calvinist form, which might say in effect: “You should accept this because it was what was chosen for you before the creation of the world, the very fact that you’re standing here listening to me preach proves that God put you here, and the twinge of acceptance you feel proves that you are and always have been one of the elect.” In the Bodhisattva’s case, however, the pitch is rather: “You should accept this because your very presence here proves that you already have accepted it, and that you have a deep investment in it, that you have already long ago fallen in love with these ideas, and that you set this up for yourself to find them again now.” The sutra is a post-it note reminding a groggy man of his intended schedule for the day of his hangover, for fear he might have forgotten.
But the difference is further exacerbated by the nature of that schedule—what it is to be a bodhisattva—and the kind of universe it exists within. For the self-created purpose of the Buddhist exists in a universe that, once again, was not itself created for a purpose, and is not one cog in a larger universal purpose standing at the root of all existence: it is a temporary purpose, a purpose surrounded by purposelessness, and ultimately grounded in its ability to transcend all singular purposes (and in the case of the Lotus, not to discard all purposes but to embrace all possible conflicting purposes). It is again Compensatory Atheism writ large. This is an ingenious move, in that it can deliver the religious attractions of “living for a purpose” and answer the question “why am I here?” sufficiently to give this sort of “meaning” to those who may be in need of it, but without poisoning the universe with purpose into the bargain! The bodhisattva is to think of his actual being as really deriving from the purpose embodied in his religious calling, just as must be the case for all creatures in a monotheistic universe—yet in this case without metastasizing into a domineering hegemony of one overriding purpose applying to all things. A bodhisattva makes no claim about what the purposes, or lacks thereof, of other living beings may be, whether they were born for any purpose and if so what that purpose is; she does not judge them to be at odds with their own real purpose if they should turn out to have completely other purposes from hers, or to recognize no purpose at all.
So it is not only that the nature of her religious vocation is intrinsically self-cancelling, designed to culminate in the deep openness to otherness bodied forth in the uncreated purposelessness of the real world of Emptiness, but also that even this temporary vocation itself is understood as a voluntary personal vow, one intentionality among many. The religious vocation will indeed become the center of gravity and guiding string of this person’s life, inasmuch as it is credited with the causal primacy of a purposive self-creation: it is what she’s here for, and causally speaking it is why she is here, literally. But the nature of the bodhisattva vocation, as demonstrated by this very structure of self-reminding and re-creation, is such that this does not translate into the literal fanatical monomania that goes with a monotheist notion of what purposive creation is, i.e., creation by the Self of Selves, God, a fully conscious, fully purposive, never-sleeping Being. God as creator is conscious and purposive from top to bottom, at all moments: agency is absolute, is the absolute principle. The self-creating bodhisattva, conversely, is self as non-self, non-self as self: her vow is itself a temporary emergent froth of agency in a sea of non-agency, itself illusory in the same way all other existences are, saturated through and through with non-agency, non-purposivity, non-self, with which it is in fact committed to reconnecting and reintegrating. Its purpose is to transcend the very dichotomy between purpose and purposelessness.
To put this point more technically, causality in Buddhism is never single-causality, and thus for Y to be caused by X is not the same as for Y to have all its characteristics fully determined by X alone, to be ruled by X. We may say that the whole point of monotheism is to conflate “creation” and “ruling.” The whole point of Buddhism is to separate these ideas, to show that, while they appear to be synonymous due to the structure of our misunderstanding of our own agency, the notion of self as creator and ruler of our own actions, projected into the notion of God or into the notion of Nature or world, in fact they are actually mutually exclusive, literally contradictory. Creation is not ruling. What creates is not what rules. Nothing rules, because nothing in isolation is able to create. This applies to purpose as cause as well: one’s purpose does not rule over one in the same way that it would in an ontology where single-causality is taken as ultimate, and where agency for both God and man is modeled on this conception. The bodhisattva’s vow is purpose as cause, but in the specifically Buddhist sense of causality. For a very advanced bodhisattva, it is perhaps the chief or decisive factor, but it can never be the only factor. This applies to the way it operates as well as its etiology: one does not expect everything to be arranged under the command of a purpose as a fully subjugated means to an end.
So even a bodhisattva who recognizes herself as self-created just to be here to do Buddhism will not need to do Buddhism all the time, or to instantly subjugate all other sprouts of intentionality toward the Buddhist end. For the bodhisattva’s will is never ex nihilo, and never omnipotent: he vows what he vows explicitly in terms of a response to the prior and defining desires, beliefs, attachments, sufferings and needs of sentient beings, created by their own conflicting intentions. Both God and the bodhisattva’s own prior will “work in mysterious ways”—in both cases the purpose is expected to be partially concealed at any time. But in the case of God, this is merely a consequence of the finitude of the creaturely intellect: it is not mysterious to God himself, because he is really fully in control of all the parts of the plan. It’s just that we don’t know all of them. In the bodhisattva’s case, the mystery is the nature of the case: no one is fully in control, and no one can fully know what is happening or why. The epistemological and ontological conditions converge here: as it is is as one knows, always incomplete, and that incompleteness is fully present and immanent in the here and now of the bodhisattva’s action, even of his control. Even in his own case, he, the creator of himself, did not know when he was born that he was the creator: the creating consciousness does not remain constant, transparent to itself, always present. This purpose of his own, which created him, is a past that combines with a present and with infinitely many other pasts, with infinite futures, manifesting anew in a new configuration at each moment, some of which reveal its purposivity and some of which do not, and that irreducible multiplicity is its most fundamental being. The creator (the bodhisattva “himself”), like the created (also the bodhisattva “himself”), sometimes knows and sometimes does not, going through phases of forgetting and recovery as an intrinsically interactive and multiple being. In the theistic case, the epistemological and ontological conditions also converge, but only in God, and only in exactly the opposite way, as in both cases complete: real control and real knowledge are both always total in God. The believer on the other hand is epistemologically at odds with his own being: he has incomplete knowledge of his purpose, but his being is completely controlled by this unknown but absolute purpose.
The thinking of the theistic believer would thus be, “God created me in this body and life and situation in order to serve and know and love him: what is happening now doesn’t look like it’s leading that way, but really it is: God works in mysterious ways. What I need to do is always direct my consciousness toward fulfilling God’s will, align my will with his. Whenever I don’t, I am disobedient, and that is sin. Any time I’m doing anything other than obeying God’s will, I’m falling away from the purpose that created me. I need to strive to do this all the time. He is watching and guiding me. If I’m sitting alone at home eating popcorn and watching a movie, I had better make sure it is in accord with his commands, and pleasing to him, and thus fulfils of the purpose which created me.”
In contrast, the thinking of this kind of bodhisattva would be, “I created myself in this body and life and situation, through a vow in a previous life, in order to continue my self-imposed task of liberating all sentient beings from suffering. What is happening around me naturally doesn’t look much like it’s conducive to liberation from suffering, because it isn’t—why should it be? It is mainly produced by the misguided activities of benighted sentient beings, precisely the ones I have vowed to liberate from precisely this. I should at all times try to open their eyes—and any time I’m doing anything other than working to liberate both self and others from ignorance and suffering, I’m falling away from the purpose that created me. All Buddhas and bodhisattvas throughout the universe are watching and guiding me. If I am sitting alone at home eating popcorn and watching a movie, I might be wasting time that should be spent energetically trying to liberate sentient beings. But just as possibly, I might be doing something that will contribute to that task—for example, learning something about this community, about human psychology, about my own craving for pleasure and recreation and thus the craving of other sentient beings—all of which will no doubt become useful to the infinite task of liberating all sentient beings, in all their variety, that still lies ahead of me for countless eons. Because I cannot accomplish this task unilaterally, because it is remedial to a pre-existing condition of karmic delusion in infinitely diverse sentient beings, to whom I must learn to respond in the maximally appropriate and effective ways, I cannot expect immediate results, I cannot rush. This is a long haul, not in anyone’s unilateral control, with an infinitely complex matrix of contingencies rooted in the idiosyncracies of infinite sentient beings, and there will necessarily be many pauses and detours, many episodes that I cannot yet know the meaning of or use for but which may be later skillfully brought to use as tools for the task. Since the task is infinite, the number and kinds of tools are infinite, and that means anything and everything can turn out to be a tool. Anything and everything can contribute to that task in all its multifariousness—and no doubt one of those bodhisattvas who is watching and guiding me has something analogous to this in his or her infinite experience of infinite lives, and knows how best to utilize it toward our shared task of liberating all sentient beings; I will hope for his or her guidance.”
What is at stake here is what Nietzsche called the “innocence of becoming”: the non-self-createdness and non-ultimacy of a purpose which nonetheless created you as you exist in your current state saturates existence with meaning, while also embedding that meaning in a surrounding structure of openness to other meanings, of ultimate purposelessness and meaninglessness. More searchingly, it points us back in its own way to the asymmetry of purpose and purposelessness noted in Part One: for it gives us a purpose to existence which at the same time discloses the non-dichotomy between purpose and purposelessness, rather than foreclosing this convergence of these opposites forever, fighting rather to separate them as perfectly and cleanly as possible, as both monotheism and more usual forms of Compensatory Atheism do.
It is in this context that we may further reconsider the implications of “compassion as an epistemological category,” alluded to above. For this idea opens our view to a particularly tantalizing situation in the phenomenology of religion. Imagine that I am someone who feels that no one understands me correctly, that I cannot explain myself to others, that my particular problems are so specific and hard to describe that I despair of anyone understanding or helping me. A monotheist can of course then suppose that God alone understands him, can solve his problem, can save him—since God created him, and is also omniscient and omnipotent. But a Mahāyāna believer could instead here make the vow to be the bodhisattva caring for all beings but especially attuned to people of his own type, however rare they might be, whenever they occur in the infinite future anywhere in the infinite universe. Though he does not presently know the solution to his own problem, and feels that no one else does either—indeed, that no one who has not experienced what he has experienced can even understand what he’s going through—he vows to discover the solution, become a superpowered bodhisattva, and help liberate and resolve precisely this problem for others in the future. If he is irrationally obsessed with some random fetish, keeping rotting fish heads in his car for example, and cannot seem to resolve this problem or understand it, he vows to be the Bodhisattva of Fish Heads, specially attuned to the intricacies of Fish Head obsession and also to its solutions, discovered (he still has no idea how) only after eaons of contemplation, helping all those with this problem in the future. Now the more he commits to this compassionate vow, the more fully he embraces the endeavor of somehow—at present he has no idea how—acquiring this solution and the magical powers to implement it, not for his own sake only or mainly, but for the sake of others with precisely this sort of psyche and problem throughout the future universe, the more certainty he is entitled to feel that there are presently Bodhisattvas of Fish Heads, who in their previous deluded state were deluded in just the way he was, who were equally incapable of understanding themselves or solving their own problem but simply vowed to do so for others in the future, who understand his situation perfectly because they have lived it, who see his point, who take his side, not from an objective standpoint or the standpoint of an omnipotent creator, but from the standpoint of himself and his own peculiar and inexplicable obsessions and obstructions. The more committed he is to his own vow, the more evidence he has that it is indeed possible to be committed to this vow, to be willing to see it through and acquire the necessary powers at any cost. He is in essence praying to an apotheosized permutation of himself in his most intimate and uncommon aspects, and committed to saving other versions of himself, not in the general sense of “a person” or “a sentient being,” but in his precise form of trouble, idiosyncracy, and delusion. The religious experience created by this notion, fully and deeply atheist, profoundly egalitarian and yet self-tailored to each individual in the most intimate realm of his own private hell, all-embracing and yet individualistic, relativist and yet universalist, giving due consideration to each and all as both particular and universal, can easily be imagined to have profound experiential effects that are perhaps unique in the history of religious consciousness.
And as we’ve seen in several contexts already, with reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, there is another name for the coextensiveness of purpose and purposelessness, of universal and particular: it is called beauty. This motif of the full identity of the opposites of being and non-being, of universal and particular, of relativism and universalism, as well as that of purpose and purposelessness, this ontological structure of beauty as the omnipresent texture of all possible existence, is perhaps most extensively developed in the Tiantai School, to which we have already often alluded. We must here pause to say a few more words about the treatment of the atheist Mahāyāna deites in that school, further exemplifying this point.
Tiantai on Bodhisattvas: Fully Real, Fully Unreal
There is only one school of Mahāyāna Buddhism that does not accept some version of either a One Truth or a Two Truths epistemology, stipulating that “truth” is of one or two kinds (e.g., Conventional Truth and Ultimate Truth). That is Tiantai Buddhism, which instead posits Three Truths, three forms of truth, three senses in which something can be considered true. Tiantai, like most of the Two Truths advocates, is deeply committed to Nagarjunian emptiness dialectic, which attacks at its roots the most fundamental premises of all absolutism and naïve realism, that is, the sort of One Truth realism that is shared by almost all non-Buddhist epistemology, which takes it as axiomatic that there is only one kind of truth, that the term truth is univocal and fundamental, and that there is a straight dichotomy between true and untrue. Like Two Truths Buddhism, Tiantai rejects this. In Tiantai too, there are no ultimately real determinate entities, so the ultimate reality of bodhisattvas on the model of gods that simply exist, full-stop, as opposed to simply not-existing is out of the question. But Three Truths theory changes the nature of Conventional Truth so that the easy Two Truths solution suggested above is no longer an option: it can no longer be the case that a bodhisattva like Avalokitśvera (Guanyin) is more real than Zeus, nor for that matter that a chair is more real than a perpetual motion machine. And yet Tiantai is deeply devoted to the religious significance of the interaction between ordinary mortals and these Bodhisattvas, especially Guanyin (Avalokitśvera). How can this work?
The crux of the matter has to do with the distinctive Tiantai handling of two seemingly only distantly related questions: the epistemological question of the subject-object relation, and the ethical question of compassion as part of the bodhisattva practice, embodied in the compassionate bodhisattva’s relation to the suffering sentient being. These questions in Tiantai are one question: the question of self and other. The question is how a consciousness relates to what is putatively external to that consciousness, whether that is an object of cognition or another being serving as source of recognition, compassion and assistance. Another thing (object) or another self (bodhisattva)—in both cases, we are talking about the basic ontological question addressed by the Tiantai Three Truths. That question is the basic question of ontology: what does it mean to exist? What does it mean to be determinate? What is the nature of a determination for any finite entity, real or imagined, concrete or abstract? What does it mean for something to be X, as opposed to not-being-X? How does being X relate to not-being-X?
The Tiantai answer, which we’ve glanced upon several times above, goes something like this: To exist is to be determinate, to be finite, to have some among the set of all possible characteristics but not others, to be somewhere but not everywhere, to be sometimes but not all the time, to be some of what is possible but not all of what is possible. For it would be impossible to meaningfully claim “existence” for anything that did not meet these criteria, since its existence would ipso facto be indistinguishable from its not-existing. To exist is to be non-all, which is to say, to have an outside. But this having-an-outside, the necessary condition of all existence turns out be problematic, and ultimately unintelligible, even impossible: no unambiguously distinct and self-standing entities can arise in counterdistinction to “other” entities, including their putative causes, since it is logically impossible (according to Madhyamaka dialectics) to construe how it can both have an efficacious relation to its defining or causal “other” and yet be genuinely and wholly distinct from it. The relation to an outside will thus be shown to be both the necessary and the impossible condition of all being. To describe this situation, and the convergence of this necessity and this impossibility, is the thrust of the Three Truths, which are a way of describing the always inconceivable relation of any self to any other, any inside to any outside, a relation that is deeply misconstrued in our ordinary consciousness, which bifurcates self from other and also, perhaps more importantly, bifurcates the necessity of otherness and the impossibility of otherness.
The relation between Guanyin and a sentient being is presented in terms of the category of “eliciting and responding” (ganying感應). The basic model here is that the sentient being, through her suffering or devotions, “elicits” (gan 感) the bodhisattva Guanyin, who then “responds” (ying 應) to the sentient being with upayically appropriate sensations, circumstances, encounters or teachings. By definition these are different roles and different functions. Guanyin is not me, I am not Guanyin: to elicit is not to respond, to respond is not to elicit. How are these two different beings, the eliciter and the responder, related?
Tiantai’s answer is emphatic: they are neither one nor different. By this is meant, as noted above, that their difference is at once impossible (Emptiness 空) and necessary (Conventionality 假)—and indeed that this necessity is just this impossibility, and vice versa (Middle 中). This is exactly what Tiantai says about any relation between two putatively different entities: cause and effect, mind and its objects, self and other, Dharma-nature and Ignorance, good and evil. In this case, the relation is explicitly not ordinary cause and effect, but specifically “eliciting and response.” The form of “neither one nor different” taken here is explained as the “intertwining of the paths of eliciting and response” (ganying daojiao感應道交) in the Guanyinxuanyi 觀音玄義, a work by Zhiyi, the founder of Tiantai, devoted specifically to this topic. Zhiyi here applies the straight Madhyamaka explanation of emptiness, through the negation of the tetralemma, regarded as exhaustive: the bodhisattva and the sentient being beseeching her cannot be the same, nor can they be different. The response of the bodhisattva to the sentient being cannot be caused by only the sentient being, nor only by the bodhisattva, nor by both acting in tandem, nor can it be uncaused.[3]
That is just what it means to say that the bodhisattva and all experiences and thoughts about the bodhisattva are, like anything else, Empty: never actually produced as such, not an actual separable or self-standing entity at all. What then? “The sage (Guanyin), by means of the fact of everywhere equal non-dwelling, keeps free of any dwelling in the [sentient being’s] eliciting (shengren yi pingdeng wuzhu fa buzhugan聖人以平等無住法不住感), thus responding according to the triggers in whatever way is appropriate, that is all.” Zhiyi presents the bodhisattva’s upayic response to X as nothing other than the very emptiness of X, precisely as equality and non-dwelling itself. That is, the emptiness of any entity is the sagely upayic response to that entity, because this emptiness means “equality” and “non-dwelling”—which is to say, unstuck anywhere and equally distributed everywhere. Let us try to understand this.
According to this stock Madhyamaka analysis, the arising of response of Guanyin cannot arise 1) caused by oneself, 2) caused by something other than oneself, 3) caused by both self and other working in tandem, or 4) uncaused. This of course would apply for either Guanyin or the eliciting sentient being. Guanyin alone does not cause her response, nor does the sentient being, nor do both together, nor does it arise without a cause. Similarly, the sentient being does not produce the response of Guanyin, nor does Guanyin alone produce it, nor do both, nor neither. Hence, by the usual Madhyamaka logic, we conclude that it does not arise. This exhaustive rejection of alternatives is meant to demonstrate that no arising takes place, that the response of Guanyin is simply not produced—it is quiescent, nirvanic, in its very nature.
However, the implications of this conclusion are different in Tiantai, with its Three Truths epistemology, than they were in Madhyamaka, with its Two Truths. In Tiantai, “not produced” is a shorthand way of saying, “non-dwelling anywhere and equally distributed everywhere.” Emptiness is also the middle: non-arising is also omnipresence and unconditional presence unlimitable to any specific form or essence. To say of Guanyin’s response that it is empty is thus to say all of these about it. The Tiantai thinker Siming Zhili (960-1028) explains this passage in his Guanyinxuanyiji:
The great sage (Guanyin) has perfectly realized all of the Three Thousand [a Tiantai term of art meaning every possible determination and every possible view of every determination] both as principles and as phenomena. Because these all reside equally in her one mind, her one mind treats them all equally, and because she understands each and every one to be empty, provisional and the Middle Way, her mind dwells in none and attaches to none. It is this mind of equality and non-dwelling [=non-attachment] that the sage makes use of in responding to sentient beings, and hence she does not dwell in or attach to the stimulus to which she is responding, instead merely following whatever is appropriate to the pleasures and desires of the beings of the ten realms to overcome their evils and bring them into liberating principle. This is done by freely responding according to the four types of eliciting, with the four types of responses [described in the four siddhantas], namely 1) according to shared conventions of the world, 2) tailored idiosyncratically to go along with a particular individual, 3) tailored therapeutically to oppose a particular individual, and 4) in terms of the ultimate meaning. How could this sort of eliciting and response be conceivable in terms of self, other, both or neither? But then again, if any sentient being is benefitted, in any of these four ways, by the idea that eliciting and response are self-produced, we can also legitimately say that it is oneself that elicits and oneself that responds. And if any sentient being is benefitted, in any of these four ways, by any of the other three stances, we can also say that the eliciting produces the response, or that the response produces the eliciting, or that [the sentient being and Guanyin] together produce the eliciting or together produce the response, or that the eliciting is produced by neither or the response is produced by neither. All of these can be validly said; as long is there is no attachment to any of the four, all four can be validly said. Hence the scriptures and treatises, when describing how eliciting and response take place, never exceed these four alternate descriptions.”[4]
Notice first that the rejection of the four alternatives, and the conclusion that this response thus never “arises” and is not “produced” is not a rejection of the reality of Guanyin’s response; rather it is a proof of its inherent entailment in reality, and in an infinity of forms, none dwelt in, all treated equally—stuck in none, not constrained to any specific limited location or direction, distributed through each of them equally everywhere, and indeed distributing each of them equally everywhere, as we shall see. It does not “arise” because it is always already going on, wherever or whenever it is sought. Guanyin’s state of enlightenment is the Three Thousand (i.e., all things viewed in all ways, including ourselves and everything we do, all our “elicitings”) as one instant of her own experience: the famous Tiantai yiniansanqian 一念三千, “three thousand quiddities in a single moment of experience.” According to Zhiyi’s formulation of that doctrine in the Mohezhiguan, that means that we are not outside her mind, nor produced by her mind, nor merely included in her mind, but that each of us is rather a constituent part of her mind, of each moment of her experience (just as she is a part of each of our minds). Her mind has the same relation to all that is putatively “other” to it that, according to Zhiyi, every moment of every sentient being’s mentation has to all its contents, all that seems to stand opposed to it: “just this mentation is all phenomena themselves, just all phenomena are this mentation itself.” :秖心是一切法。一切法是心.[5] This “is” is to be understood in the manner outlined above, of course: neither same nor different, same as different, different as same, necessarily and impossibly one, necessarily and impossibly different. As a description of a mind that has explicitly realized this, her mind is thus all of us, all of us are her mind, but without reducing to—“dwelling in”—any one particular identity, hers or ours. Her mind does not dwell in just being “her mind,” nor for that matter in just being “mind” or just being “Guanyin”: it is equally distributed through all of us, minds and bodies, good and evil. Moreover, according to that exposition, this means experiencing all those constituent parts not merely as “parts,” as mutually exclusive elements, but as interpenetrating, both with each other and with the “one moment of experience” which is Guanyin’s own mind at any time, for to refer to the one (her mind) is always to refer the many (all of us), and to refer to the many is always also to speak of the one. Hence, to point out any one of us, any of the elements of her mind, is also to point out the oneness itself, to make that the central point that subsumes all other content, not-dwelling itself, equally distributed through all other contents.[6] Any one of those elements is the subsuming “one” against the remaining others as subsumed, including Guanyin as subject herself. According to Zhili’s explanation, our own eliciting is one of these three thousand as phenomena 事, as mutually exclusive determinate events occurring only at a specific place and time—that’s how we experience them ourselves—and also one of these three thousand as “principles,” 理, i.e., as three thousand different versions of the Three Truths, each determinate one of which is omnipresent and omnitemporal. In the former sense, as phenomena, they are all treated equally, since all are equally embraced in her one moment of experience, her “regarding of the sounds of the world.” In the latter sense, as “principles,” they are each Empty, Provisionally Posited, and the Middle, and thus “not-dwelt-in”—being present as X is Provisionally Positing, not attaching to this X as X is Emptiness, and equally presence of X in X and non-X is the Middle, the non-dwelling of X exclusively in X. That is, my eliciting—my good or evil thoughts and actions, my pleasures or sufferings—are equally parts of Guanyin’s present moment of experience, no more and no less than her own experiences are: her mind comprises awareness of both herself and me, and in both cases she is not the sole cause or owner of that awareness. The me she is aware of also comprises awareness of both me and her. That is my eliciting as one of the Three Thousand shi, phenomena. But my eliciting, my good or evil thought and action, is also present in her mind’s experience of every element of this whole 3000, which is her one moment of experience, is intersubsumptive with all the others. So all the other 2999 forms, to speak figuratively, are intersubsumptive with my eliciting deed: the not-dwelling of my deed in my deed undermines its finiteness, reveals the non-attachment to itself which is synonymous with its presence (the emptiness that is synonymous with its provisional positing), and thus allows it to be read simultaneously as any of the other 2999, calling forth its omnipresence and hence its unconditionality (the Middle). When I am aware of her, this awareness of hers is what I’m aware of. Every otherness to which my action or thought is contrasted, the contrast with which alone gives it its determinacy, is thereby intersubsumptively present in it. My suffering intersubsumes with the bliss which it is established by excluding. My selfishness instersubsumes with the compassion which it is established by excluding. This is precisely Guanyin’s salvific response to me.
We can see now that this is all about the implications of emptiness as equality and non-dwelling. These are here meant as synonyms of “emptiness”: they mean the non-arising of the two allegedly singly located not-all finite entities we are calling “Guanyin’s response” or “the sentient being’s eliciting.” To be non-arising as finite is to be inherently entailed as non-dwelling and equally present to all locations. Non-dwelling means unstuck to any specific identity, able to appear in any form, ambiguity that manifests inexhaustibly in a variety of different forms, since it dwells definitively in none: it means there is no definitive answer to what or who I am, and thus that I can be anyone, and already am as much anyone else as I am myself—which is to say, not definitively the others any more than I am definitively me, but by the same token, not definitively not the others any more than I am, in my present reality, definitively not me. “Equality” means equal distribution, non-restriction to any single location: it is omnipresent (to exactly the extent that it is present anywhere)—because omniabsent (to exactly the extent that it is absent anywhere). To be empty is, in the Three Truths, identical to being the Middle: transformation (having no single stable identity, non-dwelling) and omnipresence (the presence of this non-stable non-single identity everywhere equally). But omnipresent transformation is precisely what Guanyin’s salvific response was always supposed to be. The “wondrous” function that is Guanyin’s upayic salvific response to our eliciting is everywhere, but what is everywhere is no single identity (some particular being named Guanyin), but rather precisely that non-dwelling ambiguity and transformative power which is ourselves. We are saved from ourselves, though, by being ourselves: the omnipresence and ambiguity of me undermines the putative single location and definiteness of me, which were what in fact, on pan-Buddhist premises, account for my suffering. My suffering is cured by the response of Guanyin, which is just my suffering undermining its own finitude, undermining my specific non-all attachments and mutually exclusive ways of being: my suffering and joys, my good and my evil. That is, Guanyin’s response to me is just me myself seen in a different way, but that also means Guanyin seen as my own otherness to myself. Hence I can describe it equally as “Guanyin is really just an aspect of myself” or “Guanyin is really other to me.” That is, “Guanyin’s response is just my own activity viewed in all contexts, unstuck, equally connected to all other things—but that means equally that Guanyin’s response is the undermining of, the reversal of, the wholly other to, my own activity as originally conceived by me.” And this entails, equally, that I can say, “I am just an aspect of Guanyin.” We are intersubsumptive (the Middle), each an aspect of the other, reducible exclusively to neither side.
Notice also that this rejection of all four explanations of how this happens is equally an allowing of all four explanations—on this level too, equality and non-dwelling are applied. It is equally valid to say self-caused, or other-caused, or both-caused, or uncaused, as long as one dwells in, is attached to none of them. It is non-dwelling that allows one to smoothly move from one to the other, treating them all as equally valid. Actually, by Three Truths logic, this same equality and non-dwelling also applies to what Zhiyi says in the first discussion, namely that it the response of Guanyin is empty and never really arises. This fits, in fact, in the fourth siddantha, the “ultimate meaning,” which is itself placed along the other three as nothing more than one more siddhanta, basically on even footing with the other three forms of conventional truth (first siddhanta) and upāya (second and third siddhanta). Put another way, the same non-dwelling equality applies to the question not only of how Guanyin’s response happens, but whether it happens.
This is worth pausing over, since this is the basic question about the reality of the bodhisattvas. The issue, in modern terms, is whether Guanyin really exists or not, i.e., when someone says Guanyin is helping out and responding to them, is this all something in his imagination? For that is what “self-caused” would amount to here: there is no external Guanyin, when I think Guanyin has produced some response to my need (for example, some event in my life that I am interpreting as an instructive upāya designed for my edification), I am just reading it into a random event. “Other caused” on the other hand would mean Guanyin really exists out in the world separate from me, outside of my imagination, independent of my hermeneutic intervention; this would be the way gods or God are generally assumed to exist in non-Buddhist contexts, i.e., they are “really out there,” and exist independently of what I believe about them. Both of these accounts are rejected, and both are accepted. According to this analysis, the following five descriptions are all equally true and equally false:
- Guanyin is a figment of my imagination, entirely caused by me (or by cultural processes, traditions, narratives—in any case, the effect I am attributing to her is really caused by myself or ourselves). Guanyin is an effect of a particular set of illusions, lies, hermeneutic choices, attachments, wishful thinkings, desires. Her effects on me are a figment of my own activity.
- Guanyin is an actual entity existing in the world outside me, independent of me and what I think, and indeed independent of any cultural practices, any traditions, any beliefs of others. She makes things happen through her own real action. Her effects on me are caused by her real presence outside me.
- Guanyin’s effects on me are a joint product of her and me.
- Guanyin’s effects are not produced by Guanyin, nor by me, nor by both, but spontaneously and miraculously occur for no particular reason.
- Guanyin’s effects are actually not produced at all, never occur, do not arise. There is no discoverable identifiable entity called Guanyin’s response.
How is it possible for all of these to be true, and all of these to be false?
To answer this, some remarks are in order here to frame this issue in a comparative context.[7] In most Western philosophical traditions, activity that is not mechanically or physically caused is thought of as something coming from a mysterious quality called Free Will, which is generally linked to a self or a personality, and thence to teleology: it is something that has no mechanical, efficient cause, so it must have a final cause, it must be done by someone and done for a specific purpose. Freedom from mechanical causality—from efficient cause—lands us in subordination to final causality, to personality, to purpose. The only alternatives are “it is mechanical and therefore unfree and impersonal” and “it is purposive, freely done by a person, a deity.” In stark contrast to this, the Tiantai rejection of mechanical causality and causelessness (as seen in the refutation of the four alternatives, self-caused, other-caused, both, neither) rejects also “spontaneous arising” and the specific type of “miracle” that is usually associated with divine intervention, i.e., a kind of miracle produced by Someone’s free will and purpose. The result of the supersession of causality, of causelessness and of purposive miracle is “inherent entailment,” that is, the insight that what had appeared to be a caused effect, occurring at a particular time and place, is in fact an inextricable and eternal law of the universe, that is actually instantiating at all times and places, but in an infinite variety of forms. What it is is, in fact, the Absolute itself, the Middle Way, the Buddha-nature, the source and end of all other dharmas, ever-present, eternal, always operating and responding and producing itself as all other dharmas. This is the “wondrousness,” the “inconceivability” of all dharmas in Tiantai context: a transcending of mechanical causality that does not revert in any way to a concept of Free Will or purposive intervention, rather just the opposite.
Free Will is primarily a juridical concept. It evolves in the context of this notion of a deity as personal, as purposive, as conscious only, with a single notion of the Good. Christian theology required an absolutist conception of Free Will, from Augustine onward, in order to square two conflicting planks of its theological platform: on the one hand, God is to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent, but on the other hand the Christian scriptures, in particular the words of Jesus Christ in the Gospels of the New Testament, threaten eternal punishment or annihiliation to some human beings. This requires some notion of genuine, absolute guilt and total responsibility to justify such punishment: the sinner must be really and fully responsible for his sin if God is not to appear unjust; for if God is in any way responsible for the sinful actions, God appears to be punishing unjustly.
In Buddhism, there is no concept of Free Will in this juridical sense. When we refute the absoluteness of the concept of efficient causality, we arrive at a kind of miraculous manifestation which is not equivalent to the freedom of purposive activity of a self. Quite the opposite. What we have here, I will argue, is precisely miracle in a distinctly atheist sense. Guanyin is an atheist miracle, in the sense that matters most. Person is always something other than the last word, except in the way that any and every false (=provisional) construct is also ultimate, also the last word. This goes for Guanyin as well: her activity is personal and impersonal, miraculous and caused, both.
One reason for this has already been touched on: as omnipresent transformation, “Guanyin” cannot be the name for any specific essential entity. This is really just an entailment of basic Buddhism: “Guanyin” (like any other determinate being) is an interpretation of certain data, rather than being a brute datum itself. Guanyin is omnipresent, but what is omnipresent cannot be just “Guanyin” in particular: Guanyin is one particular interpretation of what is omnipresent, just as “table” is one particular interpretation of the array of data going on under my computer right now. Guanyin is transforming into all forms appropriate to the liberation of all beings, but what is transforming is not some specific constant entity called “Guanyin.” That would, indeed, undermine the thorough omnipresence of transformation, leaving at least one datum untransforming (the essence, the identity, of Guanyin). Rather, Guanyin is a name for the omnipresence of transformation which is identical to and also transcendent of all suffering, and ipso facto cannot be any one specific being.
Another reason for this understanding of the atheistic miracle of Guanyin’s responses is that this is the Tiantai understanding of all phenomena without exception: they are all to be contemplated as “atheist miracles” in just this sense, “wondrous,” 妙境or “inconceivable” 不可思議境. This is precisely what is meant to be realized in Tiantai meditation practice. For this means to reveal, for any content present to consciousness, that, though it is present, it is also impossible. “Impossible, and yet there it is!” This is Georges Bataille’s atheistic formula for “the miraculous”—meaning something that breaks out of the rule of the concatenation of cause and effect, the anticipation of consequence, the subordination of effect to cause, or of means to end. That is, something that escapes the subordination of the past to the future, the subordination of labor to the accumulation of desired consequences—all work, all desire, subordination of time. The more general word for this sudden escape from subordination, particularly the subordination to time (both past and future), is for Bataille “sovereignty.” This is miracle in the specifically atheist sense: not the breaking of the chain of mechanical causality to allow the epiphany of another kind of causality, i.e., intentional, deliberate, teleological, purposive causality produced by the Free Will of a deity. That would be simply escaping one subordination—that to mechanical causality, to the secular order—to land in an even worse one: that of purpose, of personality, of Free Will imposed by the person of God and with it the demand for accountability through our own Free Will. Miracle in the usual, theistic sense means going out of the frying pan of mechanistic causality into the fire of final causality, free will, reward and punishment, the inescapable authority of God. The atheist miracle in Tiantai’s Guanyin is much closer to Bataille’s notion of sovereignty. For again and again, Tiantai stresses that the miraculous compassionate responses of Guanyin and all other buddhas and bodhisattvas is precisely not done on purpose, not the result of Free Will, not deliberate, not intentional, not the result of any special decision or effort:
Next, we explain the True Nirmanakaya, or Response Body. “True” means unmoving and not false. “Response” means appropriately matching the roots and causes of sentient beings. “An accumulated store of something” is the meaning of “a body.” If one can perfectly accord with the unmoving, never-false principle, then one is able to respond in perfect accord with the triggering situation. It is like a mirror: as soon as a visage is placed in front of it, that visage takes shape within the mirror instantly. This true response is necessarily always going on, inseparable from [the bodhisattva doing the responding]. Although ascetic non-buddhists can perform miracles through the application of deliberate intention (作意), they are like stones and tiles (rather than mirrors), which manifest nothing in themselves when confronted with light and shadow. How could this be considered what we presently mean by response? They have not even yet transcended the four dwellings (i.e., the four accounts of causality, the ideas that effects are caused by oneself, by another, by both or by neither) to manifest the still one-sided so-called “true principle” (of Emptiness)—how could they have reached the True Response of the Middle Way? As for the Two Vehicles, who practice the arts of miraculous transformation, what they thereby attain is also not this response we speak of here. Their case is like someone drawing an image, brought to completion through deliberate activity, but not really resembling fully its model. It is different in the Mahāyāna. Obtaining the truth of the Ultimate Reality is like obtaining a bright mirror: one no longer needs to do anything deliberately or with effort, and yet all the material forms in the entire universe are responded to perfectly the instant they are placed in front of it, like a mirror delineating an image, its appearance is always completely the same as the real thing in front of it. [8]
Non-deliberateness, effortlessness, wuwei, is a result of inherent entailment of all three thousand, good and evil, in the nature. Because it is all-inclusive and absolute, it is able to be non-deliberate, non-personal, non-purposive and yet maximally effective, maximally responsive, maximally present. This is the key to the notorious Tiantai doctrine of inherent ineradicable evil in the nature of Buddhahood:
If at the stage of Buddhahood all evil was eliminated, the use of evil manifestations to transform sentient beings would require the deployment of miraculous powers. But then this would mean one could only do evil deeds by making a deliberate effort to do so, like someone painting pictures of various forms—it is then not spontaneous and effortless. Conversely, when a bright mirror, though not moving, allows all the various forms and images to take shape in it naturally and of their own accord, this is like the inconceivable principle’s ability to respond to and with evil. If deliberate effort is made, how is that any different from the non-Buddhists? Thus we now explain that just as the [most evil being like the] Icchantika can give rise to goodness when he encounters good conditions, since his inherent virtues are not destroyed, similarly the Buddha enters the lowest hell and participates in all evil deeds to transform sentient beings when the situation calls for it and as saturated by his own power of compassion, because he does not eliminate his own inherent evil.[9]
Guanyin does not have to try to be compassionate, does not even have to know she is compassionate; she has no will to be compassionate. Rather, it is in her nature, as is the evil that she responds to, and with. To say it is her “nature,” however, really just means she has no nature, her nature is “empty,” which as we saw above means that it is non-dwelling and equally distributed—that is, that it is everywhere and it is confined to no single identity, that it is the omnipresent ambiguity and transformation: it is nothing but the inexhaustible and irresistible process of transformation into all forms everywhere, and this itself, rather than a particular being, much less a purposive ideation or intention, is what may be legitimately called liberating compassion: it the feels the pain of all conditional being because it is all conditional being, and it liberates all conditional being from conditionality because conditionality is itself to be inseparable from all other conditionality, to have a necessary outside, the externality of which is also impossible, and just this is the true unconditionality, the true liberation. Because all things and the response to all things are her nature, and that nature is this inner-outer Three Truths, it is the precise opposite of both mechanical causality and free will theistic miracle. It is “sovereign.” It is spontaneous, but not acausal. We might say “autotelic”—no longer subordinated to a goal external to itself. But more precisely, rather than describing this as the disappearance of the entire construct of ends and means, or else, alternatively, as this thing being its own end, an end in itself, it signifies that the ends and the means are reversible: it is intertelic, each is the means to the other, each is the end of the other. Even more precisely, it is omnitelic. In Tiantai, we must view the meaning of “Center” 中 as meaning “the source of all other dharmas, subordinated to none” and “the goal towards which all other dharmas tend, the ultimate end sought by all their activities, revealed at last.” To see it as Center中 is not just to see it as coming from nowhere, going nowhere, outside the chain of causality—i.e., as “unconditional” in the older Buddhist sense of Nirvana, but to see that unconditionality also cannot be the total exclusion of causality. It is explicitly denied, in the meditational technique as derived from Nagarjuna’s rejection of the four alternatives, that anything arises “from itself, from something else, from both itself and another, or from nothing at all.” The claim here is not that it arises from nothing at all, then—not that it just springs spontaneously into existence for no reason, free-floating, a burst of miracle. Rather, it redefines miracle to include causality—redefines unconditionality to include conditionality. How? The alternative is not between “no causality” and “one unique chain of causality” but between “one unique chain of causality” and “all possible chains of causality”—unconditionality is actually omniconditionality. The key lies in the change from Two Truths to Three Truths. In Two Truths theory, conventional truth (and upāya) is a raft used to get beyond rafts. It ability to lead beyond itself is the criterion of its validity. In Three Truths theory, conventional truth is the only kind of truth-content there is. All truths are conventional truths (even Emptiness and the Middle are also conventional truths). But, vice versa, conventional truths are now seen to have the property of also being Empty and the Middle. That is, they still lead beyond themselves, but they themselves are this beyond. How? Each truth—each content, each proposition, each percept—is still a raft. But the raft does not lead beyond rafts—there is no such beyond. Rather it leads to all other rafts. It leads to the raft factory from which all rafts are made (Emptiness, the Middle) and the infinite rafts, including back to itself, that are produced therefrom. The raft factory, in fact, floats on every raft; to be a raft is to be equipped to transcend itself and create other rafts. The raft of conditionality leads not to the “other shore” of unconditionality, but to the “raft factory” of the Lotus Sutra, the creation of infinite rafts. This has an analogue in that Sutra and its huge jumps in causality, or in the final stage in Zhiyi’s descriptions of various meditation regimes, where any cause can lead to any effect—because any cause can always be further contextualized by some further factor that will retrospectively change or extend its effect (set-up/punchline). That is, the liberation from subordination of means to end, or present to future, is found not in the isolation of all moments (or entities), but of the end of one-way subordination. The overcoming of subsumption is not fragmentation into atomistic momentariness, but intersubsumption of all moments as eternities, each consisting of all other moments.
Applying this to the present case, we can see that accepting any one of these rafts leads to all the other rafts. In other words, to fully see that Guanyin is just a figment of my imagination, or a cultural construct, is what leads me to seeing that Guanyin is an ultimate independent reality, and both, and neither. Similarly, regarding Guanyin as an existing deity is the way to get to see that she exists only in my own mind, as my fantasy. The omnidirectionality of all rafts to all rafts is the epistemological basis of certainty of the reality of Guanyin: if I can conceive of Guanyin, imagine Guanyin, fantasize about Guanyin, in the mode of “not-me” and “not-present” and “not-real,” it is just that fantasy, viewed the other way around, which is Guanyin’s real presence and real compassion. Yearning for a compassionate omnipresent hearer of my cries is, if I remove the categories of “dwelling” and “non-equality” that limit my understanding of this experience of yearning, the compassionate omnipresent transforming hearer of my cries. For the distinction between “real” and “imagined,” like the distinction between “giver” and “receiver” or “eliciter” and “responder,” is a kind of “dwelling” and “non-equality” applied to an experienced mentation: it confines our view of it to one side rather than another, to one narrative sequence rather than another, to one modal format rather than another. My feeling of yearning can be interpreted equally validly as 1) my own feeling of Guanyin’s absence, 2) Guanyin’s active presence impacting me with the thought of Guanyin as a way of manifesting her exact characteristics in my experience precisely in searching for and failing to find them, 3) both and 4) neither. To have the thought, “May all beings be happy,” as Buddhists do in the Loving-kindness (Metta) meditations of the Four Brahmavihārās, is to make it be true that there are beings in the universe who have the thought, “May all beings be happy.” To take the Bodhisattva vow, saying, “I will exert myself for as many billion years as it takes to make sure that I will have the ability to be present to all sentient beings in distress, and transform myself and my teachings into just such a form as will allow their suffering and delusion to be dispelled,” is to make it the case that there are beings in the universe who take that vow. Is the one sending out that vibe of indefatiguable compassion me, or is it another? Are its recipients me, or all other beings? In the first instance, I am the sender, not the receiver, of that compassion. But as we have just seen, this cannot stand as a hard-and-fast distinction. If I am really perceiving the non-dwelling and equally-distributing character of the mentation of this vow, I must include myself also in the receivers, and others also in the senders. Hence by vowing to envelop all beings in my compassion, I find myself enveloped in the salvific compassion of these heroes of Buddhism, the great bodhisattvas, filling the universe. In the Lotus Sutra’s story of the lost son, the riches I was counting, thinking they belonged to another, are revealed to have belonged to me all along: those miraculous descriptions of the bodhisattvas in other Mahayana sutras were actually describing me, who am a bodhisattva without having realized it. Entailed in this, on the Tiantai reading, is the reverse as well: my small endeavor to be compassionate belongs to others as well, is the activity of the bodhisattvas bestowing their compassion also on me. In the present case, a further step is taken: here I am not offering compassion, but yearning for it: I am suffering. But the same reversibility that applies to self and other in the case of bestowing and receiving compassion also applies to the modes of wanting and receiving in the case of the receiver: his wanting is his receiving, the two cannot be definitively separated, even in thought, each being a one-sided description of a total experienced datum that includes both an awareness of the desire and of the desired compassion, present to awareness at the very least in the mode of “not-present.” It is again this non-dwelling and equal-distribution, omnipresence and ambiguity, that guarantee that whatever happens to me will be the asked-for compassionate response: at the very least, receiving the response to my yearning in the form of the third siddhanta, the 對治 or “remedial”: not getting what I want is also a way of getting what I asked for, a liberating response, a datum in which compassion can be read, an undermining of an attachment. Anything at all that happens has the nature of necessarily being readable as Guanyin’s compassionate liberating response to my suffering.
Perhaps someone will respond to this: “But this is madness! An outrage to common sense! A manual in wishful-thinking! An invitation to schizophrenia! The all-important lines between fantasy and reality fatally blurred! Not to mention meaningless: incapable of disconfirmation!” We are hoping to undermine not the observations that lie behind these complaints, but the assumptions about what is desirable and possible that underlie them—and we surely cannot take even a single step into Buddhist thought, and Tiantai thought all the more so, without being willing to suspend our unquestioned faith in precisely these assumed premises about common sense and wishful thinking and madness and sanity and fantasy and reality and true versus false. A remark of Bertrand Russell’s that I have quoted before in a similar context again comes to mind here: “From a scientific point of view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes. Each is in an abnormal physical condition, and therefore has abnormal perceptions.” As before, I suggest we replace the contentious word “abnormal” with the more neutral “unusual,” and replace the causative “therefore” with a merely correlative “concomitantly.” With those adjustments, we may adopt a similar statement about Guanyin, but without the dismissive implications of Russell’s remark. We become aware of Guanyin due to causes and conditions—including the unusual state of our body in severe ritual practices, in states of stress and deprivation, in extreme distress or exhaustion or discouragement. Like anything else, Guanyin is the product of causes and conditions, and the same is true of any particular manifestation of her. But to be conditional in this way, says Tiantai, is to be provisionally posited. To be provisionally posited is to be Empty. To be empty is to be the Middle Way. To be the Middle Way is to be Non-dwelling and present equally everywhere. Guanyin is entirely an illusion, like all of us, and just this is what makes her activity so efficaciously upayic and salvific. Guanyin now appears before me as my coffee cup. My coffee cup can also appear to me as Guanyin. “Guanyin” signifies the experience of the equality and non-dwelling of my coffee cup and all other phenomena, hence my coffee cup’s presence in all things, including Guanyin, and Guanyin’s presence in all things, including my coffee cub. All I have to do is think of Guanyin—to say the name Guanyin–to put my coffee cup into the context of connections which reveal both of these at once—and precisely that is Guanyin’s salvific response. This is Guanyin in the Tiantai reading: fully a fantasy, fully a reality.
Just This is Divinity: There Are Gods but There Is No God
But this is the really important point of all this, the crucial contrast between “atheistic” polytheism and both monotheism and “monotheist” polytheism. Mahāyāna Buddhism is an atheistic polytheism in that the personal element is always multiple, and rests on a deeper principle which is impersonal. It seems to me that among Hindu theologies we find both atheistic polytheisms (Samkhya, Mimansa, Advaita Vedanta, etc.) and monotheist polytheisms, the latter being systems where a single ultimate principle that is itself to some extent personal, purposive, intelligent, mental, and deliberately creative in something like the sense of Noûs, nevertheless can manifest Godself in many different personal forms, all of whom are avatars of Godself. The Abrahamic religions are here monotheisms full stop, with some complications for the Christian trinity and Jewish Kabbalah and the like. But the Mahāyāna case, particularly in its Tiantai form, gives us the clearest understanding of why this matters at all, i.e., where the immense religious benefits of this kind of polytheism lie.
For in the above I have been speaking about one bodhisattva: Guanyin, i.e., Avalokiteśvara, who is (as the name suggests) a very clear stand-in for the Big-Other overseer of the world (Iśvara): essentially Avalokitśvera is the Mahāyāna’s candidate to fill the position of big G God. But in the Tiantai universe, which is the standard Mahāyāna universe, simply by virtue of the power of raw infinity, there are literally an incalculable number of bodhisattvas, each of whom has his own distinctive history, vow, orientation, areas of special concern. This means there is every imaginable type of deity out there, and all of them are in their own ways identical to Buddhahood and identical to all other sentient beings. The meaning of this in the Tiantai metaphysical view is that there are an infinite number of different value systems in the universe, and that all of them are deifiable. Any orientation, any obsession, any point of view, if fully realized, expanded into all-inclusive unconditionality, is also divinity, Buddhahood, salvation. There is a bodhisattva for every single orientation: that is, there is someone who has done the work of realizing the inherent Buddhahood of precisely that set of desires (for value-orientations are nothing but sets of arbitrary one-sided conditional desires). There are these infinite alternate conduits of ultimate value; more precisely, not only are there are infinite alternate ways of assigning value to things, but each one of these is the ultimate, God’s-eye judgment of what is ultimately valuable. Now from the point of view of the devotee, the practitioner, the ordinary being in delusion, that means that there is somewhere out there at least one bodhisattva who totally gets me, in the sense of sharing my innermost, most perverse and idiosyncratic value orientation. As Zhuangzi had pointed out, there is some imaginable point of view from which any and every action, cognition, or person, is right. The Tiantai bodhisattvas are embodiments of these infinite points of view, and the religious task is to connect with the bodhisattva from whose point of view your own peculiar form of delusion, obsession, blindness, greed, anger, foolishness, has been realized as the conduit to its own universalization, the unique form of his or her vow and realization of identity with unconditionality, with Buddhahood. Here we have a thoroughgoing realization of Nietzsche’s sought-after “innocence of becoming,” for here every action and thought and deed really is ultimately innocent, pure, even salvific if looked at in the right way. The trick is finding this “right way.” The religious faith of a Tiantai Buddhist is that there is some being in the universe who has lived the specific self-made nightmare that is my own plight, and has made good on it, has found the contextualization that allows its inherent Buddhahood to shine forth, and that this being has vowed to connect to other sentient beings in the universe suffering from a similar set of values, i.e., set of delusions, and to respond to their special needs by helping them contextualize this in a way that will again open up its eternal Buddhahood, will show that this folly has itself always already been Buddhahood. My good faith is ultimate and unimpeachable: I am being what I am being. Even though that inevitably goes wrong and hurts everybody, including me, that does not mean it has to be abandoned and replaced with someone else’s values, i.e., someone else’s folly, someone else’s obsessions and one-sidedness—whether that someone else is a Buddha, or the Lord God, or a wise man, or an ethicist, or a jurist representing society. The divine has no values! That is atheism! But that means all values are equally divine—if we can find the way to divinize them—and that is the challenge, the sole religious task! Hence Nietzsche: “Just this is divinity, that there are gods but no God.” Any deity that does not share my bottomline values—my stubbornest nonnegotiable unjustifiable obsessions and follies, that is—is one I can disregard. The only deities relevant to my religious task are those that really love and respect me, identify with me, because they have lived what I have lived, my precise folly and evil, and thus truly understand it from the inside. They have also lived out its full realization and revelation as Buddhahood. All things can be divine, all follies and all values are roads to divinity: the polytheist Buddhist finds and relates himself to the deity who has divinized precisely his own folly. This is why atheism matters and why atheist mysticism matters even more. If the ultimate principle is personal and/or purposive, there is one privileged set of values, one particular folly to which all other forms of folly must be subordinated, or which must even judge or replace all other forms of values/follies. But secular atheism leaves all these values undivinized, a war of all against all where indeed all values are wrong, because all fail to accord with the real truth, the valuelessness of the ultimate principle, of the impersonal material or otherwise person-transcendent source. Atheist mysticism, however, allows an infinity of alternate values, but all of which are ultimate and ultimately true, all of which are pathways to divinity, and not just pathways, not just ladders to be cast aside when divinity is reached, not just rafts to be abandoned on the other shore, but in keeping with the Tiantai identity of means and end, themselves are what is found at the end of those pathways: every set of fool values is itself the content of Buddhahood, and there is a Buddha-bodhisattva who has lived that realization, and dwells forever in the universe to help out others, like yourself, with analogous obsessions. As the Bodhisattva Never Disparage says in Chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra, “You do not need to change your course: you are practicing the bodhisattva way, and you will be a Buddha.”
Theists have the lovely comfort and the great bulwark of individuality of saying, “Well, everyone might think I’m wrong, all of society might condemn me, no one understands my passion and my plight—but God knows my heart.” This is a fantastic contribution to the world which is lost forever by secularism. But in monotheism this comes with too high a price: for in finding one’s independence from all worldly values, one has sold oneself out to God’s values. No one can judge me—except God. That looks like a gain in autonomy and individuality, but in the long run is a loss. It is borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, no pun intended. For I am always still in danger of being condemned by God, and I must twist my own individual values to make it seem—above all to myself—that my defiance of society is in the name of some “holy” values that in some way accord with what revelation tells me God wants. There’s another problem, a big one. You don’t understand me—I’m really doing this for God, and my values are God’s values. The corollary of course is that your values, since you oppose me, are the devil’s values, or the world’s values, the unholy world: “He who is not for me is against me” (Matthew/Mark). So for this gain in individual autonomy, I must also become 1) a hypocrite and 2) a bigot—the twin curses of monotheism. I must deceive myself about what I really want, or else subject myself to an endless cycle of self-condemnations, temptations and repentances, and I also must vilify all the values of all the people who do not get me and do not approve of me.
Polytheist mysticism of the atheist Tiantai kind gives the real satisfaction of this impulse while circumventing the price. Indeed, no one knows me, no one understands me, everyone condemns me, everyone hates me, my parents disown me, my children despise me, my colleagues revile me, the whole of society is up in arms and calling for my destruction–while there is one supernatural being who alone knows my real value, who understands my innocence and my good intentions within the distorted shell of my obsessions, that my violence and selfishness are themselves my own twisted forms of love and compassion. This deity knows it because he shares it, ineradicably: it is exactly what he went through, and it ended up being repurposable by him to become a cause of his own accomplished Buddhahood, and this deluded cause remains forever inherently included and functional in his presently accomplished Buddhahood. This Buddhahood is manifest as his bodhisattvahood, but which is specifically the bodhisattvahood of this particular form of delusion. Part of what is realized in this, of course, is that the same applies to everyone else’s delusions, so I am freed of the necessity to be a bigot or to conclude that all who oppose me or misunderstand me are of the devil’s party: no, they too are right from some angle, and there exists a bodhisattva who sees them that way, and will help guide them on that path to Buddhahood. Nor do I need to divide against myself or tell myself my values are really those set forth in the holy books: no, my values are just what they appear to be, these specific obsessions and perversions and selfishnesses and deluded distortions and stubborn fixed ideas and prejudices. But precisely those are exactly the divine values as realized by that specific bodhisattva who is my only friend in the universe, a bodhisattva who is also his own prospective Buddhahood as I am also both.
This claim that Buddhahood is always inherent and ineradicable also in any kind of delusion and evil is of course the mutually entailing flip side to the opposite claim that evil is always inherent and ineradicable in Budhahodd–the famous Tiantai idea of “inherent ineradicable evil even in Buddhahood.” This idea of inherent evil developed in Zhiyi’s treatment of the nature of the bodhisattva’s responses to deluded sentient beings had enormous effects on the Tiantai view of the experience of undesired states—a key atheist mystical issue, as we have seen in Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bataille above. We may pause here to survey where Tiantai lands on this crucial question.
- Early Buddhism regarded the ending of the three poisons—greed, hatred, and delusion—as liberation. But according to Zhiyi, a bodhisattva has not less of these than the ordinary person, but infinitely more: what he calls “great greed,” “great hatred,” and “great delusion.” Great greed is the insatiable desire, the implacable vow, to live all possible lives, to suffer all possible states, to take to oneself all possible beings, to learn infinite modes of practice and teaching. Great hatred is not just the denial or rejection of some things, but the resolute vow to annihilate all things—that is, to negate the reality of every possible entity without exception, to fully realize the absolute emptiness of every entity; not only every ordinary state and being, but even of emptiness itself must be shown to be empty, to be nothing real; even Buddhahood and nirvana must be exposed as nothing but empty names—a destructive rage that negates any positive datum, denies self-nature and subsistence to all. Great delusion is not just ignorance about some things, but a deep apprehension of the unknowability of all things, that any conceptualization of reality fails, that all things are beyond thought. The problem was not greed, but the partiality of greed: greed applied universally is its own overcoming. The problem was not hatred, but the partiality of hatred; hatred applied universally is its own overcoming. Partial greed is different, indeed opposite to, partial hatred: greed is a desire to establish and possess something, while hatred is a desire to demolish and get away from something. But hatred universalized reveals itself to be indistinguishable from universal greed, and the greed universalized reveals itself to be indistinguishable from universal hatred. The indistinguishability of the two opposites, greed and hatred, reveals their inconceivability, and the same applies to all things—thus revealing the great ignorance.[10]
- Tiantai propounds the idea of ineradicable inherent entailment of all states and qualities, including even evil ones, in any state or quality, including even Buddhahood. All things are causes and effects of each other, nothing is eradicable, all things are essential to the being of all other things, all relations are both external and internal, because externality itself is internal. Since the existence of each thing necessarily depends on other things, otherness is internal to the constitution of each thing, and impossible to exclude from any identity. But if “otherness” per se is necessary for the establishment of any entity, even the new entity constituted by the original entity and the finite set of othernesses immediately required for its existence, thence considered internal to it, must have a further otherness to exist. The entity identified as A turns out to requires some specific otherness, B, to exist as A at all. But this means B pertains to its essence, which means that what we were calling entity A is really A+B. But this new entity A+B requires otherness too: it is really A+B+C. And so ad infinitum. Each otherness newly considered internal to the entity will require still further othernesses, legitimately viewed alternately as internal to or external to the original entity. There is no non-arbitrary stopping place for this proliferation of inside-outsides: it is in this sense that each thing is all things. Hence each thing is both internal to and external to every other thing, and in this sense on the one hand maintains its distinctive difference from all other things and on the other hand pervades all times and places, is absolute, can never be definitively eradicated. This includes all evils, greed, hatred, and delusions of all kinds, which are not only expanded practically as part of bodhisattvahood but are even essential to, and ineradicable from, Buddhahood. The same applies to bodhisattvahood and Buddhahood themselves, ostensibly a mutually external pair of cause (bodhisattva practice) and effect (resulting realization of Buddhahood). In fact, Buddhahood is nothing but eternal bodhisattvahood that recognizes this very inescapable inherent mutual entailment of the two, that being a bodhisattva both is and is not already being a Buddha.[11]
- With this we are poised for a completely reconfigured relation to desire and will, which means a rethink of the entire Buddhist program of ending attachment to desire. For now the goal of overcoming desire cannot be done by simply eliminating desire, which on these premises is impossible; like any other putative entity, real or imagined, desire—even my specific desire right now–is inherently included in all things, ineradicable from every other thing. It can thus only be by willing all things, desiring all things equally, desire made universal and exceptionless, the Great Greed, that attachment to desire is overcome: desire is seen thereby to always already be not-desire, to be indistinguishable from Great Hatred and Great Ignorance. But as biased conditional things we cannot will all things equally simply by fiat: even our aspiration to do so is a biased desire for one state (“Great Greed”) over any other. Willing is after all a kind of imbalance of cathexis, an investing of more energy and attention here than there. It is the opposite of an even distribution of attention, requiring some sort of wall of tension to prevent free-flow evenly in the totality of awareness: some thing must be focused on and obsessed over, while other things are neglected. To desire nothing means equilibrium, evenness of distribution; but to desire everything equally also means evenness of distribution. Perfectly even distribution of energy and attention, however, is impossible, or rather is literally death. To be alive is to be a partial, finite, contingent being, always off-balance, always preferring one thing to another. Instead of a static evenness, then, what we have here is flow, unobstructed non-dwelling and promiscuous transmission in unpredictable directions: at any given moment, one thing is singled out, but that one thing is always in the process of becoming more, becoming less, becoming other. We are always willing, we cannot help willing, but willing any one thing also brings with it the moreness, the rest, the inescapable otherness that it entails.
What we need, then, is a way to will all things by willing one thing. This is just what the above points make possible. The previous point stipulates that each thing inherently includes, and is ultimately identical to, all other things. But also included in each thing being itself is the ignorance of sentient beings that see it as “this” and nothing besides, to the exclusion of all other things, and this deluded-view-of-it too is essential to the being of this thing-which-is-all-things (i.e., this limiting deluded-view-upon-it is another of the “all things” that is inherently included in its own being). In the Lotus, bodhisattvahood is sometimes accomplished by willing its opposite, nirvana—by willing the end of willing. The parable is told there of a group of climbers seeking a treasure; they grow weary and want to turn back, so their guide conjures an apparitional pleasure-city ahead of them. This lures them forward. But each step toward that illusion is actually also a step toward the treasure that is situated far beyond the illusory city. It is only by not knowing that they are heading toward the treasure that they are able to move toward it. Each step is consciously willing one thing—the pleasure city—but actually also, thereby, accomplishing the journey toward something else—the treasure, here denoting the accomplished state of interpervasion of all things.[12] In the sutra these arhats who learn that they have really been bodhisattvas all along, that they have been practicing the bodhisattva-path, unbeknownst to themselves, precisely by denying it and trying to be arhats, declare: “We attained it without seeking it.”[13] But this means that we did not, as is usually believed, attain what we willed by means of willing it. But nor did we, as in early Buddhism, attain what we really wanted by willing nothing, by putting an end to all willing. It means instead we attained X by willing Y.
It is here that we can perhaps pause to relate this motif more closely to some of the mystical atheist thinkers addressed in the body of this book—in particular, to Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence. The conjunction of the global purposelessness with emergent multiplicity of purposes that express it and complete it can be found also in Spinoza and Hegel. On some readings, we can also find there an absolute affirmation of the infinite not only in each and every thing, but also in each and every purpose—and not because any of them are uniquely the purpose of the universe as a whole, the will of God, but precisely because none of them is. But these are somewhat esoteric readings of Spinoza and Hegel. There is perhaps a more immediate analogy here to the Nietzschean approach to this problem in the idea of the Eternal Recurrence. In both the Tiantai and Nietzschean cases, we have an attempt to remedy a certain kind of purposivity, and a certain relation to time: that is, the subordination of the present to the future, the present used as a means to attain a future goal, a purpose, or the displacement of value in an otherness, a future, standing over against every present, and with it the unchangeability of the past. In both cases this is seen as something structurally necessary and irresolvable, given the ordinary relation to time: the relation of will and desire. In both cases, too, the obvious first stab at a solution to this—the attempt to make each moment autotelic, a value in itself, freed from subordination to a future, is quickly seen to be impossible: to be free of (future) goals, to live in the moment, to transcend willing, is itself a goal, requiring another moment, and a willing therefore of the future. So both have a deep and abiding insight into the double-bind of will and will-lessness. This already puts them rather close together in orientation, when contrasted to alternate responses to this problem. More usually, when this double-bind involving future goals and past unchangeableness is recognized, and the obvious solution—to make each present moment its own goal, and seek nothing besides—is seen to be structurally self-contradictory, we have the self-consciously impossible attempt to regain the sovereignty of the present pursued down new and often brilliantly convoluted paths of self-reference and self-laceration—itself possibly also fruitful in its own way. But this also inevitably makes “sovereign moments” (Bataille) or “enlightenment experiences” (Zen) into goals to be pursued in the future. This paradox itself can be made use of, and that is where the subtlety and artfulness of these traditions tend to lie. Another approach (Simmel, Heidegger, Sartre) is to simply accept the desiring, future-projecting, self-transcending structure of time and consciousness as unavoidable, thus abandoning the notion of autotelic moments as inauthentic or illusory, and working from there to create an alternate ideal. But the cases of Zarathustra and Tiantai go in another direction Both offer a solution to the dichotomy of will and will-lessness in the idea of “willing all,” based on two insights: (1) the strict structural equivalence of “willing all” and “willing none,” inasmuch as “will” per se implies a preference of one object over another and is thus constitutively “willing non-all”; and (2) the concomitant impossibility of “willing all” unless we can somehow will all by willing some one thing. In Nietzsche, as I read him, this means the apprehension of a single joy or beauty, a great noontide, that is deep enough to affirm the willing of all the pasts and futures which are causally interlocked with it in the Eternal Recurrence. Knowing this doctrine, it would seem, allows one to will backward in the depth of a moment of joy to affirm one’s entire being, and the eternity of all things, with all one’s will. In the Tiantai case, we have rather a case of “willing whatever you are already willing”—not a decision to will, but a predisposition to the liking of something. The great Song dynasty Tiantai thinker Siming Zhili said, when challenged about his intention to satisfy his persistent and unjustifiable desire to set himself physically on fire, that he had no reason for this particular obsession other than that the thought kept occurring to him. He therefore supposed it “must be a vow I had taken in a former life, eh?” and straightaway set about pursuing this desire as his main mode of Buddhist practice. The reference to past karma was here invoked not as a justifying ground of the rationality or wholesomeness of the proposed deed (which Zhili admits elsewhere in the same correspondence to indeed be a result of, as his interlocutor charges, “a demonic teaching”), but rather precisely as an instance of inescapable delusion that was nonetheless incumbent upon him personally to honor and obey. Zhili explained, “Whatever happens to please you is what is appropriate to you, and it is by cultivating that one thing that you will be enlightened.” suilesuiyi suixiusuiwu隨樂隨宜隨修隨悟[14] Desire is here arbitrary, ungroundable, specific, a brute datum about which we can only surmise an unknowable unconscious prior cause, which in Buddhist mythological terms means that somewhere in my infinite past lives I must have decided, for some reason I now neither know nor have to know, that this was what I would vow to do: in plain English, I happen to like X, not Y. My present strange desire to do it is the sole criterion allowing me to judge it as a manifestation of my forgotten prior vow, and this is sufficient to justify it as my specific mode of practice. But recontextualizing this will with the further knowledge that I am always doing more than I know, and willing more than I know, that otherness leaks into both the subject and object of every act of willing, I find that in willing this one thing and denying all others, I end up also affirming all others: as I accomplish my will, I find that, just as pessimistic early Buddhism promised, it isn’t what I wanted. It is, rather, also everything else. I need not know this when I will it: in fact, to will it is to willfully deny explicit knowledge of its nonexclusion of what I don’t presently want. The Lotus propounds a necessary rhythm of nonknowing and knowing: I must not-know what I’m doing for awhile, and only then can I realize what it was I was formerly unknowingly doing and willing. Is this functionally the same as Zarathustra’s drunken song’s desire for graves and despair and failure? I ask this question in particular with respect to the status of knowledge in both cases: Does Zarathustrian joy that wills with all its will have to know about the Eternal Recurrence? Or does it need also to sometimes forget? There seem to me to be some basis for both readings in Nietzsche’s texts. We may think here of the second Untimely Meditation, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” which puts the necessity of forgetting front and center to its revaluation of the historical consciousness, but even more crucially, we might want to ponder again the third of the three “Transformations of the Spirit” delineated in Zarathustra’s very first discourse: from a camel to a lion to a child. The final stage, the new beginning, the source of yea-saying and absolute affirmation, is that of the child, which is explicitly described as a “forgetting, a beginning anew, a play, a self-propelling-wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yea-saying.” The camel wants the heaviest burden, says an obedient yes to accepted values and the duties they impose; the lion speaks a destructive “nay” to all that has existed, the holiest as well as the lowliest of values and wills on earth. But the child stands for neither an acceptance nor a rejection, neither a preservation nor a destruction of the putative values of the received world, of the contravening willings of tradition, of history, or even, we may say, given Nietzsche’s occasional forays into a mythical cosmology of the will, the entire existent world, both natural and cultural, as an ocean of conflicting wills. Rather, the child is a forgetting, and forgetting is presented here as coextensive with the highest form of affirmation: the creative will. This consideration perhaps provides us with a vantage point from which to reconsider the question of creativity itself in Buddhist tradition, in particular in Tiantai, under the aegis of the notion of upāya (“skillful means,” including both various teachings and various transformations of oneself, created by a bodhisattva to communicate with and liberate sentient beings), upāya as a function not only of knowing exactly what one is doing, as in the majority of normative Mahāyāna presentations of the concept, but with the distinctive Tiantai twist: upāya as a responsiveness to and transformation of the preexisting world, both cultural and natural, which derives its effectiveness precisely from not quite knowing what one is doing.
Intersubsumption of Purpose and Purposelessness, Theist and Atheist Versions: Hegel and Tiantai
I promised way back in Part One to supplement the fourfold list of positions with respect to the world’s purpose or lack thereof and our own (i.e., Emulative Theist, Emulative Atheist, Compensatory Theist and Compensatory Theist) with two more, more intricate categories: Emulative Intersubsumptive Theism and Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism. We are now in a position to do so.
Emulative Intersubsumptive Theism is what we find in some interpretations of Hegelian theology, in particular of the Hegelian interpretation of the Christian Trinity. On this view, what is ultimate is Spirit, which is both Substance and Subject—or more strictly, is that whose substance is its subjectivity and whose subjectivity is its substantiality. “Subjectivity” here means a rethinking of Noûs in terms of Fichte’s notion of “self-positing,” which itself can be most thoroughly understood by tracking it back to Kant’s Practical Philosophy in the Critique of Practical Reason, but which for now we can briefly indicate by an easily-grasped reference to its more distant roots in Descartes’s Meditations. Descartes proposes to doubt everything without exception that is in any way dubious, anything that can be doubted. This ability to doubt is the activity of subjectivity: it steps beyond any given content and puts it into question, relating it to other contents, including possible entities and possible future disconfirmations. There is no content to which this cannot be done, and thus there would seem to be no possibility for certainty about any particular facts. Subjectivity undermines and dislodges all determinate content—indeed, it is this activity of undermining and dislodging, connecting and disconnecting and reconnecting various actualities and possibilities. But then Descartes notices that there is one thing he is literally unable to doubt: this activity of doubting itself. For to doubt that would only further instantiate it. It literally cannot be lacking, since it manifests even in, as, its own negation. “Cogito ergo sum” really means “dubito ergo sum.” Subjectivity undermines all “substantiality”—ultimate and undoubtable determinations that can in principle be known with absolute certainty, independent of any further confirmation or disconfirmation—but this activity itself then steps forward as what alone is substantial, certain. And it is from here that, for Descartes, it can begin to rebuild certainties, rooted in the certainty of the activity of doubting—of uncertainty—itself.
The German idealists I have in mind here do not follow Descartes very far through the further steps of his derivations of certainty from this starting point, but this notion of substance-as-subject, negativity-as-content-rejecting-and-content-generating-certainty, continues to inform Hegel’s notion of the Absolute as Spirit. God is Spirit in this specific sense, and the purposivity of primal Noûs inherited from the Greco-Christian traditions must here also be understood in this way, with “purpose” integrated into this picture with some help from the analysis of subjectivity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (i.e., the derivation of this self-positing-as-self-negation from the transcendental unity of apperception) and its application to the question of purposivity (i.e., purpose as the generation of content through concepts, which are rules for unifying particulars rooted in that same transcendental unity of apperception) in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as we’ve addressed above. But because Spirit just is its own self-positing self-certainty through self-negation, since it is precisely the undermining of self that remains itself in becoming other to itself (as doubt remains doubt all the more precisely in doubting any possible content it might give to itself, including itself considered as a content), this Spirit is no longer simply other to the world, and to humankind, as is usually understood to follow from the creator-created relationship in classical theism. The world too, and man in particular, are also really Spirit in essence. Spirit is the certainty at first merely felt in its indubitability as doubt, as pure abstract subjectivity: that which is certain in its negation, negative in its certainty. It is substance as subject, subject as substance. All its activity is a way of making good on this fundamental self-certainty of positing itself in its own negation, negating itself in its own positing. When man realizes that his own mind is Spirit in just this sense, having gone through every lesser “other” and “opposite” and finding himself present in it precisely through his negation of it, he finally reaches the standpoint where he can look to his most forbidding “other,” God, infinite spirit as such, as his own self-posited essence, persisting in its very negation: the created non-God world, including the created non-God human being. Here the relationship to the other becomes reciprocal in the most thoroughgoing way. Because it is after all Spirit, even finite Spirit sees itself in its utmost opposite, which is infinity. Because it is Spirit, infinite Spirit sees itself in its utmost opposite, which is finitude. When God looks to man, he sees his own self-posited essence, persisting in its very negation. Man is like God in seeing himself in his other, in what is unlike him. God is like man in seeing himself in the unlikeness of Himself in Man. Man thinking of God is God thinking of Man. And it is this that Hegel sees figured in the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity, speculatively understood. Spirit is thinking, understood in this precise sense. When I think of thinking, thinking also thinks of me thinking of thinking. For Hegel, this is the real meaning of Aristotle’s “thinking thinking thinking.”
Purpose is here understood not in the usual sense that attaches to Noûs in the traditional account of divine design, i.e., the prior embrace of a desired determinate content in idea, which then acts as the cause of the production of an isomorphic reality. Purpose instead becomes a name for the very essence of thinking in its new meaning (though Hegel will claim that this is what Noûs meant all along, implicitly): doubt as certainty, subject as substance, negativity as content-production. In online appendix A, supplement 11, “Europe’s Missed Exit,” we have already explored this idea of purpose in some detail, and how far it departs from our everyday meaning of purposive activity. Here we can note that, if Spirit is purposive in this sense that involves unification with its opposite, it is so precisely through its relation to purposelessness, its own proper opposite: it involves an indivisible unity of purpose and purposeless, and that this is found on both sides of the human/absolute relation. But something funny happens here. In Schelling’s early version of this idea (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), both God and man are this spiritual activity as a unity of purposive and purposeless: Nature’s apparent purposelessness is taken up into God’s purposive-purposeless unity, and man’s activity reaches the same purposive-purposeless unity in the activity of artistic genius. Both purpose and purposelessness must be found on both sides of that relation: it is a kind of activity that is not purposive as a craftsman is purposive, with a clear prior idea of his goal, but as an artist is intentional without ever quite knowing what he’s doing. We can no longer think either “God is purposeful to the exclusion of purposelessness, therefore man should also try to be as purposeful as possible” (Emulative Theism), nor “God is purposeful, therefore man should relinquish his own purposivity” (Compensatory Theism), nor indeed “God/World is purposeless, so man must establish purpose” (Compensatory Atheism) nor “Dao is purposeless, so man should also be purposeless” (Emulative Atheism). For Schelling at this time, God is the artistic genius of nature, whose works proceed by means of the simultaneous-purposelessness-and-purposivity of a genius: not acting randomly, always driven by a strong sense of purpose, but like a great artist also unable to clearly articulate even to himself what he’s doing, never able to be quite sure in advance what he’s driving at. God does not know everything, even about himself, even about his own will. This is the full convergence of consciousness and unconsciousness, of purposive spirit and blind nature, and man should strive to be as much like that as possible (hence we have a modified Intersubsumptive Emulative Theism/Atheism).
But in the mature Hegel, from 1807’s Phenomenology of Spirit onward, this picture has changed in a small but decisive way. Now the goal is to reach a position where man’s relation to Nature and to his own creative activity is always to be priorly mediated by the relation to God, in whom the unification with purposelessness has already taken place such that it is already known to have been sublated. There is no legitimate place left for a direct relationship with either man’s own purposeless aspects or the purposeless aspects of nature— just as in classical theism, all are known as simply indirect expressions of the divine purpose (even though purpose here is no longer “external purpose” as in traditional theism). Purpose seems to have regained the upper hand here. The religious implication of the final Hegelian position was well-expressed by a young David Strauss in 1835, before he had crossed over from a “Right Hegelian” to become the first “Left Hegelian”: “
When it is said of God that he is [Spirit, Geist], and of man that he also is [Spirit], it follows that the two are not essentially distinct. [Strauss’s brackets: It is the essential characteristic of Spirit to remain identical to itself in the distinction of itself from itself, that is, to possess itself in its other. Thus to speak more precisely, it is given with the recognition of God as Spirit that God does not remain as a fixed and immutable infinite outside of and above the finite, but enters into it, posits finitude, nature, and human spirit, merely as his alienation of self from which he eternally returns again into unity with himself.] As man, considered as a finite spirit, limited to his finite nature, has no truth; so God, considered exclusively as an infinite spirit, shut up in his infinitude, has no reality. The infinite spirit is real only when it discloses itself in finite spirits; as the finite spirit is true only when it merges itself in the infinite. The true and real existence of spirit, therefore, is neither in God by himself (für sich), nor in man by himself (für sich), but in the God-man; neither in the infinite alone, nor in the finite alone, but in the interchange of impartation and withdrawal between the two, which on the part of God is revelation, on the part of man religion. [15]
If Strauss has correctly characterized the implicit religious position of the mature Hegel, as I think he has, we now must say, not as in early Schelling (and early Hegel), “God is Purposivity without specific Purpose; Man should be (in some sense) that way too—preferably a romantic creative genius,” but rather, “God is Purpose positing but sublating its opposite, purposelessness; Man should see the apparently purposeless aspects of his own experience as an aspect of his own nature as Spirit, i.e., in the intersubsumptive relationship between finite and infinite spirit that is intrinsic to the nature of Spirit as such.” Since we are to relate to Nature both in ourselves and in the world purely through the mediation of its relation to God, we have come back to “Not my Will but Thine be done” as in Compensatory Theism. So we may say that while the early Schelling’s version gives us Emulative Intersubsumptive Theism/Atheism, Hegel’s tilts toward Compensatory Intersubsumptive Theism; in both cases, the demon seed of theism continues to infect the results, even with these enormous revisions to the basic conception of God, no longer a temporally prior creator at the beginning of the world, no longer a self-standing transcendent consciousness, and yet still prioritizing and absolutizing a single purpose for the world. (I am speaking here of the theological application of Hegel’s view within the sphere designated as Religion, wherein speculative truth is still depicted in the “inadequate form” of picture-thinking appropriate to the understanding; to what extent this still applies even to the same view when that inadequate form is surpassed, in thinking of Reason proper to the realm of Philosophy itself, has been taken up in online appendix A, supplement 11, “Europe’s Missed Exit to Atheist Mysticism: Spinoza Introduced by Schelling to Kant in the Mind of Hegel in 1801.”)
In contrast to both Emulative and Compensatory Intersubsumptive Theism, we have Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism: Tiantai Buddhism, which I have addressed in some detail elsewhere. But to provide an orienting point of contrast, I will here give a succinct but relevantly contrasting passage from this tradition, translated a bit expansively so as to avoid too many further technical details:
Begininglessly there has been nothing to you [or any sentient being] but afflictive delusions, self-defeating volitions (i.e., karmic action), and suffering–nothing besides! But all of this is precisely the inextricable and omnipresent Threefold Buddhanature, [i.e., the Three Truths: Emptiness, Provisional Positing, and the Middle which is their Intersubsumption]. When you have not yet aspired to realize it or taken up any practices conducive to doing so, the inextricable practical and cognitive causes of that realization are together called merely “the inextricable nature of all things, as such,” [i.e., considered at first only as the intrinsically omnipresent Three Truths objectively available to be realized, rather than any explicit process of cultivations and cognitions constituting this realization itself, which you will afterwards discover you have also always been engaged in]. This is why we merely say “All sentient beings have the inextricable [Buddha]nature per se [i.e., as objective ‘substance’ to be known, whereas in reality each psycho-physical organism that either knows or doesn’t know it also is the Threefold Buddhanature in its entirety, i.e., the Three Truths, both active and cognizing (i.e., as ‘subject’) as well as object to be cognized.” Once it is accepted that one’s own mind [i.e., one’s delusions and self-defeating volitions and sufferings, which, because determinate, are also Provisional Posits, and thus are also Empty and the Middle, i.e., are the Threefold Buddhanature] “possesses” this inextricable nature, we then show that this nature has no insides or outsides. It thus pervades all space, the same through all Buddhas, equally there through everything in the entire field of possible experience [Dharmadhātu]. Once its omnipresent pervasion is accepted, we show that whatever it pervades is also inextricable from it at every locus. Since it is the same through all Buddhas and equally there through everything in the entire field of possible experience, the bodies of all Buddhas are inextricably present at every locus in this omnipresently pervasive nature, such that one body being given, all beings are then aspects of this body. The same thus goes for the surrounding environment thus brought into being around each of these Buddha-bodies: one environment being given, all things are then aspects of that environment. Thus are the body and its environment identical to one another, i.e., intersubsuming, such that to speak of the body is to speak of its environment. The same goes for the intersubsumption of large and small, or of one and many. Because we possess such a nature, it is said that we have Buddhanature.[16]
It would take some time to unpack all that is going on in this passage. But for the moment we may just say that what is primary in this view of the world, both temporally and logically, is simply deluded volitions and suffering of innumerable conditional sentient beings, going back through endless time, not created for any reason and not endowed with any special divine faculty, just suffering beings blindly flailing around trying to avoid suffering in all sorts of stupid ways. They are as stupid as the universe that produced them, and for this reason their actions have no rhyme or reason, and never work out, always leading to self-perpetuating patterns of suffering. Purpose itself is one of the aspects of this stupidity. It is nothing more than what is here called “volitions”—not a single purpose, and not a wise purpose, but an infinity of conditional and futile desires and intentional actions, which are the very core of this suffering—all rooted in the deluded idea that there is some purpose worth pursuing, i.e., desire. It is the nature of “conditionality” as such (i.e., elaborated in Tiantai thought as the “Three Truths”) which does all the rest of the work, allowing these originary multiple, partial and misguided purposes to be seen as identical to something else. What is that something else? Not a grand purpose, certainly, but something that is perhaps comparable to “realizing the nature of Spirit as self-positing in self-negating.” But here this self-positing-as-self-negating is not simply a conception of Mind cleared of the implication of Noûs and hence of the purposivity associated with Spirit (the kind of mental entity, to be discussed below, that we see in the Chan/Zen Buddhist idea of the pure mind of desireless universal awareness–somewhat similar to the Tibetan Dzogchen idea of rigpa or the Vedantic notion of Brahman as sat-chit-ananda). Rather, it is also cleared of any special association with consciousness or subjectivity as opposed to matter or objectivity. What is it then? Simply the inextricable nature of conditionality, entailing that any conditional being “has neither inside nor outside.” The Tiantai name for this explication of the meaning of conditionality as such is “The Three Truths,” or perhaps better, “The Threefold Truth”: local coherence as global coherence as intersubsumption. This means something similar to the Hegelian reading of the Spinozistic conception of what finitude means: to be finite is to be something whose essence does not involve its own existence, such that its existence depends on something other than what it is, something other than its own essence, on what is essentially other to and outside itself: in Hegelese, that it has its own essence outside itself (as in Spinoza only the Absolute, Substance or God, is self-caused, meaning that its essence is its existence, something for which what it is guarantees that it is—for its essence is simply infinity, which can be conceived of only as existing, just like the Cartesian dubito, which becomes here Thought, one of the attributes of Substance, expressing precisely this essence: infinity). And to be determinate, to be any definite essence whatever, is to be finite: “all determination is negation.” What this means here is, again, that whatever is, is conditional, because to be is to be determinate, which is to be finite, which is to be necessarily conditioned by what is not itself. But this otherness is necessary to its existence, and hence is inextricable from it, is what makes it what it is, is internal to its most basic definition. “To have an outside” is its own internal essence. It essence is to-have-an-other-which-is-mutually-exclusive-with-it-but-which-is-the-necessary-copresent-condition-of-its-existence. That is, its essence is to have a mutually exclusive entity which is also coextensive what makes it count as what it is, i.e., with its own essence, with its ownmost being. Anything regarded as mutually exclusive to X, any and every non-X (whether what precedes or succeeds it temporally, what composes it mereologically, what contrasts to it conceptually, or what is alternative to it in imagination), cannot be said to be either internal or external to it, identical to it or different from it—which is to say, it itself is equally identifiable as X or as non-X. That is the “inextricable nature” of all conditioned, finite, determinate things: to be what they are not, not to be what they are, just by being entirely what it is. This is the “neither inside nor outside” that leads to the evocation of intersubsumption in the passage just quoted.
I realize this will too-brief explication will not be very illuminating without a full exposition of all that is entailed in Tiantai thinking in all its intricate details, which is of course offered elsewhere. But for now I just want to point to the way the relationship between purpose and purposelessness, and the very different relation between deluded sentient beings and enlightened Buddhas, is presented here. Purposes (i.e., desires) are a result of trying to blot out this nature, to make things simply determinate as one thing rather than another—for that is the nature of desire, to prefer one outcome over another, where the two outcomes must be mutually exclusive to have any meaning. Purpose is desire, which is what attempts to disambiguate and clearly divide entities, always doomed to failure precisely because of this nature, because of which nothing can really be simply “inside” or simply “outside” any proposed boundary. This is precisely why all desire is deluded, and precisely why it is always inevitably doomed to failure and frustration, why all deluded desiring finite existence is suffering, why all purposes, qua purpose, are themselves causes and effects of suffering.
The realization of this nature means seeing that any particular entity itself—even my own moment of suffering or deluded desire—is always already also outside itself as something other, uncontainable in any delimitable conceptual space or essence. Because my delusion pervades all its othernesses, it also pervades the realm of another specific entity—a Buddha, who is someone who simply the idea (real or imagined) of someone who has realized just this uncontainability and lives it. Here too, as in the above account of the God/man relationship in Hegel, Buddhas overflow into sentient beings, and sentient beings into Buddhas, precisely because of their shared nature. But this shared nature here is not “Spirit” but simply conditionality itself, which is to say, finitude, determinacy itself. “Infinite-qua-finite, finite-qua-infinite” is shown to be the nature of finitude as such, and of infinity as something definite, distinct from finitude as well. The same point is made by Hegel, in slightly different terms, above all in the Science of Logic, and it is still clearly discernible in the contours of Hegel’s theology as described by Strauss above. But the difference is seen clearly, when the dust settles, in the status of purposes. For in Tiantai, the infinity of deluded futile purposes that begin the process are retained in the final intersubsumption such that each is now the absolute purpose-purposelessness itself. Each purpose becomes the absolute purpose, precisely through its coextensivity with purposelessness, which also guarantees that purpose is always multiple, never reducible to a single purpose. There are directions, infinite directions, each absolute, each subsuming and subsumed by all the others—but there is no one direction, and nothing can ever be superseded once and for all. When a sentient being thinks of a Buddha, he thinks of the Buddha thinking of himself and all other sentient beings, and every moment of their sentient experience including this one, as internal-external to this very thought of his, in the manner described above. Thinking of a buddha thinking of me and all other sentient beings each thinking of a buddha and of all other sentient beings, each irresistibly flowing out in all directions into all that is other to itself due to their very nature as limited to themselves, is both the Buddha thinking of me and me thinking of the Buddha—but it is also all sentient beings, indeed every moment of sentient experience, experiencing every other moment of sentient experience. My purposefully taking up the intention to think of a Buddha is a deluded desire that overflows into what it does not intend, because like all entities it is essentially also what it is not. My intending the buddha intending me and all other sentient beings is also the buddha and all other sentient beings intending me and each other, intending every possible intention. My purpose is all purposes, even those that contravene it. The world is now seen to be purposeful as purposeless as omnipurposively intertelic.
This is the ne plus ultra, I would say, of the way in which the primacy of purposelessness guarantees the irreducible multiplicity of purposes, even when its perhaps one-sided but thoroughgoing initial form in Daoist wuwei is developed in Tiantai to the convergence of purpose and purposeleness, and indeed the absolute inextricability of all of these purposes in all of nature, and their intersubsumption with one another. Here as in the Hegelian theology discussed above, it is the essence of a finite consciousness (man in Hegel’s case, all deluded sentient beings in the Tiantai case) as well as of a perfect consciousness (God, or Buddhas) to regard and in a certain sense subsume the other, where the perfection of the latter is not compromised by its necessary relation to the imperfect consciousness but is instead constituted and indeed perfected by it. But of special note in comparing these two Intersubsumptive visions is the difference that is made precisely here, in the difference between the concept of “God” and the concept of “Buddha.” The first is a conscious, purposive source of all things, including the finite consciousness, and though this primary meaning is radically modified in Hegel’s reconstruction, it is not wholly left behind. The second, however, is something quite different. A buddha is a conditioned sentient being who has gone on to realize the nature of his own conditionality, and of conditionality as such, as something that intersubsumes with unconditionality, and thence with all other conditioned entities. The existence of this being is stipulated not as the source of the world, but as a necessarily thinkable thought in negative response to a negative response to the world—a very low bar indeed. Here is Zhiyi telling us what is thinkable, by which he means what is conceivable in terms of oneness and difference—as a way of going on to tell us how thinking through these thinkables allows us to contemplate his real target, the deluded conditional mind that produces this thinkable thought, for that is the unthinkable: what is neither identical to what it is constitutively contrasted to, what it is defined as excluding, nor different from it. That deluded mind is what Tiantai meditation focuses on, in order to reveal that this conditioned deluded mind itself turns out to be, upon examination, inconceivable and unthinkable in such terms, the truly conditioned as the truly unconditioned that intersubsumes all conditioned phenomena, including the Buddha that it has thought up. Here is how it comes to think that up:
Our first object of contemplation is the mind as the unthinkable object. But this object is hard to talk about, so let us first talk about thinkable objects, to make it easier to present the unthinkable object. Even the Hinayanists say that mind generates all phenomena, by which they mean the causes and effects of the cycle of the six paths of samsara [all generated by the intentional karma of sentient beings]. They then reject the ordinary and aspire to sageliness, dropping all this and emerging above it all, leaving only a withered body and extinguished consciousness. This is the Four Noble Truths considered as deliberate activity, with beginnings and ends in real time. All of these are to be considered thinkables.
Now in the Mahāyāna it is also said that mind generates all dharmas, by which is meant rather the Ten Dharma Realms [i.e., the prior six plus śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, bodhisattvas and buddhas]:
Contemplating the mind as existent, it is then regarded as having both good and bad mental states. The bad are the causes and effects of the three evil paths of hells, hungry ghosts and animals, while the good are the causes and effects of the three paths of Asuras [ferociously competitive titans], humans and gods. These six types are then contemplated as all being impermanent, arising and perishing constantly, and the mind that does this contemplating is also seen as changing with every thought, never dwelling for a moment. Further, both what contemplates and what is contemplated are generated conditionally, and what is generated conditionally is Empty of self-nature. Such are the phenomena of cause and effect for the two Dharma-realms of the Two Vehicles, śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas.
Contemplating this sort of Emptiness [of the Two Vehicles] and this sort of Being [of the Six Paths of Samsara] as both trapped in the dualistic morass of two extremes, either sinking into nothingness or obstructed by being, great compassion arises, and one enters into the Provisional to transform and liberate beings. Though there is no body in reality, one provisionally creates a non-literal body. Though there is no emptiness in reality, one provisionally speaks non-literally of emptiness. Thus does one guide and transform them all. These are the phenomena of cause and effect of the bodhisattvas.
Contemplating all these phenomena, of both liberators and liberated, as all precisely the dharma of the Middle Way Ultimate Reality, all of them thus ultimately pure, who is good and who is evil? Who exists and who doesn’t exist? Who is liberated and who is not liberated? All dharmas are like this. These are the phenomena of the cause and effect of the buddhas.
All these ten dharma-realms, in all their tangled connections, from the shallow to the deep, emerge from the mind. Although this is all to be classed as belonging to the Innumerable Four Noble Truths of the Mahāyāna, it is still the thinkable. This is not the focus of our present contemplation. [He then goes on to describe the “inconceivable” or “unthinkable”: all these Three Thousand as any single moment of mentation.][17]
“Buddha” emerges as a thought that negates the negation of the negation of the negation that is conditionality, the world of finitude. Finitude is itself the realm of negation: to be finite is to negate or exclude another finite thing. Determination, conditionality, is negation. The “Two Vehicles” are the negation of this negation which defines the conditioned, thereby positing the non-conditioned, the Unconditioned. The “Bodhisattvas” are the negation of this negation of negation, seeing it as equally conditioned, inasmuch as it negates and therefore excludes something: to exclude is to be conditioned. The idea of “Buddhas” is the idea of reaffirmation of the ultimate reality of every conditioned phenomenon, by negating this triple negation. But the power of negation itself derives from, indeed just is, the conditioned nature of the conditioned. The result is a view of the world that sees each thing as equally the ultimate reality, i.e., as the Middle Way that falls to neither of any two extremes (e.g., liberator versus liberated, conditioned versus unconditioned, neither-conditioned-nor-unconditioned versus conditioned and unconditioned, good versus evil and so on), nor of the simply negation of the two extremes in a oneness that underlies or supersedes them. Both of the contrasted qualities are produced (negating the negation of the duality that would blur the distinction into a oneness) but neither can land definitively in any one locus, on any one side or the other (negating the duality as well as preserving it). Hence the Buddha realm is expressed not as negation or as affirmation on any level, but simply as “who is X, who is non-X?” This “who?,” rather than a stably identifiable “unconditioned” as definitively opposed to the conditioned, is what it means for them to really be unconditioned, omnipresent, mutually intersubsumptive.
But even this point of view, the way a buddha views the world, which emerges from this immanent structure of negation built into the very negativity of conditionality itself, considered as a particular single thought, one viewpoint among others, is produced as a thought in the conditioned mind, and though in its “who is X, who is non-X?” this perspective has reached the point where nothing is “thinkable” as either any X or any non-X, it itself, as one particular way of thinking as opposed to others, is still counted among what is “thinkable.” The text goes on, in the passage after this passage (not translated here), to show in contrast that the mind that produces these various viewpoints is itself intersubsumptive with all these (deluded, thinkable) thoughts and viewpoints it produces and negates: it is viewed by its own thought as much as it views its own thought. In viewing itself as viewed by the view that views it as absolute, and as intersubsuming all other perspectives, it experiences this same absolute “who?” with respect to its own (deluded) experience. My viewing the Buddha that my mind produces is the Buddha viewing me, produced by his own mind (for my mind produces the thought of the Buddha thinking of other sentient beings, including me, producing them with his mind as I produce him producing them with mine).
So in a sense I produce the Buddha and the Buddha produces me. We are here already very far from the idea of God unilaterally producing man and world, and equally far from the idea of man unilaterally producing God and world, or world unilaterally producing God and man–as we are already far from any of that with Hegel. Each can be said to produce the other. But further, neither man-producing-Buddha-and-world nor Buddha-producing-man-and-world nor world-producing-man-and-Buddha is done for a purpose: it is an inevitable involuntary by-product of simply being a conditional being to “produce” its negations in this way. And indeed the whole point here is the undermining of any possible definite endpoint or starting point, any single source or single telos. Who is liberated, who is liberating? Who is the source, who is the product? Thus does an atheist version of intersubsumption of infinite and finite mind play itself out, in sharp contrast to the Hegelian, (post-)theist version. We still hew to the basic Buddhist structure here: yes, there is a telos (do the contemplation of the inconceivable object in order to realize this vision of universal absoluteness), but that telos is precisely the overcoming of all particular teloi into the atelic, the omnitelic, the intertelic.
Now it is possible, as touched on in online appendix A, supplement 11, to see Hegel himself to have reached this vision as well: what he calls “the absolute Purpose” is no specific purpose, and is realizing itself at every moment in every event. The purposive work of history and of the dialectic practiced by the individual philosopher to think all this is then analogous to the Buddhist case: to reach the point of this self-cancelling vision of teleology. May it be so. But even if that is what Hegel does intend (a still very controversial hermeneutic claim), the hangover of theism continues to haunt the final overcoming. I think this can be best pinpointed by considering the status of the idea of “intellectual intuition” in the context of these two contrasted systems.
Intellectual intuition is Kant’s term; “intellect” and “intuition” are both meant in the Kantian sense here. For us finite beings, the “intellect” (Verstand) is the faculty of universal concepts, involving necessity and universality, none of which can be derived from particular empirical data. These necessary and universal concepts are transcendental (a priori), not derived from empirical data but instead the condition of the appearance in experience of all empirical data, and in this sense linked to the spontaneity of autonomy. “Intuition” on the other hand is what we directly perceive, for example in particular given sensory experience arising at a particular time and place: the experienced empirical content for which the universal and necessary concepts serve as rules of unification, which is the condition of the appearing of these experiences. Since we are finite minds, the universal concepts of our intellect, which in a sense we do produce ourselves in that it they are inherent to ourselves, are empty without a “given” field of sense experiences that we do not produce. Whatever possibilities we may produce in our minds, we must wait for external data for anything to count as actual. A gulf lies between conception and perception. For the infinite mind of God, if it exists, however, intellect and intuition converge and are coextensive: what He conceives is also immediately ipso facto produced as real. He says “Let there be X” and ipso facto there actually is X. Just to conceive of something is for Him to produce it.
Fichte notes that we do have one instance of intellectual intuition even as finite beings: the thought “I.” To think of it as possible is to make it actual. We are back to the cogito, the dubito, where merely thinking it proves, nay accomplishes, its reality. This self-positing of the “I” is for Fichte also precisely the ground of all other knowledge, the transcendental unity of apperception, and also the autonomous will of Kant’s practical philosophy, his ethics. When all knowledge is seen as rooted in and instantiating this intellectual intuition, we have arrived at true knowledge. Early Schelling and Hegel see this further developed in the purposivity without purpose as beauty in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and indeed in the Critique of Pure Reason itself in the antinomies: the very thinking of these antinomies is the actuality of the Ideas of Reason. And Hegel’s mature project in the Logic, and from there into the rest of his system, may be viewed as a full playing out of the implications of this claim to its furthest implication, showing how thinking produces all its contents immanently, until all the contents one might encounter in “intuition”—in ordinary perception of the world—have been shown to be autonomously produced by the self-movement of the transcendental categories themselves, developing into one another through their immanent dialectic. This reaches an impressive level of fine-grained detail: all the phenomena of thought, of nature, of society, of institutions, of politics, of history, can now be experienced as the full expression of one’s own self-positing as self-actualizing, self-negating, self-developing, making itself actual by the very nature of its thinking. The various sections in the dialectical system represent concepts of increasing concreteness, and these concepts are themselves contents. Concepts do then generate all contents, and this is why Hegel can continue to speak of teleology amidst all this, since “teleology” originally just means “concepts actually producing their own contents,” as discussed in online appendix A, supplement 11.
But two things are to be noted about this here. One, these concepts which are also contents stand in a certain definite relation to one another, such that their subsumption always goes in one direction only, from more abstract to more concrete. Their derivation follows a strict single sequence, which is just what the system lays before us. It is true that the abstract categories at the beginning of the system “implicitly” include the later categories, just as the later categories “explicitly” subsume the earlier ones. But this directionality of implicit to explicit is fixed and determinate—a point of particular pride for Hegel, and understandably so.
Two, fine-grained as Hegel strove to make the system, there are in the end a finite number of these categories. Far more than Kant’s measly 12, to be sure, and now provided with their immanent convertability into one another spelled out in its precise contours, and (even more admirably), including not only alleged facts but also (in the Phenomenology of Spirit) all sorts of deluded ways of experiencing all facts–but still a finite number. Not every passing thought of a content, or every perception, is a category. Hegel will claim that his net is finely enough meshed to catch everything, but some particulars nevertheless resolve into their adjacent universals more quickly than others, and some serve only as subsumed, never as subsumer. For example, this pen on my desk could be absorbed into and thus instantiating the various a priori categories of mineral matter from the Philosophy of Nature, and the a priori categories manufacture and commerce from the Objective Spirit portion of the Philosophy of Spirit, while my current perception of use of it could be instantiate a priori categories of my current historical shape of Spirit, and of cognition and will also from the Philosophy of Spirit. All these categories are immanent transformations and self-concretizations of the primary a priori categories of Being, Nothing, Becoming and so on up to Mechanism, Chemism, Life and so on from the Logic. When I see it thus, the pen could be experienced by me as rational, i.e., as expressing my own spontaneous inmost nature and the inmost nature of all existence, and of Absolute Spirit, my own substantiality as subject and my subjectivity as substantiality, rather than as something arbitrarily imposed upon me. I would then be seeing the pen just as a Kantian could experience his own moral freedom, or indeed his scientific cognitions according to cause and effect and the other categories, which come from and express the inalienable nature of my own mind. Then I would be “at home” with this pen. Now if I happen to notice a slight sparkle reflected off the metal of the pen in a pensive moment and be reminded of the sunset reflected off the window my childhood home, this might be absorbed into the categories of Poetry, under the category of Art in the Philosophy of Spirit, and the categories of optics and light in the Philosophy of Nature—so I could be at home with that too. If I pick up the pen and stab my brother in the neck with it, it would show me the categories of Crime and prospective Punishment from the Philosophy of Objective Spirit, perhaps also of love and family and society and so on as well. Then I could be at home with all that too. But the specific manner of my being at home and recognizing myself in all these things goes through a single determinate line of developments, with one category connected to all the others in a strict single sequence, with no skipping around and no leapfrogging over intervening categories. Further, whether or not the full particularity of my pensive encounter with the gleam of the pen or my violent misuse of it, and whatever other further contingent associations may inform my moment-to-moment experience, is captured in the meshes of this net is highly questionable. At best, I think, Hegel resigns himself to relegating whatever does not get articulated somewhere in the system to the (to be sure, necessary) a priori category of “contingency.” But this might include the entire moment-to-moment sequence of my everyday experiences, prior to their being rethought and rearranged into the order of the categories of the system. A truly heroic attempt is made to give due weight to the category of contingency; the universal Idea needs some contingency as its vehicle, and this is presented to us as the full integration of the universal and the particular in the singular, the individual, fully suffused of both, sublating the abstractions of either a pure universal or a pure particularity. To put it crudely, when the World Spirit has reached a certain point in its development, it must transition and sublate into the next phase. Some contingent individual or event appears—Napoleon, let’s say, or Trump, or the Beatles, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand—and a world conflagration ensues: this required both the universal world spirit on one side and the contingent individual, who happened to be in the right place at the right time and have the right character to trigger what would have to happen sooner or later. If this individual didn’t appear, another one would have soon before or after. But the roles of the universal and the individual here are wildly asymmetrical. The Spirit wins out no matter which contingent person or event serves as its trigger, even though there must be one—and who or what will be able to so serve is determined by the criteria developed by the sublation needs of the Spirit, making use of the contingent desires of the individual but not elevating precisely these to the status of the criterion of sublation. Now what makes that event or person contingent rather than necessary is that not all of his or its characteristics are necessary to spark the conflagration. So any two workable candidates must differ in some contingent respects. But these respects do not matter. They are wholly inessential, purged in the process of the sublation. A true synthesis would require that difference on either side would alter the outcome—i.e., we would have had a different next phase of the Spirit’s own development, its next step of sublation, if the Rolling Stones rather than the Beatles came to America first, or if Giuliani rather than Trump had been the figurehead for the rightwing resurgence in the USA, or if Franz Ferdinand had been only crippled but not killed at Sarajevo. A Stones-led sixties would also have been the Spirit, would have been a different unity of universal and particular. I don’t think Hegel will allow this; rather, even if the first few months after Ed Sullivan looked a little differently, the ensuing upheavals would finally find their level, giving us in the end much the same picture as we have from the Beatles-led sixties. The universal requires the contingent particular and will modify the particular, bending and breaking and using it up through its assumption of the mantle of the universal, and the particular contingency certainly also requires the universal—but, from a Tiantai perspective, the particular contingency should also modify the universal. Yet this is not what Hegel gives us. Noûs-as-Arché slips in the backdoor: universality must win if only by dominating and determining the content of the synthesis that sublates it, and the alleged union of necessity and contingency ends up excluding from the result the determinative power of the contingent, its power to modify the universal.
Now in Tiantai, neither of these two final limitations—the finite number and the definite order of the a priori categories–apply. On the contrary, every experience reveals a new a priori category. I could not have the experience if there were not in my mental apparatus the prior ability to “see-as” in this particular way. I may be shown three dots a million times and not “see” a so-called “triangle” there: for the latter, I need to be able to form the necessary Gestalt of these dots. Now it’s true that I can be instructed and guided to come to see them; but this must start from something already in me, which can then be shown to have further forms of expression and applications, much as the knowledge of mathematics is shown to the slave boy in Plato’s Meno: I will have to be made to discover something more about what is “in” me already to really see what is meant. Whatever comes into my experience, in whatever sequence, is thus inherent in my own mind. But since this goes for any determinacy whatsoever, this applies to the sequence itself as well, and any random combination of elements or links may be focused upon. If I see them, they have always been there—but in an inexplicit form, which is to say, in the form of whatever I was priorly experiencing instead, fully present as this something else. Further, they will be there in and as whatever experience replaces them. This is why there is no finite number of these categories. Further, like the 12 Kantian categories, each of them applies to all experiences qua experiences—they can be found priorly informing each and every one of them, if I only know to look for them. I learn to look for them by having them as explicit experiences. This might be said of Hegel’s longer list of categories as well, in that what is explicit in the later ones is implicitly present in the former ones, but still, Hegel’s commitment to unilateral development in a single direction—the theistic hangover—means that he will stop short of allowing us to claim that a specific human category—say “constitutional monarchy”—also can be found in, say, molten lava or a pile of sticks. In a certain sense yes, but in the more important sense, it seems to me, no. Here he is in line with the early Schelling of the Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, in the Introduction to which, after establishing with Kant that we could never even have the idea of an organic being if it were not a priori derivable from our own nature–that it could never get into us simply from outside, that we would have no way to derive it simply from unmixed empirical data if we didn’t have some prior forms of the understanding by which to conceive it—he nevertheless rejects the idea that we are randomly projecting these categories onto nature. If so, he asks, why do we only project in some places, onto some beings, and not others, not all? For this he needs a kind of Pre-Established Harmony, not in Leibniz’s naively theistic sense but in the sense he tries to establish in his philosophy, where nature and spirit recapitulate each in their own way the same primal a priori developments, such that each is the fulfilment of the other (spirit is realized nature, nature is realized spirit, both deriving from the Identity point which is neither and both). But this means the conception of nature—and by extension of history—is still the “big story” presented by pre-philosophical common sense: some beings are organic, others are not, period. Some things are piles of sticks, others are not, period. This is of course convenient for the continued practice of science and morality as commonly understood, and for many this will therefore seem a feature, not a bug. But this is where the Tiantai version of Intersubumption differs: there everything is in some sense a pile of sticks—even a pile of sticks is a pile of sticks only “in some sense.” There are no entities that either are or are not some specific determinacy simpliciter, just as “causality” is not a simple empirical entity, a particular experience, simpliciter, but rather a way of reading all experiences. That is, each is both a content and a category—both a fact (which can be expressed in any style) and a style (in which any fact can be expressed).
This is also why the Tiantai version does not collapse back into a kind of Leibnizian monadology picture, in spite of the fact that here, as in Leibniz, all the representations I experience are a priori in the sense that none come from outside me, all are built into my nature. For the next step in Tiantai is to reject both inside and outside as sources—for these two would have to be understood simpliciter for anything to come exclusively from one or the other, or indeed from both or neither. All experiences I have are inherent in me—but I myself am not inherent in me. The post-theistic version of this point would be to consider my own soul, with all its built in representations, as created by something else, by God. But then God has to be something simpliciter, a determinate datum with a conceptual inside and outside. The Tiantai version rejects this. All my experiences are inherent in me as a priori categories of my own mind, but this mind itself is but a category, discoverable everywhere if I’m looking for it and nowhere if I’m not. Thus all my experiences, in their exact sequence, saturated as they are with all my contingent delusions and all my accidental and misguided lusts and hatreds, are found to be inherent and ineradicable a priori categories operating everywhere and everywhen as much as they are ineradicably operating in and as me. This is the Tiantai doctrine of “inherent entailment,” including also “inherent entailment of every delusion and evil.” And as seen above, it is precisely because these contingent conditional evils are seen to be ineradicable everywhere that they are seen to be unconditional—and hence to be Nirvana, liberation, Buddhahood itself. I am not asked to straighten them out and rearrange them according to an alleged objective order, as seen in the eye of God or Buddha as arranged by his infinite wisdom; Buddhahood is not a creator in that sense, the purposive creator, but only in the same sense that I am the creator of Buddhahood, in the sense that all entities create each other. Similarly, Buddhahood neither creates nor perceives an “order” to things in the theistic Noûs–as-Arché sense of an arrangement made by and according with a single purpose; rather, every moment of every being’s experience is its own deluded configuration, and it is the ineradicable intersubsumption of these that is realized in Buddhahood. That also means we retain here, and even expand to infinity, the characteristic virtues of atheism: the meanings of things, the orders of things, the characters of things, are infinite in number, and infinitely intertwined. What becomes absolute, and salvific, is my own version of the world (still transformed, insofar as it becomes unconditional, but not replaced by some other God’s-eye order and meaning), the narratives and significances and meanings that emerge from my own peculiar contingent conditioned experience of things, my own delusions, my own obsessions, my own quirky misreadings, my own flavors and scents and colorings of things. These are now the omnipresent ordering and meaning of the world, that all beings take in and express and realize in their own realizations of their own quirky orders and meanings, as I realize theirs. That is the religious vision of Emulative Intersubsumptive Atheism.
Universal Mind in Early Southern Zen: Another Opposite of God
Tiantai, like Spinoza, like Nietzsche, allows all purposes as aspects of the one purposelessness that is also every purpose and crosspurpose. There is, however, another interesting Buddhist approach to the purpose/purposelessness problem in light of the Noûs versus raw infinity problem. For another version of universal Mind which however is not a person and has no purpose at all, is presented by certain Chinese Buddhists, who moved from the disparagement of mind in early Buddhism (mind is constantly changing, temporally finite in the most severe way moment to moment, even less of a “self” than the relatively stable body), to an appreciation of the impersonal spacelike infinity of mind. Many Chinese Buddhist systems advocate some teaching of “mind-only” 唯心, positing the existence of a universal, omnipresent mind, and many seem to assert a strong sense of omniscience in their treatment of the enlightened mind of a Buddha. These features might tempt an unwary reader to assume that we have here something resembling the Noûs as Arché, proto-God-centered views of the Phaedo and Timaeus and of Abrahamic monotheisms and their theologies. But Chinese Buddhist mind-only doctrines are again not only not close approximations of God theories, but the exact opposite: they are radically atheist. The reason for this can be stated simply: the universal “mind” in all such Chinese Buddhist systems is not something with “intention,” “a will,” “commands,” “favoring of the good,” “control,” or “ideas,” as the mind of God is supposed to be, but rather, is precisely the lack of all of the above. For all of these features—favoring, intending, willing, controlling, the holding of views–are in pan-Buddhist thought precisely aspects of desire, which are the very antithesis of the enlightened mind. The problem of course is that Mind as Purposive cannot be all-inclusive; by definition, purpose, intelligence, is selective. That means that “infinite mind” can really only work if mind is also, equally, not-mind. We saw a version of this idea in the later development within Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism, the idea of “the Mind of Heaven and Earth,” which is “mindless mind.” There this phrase signified purposesless purposivity, intentionless intention, the telos of ateleology: the intention only to keep going, the goal of having no specific goal. Here in the earlier, Chinese Buddhist version too, we find that this universal mind at the root and heart of all things is equally no-mind, in a different but related sense that we will now consider.
The term for all these aspects of purposive dualistic controlling mind in this tradition is generally nian 念, determinate mental events that arise and perish, and that seek or intend something. The universal enlightened mind, which sometimes plays a foundational ontological role, is on the contrary consistently understood to be awareness, not as the doer or controller or mover of thoughts but as the field or space in which any of these thoughts or desires might arise and perish, both enabling them and remaining unstained by them. In the typical formulation of the Dasheng qixinlun 大乘起信論, hugely influential for Chinese Zen, “the nature of mind is free of nian” 心體離念. This freedom from the divisive character of mind as intentional is also what allows for its immanence: the universal mind is all of our minds, the nature of every mind qua mind, not as a self-positing activity but precisely as the undivided neither-one-nor-different illimitable space in which all positings can arise, which is present in every sentient being. In some versions, these thought-desires are to be eliminated; in others, they are to be allowed to come and go, but without being clung to, so that they don’t obscure the underlying field of which they are mere transformations, like waves arising in water. In the former versions, all characteristics of the Godlike mind are definitely excluded from this highest value and deepest ontological source; in the latter versions, the universal mind may have thoughts and desires and even personalities, but what it can never do is cling to any single personality, one single system of consistent desires and thoughts. It is either no person/thought/will or it is all persons/thoughts/wills; what it can never be is one person with one will and one idea of what is good. Space limitations forbid a full exploration of this theme here; for that I ask the reader to consult my other works on the topic. But it is hoped at least that the sharp antithesis between the enlightened universal mind of Buddha and the mind of God can be easily observed by any reader of the most representative texts in this tradition.[18]
Consider, for example, the following passage about the infinite mind from an eighth century Chinese Buddhist text, developed under the aegis of a radicalized atheist vision of religion:
All Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the one mind. There is no other thing. This mind is beginingless, neither born nor extinguished. It is neither green nor yellow, without any form or characteristic, belonging neither to existence nor to non-existence, thinkable as neither old nor new, neither long nor short, neither large nor small, transcending all limit or measure, all names or designations, all traces and all opposites. It is just whatever is before you, but any movement of thought about it departs from it. It is like empty space, without boundary or limit, impossible to measure or fathom. This mind alone is Buddha. Buddha and sentient beings are not different, except that sentient beings cling to finite characteristics and seek something outside themselves. In seeking it, they lose it, making the Buddha search for the Buddha, using mind to try to grasp mind—which can never succeed even to the end of all forms in infinite eons. They don’t realize that if they simply ceased giving rise to seeking thoughts and purposive deliberations the Buddha would naturally become present. For this mind is itself none other than Buddha. Buddha is precisely none other than sentient beings. When it becomes sentient beings, this mind is not diminished, and when it becomes the buddhas, it is not increased….This mind is precisely Buddha, and there is no other Buddha and no other mind. This mind is bright and pure, like space itself, devoid of even the slightest characteristic or appearance. But when the mind is raised and seeking thoughts move, its essence is violated, for it becomes attached to specific characteristics….If you just awaken to this one mind, you will see there is not the slightest phenomenon there to be attained. This is the true Buddha. Buddhas and all sentient beings are just one mind, with no difference between them, like empty space without the slightest admixture and never decaying. It is just like the sun shining in the sky: when the sun ascends and shines universally on all the world, the space is not itself brightened, and when the sun descends and darkness covers the world, the space itself is not darkened. Brightness and darkness are characteristics that exclude each other, but the nature of space is openness that never changes. Buddhas, sentient beings and the Mind are also thus. To see the Buddha as characterized by the pure light of liberation and sentient beings as characterized by the filth and darkness of samsara involves you in a view that will never liberate you, even in as many eons as there are grains of sands in the Ganges river—because it is attached to characteristics. There is only this one mind, beyond which there is not the slightest atom of any phenomenon to be attained. Just this mind is the Buddha. Because students these days do not awaken to this mind, they produce a state of mind seeking the mind, seeking the Buddha outside their own minds, and try to practice Buddhism in attachment to characteristics. All of this is unskillful practice which does not lead to awakening. To give offerings to all Buddhas throughout the ten directions is actually not as worthwhile as supporting one practioner of the Way without any intention, for to be free of intention is to be free of all mental attitudes, like the substance of Suchness itself, internally like wood or stone, unmoved and unshaken, and externally like empty space, unobstructed and unblocked, without subject or object and without position or direction, without form or appearance and with neither gain nor loss.[19]
It is crucial for our purposes to see how directly opposed this idea of infinite mind is to the Noûs idea of infinite mind, God or intelligence as infinite. Unlike the dialectical emulative atheism of Tiantai or the early Hegel, where the non-personal manifests itself in and as all personal purposes, but like Bataille in his paradoxical quest for the pure unmediated experience of chance and chaos, these doctrines of universal mind as awareness often involves in the rejection of thinking and purpose, for these are the very mechanism of non-all-inclusiveness. In this way, it tries to exclude the excluder, and can sometimes run into a serious philosophical impasse. This is a problem of certain forms of Chan (Zen) tradition, in my view, which however are still fine exemplars of a certain dimension of thoroughgoing emulative atheist mysticism. That tradition is very inventive, and sometimes finds intriguing solutions to the problem it has created for itself.
This is accomplished in some of the successors to this idea by a further God-less refinement: not only is the universal mind of awareness understood to be the antithesis of nian, of purposive and differentiating thought, but it is also understood to be not only mind, but to be “mind as not mind,” to be empty of any specific essence or characteristic which makes it mind. Indeed, mind has the paradoxical essence of non-exclusion of all objects, like a mirror (an image derived from the Zhuangzi, as we’ll explore below, and which was put to a somewhat different use in Zhiyi’s discussion of unintential bodhisattva activity, as we saw above), which alone is what allows it to be aware, to non-exclude the objects of awareness. We find this in texts like the *Surangama Sutra (Lengyanjing 楞嚴經) and in the “Southern” Chan teachings of figures like Mazu and Huangbo, who typically first assert the presence of this universal awareness, but then tell us that it is called mind or awareness at first only as a temporary expedient; in reality, there is no mind without object, and we must advance from “just the mind is Buddha” to “neither mind nor Buddha nor any other thing.”[20] It is in reality no more mind than object, no more this than that: real mind is not mind as opposed to object, but object and mind both, neither mind nor matter nor any other determinate entity or essence at all.
This is what accounts for the surprising reversal found in all the “Southern” Chan materials from “Huineng” forward, and most clearly in writings associated with the Chan master Linji Yixuan: this pure awareness thus ends up being not a motionless field but rather the ceaseless activity or “function” of the thoughts, nian, themselves, never settling into any static consistent system of presence—and there is in this view no other “substance” (ti 體) to the pure awareness above and beyond its “function” (yong 用) as any presently given nian. Here we may indeed have what would be described as thoughts and desires of the universal mind: but all thoughts and desires are its thoughts and desires, as are any other “functions” occurring anywhere, including rolling on the ground and raising the eyebrows, or the wriggling of any insect. For in this stage of Chan thinking, the “background” of stillness, the unmoved awareness, has fallen away: instead, we have the non-dwelling (wuzhu 無住)[21] freefall of nian after nian as the sole reality of the Buddha-nature. These pure mental events with no substance behind them are then themselves said to be non-nian; a reversal occurs when each nian is utterly separated from any relation to any other nian. The fluidity of thoughts is pushed to such an instantaneous extreme that it is freed from the relation to either a static background awareness or to any other thought. Thus lacking any static point of reference or link to form mediated chains of premises and conclusion or to contrast one thought to another, or to anything other than thought, anything other than the experience itself as it is happening, there is nothing making it determinate as a nian. It is no more nian than non-nian. The great central insight of Southern Chan is that while it may be true that the essence of mind is free of thoughts, what can alone be realized in experience (and in fact is never lacking from any experience) is that each nian itself, considered in strict isolation as the pure activity of nianing, is itself already free of nian. Mind cannot see mind, as the eye cannot see itself, so anything seen is not the essence of mind; whatever is posited as the essence of mind, mind as mind, is ipso facto not it. As the Surangama Sutra says, “When seeing sees seeing, this seen seeing is no longer the real seeing: seeing is free even of seeing.” 見見之時,見非是見,見猶離見。 The real seeing, the real mind, is just the emergence of function itself, the constant emergence of determinate thought after determinate thought, object after object, experience after experience. The mindiness of mind lies not in any characteristic of “mentalness,” nor in spacelike contentlessness, but in the non-dwelling flux of all contents. The real Buddha is this moment of function, of your own mind’s activity, which constantly makes and breaks Buddhas.
Hence any function is the entire Buddha nature: it is now any deed, including the deed of determining and naming, not any one specific determination or name, the deed of meaning-making (and meaning-destruction), not any single consistent meaning.[22] The upshot here is that true action as opposed to passivity, true mastery as oppose to servitude, true subjectivity as opposed to self-alienation, true life as opposed to death, cannot have any single determinate purpose. Each action is the action of the whole, and the action of the whole cannot have a purpose. To have a purpose is to be subordinated to something, i.e., to that purpose—“to be deceived by others.”[23] The alleged omniscience of the Buddha as this universal mind is thus the precise opposite of the omniscience of the single-purposed, single-minded God. The one mind is no mind.
The Lotus Sutra: Monotheism Buddhified, i.e., Destroyed
The above is one surprising way atheist Buddhism is developed, one that is easily mistaken for a theistic turn and thus in clear need of being addressed in the context of our present discussion. Another example is found in the rich and strange text known as the Lotus Sutra (Skt: Saddharmapundarīka sutra; Ch: Miaofalianhuajing 妙法蓮華經). This text can be interpreted in many ways, and indeed, with its odd displacements of emphasis, its outrageous left-turns and hyperbolic effusions, its unexplained inflations of consequences of seemingly insignificant actions and states, its confusing hints and innuendos about its own implications, it rather begs to be. It has special relevance for our discussion, though, because it’s one of a handful of places in the Buddhist canon where someone might be tempted to see something resembling monotheism in the Buddhist canon. Indeed, we cannot rule out the availability of Gnostic, Christian, Jewish, Zoraostrian ideas in the milieu in which the text was produced; as many have suggested, the monotheist idea tends to be concomitant with the earthly advent of a single dominating and unifying emperor, and indeed the text was probably produced at a time when some form or another of monotheist idea was in resurgence in many places in the world (in the Roman Empire, in the Han Empire, in the Persian and Indian ventures into Empire), which would likely have been making themselves felt in Indic cultural spheres. Is this text showing an infiltration and acceptance of the monotheist idea, boldly brushing away all past Buddhist ideas with the broom of upāya (“skillful means,” the raftlike temporary and disposable measures meant to lead beyond themselves) and finding a thin reed or two on which to hang a Buddhist monotheism, with its own incarnational story, and its own eternal world-fathering, world-watching deity called Sakyamuni Buddha? This would be almost impossible to do within the context of traditional Buddhist interpretation, and as far as I know no traditional school or commentator has taken it this way. Reading it within the context of prior Mahāyāna mythology, with its infinite multitudes of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas living in the atheist universe we have described above, makes this almost impossible. The Mahāyāna Buddhist anti-realist ontology of Emptiness, which is even more deeply atheistic in its implications, discourages such an interpretation even more vigorously. We have seen the way in which Tiantai teaching, and even general Mahāyāna Emptiness and Two Truths thinking, deal with the personal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and their supernormal powers. The same generally applies, mutatis mutandis, to the way the big world-engaging supernormal “eternal” (actually, very very long-lived) Buddha figure in this text is interpreted. But here I’d like to do a thought experiment for illustrative purposes, to demonstrate that, even if someone were to try to read the text in the most context-neglecting possible way, maximizing its similarity to monotheism, the result would still be deeply and eye-openingly atheistic.
The interpretative problem that concerns us here has to do with the status of the “Long-lived Buddha Sakyamuni” as presented in that 16th Chapter, because such a fanfare is made about his revelation of the length of his life, and his claim that all the other Buddhas of whom he has spoken were really just versions and emanations of himself, and that only now is the real truth being presented. This allows some marginal leeway for a monotheism-craving interpreter to dismiss all the usual entailments of Mahāyāna mythology as mere upāya, as well as its traditional anti-realist Emptiness ontology which would equally dismiss any attempted Father-of-the-World Godlike Buddha, leaving standing only the core teaching of Chapter 16 itself as the real truth. For there, Sakyamuni seems to be claiming that only he is the real Buddha, that he’s the father and proprieter of the world, and that all other Buddhas are just upāyic parts of his own teaching. The question is, does this include the Buddhas that he had predicted all sentient beings would become, in the first half of the sutra, and all the other Buddhas in the universe, past and future? Are they all just his own partial embodiments, his own upāyic self-presentation? What would be the final upshot, if so?
To begin to answer these questions, here is a quick outline of what happens in the Lotus Sutra, insofar as we deprive it of any of the interpretative tidyings that try to make sense of it:
The Buddha shines a light from his head and sees lots of Buddhists doing lots of different Buddhist practices all over the universe. The Buddha emerges from a meditative state with the name “Place of Infinite Meanings,” and then, uninvited, announces he is going to say something very important. He praises the immense mysterious inconceivability of being a Buddha, saying how far beyond anyone’s conception of it it really is. In particular, it involves two things: only a Buddha “together with a Buddha,” knows what’s really going on, what the ultimate reality is of any and all phenomenal things, how they look, what their nature is, what they’re made of, what they can do, what causes and effects they have, and what sort of consistency they have from beginning to end of this multifarious causal process, or indeed, in some versions, their “equality and ultimacy from beginning to end” of this process, their ultimate equality and their equal ultimacy. He also particularly stresses the role of upāya, or skillful means, in making a Buddha what he is, and how far beyond anyone’s conception this is. Then he says that all of his disciples are really Bodhisattvas, that is, Buddhas-to-be, nascent Buddhas, beings committed to becoming Buddhas and postponing their own Arhatship (their ending of their own suffering and rebirth) to liberate all other sentient beings as well. This goes even for the śrāvakas (“voice-hearing disciples”) who are, as far as they know, only shooting for Arhatship, the end of suffering and rebirth. In fact, śrāvakas are disciples who explicitly reject the option of becoming Bodhisattvas. But now we are told that they are Bodhisattvas too. In fact, all Buddhas appears in the world for one reason only: to display what it’s like to be a Buddha, and thereby to allow all sentient beings to experience being a Buddha. All Buddhist practices lead to this eventually, given infinite time. It turns out there are no Arhats and there is no individual Nirvana—all of that was just upāya. There is no such thing as individual nirvana as the ending of desire; in fact, what looked like the end, the goal, the state of the arhat freed of life-and-death, is itself always no more than one more means. Alleged nirvana of the arhat—freedom-from-life-and-death—is really a part of the bodhisattva path. The ends-means relation is reversed: it is not that desire is a means to the attainment of desirelessness but rather that apparent desirelessness is one more state of desire, is itself a means toward an even more greatly expanded state of vow, of bodhisattvahood, of desire.[24] The Buddha tells a parable to illustrate this, and to clear himself of the charge of deceit: it’s not lies, it’s upāya, even though it’s not literally true. Upāya is the main virtue of the Buddha, the means by which his wisdom and compassion are perfectly expressed, and it has this paradoxical form. Some of the erstwhile śrāvakas say how happy they are to learn this, and tell a story about this. Then we get an expanding series of “assurances of future Buddhahood.” These are a traditional prerogative of a Buddha: he recognizes bodhisattvas, and sees into their future. He sees the Buddha they will become. These are very specific, telling what the name and lifespan of that future Buddha will be, and what his “Buddha-land” will be called, what it will be like, what kind of sentient beings will inhabit it, and so on. This is first given to the key śrāvaka-disciples, those who had denied the quest for Buddhahood for themselves. Then it is suggested that all sentient beings who hear this very teaching—about the Buddha’s sole purpose, that of modeling for sentient beings what it’s like to be a Buddha and finding ways to get them to an equal experience of it eventually—are thereby all given the assurance of future Buddhahood. We’re told that this teaching itself is “the entire body of the Buddha.”
Then lots of magical effects take place. A stupa emerges from the earth. It contains a long Nirvanaed (i.e., deceased) Buddha—even though we’ve already been told there is no Nirvana-as-decease except as an upāya, a skillful means—who says he once made a vow to show up and be alive again whenever the Lotus Sutra was preached. But the stupa will only open up to reveal the “whole body of a Buddha” (as the teaching itself was described) if this present Buddha who is preaching it, Sakyamuni, gathers in one place all his “separate partial embodiments” (in Kumarajiva’s Chinese, 分身)—a term that hadn’t been mentioned before. It turns out there are Buddhas all over the universe who are Sakyamuni’s “separate partial embodiments,” and they all come to this world, clearing out all other sentient beings temporarily to make room (except the congregation). Then the stupa opens up, and Sakyamuni enters, and the two sit side by side in there for the rest of the story.
After the surreal scene in the Sutra where the two Buddhas come together, the crowd is all riled up. Traditionally, only one Buddha can exist in any world system at any one time. Two of them sitting in a single stupa is meant to be something of a scandal, but also meant to be something of a revelation. With the Buddha of the distant past, long dead, and the Buddha of the present, with billions of his now reunited partial embodiments from all over the universe, gathered together in one place, we have a concrete demonstration of that mysterious phrase from Chapter Two: “Only a Buddha together with a Buddha” can realize the ultimate reality that each thing is. So the crowd is all riled up. They want to put this Sutra into practice here in our world, and ask how it’s done. The Buddha answers, in Chapter Twelve, saying well, the way one would do that, if it had to be done, would be with a fairly standard set of Mahāyāna practices, which he proceeds to relate. But then, surprisingly, we are told that this is not necessary at all, for the Lotus Sutra practice is always already being practiced here in this world. Thereupon, billions of Bodhisattvas emerge from under the earth, saying they’ve always been here practicing the Lotus Sutra (Ch. 13). The question is then asked by the astonished onlookers: who are all these Bodhisattvas? We’ve never seen them before! Who started them on their Bodhisattva practice? Who gave them the initial teaching, showed them what a Buddha was and thereby inspired their own initial aspiration to become one? The Buddha says that he himself has done so: all these Bodhisattvas took their initial Bodhisattva vows and began their Bodhisattva careers under Shakyamuni Buddha as their teacher. But how is that possible, the crowd asks. We have been with you all this time and we’ve never seen them before. Besides, they are all advanced Bodhisattvas who have clearly been practicing for gazillions of years; but you have only been a Buddha for forty years or so, and according to the standard situation, a Bodhisattva can only get his initial teaching from a full Buddha. It’s like a strapping young man pointing to a white-haired geezer and saying, “That’s my son.”
This is where the crypto-monotheism comes in. The big revelation of the Lotus Sutra comes in Chapter 16. The Buddha asks us to imagine a huge expanse of space and then a commensurately huge expanse of time, beyond the powers of human imagination to conceive. Then he declares:
“For an even longer time I have been constantly here in this world, preaching the Dharma and giving instructing, and also in gazillions of other worlds, guiding and benefiting living beings. During this time I have spoken of Dīpankara [‘Lighter of Lanterns’] Buddha and others, and have also said that I would entire Nirvana, extinction. But all this was said merely as a skillful means.”
Dīpankara Buddha is the Buddha who, according to the established hagiography, first shows Shakyamuni, in a previous lifetime, what it was to be a Buddha, and thereby inspired his initial aspiration toward Buddhahood, under whom he had taken his Bodhisattva vow. Dīpankara is the Buddha from whom, according to the traditional account, Shakyamuni himself received his initial instruction as a Buddha-to-be, a Bodhisattva; under whom he took his Bodhisattva vows; from whom he received his own assurance of Buddhahood. Dīpankara is Shakyamuni’s teacher, the source of his own training, the one who embodied for him the idea of Buddhahood in the first place. Now he is saying that the whole story of Dīpankara was just something he made up, someone who emanates from him rather than the other way around.
The Buddha continues:
When living beings come before me, I view them with the Buddha-eye, perceiving the condition of their faith and other capacities, and then speak of myself, according to what is necessary for their liberation, as having this or that name, this or that lifespan, and tell them that I will enter the extinction of Nirvana….Everything I’ve said in all the scriptures is for the sake of liberating living beings. Sometimes I describe my own person, sometimes the person of another; sometimes I manifest as myself, sometimes as another; sometimes I present my own deeds, sometimes those of another. And all of it is true, not false. How so, you ask? Buddhas see the attributes of the world not as the world views itself, but as it really is: without birth and without death, neither emerging nor retreating, free of both being-in-the-world and extinction-from-the-world, neither real nor illusory, neither thus nor otherwise. A Buddha sees all this clearly and without error, but in accordance with the various natures, desires, practices and conceptions of living beings, in order to generate good capacities in them he produces of all sorts of narratives, parables, phrases, ways of preaching. I never cease doing these Buddha-deeds even for an instant, and will continue doing so as my lifespan continues onward without measurable end, constantly dwelling here unextinguished.
In the verse at the end of the chapter, he says something else pertaining to how differently he sees the world from the way the world sees itself. When sentient beings see suffering and fire and destruction at the end of the eon, he sees this very world as a “Pure Land” that is forever undestroyed. It is not just an undifferentiated eternity: it is full of men and gods, flowers and music. He’s always here, teaching—and in all other places as well. So being “neither like it appears nor any other way” apparently doesn’t mean there are no beings or activities in it; it means rather that there always are, in some sense of other.
But since his being always there and everywhere as a Buddha is for the sole purpose of teaching others how to be a Buddha, he sometimes has to manifest not his presence but his absence. The rationale is that if sentient beings could always see him, they would take him for granted and would not listen to him. That would make his teaching ineffective. In the absence of a contrast between his presence and his absence, his presence would not be felt as presence. Omnipresence can only manifest by means of presence, which requires absence. So to make his teaching effective, he has to shock them with stories of his own disappearance and the preciousness of his own presence, even though it’s the most common and cheapest and easily available thing in the world, like air. Since his presence is all about the teaching, his presence sometimes requires his absence, without which his teaching would be ineffective, thus making him effectively not present. He has to be absent to be really present. Chapter 16 gives another father-sons parable to illustrate why the Buddha sometimes tells sentient beings he is or will be dead and gone, even when he’s not and never will be. A doctor goes on a trip. While he’s away, his children get into his medicines, and recklessly ingest them at random. When the father returns, he finds his children violently ill, frothing at the mouth, inebriated, out of their minds. He sees what medicines they took and immediately prepares the antidote. But the children are too far out of their minds to even heed his instruction to ingest the antidote; he cannot catch them and force it down, they keep spitting it up, running about wildly. So he devises a “skillful means.” He departs, leaving the antidote and instructions to take it, telling them he’s off on another business trip; then he sends back word to them, announcing to the children that their father has died on the road. The news of their father’s death shocks the children back to their senses; all they have left of him is the antidote–which suddenly is not only noticed but seems precious, the last vestige of their dead father–and his instructions to take it. In their desperation and grief, they finally do so. Once they are restored to health, the father returns, telling them that he had never really died.
After that we are told of the immense merits that come from believing and understanding the Buddha’s immense lifespan, even for a moment (Ch. 17), and even greater benefits for taking pleasure in the idea (Ch. 18). Then we are told, further, that communicating it to others causes immense expansions to the range of to one’s own powers of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, speaking and thinking (Ch. 19). Then we’re told a past life story about Sakyamuni, who was once a monk called Never Disparage, who would go around telling everyone he dared not disrespect them, because they were bodhisattvas, practicing the bodhisattva way, and they would all become Buddhas (Ch. 20). They get mad and attack him for this empty promise; he responds by saying, “I dare not disrespect you: you are all practicing the bodhisattva way, and will all become Buddhas.” They then go to purgatory, suffering for a long long while, but then because of this karmic connection, they meet Never Disparage again—they are, we are told, the assembled listeners to the story right now, the ones who are again being told that they will all become Buddhas, and Never Disparage Bodhisattva is the being they now know as Sakyamuni Buddha. A few more illustrative stories follow about other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
There are at least four ways to interpret the claims of Chapter 16.
First, the straight Emptiness reading. The Buddha is just telling us that all the Buddhas are upāyas. There are no truths about the world: he’s telling us these stories just to help us get to the point where we can see that. His own long duration is also just a story. There is no future or past Buddhahood, there are no Buddhas throughout the universe, Buddhahood as such is something that cannot be said to exist or not exist; all Buddhism, like all time, is just a story, and paradoxically, knowing that is all there is to being a Buddha. As he says right there in the chapter, what the Buddha uniquely knows is that the truth is neither one way nor another, so all descriptions are equally true and equally false. The ones that count as true are the ones that act as upāyas, as rafts, to get us beyond the dichotomy of true and false.
Second, an expansion of this, in the Tiantai reading. Here the chapter is read as an illustration of what the Sutra had claimed back in Chapter 2: a Buddha appears in the world for one reason only: everything a Buddha does is a way of showing sentient beings what it’s like to be a Buddha, and making them equal with him, and further, revealing that this vow to make all beings equal to himself has already been fulfilled, they already are Buddhas: he has just revealed the neglected dimension of every being which is its Buddhahood. What Sakyamuni says in Chapter 16 then applies not to him alone, but to each sentient being: it is a graphic expression of what it means to be a Buddha, which is what all Buddhism is showing all beings to be. When the Buddha predicted your future Buddhahood, this is what he was predicting: when you become a Buddha, you will realize that you have been a Buddha for measureless ages in the past—in other words, you will at that future time see your present self as already having always been a Buddha. The Buddha looks back at his past eons as a bodhisattva and declares that he now sees that he was a Buddha already during all that time. The future Buddha he has assured you you will become will look back and see you as an unwitting bodhisattva (assuming the form of this ridiculous “you” and your ignorance of your bodhisattvhood as one his infinite compassionate and educative upayic transformations), which is now seen to have always been a Buddha. Hence, in addition to an expanded version of the Emptiness reading above, such that the skillful means are no more or less real than their own Emptiness, such that the Emptiness and the infinite positings of all these stories and propositions as skillful means are identical, we add the that this understanding of his own experience is an illustration of what it’s like to be a Buddha at any given moment, insofar as a Buddha is the one who has realized universal ambiguity, such that all determinations are temporary disambiguations. The epistemological and ontological framework for the claim is explicitly and emphatically anti-realist, even “trivialist”: Emptiness means literally that any interpretation is possible, and valid, and “works” in some way: it follows therefore that this interpretation, that these things are the Buddha’s intentional arrangement, is also valid and also works. It does not eliminate the alternate possible interpretations; in fact it coexists with them, even encourages them as the principle of infinite upāyas that is promulgated in the same breath as that of the eternal Buddha; indeed, the only special character of the “it’s done by the Buddhas” interpretation is that it also allows and even empowers the alternate interpretations, e.g., “it is all random chance” or “it is all my own karma,” incorporates them not by unilateral subsumption and dissolution into itself but rather by allowing them as alternate expressions of itself—as ways in which the ineradicable intersubsumption of purpose and purposelessness, of multiple purposes, manifests: each transforms freely into all the others, with no beginning and no end, none more basic or final than the others. Each is a way of keeping all the others alive; the Buddha’s intention is discoverable in every effect, and part of his intention is the embrace of all other intentions, and of all intentionlessness. It means that when you achieve Buddhahood, even the prior Buddhas who inspired and instructed you become aspects of your own present Buddhahood. All pasts and all futures become aspects of your present. You become the source of your own source. Like the “transformation bodies” of the present and the other Buddhas of the past, all the causes and conditions of one’s own past are now recast in the light of this new present, become functions of it, recontextualized and transformed into parts and aspects of this present vision. It is a description of what it’s like to see the world as a Buddha sees the world: one sees all beings and all actions as aspects of oneself, of one’s present moment, one’s present activity: since the present in question is the experience of Buddhahood, one sees only Buddhahood everywhere. All those specifications are manifestations of the Buddha’s present experience of Buddhahood, his compassion and wisdom. To be a Buddha is to see all beings as Buddha. But as in the relation between sentient beings and Guanyin explored earlier, this also means it is impossible for the agency to land simply on the side of the Buddha: to be seen as a Buddha by a Buddha is something inherent to the nature of sentient beings. We produce the Buddha through our own ignorance, and the Buddha produces us through his wisdom and compassion. Everything said about the body and mind of the Buddha is also said about the body and mind of all sentient beings, for the difference between “will be a Buddha” and “is a Buddha” here becomes meaningless. The Three Truths signify the inseparability and inter-identity of all these diverse states and phases of time. Strictly considered, moments are not just extremely short: they are nonexistent. If a moment has room for any content it all, it must arise and perish at different times; but then it is further subdivisible into smaller moments, and the same must apply to them. Since there are no separate moments, any determination at all requires a continuity across moments: the relation to otherness is intrinsic to any selfhood. That means the content of any so-called moment is just what is read into it by another moment, with a distance already stretched between them. But if one moment is nothing but the way it is read by another moment, that second moment can also be read by a third moment, and will turn out to be nothing but that way of being read. There is no non-arbitrary way to stop this process. So if there is anything at all, it must be a continuity across time, where the two end points are not really separate beings, but aspects of one and the same being. Since this applies equally in all cases, to admit you have a self at all is to admit that you have all selves. If the person you were half a second ago is still you, if the person you were two minutes ago is still you, if the baby you were is still you, then all the past is also you—in each case, if and only you choose to see it that way now. If the person you will be when you reach the end of reading any given word in this sentence is still the same person who read the beginning of the word, then all the future is you as well—in each case, if and only if you choose to see it that way right now. To be a Buddha, it turns out, is just to be in a moment when you are seeing things this way. All moments behold and intersubsume one another in this way, including our current state and our own future Buddhahood. The Buddha is always also a bodhisattva, and all other beings; and the same therefore applies to each of these beings. This provides a way of reading the text that allows an expansion of all the strange interfoldings of past and present, of here and there, of one and many. There is no end to bodhisattvahood, nor any beginning: Buddhahood is nothing but eternal bodhisattvahood that recognizes that there is never any end to its process of rebirth. A bodhisattva is a bodhisattva who falsely believes that bodhisattvahood is a mere means to the end of reaching Buddhahood, which he or she thus regards as a different state that will put an end to his or her present bodhisattvahood. A Buddha is a bodhisattva who knows, on the contrary, that there is no Buddhahood outside of eternal bodhisattvahood. Moreover, it is possible to be a bodhisattva without knowing it. Indeed, to deny and reject bodhisattvahood—to reject life—is one more way in which one may sometimes be expressing bodhisattvahood—expressing life. Indeed, “not knowing it” might sometimes be essential to being able to do it. Indeed, it is impossible not to always be a bodhisattva, as well as a demon, an animal, a god, a human, a titan, a sravaka, a Buddha. For a Buddha is just an eternal bodhisattva, and a bodhisattva is just a constant process of rebirth in any and every form, in response to any and every condition, embodying the liberative neither-sameness-nor-difference between the conditions and the conditioned, their mutual pervasion and intersubsumption of one another, which is what constitutes the liberation of both from attachment to any single fixed identity or the lack of any particular identity. I have written about this interpretation in detail elsewhere.
Third, the realtime reading which keeps to traditional Mahāyāna mythology without worrying about its anti-realist implications of Emptiness theory, which is seen as de-emphasized in this sutra, perhaps even itself relegated to the realm of upāya. On this reading, Sakyamuni is revealing that he is the sole Buddha of this world-cycle, of the imaginable universe. The general picture of the Buddhist path remains as it always had. Just as we had always thought, he will eventually reach Nirvana, leaving the world of birth and death entirely. Just as we had always thought, he did originally begin as an ordinary being, becoming a Buddha through long and strenuous practice the Bodhisattva path. It’s just that all this happened a much longer time ago than we knew, and will go on for much longer than we thought. In effect, he repeats the real process in playacting form innumerable times within the unimaginably long but still finite tenure of his Buddhahood, for upāyic purposes. This illustrates what it’s like to be a Buddha, which is just what he has been predicted for us, and will occur at some specific time in the future for each of us. To be a Buddha is to be Father of a World, which one views as one’s own responsibility, and which one experiences as, in some way, eternal and pure and blissful. We will all do that, in the unimaginably distant future. Each of us will have our own world, and will feel and behave as a father to that world, and constantly strive for unimaginably many eons to save the sentient beings in that world. Our method for doing this will involve presenting to our students a play-acted repeat of our real process of delusion and awakening and dying innumerable times, and the telling stories of other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, presenting ourselves under many guises, all out of compassion. That is what we will all do. There may be other Buddhas in other world-cycles, but all the ones we know about are really just forms of Sakyamuni. The Buddha really did have a prior teacher of Buddhism; it’s just that it was not Dīpankara, but some unknown Buddha of the much more distant past.
For convenience, we may call this the “crypo-Mormon” reading of the sutra. The meaning of “Father” is here radically opposed to the key monotheist element: for God’s fathership in monotheism is predicated on the eternal difference in status between Creator and Creatures—an odd kind of Fatherhood, for the sons are never permitted to become fathers in their own right. They are to remain eternally sons only. In the Crypto-Mormon reading of the Lotus, in contrast, the Buddha is called a father only insofar as he contributes to the creation of further Buddhas, further equals, further fathers. A father fails as a father if his sons never grow up, never become adults, never become fathers in their own right. If he failed to produce other Buddhas, he would not be a proper Buddha. If he were the only Father of the world, he would not be Father of the world.
Interestingly, the successive realtime “crypto-Mormon” reading and the Tiantai “simultaneous intersubsumption” reading actually end up converging–precisely because of the specific nature of the concept of “Buddhahood.” The “literalist” crypto Mormon reading is the real-time prediction of actual Buddhahood, first for some beings and then for all beings, and then, in Chapter 16, the revelation of what Buddhahood is: in effect, that what monotheists have been mistakenly calling God, Father of the World, etc.–the One Mind that is lovingly watching at all times, since the beginning of the universe until now, always finding ways to benefit all beings–is actually Sakyamuni Buddha. (One wonders if there is some Gnostic influence here: the real God is the God who cares for all souls, and appears as a savior figure, but is not the creator of nature. Here too the Buddha is purely benign, cares for all sentient beings spiritually, but does not create the natural world–which is said in Chapter 3 to be like a dilapidated and dangerous old house, which is read in the traditional Buddhist way: it is the collective creation of the karma of all sentient beings. The Buddha is proprietor of it only because of his compassion for the beings in it and his mastery of all there is to know about it.) In effect it completely accepts and subsumes the “one mind surveilling the world” model of monotheism–and I believe should be taken as a deliberate coup of sorts, a way of fulfilling the need (perhaps the return of long-repressed infantile longing toward an powerful and benevolent father, as a Freudian would say, but prevalent in various forms everywhere) for monotheism: the desire for an all-powerful benevolent indestructible father who is looking after us. But the nature of this one mind is not as the monotheists think: the father of the world is not the creator and judge of the world, who sees all things as creations of his own sovereign will, and thereby determinates what roles they are to play as finite creatures. Rather, this mind has been revealed in the previous chapters to be a mind which began (in some other universe, at some incalculably distant time) as an ordinary being like us, but which is now constantly monitoring the world to find ways and means to advance all sentient beings to Buddhahood, but also a mind that sees all the past and future causality of beings sub species aeternitatis, all sentient beings as becoming Buddhas in the future. But this means to see them presently already as Buddhas-to-be, perceiving their past and future all at once. To become a Buddha means “to become someone who is the God-figure for a particular universe,” but also, at the same time, “to see all beings presently as Buddhas.” The Buddha sees all time at once. So seeing your present, he sees your future: he sees you as a sentient-being-to-Buddha. But the Buddha-part of you that he sees also sees all time at once! So the one mind that is always watching you is seeing you as the one mind that is always watching all beings. You are not the Buddha of this world, but you will be the Buddha of another world. But when you are that Buddha, you will see all beings of all worlds as Buddhas.
For this is how the specific conception of “a Buddha” seems to differ decisively from the conception of a “God,” even the Mormon God which is no longer a single creator of the world, but still is modeled on the monotheist notion of what Godhood otherwise entails. I don’t know if Mormon theology, in making its Gods subject to becoming, has retained the traditional disjunction between time and eternity inherited from monotheist traditions; if not, the events proceed linearly in realtime, which is considered an ultimate reality in the commonsensical manner, and this would apply also to the achievement of Godhood: it will look back at past moments of its own becoming as really past. This is not the case in Buddhism: rather, we have a combination of time and eternity in that we have a temporal process that leads to a vision of eternity, which sees even its own past process of reaching that state as eternal and forever present. A Buddha sees a sentient being in the way a Tralfamadorian sees a person in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, which is probably modeled on some popular presentations of the “loaflike” nature of time in the Einstein-Minkowski interpretation: they see his past-present-and-future all at “once.” “I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change….When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.”[25] When a Tralfamadorian looks at a human, what is seen is not just the present moment, the present adult. It is rather a long centipede, with baby legs at one end, growing legs along the way, and finally old man legs at the end. Extend that picture to a being with infinite past lifetimes as infinite creatures. When a Buddha sees a sentient being, he sees a long millipede with trillions of legs and bodies, culminating in a Buddha-body that sees the rest of its own body in exactly the same way, as an infinite millipede stretching out behind it, and infinite bodhisattva transformations stretching out into the future. All of that is what the Buddha is, not what he used to be or will become. And to be a Buddha is to see all sentient beings that way: for “seeing a sentient being” just means seeing the “sentient being legs portion” of that infinite millipede. Hence when he looks at any sentient being, he sees that he or she is, not will be, a Buddha, just as if I am looking at the hindmost legs of a millipede, I am looking at a millipede. Particularly if I can see the whole millipede. Further, I see the head of that millipede which sees the whole millipede, just as I do—so I can say that I see every sentient being as a Buddha who knows (not “will know”) that he or she is a Buddha—and is seeing all other beings as Buddhas. The Buddha sees all beings as Buddhas, which means that he sees that head of yours way somewhere up ahead along the millipede that sees all beings as Buddhas—including himself, seeing you seeing him. Not for nothing is the climax of the sutra the moment in Chapter 11 when the two Buddhas of past and present come to be seated side by side in the opened tomb of the past, opened by the gathering in one place of all the present Buddha’s transformations: as promised in Chapter 2, “Only a Buddha together with a Buddha can realize the ultimate reality of all things.”
That means also that you will see your past self, as a creature living under the watchful eye of Sakyamuni Buddha in Sakyamuni’s world, as the Buddha. The Buddhas intersubsume, even if only one exists in each world system, and each is in that world like a God: in my world Sakyamuni is a sentient being watched (and cared for, and advanced toward Buddhahood) while in his world he watches and cares for me and advances me toward Buddhahod. The key is that a Buddha is defined not only as compassionate and wise, and as “father of the world” in the sense of creating value (i.e. producing all those bodhisattvas that emerge from the earth–a usurpation of fertility powers of monotheist Gods who create the natural world–a Buddha does not do that) and caring for it, but also being the one who persists through the whole course of this world system, and whose wisdom consists in seeing within each moment the entire temporal career of each being, and hence seeing all sentient beings as Buddhas. That is what is predicted for you when Buddhahood is predicted: that you will be the “God” of some world, and thus see all beings as Gods of some world….
So it really doesn’t matter whether the Buddhahood is successive or simultaneous: to a Buddha, all time is present, so there is no succession, no emerging and disappearing, as he says in Ch. 16, or rather there is neither thus nor otherwise. Whether we say Buddhahood is just “figurative” and thus undermined by intersubsumptive motifs (someone is simultaneously a Buddha and a bodhisattva, or a sravaka and a bodhisattva, or as in Chapter 19, a regular eye that sees like the god’s eye, etc.) or successive and literal, it amounts to the same thing, because Buddahood is precisely seeing all times at once, and thus seeing all sentient beings as the entire story of their karmic history, through their millions of years of practice up to their becoming a Buddha in the future, as if one a single string, thus seeing all sentient beings as Buddhas right now, seeing all sentient beings as seers who see all sentient beings as Buddhas! Hence in Ch. 5 we are told that the Buddha’s surveillance and omniscience of the world is to know what sentient beings are really thinking and doing, of which they themselves are ignorant! The opposite of the monotheist God’s surveillance, which is watching your thoughts and judges you to be much worse than you thought (i.e., the Sermon on the Mount, where “just looking on a woman in lust is already committing adultery”–in your own judgment it was not a sin, but God’s judgment is much harsher), the Buddha sees you as much better than you think you are: you think you are merely a sentient being, acting from greed anger and delusion, but actually you are at the same time a Buddha, who sees all beings as Buddhas. (Like the lost son in Chapter 4: he thought he was merely a shit-shoveler, but actually he was doing something much more exalted, and the whole place belonged to him (already did, in the view of him his father had!). Quite a coup: perhaps the Lotus Sutra should be called “the self-overcoming of monotheism,” as Nishitani gave us “the self-overcoming of nihilism”!
The further Buddhist premises of course seal the deal on the coup: it turns out, as the story of the Doctor in Chapter 16 drives home, that being a monotheistesque God and being the absence of that God (i.e., all-powerful, undying father figure) are one and the same–and there we segue back to Spinoza, for whom “necessary existence” meant just that: something that is equally present as present or as absent. We can easily see how this blends seamlessly into the Tiantai interpretation of the effortless, non-dwelling, equally distributed Middle, neither being nor non-being and both being and non-being, as what is being referred to when we speak of the responses of the cosmic Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Even them not being there and not doing anything is their compassionate presence and action.
And now the fourth conceivable reading of the sutra, our worst-case scenario, of which I know no historical examples, but which we take up for the sake of argument: it is just like the third reading, but it takes the predictions of other Buddhas in the earlier parts of the sutra and the descriptions of other Buddhas after Chapter 16 also as upāyas. On this reading, the only real Buddha in all the universes is Sakyamuni. His goal is therefore not to make Buddhas of us—all such talk was also just upāya. He is the one and only Buddha for all space and time. He has been here as long as the world has, and even when this universe seems to be destroyed, he’ll still be here. He is the father and proprieter of the world. Let’s call this the crypto-monotheist interpretation. Chapter 16 is the only literal truth: it is telling us that everything else, all other Buddhas, are merely partial embodiments of Sakyamuni, the only real Buddha for all time and space.
Now the crypo-monotheist interpretation would require not only neglect of all Buddhist thought, but also considerable violence to the text. For even in Chapter 16, Sakyamuni casually mentions that this long lifespan of his is the result of his long bodhisattva practice—if only that chapter reveals ultimate reality, then that part too is evidently not an upāya, but part of the real story. That means Sakyamuni began as an ordinary deluded person. The Sanskrit version also refers to his eventual genuine nirvana. The Kumarajiva translation into Chinese mentions that this is how all the Buddhas teach, in the midst of the revelation of Chapter 16, and ends by saying this is all for the purpose of helping them quickly become Buddhas. So all that stuff would have to be included in what is really so, not dismissed as an upāya. All of this would support the crypto-Mormon reading over the crypto-monotheist reading.
But let’s ignore that for now, and try to seriously entertain the crypto-monotheist reading, focusing on the sutra’s traditional attribution of some kind of “omniscience” to the Buddha (which is generally interpreted radically away from any monotheist type of implications in the light of Emptiness anti-ontology: see for example Seng Zhao’s “Prajna has no Knowledge”) but also its claim that he is the “Father of all living beings in the world” to whom the world “belongs” in some sense, so much so that there is really only one Buddha, which is himself, of which all other alleged Buddhas are merely avatars. Let’s ignore the clear statement, even in Chapter 16, that he began as a Bodhisattva, and assume that he’s literally eternal. What I want to stress here is that even this near-impossible reading is still firmly within the atheist camp.
Why? Because even here, the Buddha is only described as watcher and carer for the world, tweaker of the world, responder to the world, never as a creator of the world, or as an omnipotent controller of the world, or as the judge of the world, or the executor of justice of the world. This has huge consequences for how this “omniscient father of the world” relates to the experience of sentient beings. He is said to be “father” only in the sense of having an indissoluble kinship with all suffering sentient beings, being responsible for the welfare and education of all sentient beings, and being their precursor in the path of cultivation and their teacher and potentially transforming them into a new mode of existence, not ever for literally creating their existence by fiat or will. They have created themselves with their own actions, their own karma. He reproduces them only “figuratively,” with the understanding that in Buddhism all creation is only figurative, is always from a prior pre-existing state, insofar as there is infinite time in both directions, no beginning of the universe and no ex nihilo creation of any entity. A Buddha creates Buddhas, or if we really go crypto-monotheist here, merely Buddhists; but he does not create the priorly existing sentient beings from which those Buddhas are developed. He is owner of the world as the one responsible for taking care of it, but not as its creator or unilateral ruler. Sentient beings see that world initially as a fine place, not realizing it’s a burning house. That’s due to their karma. The Buddha then uses sentient beings’ own idiosyncratic desires to help them realize it’s a burning house. He didn’t make it a burning house either. Finally it turns out that even when they see it as burning, they are not seeing it correctly. The world is eternally so, neither thus or otherwise, filled with humans and gods, even and emphatically in Chapter 16: he didn’t create that either.
All the Buddha does is teach, trying to inspire and transform the state of sentient beings by evoking certain states of desire, aspiration, reconsideration, accomplished through various types of storytelling, role-playing and hide-and-seek games. His sole activity, even on this crypto-monotheist reading, is to forever dwell in the world, lurk in all places, showing himself to whatever degree of explicitness will most help sentient beings attain benefits—in this case, not to become Buddhas like himself, since on this reading even his assurances that this will happen are being relegated to upāya, but some kind of benefit. The ones that are mentioned in the narrow range of this chapter itself are “liberating” them, which involves them acquiring “gentleness” and “flexibility of mind” and “joy” and “entering the Buddha-path.” It is hard to consider these as not implying that these sentient beings will also become Buddhas, but that is the task we have set for ourselves in trying to imagine the crypto-monotheist reading. Perhaps this would revert to the old Buddhist goal, so vociferiously repudiated in the first half of the sutra: simply helping them get free of suffering. One thing is certain: it is not for the sake of the interpersonal relationship itself. Rather, the Buddha’s engagement with us is for the sake of our own liberation. Non-personality remains ultimate. This is again a point which would count for many monotheist apologists and others as a defect rather than a merit: the relationship is wholly instrumental to the experiences of the participants. In versions two and three, the Tiantai and the crypto-Mormon versions rehearsed above, we would have a sense in which the relationship is in fact ultimate, taking the line from Chapter 2 as non-upāyic: “It is only between a Buddha and a Buddha that the ultimate reality of all things is fully realized….including their ultimate equality from beginning to end.” This line argues strongly for the “millipede” interpretation, where the mutual regard of the Buddha seeing all others as Buddhas is the ultimate goal, the only real Buddhahood, the ultimate revelation of what even all “appearances, natures, causes, effects” and so on really are. The Tiantai reading likewise would press this ultimacy of intersubjectivity, teasing out also the intersubsumption of the consciousnesses of all beings in all the Ten Realms. In both cases, the relationship itself is ultimate. But we should note well that this would still be quite different from the ultimacy of interpersonal relationship required in a monotheistic cosmos, where all virtue and all liberation is ultimately only for the sake producing the proper relationship with God: for there, that relationship is between one person who is a creature, and thus eternally subordinate and dependent on the non-personal or the other-personed (i.e., derived from the personhood of God), and one Creator, who is not dependent on a substratum of the impersonal at all. As we saw in part one of this book, this unequal relationship is a wild distortion of what makes real relationships between persons what they are, for all known persons are embedded in otherness in a way that the person of God is supposed not to be (except for the God of, say, mid-period Schelling): he is person, will, consciousness, purpose all the way down. Making the interpersonal ultimate in version two and three, on the contrary, is a way of ensuring that no single consciousness at all is based on itself all the way down, exacerbating the state of consciousness’s embedment in otherness.
But here in version four, we are even farther away from a monotheism that makes any kind of relationship the ultimate purpose of existence. This eternal and sole Buddha is presented in Ch. 16 as existing and acting only to facilitate the welfare of sentient beings, their own quests, which are not defined in terms of that relationship of facilitation. What are the consequences of this picture of the world? First, we must consider the extent to which this allows for a certain kind of Panglossian interpretation of experience: whatever happens, there is some presence there of an element which is intended for our instruction, a purely benevolent intention with none of the sublime darkness of the monotheist God in his judgmental fury. There is a substrain of monotheist apologetics that consider this a kind of tragic depth; a purely benevolent deity like this Lotus Sutra Buddha would thus seem rather insipid and shallow. But insofar as this is not an omnipotent creator, the tragic depth does not need to be imported into a terrifying deity: the recalcitrance of the world, the darkness of the non-purposive, is there from the beginning, in the prior deluded karma of sentient beings and the infinities of suffering that it entails, and it is this that he takes into his own possession, becomes father of, when taking on the role of father of the world: his Buddhahood depends on adopting all this darkness into himself as his own eternal task. The benevolent Buddha is a supplement to a pre-existing default atheist world where nothing was designed for our convenience or enjoyment, and our failure to see the liberative potentials of this world, to see it as a Buddha sees it, is not due to some disobedience or betrayal of our original design, of a misuse of the freedom he kindly bestowed on us to make us his willing fans, of the kindness shown by this Buddha in creating us, for he did not create us. All roads of causality do not lead back ultimately to the Buddha, even this maximally monotheistic Buddha. The darkness of the world is still the atheist darkness of an undesigned universe that was not made with us in mind. A natural disaster, like the Lisbon earthquake, would thus not present the kind of problem for this kind of crypto-monotheism that it does for full-on monotheism: it is not assumed that every event not accomplished by a specific human intentionality is therefore the work of the one God’s intention. While it may be the case that it is an instance of the Buddha deliberately concealing his presence to affect living beings in a certain (allegedly benevolent) way, this would not be the first go-to explanation. From a Buddhist perspective, such an event is first and foremost the result of collective karma, and unfortunate in just the way all karma is unfortunate. And while the concept of karma does open itself to the criticism that it “blames the victim,” i.e., that it refuses to see any misfortune as completely devoid of connection to some morally charged deeds and intentions of the past, and thus robs the universe, as Nietzsche would say, of its innocence (hence the importance for Nietzsche of replacing the “moral universe” with a universe of pure meaninglessness, as a redemptive move), it must be remembered that the whole point of the karma doctrine in Buddhism is to say how terrible it is that we have to live under this ridiculous regime of cause and effect. It is just what we’re trying to escape from. It is not something of which we are asked to praise the glorious justice and rationality.
So the Panglossian element is extremely limited here, and rests on a tragic substratum: it is an optimism that, while not going to the extent of claiming this is designed as the best of all possible worlds does claim the existence of an omnipresent but non-omnipotent benevolent consciousness operating with our welfare in mind in all events, even if only in the form of withdrawing its presence. Moreover, it does claim the world is pure in the eyes of the Buddha, not due to his planning and making it that way, but due to his insight into the nature of reality: it is an eternal pure land. In adopting the tragic world into his own oversight, he has made this tragedy a part of his own Buddhahood, precisely in his eternal task of having to address and overcome constantly recreated sufferings sentient beings create for themselves in all their endlessness—for that is what Chapter 16 tells us the Buddha is always doing, cheek and jowl with the assertion that this world in flames is always seen by him as a Pure Land. The presence of this deity’s effects are seen entirely in terms of available presence rather than control. The ordinary run of events would still be interpreted here as occurring due to the complicated intertwining of karma. Unexpected twists and turns, seemingly miraculous turnarounds, ironic juxtapositions, anything that strikes one as out of the normal causal run, however, is to be viewed as possibly a deliberate sign or hint or instruction from the Big Buddha. If something especially favorable happens, it can be interpreted as the Buddha’s “arrangement,” and if a setback happens, this can also be taken as an arrangement in some way done intentionally by the Buddha as part of his upāyic education. Because even this One Buddha is never thought of as the intentional ex nihilo creator, the Buddha’s providence is never, in no case, the only force operating to produce a given effect. We remain in the domain of the basic Buddhist doctrine of cooperative multiple causality here, rather than unilateral control. Each experience is produced from a superimposition of both our karma and the eternal Buddha’s upāya; the source of every experience is not unilaterally due to our own karma or the Buddha’s providential efforts to instruct us. It is a call and response, a literalist reading of “ganying” without the involuntary the-universe-is-doing-it-unintentionally reading we saw in the Tiantai treatment of bodhisattvas, discussed above. Even here, where everything that happens is fully the result of intentions, it is not one intention that can produce any experience or any thing. It is a cooperative interaction of our own deluded intentions (karma) and conceptions, and the intentions of the everpresent Eternal Buddha trying to find ways to tweak us to awaken. In this he is perhaps like the “persuasive” but sole God of the process theologies of Harsthorne or Whitehead—and perhaps similarly since he expresses himself in, rather than excludes, all alternate forms, he incorporates what he can tweak from all beings into aspects or manifestations of himself, rather than excluding them as idolatry like the classical monotheist God. That means all the events that occur are joint products of this Buddha, constantly making growth opportunities available, but limited by the extent to which our own karmic delusions will allow us to receive them. He tailors them to our dispositions, which remain the primary determinant, and this means most of what happens will be less than ideal. It ensures only that somewhere within each composite event we can discern an intention meant to liberate us, which is available for our response. If we pass up this opportunity, no worries: he will be doing this forever, and we can catch the next train. There is no final judgment, and even whatever disappointment or judgment this may elicit from him are put forward exclusively for the same reason that the benevolent lure was put forth: to encourage our liberation. They are not expressions of the Buddha’s judgment of us; if it were more beneficial to us to express a condemnation as praise, or praise as a condemnation, he would do so. We are not being tested to determine our fates: our fates our determined only by the Buddhas benevolence, he will never give up trying to liberate us. The only question is how long it will take, how much unnecessary suffering we will choose to endure by ignoring it. But no final failure is possible. Again, we see the importance of the infinite time in which we are to situate the human condition here.
This irreducibility to the control of any single intention applies also to the purity of the world and the eternal presence of the Buddha so seeing it. The Buddha is a deus absconditus, a hidden deity, and the point of Chapter 16 of the sutra is to present an interpretation of his absence as all part of his plan, just as it might be in a monotheist discourse. But here it is not a test designed ex nihilo as part of the chosen plan of a perhaps perverse omnipotent deity who had it in his power to save us in some other less cumbersome way, but a repurposing the consequences of a prior diffuse purposivity, our own karma. Our failure to see the purity of the world is in the ordinary course of things due to a combination of equally primordial causes: the purity of the world as seen by the Buddha and the views of things produced by our attachments and ignorance. Neither of these is more fundamental than the other, neither was created by the other. Eternity is present, purity is present, but we appropriate it in a way that causes us suffering, just as the children in the doctor story imbibe materials that, in the father’s hands, are medicines. Note that the father didn’t create the medicines ex nihilo. Medicine is one way of taking the given, via a certain handling of it, a certain dosage and way of combining herbs that exist prior to anyone’s intervention. The same herbs may be medicine or poison. The children’s access to the same herbs that the father has concocted into medicines are for them poisons. The effect is a joint product of the father’s benevolent intention (which is what made the dangerous drugs present and available in easily accessible form) and the children’s ignorance (in how to take them). Our intentionality that misapprehends and causes ourselves suffering cannot be part of the design, because the intentionality of the Buddha is framed entirely as a response to it. This is where the use of this motif of herbs as either poison or medicine differs from the seemingly similar trope in intelligent design theories like those of, say, Plato or Augustine. The Buddha did not create us, and we are not “free” as part of a test he has designed. Our karmic limitations of vision remain the prior given. But this given ignorance is on certain occasions skillfully exacerbated by the Buddha’s deliberate withdrawal of his visibility, the visibility of the one who always sees it as pure precisely in his adoption of it as his eternal task. The effects of our bad karma is an opportunity that the Buddha thus sometimes can tweak and radicalize into an upāya by which it can itself be overcome. Hence we are invited to see our own failure to see the eternal presence of the Buddha, and thus our failure to understand how the world looks when viewed rightly as pure qua eternal task, as he does, as both a call and a response, as an intersection of two sorts of intentionality, where the second is a kind of skillful extension of a riff we have first established, a continuation of it that also turns it around. We are suffering due to our ignorance, but the further complete hopelessness and lack of any element of value in the world is itself a result of the Buddha’s intervention—i.e., his deliberate withdrawal. It is hard to see anything eternal in the world because of our ignorance, but it is so hard due to the Buddha’s skillful withdrawal. As in the doctor’s story, the Buddha’s job is to turn mere cluelessness into genuine despair. The Buddha’s omnipresence is not omnipotent control which has designed all things to serve his one purpose, but rather the omni-availability of a dimension of intentional hiding in any instance of complacent ignorance, and an intention all the more to be suspected the more severe the absence of any sign of bliss, purity or eternity is in any situation.
We can definitely imagine a holder of this Chapter 16-only crypto-monotheist reading of the Lotus, which dismisses all prior Buddhist thought and even the rest of the Sutra as now-obsolete upāya, sharing the sentiments of these monotheists who are constantly looking for the Lord’s intention in all events, who see coincidences as signs of a plan, or who hand themselves over to the Lord’s intention in the Compensatory Theist mode (like Samuel L. Jackson at the end of Pulp Fiction, or Neil Patrick Harris at the end of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, they are willing to go “wherever God takes me”). Indeed, there is talk in the sutra of being an “emissary” of the Buddha, working for the Buddha-company—by spreading the Lotus Sutra itself. We can perhaps also imagine Lotusoid athletes praying to the Eternal Buddha for victory over their rivals, and thanking him for it when it arrives. These are monotheist behaviors often understandably ridiculed by non-believers, including myself. But their meaning changes significantly with the removal of the key monotheist premises that are lacking here: omnipotence and the sole proprietorship that comes with creation ex nihilo. The athlete praying to the Buddha is praying for an intervention in the natural course of karma, which in the context of the sutra, means, “Please find a way to use my victory as an upāya that will somehow enlighten sentient beings, myself and others, if you can find a way.” There’s no guarantee the Buddha can find a way to do so in this instance, so there is no question of why my prayer wasn’t accepted; this was just not an opportunity where the factors lined up in a way that would enable a skillful tweak in the requested direction. The monotheist might also say that it may be better for me to lose in this instance, and thus both the monotheist and the Lotus devotee can always read their unanswered prayer as not-ignored. But the Lotus devotee can never read his victory as a sign of his greater accordance with the plan of the universe, as a sign that he is more elect in the eyes of the deity than the loser, that he has won greater favor from the deity. For the expression of a desire for a particular outcome is itself proof that the praying man is still deluded and in need of waking up, and hence as much in need of instruction as the loser, perhaps more so.
In short, not everything that happens is done by the Buddha, or rather, nothing that is done is done by the Buddha unilaterally: there are no sole causes. Whatever happens is done as a cooperative venture of call and response, by Buddhas and sentient beings in tandem, and to the extent that it is attributable to any one, it is equally attributable to every other: it is fully expressive of the world of the one as of the other. Nor are the Buddha’s interventions rewards or punishments; they are always hints to goad awakening. The big point is that the goal of the two systems are radically different. The monotheist definition of the good is obedience to God, recognition of God, belonging to God. The athlete who prays to God expresses his devotion and submission to God, in the hopes that by proving his greater fealty to God than that possessed by his rival, he will be seen as more worthy of a reward than his rival. If both pray, God will look into the hearts of both and see who is genuinely more pious, sincere, submissive to God, and the outcome can be seen as the sign of a judgment. The removal of God removes what is most morally outrageous about this practice (although admittedly it perhaps remains superstitious and bizarre): the idea that the ruler of the universe would redirect the course of trivial events as a reward for those he favors, at the expense of others; that God cares about who wins this basketball game or this Grammy because it will serve as a reward for His loyal servants, while the loss expresses his disfavor. This is instructional only to the extent that they show human beings that they had better submit to God, for then things will work out better for them. This is because the sole definition of goodness here is submission to God. This cannot be so in the Buddhist crypto-monotheist case, because the interventions of this deity have nothing to do with his favor, and the goal is not submission to the Buddha, but awakening so as to end suffering. The Buddha-deities interventions are thus always subordinated to this goal, rather than being rewards for fealty. These interventions are not even the ending of suffering themselves, but rather clues to prompt all sentient beings, “whether they practice the way or not,” as Chapter 16 says, to end their own ignorance and suffering. Monotheist systems of course do claim, in the Emulatory Theist tradition going back to Plato, that true blessedness lies only in knowing and submitting to God, and thus that this goal amounts to the same thing: God is showing us the way to our own end of suffering—the suffering of being separated from God, of not knowing God, of our self-will that denies God or is directed to the idol of a lesser good. The Chapter 16 Buddha too says that our only happiness lies in knowing and delighting in the eternity enjoyed by the Buddha, and freeing ourselves of our attachment to impermanent things. But the difference remains stark: in the Mahāyāna case, as in Spinoza’s case or Nietzsche’s case, it is the knowledge of eternity itself which brings liberation—anything sub species aeternitatis, anything eternally recurring, all things eternal in Chapter 16 (“always full of gods and men and plants and lights, etc.”). It is the form of eternity itself, infinity itself, that liberates: that is atheism. In the monotheist case, this infinity is usurped to an infinite purpose, an infinite personality. Recognizing God’s goodness as expressed in his intention and design for us is the goal, having this relationship and loving him is the purpose for which we were created. It is not infinity itself, whether the infinity of this person, or of ourselves, that liberates us from our problem here: it is the infinity specifically of an intention, that is, the inescapability of an intention, of a plan that includes us—but which, precisely because it is a plan, an intention, is itself a means of exclusion, a bulwark against infinity. For that is what plans and intentions are.
This remains starkly opposed to the Buddhist case, even in its twisted impossible crypto-monotheist form, for even here, the goal is not decided by the Buddha, but by us, for it is entirely in terms of the desire to be free of suffering that the Buddha has compassion and works for us. In other words, in the absence of the aspect of judge, the good done by the Eternal Buddha is good for whom? By whose criterion? Not a universal criterion set up by the Buddhas as authorities, nor by the “eternal” Buddha as the ontological basis of beings, to which they are thus obligated to conform. Not His will, but mine. Good is still only definable as “what is good for the sentient being himself.” My suffering, my desire to end my suffering—that is the sole standard, the sole justification. The Buddha might still do things “for my own good,” against my own conscious will and judgment, seemingly in classic Compensatory Theist form, but that is not because he is imposing his own standard or goal on me. We may indeed view the Parable of the Burning House in Chapter Two of the Sutra as an attempt to make room, in a Buddhist cosmos, for the idea of the Buddha setting a goal for a sentient which is not the explicit goal of the sentient being—and perhaps we should see monotheist influence here as well, the idea that there is a plan for sentient beings decided by someone other than themselves. But here again we see how the non-monotheist premises thwart and indeed reverse all monotheist motifs—so much so that we may view this not as an incorporation of the monotheist motif but rather as its neutralization, its repurposing, its inoculation. For what remains unthinkable is the idea that any sentient being could be presented with a mission or destiny that he does not himself acknowledge as such, even if only after the fact. This Buddha is perhaps offensively paternalistic in telling a child who wants a deer cart that an ox cart is better. What if the child, once outside the burning house, says, “That’s great and all, but what I really want is a deer cart”? There is simply no available conceptual resource within a Buddhist cosmos, even if we were to add this impossibly crypto-monotheist but still non-creator version of the Eternal Buddha, by which to say, “Tough: that’s what you are created for, that is your real purpose, to drive an ox-cart. What matters is not your desire, but the Buddha’s desire—that’s what he made you for, that’s your mission.” The ultimate goal can only be decided by the sentient being himself. In the absence of the ethos of command and obedience that go with monotheism, with the ultimacy of intention and purpose, with single teleology as the real ground of being, desirability is always the function of desire, and the unilateral desires of the Buddha would be, besides being a contradiction in terms, irrelevant to what is desirable for me. The telos is entirely mine, entirely particular, not universal. If I ask for guidance and ways are devised to show me that my grasp of the means toward the end that I myself desire has been deficient, if the Buddha deliberately thwarts my immediate plans to show that I’m barking up the wrong tree for what I want, that is still completely different from trying to impose his telos on me, to replace my Will with His will, or even the Will of the whole over the will of the part. Unless I myself come to agree that this previously undesired outcome is indeed something I find even more to my liking than the original goal, there are no available grounds by which to contradict me. I am under no obligation to share the Buddha’s goals. The claim is rather that I will come to do so, in terms of desires I already have, and which are not caused by the Buddha. If I never want to be a Buddha, and if being told that I can do so never arouses joy in me, it will never be my obligation to do so. In this universe, even with a maximally crypto-monotheistic Buddha, there is no final point of adjudication, nor any need for one.
The upāya doctrine of Mahāyāna Buddhism may be viewed as way of incorporating and repurposing pre-existing religious motifs and beliefs, recontextualizing them in a Buddhist framework, and thereby sublating them and turning them away from their original anti-Buddhist implications: retaining them, but by reframing them into a larger Buddhist framework, ultimately undermining them and turning them towards Buddhist goals. We may see the bodhisattvas as a Buddhifying adoption and nullification of the polytheist gods and the role of prayer to them. And we may view the Lotus Sutra, on any of its possible readings, even the most outrageously chowderheadedly monotheistic, as the most daring and thoroughgoing of the bunch: the Buddhifying adoption and thus nullification of monotheism itself.
Now let us turn to another such case: the Pure Lands as the Buddhifying adoption and thus nullification of the always popular get-in-good-with-deity-and-posthumously-be-born-in-paradise-when-you-die type of religion.
An Alternate Atheist Faith: Amida Buddha and the Pure Land
Consider the following: a being of inconceivably limitless power who pervades the universe with the light of his infinite wisdom and goodwill, enacting at all times and places his elaborate plan to save all, even the worst sinners, if only they will take refuge in what he wills for them, express their faith in him, give up their spiritual pride in themselves, relying only on his power and not on their own paltry good works—for in comparison to the real standard of goodness embodied by his being, all these so-called “good works,” whether in the interpersonal ethical relations of the most upright citizen or in the religious practices of the highest saints, are through and through corrupt, merely thinly disguised forms of vanity, hatred, greed, selfishness, and ignorance. Constant devotion from the person of the believer to the person of this being, explicitly for the purpose of evading the hellish destiny one deserves after death through the grace of his free gift of acceptance, which will instead transport one after death to a land of bliss. Even our faith and devotion to that illimitable being are ultimately only attributable to that illimitable being himself, not to ourselves; it is him, not us, that is to be credited with our faith in him, by which we are saved. And in the current period of historical time at least, total reliance on his power is the only thing that can save us—there is no other way. None of this can be proved, of course, and in fact belief in such an unlikely scenario is highly unjustifiable through our reasoning or any evidence other than scriptural hearsay. But for that very reason, absolute faith is called for, and is itself a miraculous benediction.
All of the above obviously could describe certain well-known monotheist religions. But I am actually describing Jōdō Shinshū Buddhism, founded by the Japanese monk Shinran (1173-1263). The being of inconceivably limitless power is Amida Buddha, the shortened Japanese form of Amitābha Buddha, which means “Awakened One of Illimitable Light,” who is also known as Amitāyus Buddha, which means “Awakened One of Illimitable Life.” What needs to be addressed here is just how big a difference it makes that, in spite of all the similarities to monotheist faiths of a certain stripe enumerated above—many of the things most offensive to modern secular sensibilities about religious faith in general—just how much of a big difference it makes that this is in fact not a monotheism, indeed is a deeply atheist type of religious consciousness. For it is to be noted that among the features of this being I did not list “Creator of the Universe.” Nor did I describe this being as the creator or the judge of the beings he devotes himself to saving, nor punisher of anyone who was not saved, nor maker of the rules governing the fates of these beings. Nor, for that matter, did I even describe him as a lower-case “god.” For according to this faith, Amida Buddha began as an ordinary human being like you and me, though in a land very far removed and very long ago in the vast Buddhist cosmos. Many many many trillions of years ago, this ordinary person heard a Buddha, a fully enlightened being, preach the Dharma, the Buddhist path, and was moved to leave the household life and become a monk, taking the name Dharmākara, meaning “Treasury of the Dharma.” He made a vow to become a Buddha sometime in the future, thus becoming a bodhisattva—committed to unimaginably long periods of Buddhist practice, whereby he would attain all the necessary powers to save all sentient beings from suffering. One aspect of this vow was that he would create an environment that would by maximally conducive to sentient beings born there in their own practice of Buddhism, so that if they so chose they could more expeditiously become arhats (ending all suffering for themselves, and forever transcending the cycle of painful conditional rebirth) or else, like Dharmākara himself, become bodhisattvas striving to become Buddhas. He asked his teacher, the Buddha of that age, to show him what other Buddhas had done in creating their “Pure Lands,” the places where, after becoming Buddhas, they continue to teach and transform sentient beings. After an extended vision and tour of all existing Pure Lands of all Buddhas, he chose what he considered the best features from each of them, and accordingly made a series of 48 Vows, all with the same form: “Unless such and such is the case when I become a Buddha, I will not become a Buddha.” Dharmākara was still an ordinary unenlightened being at this point in time. The only thing that distinguished him was this vow not to stop his practice until all this was accomplished—he had no idea how it was going to be accomplished. He would create a world according to his judgment of what would be best for the beings there. So though he was not the creator of the universe, he was the deliberate conscious creator of a particular world, setting the parameters through conscious choice—a finite miniature instance of total purposivity, and of Noûs as Arché—performing acts of supremely efficacious will within the larger context of a purposeless cosmos. One of the vows stipulated that inhabitants of his Pure Land would be able to instantly and unobstructedly visit all other lands, all the lands Amida himself did not create, and learn from them. Another stipulates that their vision always extend to all those other lands, and another that they can see the thoughts of all the beings in those lands who are unrelated to this Pure Land and its Buddha, Amida, whose vow this is. There were also vows stipulating that everyone there have the same skin color and level of physical beauty, have food and clothing instantly available without labor, read each others thoughts, remember all their own past lives and so on. And one of his vows included the stipulation that anyone who ten times called his name—not his current name Dharmākara, but the name he would adopt when he became a Buddha, Amida—would be born in that Pure Land after death. Then the scripture does a flash cut and we are told: Dharmākara did in fact become a Buddha, and is a Buddha now. So ipso facto, given his firm determination, we know that all those vows must have been fulfilled.
Will and conscious purpose, determined action to achieve an ambitious goal, are front and center here. But Shinran’s Pure Land religion of faith stresses that we cannot now do likewise: we are sinful and deluded through and through, and can only depend on the “Other-Power” of Amida’s vow—until we are reborn in the Pure Land, after which we can indeed become wise and strong enough to do as he did, and in the future become Buddhas who build Pure Lands for other sentient beings. Shinran says: I have no idea what’s good or bad, I’m way too stupid and ignorant to know that. For the same reason, I have no idea of what’s true, and thus I cannot possibly be sure that this tall tale about Dharmākara is true. But I believe it, because I have no other choice: being so stupid, helpless, unable to practice Buddhism, destined to long sojourns in purgatory if left to my own reasoning and virtue, when I heard my teacher Hõnen say that all that is needed is faith—not even the recitation of the name required in the scripture, but just faith itself—I had no choice but to believe it. So now I believe it. Recitation of the name too is not due to any merit of my own, it is not even my own deed: it is Amida himself who bestows this mind of faith (shinjin). But it is not this faith that saves me: it is Amida’s vow that saves me. My faith is gratitude for that fact, and its arising of in me now is the sign that this is the lifetime in which it is happening; rather than having to continue on through samsara for trillions of eons until I encounter news of Amida’s vow, or find some other way out, I will go to Amida’s Pure Land when I die this time. But since we have infinite time ahead of us, this will happen to everyone who needs it. It’s true that Shinran insists that there is no other viable practice at our present time and place; given our present world conditions, there is no other Buddhist practice that can succeed. As in nearly all East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism, though, every sentient being everywhere will become a Buddha sooner or later. Strictly speaking, when in those vast and painful samsaric wanderings they find themselves in some in other world system, where the Dharma-ending age (mappo) has not yet been reached, they may make it to Buddhahood without having to go through the detour of the Pure Land of Amida, or may have available to them other viable Pure Lands, but all are eventually destined for Buddhahood no matter what, some sooner and some later. The arising of faith in me now is my gratitude that Amida has become known to me, that my karmic relation to him has ripened, and I will not have to undergo further eons of painful transmigration before moving into position for the achievement Buddhahood. But the faith is not what does the work: Amida’s vow does. Such is Amida’s infinite compassion. The recitation of the Nembutsu, the Name of the Buddha, is just an expression of gratitude, but even this gratitude is beyond my “self-power”—I’m way too ungrateful a wretch to be genuinely thankful for this gift, that would be way too much of a virtue for someone like me to aspire to. Nor do I feel much desire to go to this boring Pure Land of his—I’m way too stupid to see what would be so great about a place like that, so I can’t drum up much enthusiasm for it—on my own. If I ever do feel a twinkling of a desire to go there, it’s due to Amida’s grace. So it is Amida bestowing my faith, my gratitude, even my aspiration to transcend my sin and ignorance.
Shinran tells us further that what we experience as shinjin, faith, is none other than Amida’s Vow itself—as Dharmākara the ordinary deluded being aspired to become Amida, we ordinary deluded beings now aspire to be born in his Pure Land. Our faith is the experience of the grace that comes to save us as it arises on the other side, the side of the Buddha: the recognition of our utter helplessness and need of a Buddha’s help, which on the one hand manifests as Amida’s vow to become that Buddha and on the other hand manifests as the recognition of our present helplessness and need. This of course has powerful resonances with Luther’s view of faith as a gift of God, discussed in online appendix A, supplement 2, “Monotheist Innovations as Backfiring Detheologies.” The difference, however, lies in the difference between the concept of “God” and the concept of “Buddha.” No one starts as a Buddha: a Buddha is something that one must become, starting as a deluded sentient being, and this applies also to Amida. Shinran holds that the Vow that transformed him into a Buddha is the very thing that we feel as our faith in his Buddhahood. In this sense it is said that when the unenlightened Dharmākara proclaimed his Vow, his resolution toward Buddhahood, he was doing just what we unenlightened beings now are doing when we recite the name Amida and our total reliance upon him: the aspiration to become Buddha is included in the Nembutsu, in the “Namu” (“I take refuge”) of the formula “Namu Amida Butsu”—I take refuge in Amida Buddha. “I take refuge” is what we say, relying entirely on Other-Power. But “I take refuge in (the Buddhahood I am now imaginatively aspiring to, namely) Amida Budda” is also what Dharmakara was saying when he made the Vow—the Vow that stipulated that by saying “I take refuge in Amida Buddha” all of us would be born in the Pure Land and from there be able to become Buddhas ourselves. His vowing to be a Buddha is also vowing to make all beings able to become Buddhas by saying this name, by turning their aspiration in this same direction as the Vow itself turned, toward his own future Buddhahood as Amida. Our shinjin is precisely his Vow to become a Buddha, his bodhicitta, and more particularly his 18th Vow, where he vowed that whoever so much as called upon him—or directed their minds toward him—would be born in his Pure Land. His Vow to save us through our calling to him is what is calling to him right now. His will is not merely a “compensation” for our willlessness: his will is precisely what we experience as our willlessness. Further, Shinran claims, this shinjin, this belief in our own powerlessness and worthlessness and the concomitant total reliance on Other Power, is Buddha-nature itself, is Buddhahood itself, is the Great Compassion directed back at us itself, is Great Nirvana itself. Living in this Other Power, surrendering completely to it, we are to become truly wuwei, making no calculations of our own about what is so or what is good or what to do. But the purpose and will and personality that we are surrendering to here are purpose and will and personality that arose in a context of surrounding purposelessness, willlessness, and impersonality, a meaning posited by a sentient being as a response to and as a transformative taking up of a prior meaninglessness, aimed above all at becoming at home in this meaninglessness, in seeing this meaninglessness pervading its own meaning-making, at realizing the non-obstruction and coextensivity between infinite meanings and unchanging meaninglessness. The Great Assymmetry discussed in Chapter Two applies here: the ultimacy of meaninglessness rather than meaning allows for the mutual inclusion of meaning and meaninglessness, rather than their mutual exclusion. My willlessness and Amida’s will are thus simply two alternate reads of this same fact, this will-willlessness, this meaningless-meaning. Hence, rather than the monotheist’s bivalent “Not my will but Thine be done,” assuming a mutually exclusive dichotomy between the two, as pertains to any two wills when will is considered ultimate rather than non-ultimate, Shinran says, “No duty [無義-also read to mean “no meaning, no calculating, no work toward a purpose”] is the true duty [the true meaning, the true work, the true calculation, the true purpose].”
Hence we see that what seemed at first to be a close analogue to Compensatory Theism—i.e., a structure where the human being is to renounce his own corrupt self-will to let the pure self-will of an exalted Other work through me and around me, to go fully wuwei myself but only in order to let the other, true, youwei work through me—here goes through an interesting reversal, which seems to be foreclosed in Compensatory Theism. Because this is an atheist system, because purpose is not the ultimate horizon, because it is wuwei infinity and not youwei decision or intention that is ultimate, and that is dispositive in this being whose name is taken to mean “awakening of infinite life (time) and light (space),” all its irrationalism and obfuscation does not land in the bifurcation and exclusion of an ultimate judgment: the inclusiveness of the impersonal wins out even in this relentlessly personalist orientation, in the form of a compassion that combines the ineluctable all-inclusiveness of unconditional necessity with the tenderness of motherly intersubjective care–-not as decision or contract but as relentless non-negotiable drive, love as a relentless and impersonal “force of nature.” In spite of the monomaniacal focus on the believer’s relationship to a particular supremely powerful personal being as the sole means of salvation—indeed as the only thing of real value in the world–Amida eventually embraces all, even non-believers and slanderers: non-believers will be born according to their regular karma, again and again through infinite time until they encounter Amida and experience the gift of faith. (In even more radical Pure Land systems, like that of Ippen of the Ji (“Time”) School, even faith is not necessary: just saying “Namu Amida Butsu” is sufficient for birth in the Pure Land, whether you believe in it or not—and this moment of speaking the name is regarded as coextensive with Dharmakara’s utterance of his own Vow and the eons of strenuous practice by which he became Amida.) All will eventually become Buddhas, and make their own Pure Lands to save sentient beings. In a monotheist system, an attempted teaching of pure acceptance, grace, and faith will tend to end up being a means toward a dichotomy, as we saw in online appendix A, supplement 7, “Why So Hard on Love Incarnate”: oneness is a means toward a final dualism, as dualism is entailed in the structure of purpose, and with it decision, judgment, exclusion. On the contrary, here we have just the opposite structure: the extreme dualism of helpless sinful human and all-benevolent perfect deity figure ends up being a dichotomous means to an end of the opposite type, the total overcoming of the dichotomy: where the consciousness of our own powerlessness is itself precisely the almighty power that is ostensibly its opposite, and indeed an experience of the being the almighty power in its becoming, for Buddhahood is something that must become itself again and again, each time retrospectively positing its own eternity, on the Tiantai model described above (Shinran had started his career as a Tendai monk). Thus through a very simple form of devotional faith, we are at once both fully aware of our own finite nothingness, powerlessness, and worthlessness, and also thereby identical to the power and goodness of the deity. This is just what the monotheist mystics aspired to again and again, thwarted in the final hour, though, by the ultimacy of the dichotomous structure built into the ultimacy of a conscious purposeful creator as the ultimate horizon of being, haunting even the attempts to think of a nothingness beyond being, a nothingness that then comes to share the exclusive structure of purpose, of oneness, of being itself under the auspices of the Noûs as Arché tradition. Such a non-dual devotionalism, a mystical convergence of infinite distance from the deity and remainderless identity with the deity, of finite powerlessness and infinite power, can in fact be succesfully imagined–but only if, as here, there is no God.
[1] For the classical formulation of pratītyasamutpāda specifically as multiple causation, see Buddhaghosa, Vissudhimagga, trans. Bhikku Nanamoli (Taipei: Buddhist Educational Foundation [reprint from Singapore Buddhist Meditation Centre edition], 1999), 623, para. 106: “Here there is no single or multiple fruit of any kind from a single cause, nor a single fruit from multiple causes, but only multiple fruit from multiple causes.”
[2] The Udâna, trans. John D. Ireland (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1990), 20.
Q: Are eliciting and responding one or are they different? If they are one, eliciting is responding, the ordinary deluded being is herself the sage (Guanyin). But if they are totally different, they can have no real relation. A: We must speak of the eliciting and the response as neither one nor different.
…. Q: The sage (Guanyin) is what is elicited; the ordinary deluded person is what does the eliciting. The sage is the responder, while the ordinary person is the responded-to. The eliciter is not the elicited, and the responder is not what is responded to. So how can you claim that “the courses of eliciting and response interpenetrate 感應道交 (and thus are neither one nor different)”?
A: The elicited is actually without any eliciting; the term “eliciting” comes only from the side of the eliciter. Thus the sage is described as the elicited. The responded-to is actually without any response; the term “response” comes only from the side of the responder. Thus the ordinary person is described as responded-to. Further, being-elicited just is the responding, and responding just is being-elicited, and likewise being-responded-to just is eliciting, and eliciting just is being-responded-to. Thus there is neither actual eliciting and responding, nor a real difference between the eliciting and the responding. In this way response and eliciting are different though not different, i.e., the sage is given the designation of the responder just by eclipsing the idea of being the elicited, while the ordinary person is given the designation of the eliciter just by eclipsing the idea of being the responded-to. Thus we say the paths of eliciting and response are interpenetrating. But we can further critique this explanation. If there is actually no difference between eliciting and responding, why is it that now we say the sage eclipses the side of eliciting and the ordinary person eclipses the side of responding, rather than the other way around? If you could reverse them, then there would really be no difference between the sage and the ordinary, but if not, they are in this sense truly different—how can we say they are not different? Moreover, if the eliciting can be called the eliciting in spite of having no actual eliciting to it, why can it not just as well be called the responding? If the responded-to has nothing actual to it, why not call it the elicited instead? If you could do this, then there would be no eliciting and response at all, but if you cannot, they are clearly different. How can we say they are not different? A further difficulty is the following: if we take the eliciter to be the responded-to, and the elicited to be the responder, this is the idea of being “self-caused” (the first of the four alternatives denied by Madhyamaka Emptiness critique, i.e., just by eliciting itself, there is response, eliciting is the sole cause of response, it itself fully accounts for or causes it). Again, if the responder just is the responded to, or the elicter just is the elicited, this is also the idea of self-cause. But if the responding produces the being-responded-to and the eliciting produces the being-elicited, if the eliciter produces the elicited or the elicited produces the eliciter, if the responder produces the responded-to or the responded-to produces the responder, this is all “produced by an other”—is it not [the error] of other-production? If the production is through the two together, this combines the two errors. If the production happens without either self or other, we fall into the error of causelessness.
Q: In that case, there is no eliciting and no response!
A: The sage (Guanyin) by means of the fact of equality and unattached non-dwelling keeps free of any dwelling in the eliciting 聖人以平等無住法不住感, thus responding according to the triggers with the four siddhantas, that is all. 觀音玄義, T34n1726_p0890c29- T34n1726_p0891b10 (T34.890c-891b).
[4]大聖圓證三千理事。同在一心故心平等。一一皆了即空假中。故心無住。聖既用此平等無住為能應法。故不住著所應機感。但隨十界樂欲便宜破惡入理四機扣之。即以世界為人對治第一義四種之法。任運而應。此之感應豈可以其自他共離而思議邪。又復眾生於自生感應。有四益者。亦可說言自感自應。若於三種有四益者。亦可說言由感生應由應生感。共能生感共能生應。離二有感離二有應。皆可得說。既無四執隨機說四。故諸經論談於感應。不出此四也. T34.920b.
[5] T46.54a.
29心與緣合則三種世間三千相性皆從心起。一性雖少而不無。無明雖多而不有。何者。指一為多多非多。指多為一一非少。故名此心為不思議境也。若解一心一切心。一切心一心。非一非一切。一陰一切陰。一切陰一陰。非一非一切。一入一切入。一切入一入。非一非一切。一界一切界。一切界一界。非一非一切。一眾生一切眾生。一切眾生一眾生。非一非一切。一國土一切國土。一切國土一國土。非一非一切。一相一切相。一切相一相。非一非一切。乃至一究竟一切究竟。一切究竟一究竟。非一非一切。遍歷一切皆是不可思議境。觀音玄義記 T46.55b.
[7] In the following several paragraphs I freely quote from my previous work, Emptiness and Omnipresence, pp. 228-231, where a parallel topic is discussed.
[8]釋真應者。真名不偽不動。應名稱適根緣。集藏名身。
若契實相不偽不動之理。即能稱機而應。譬如攬鏡像對即形。
此之真應不得相離。苦外道作意修通雖能變化。譬如瓦石光影不現。豈可以此為應。尚未破四住顯偏真理。那忽有中道真應。 若二乘變化修通所得此亦非應。 。大乘不爾。得實相真譬得明鏡。不須作意法界色像即對即應。如鏡寫像與真不殊。 (T34.879c)
[9]若佛地斷惡盡作神通以惡化物者。此作意方能起惡。如人畫諸色像非是任運。如明鏡不動色像自形。可是不可思議理能應惡。若作意者與外道何異。今明闡提不斷性德之善遇緣善發。
佛亦不斷性惡機緣所激慈力所熏。入阿鼻同一切惡事化眾生. (T34.883a.)
[10] Taishoshinshudaizokyo 大正新脩大藏經 [The Chinese Buddhist canon as compiled in the Taishō reign], ed. and compiled by Takakusu Junjiro, Watanabe Kaigyoku, et al. (Tokyo: Taishō Issaikyō Kankō Kai, 1924–34) (henceforth cited as “T”), 34.929c.
[11] For a full exposition, see Ziporyn, Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 112–98, 240–60.
[12] T9.22a.
[13] T9.16b.
[14] T46.900a. This is not simply an endorsement of unrestrained antinomianism: the key is that “practice”—the application of the specific Tiantai contemplation of the “Three Truths” revealing the local coherence, global incoherence, and intersubsumption of any determinate entity—must be applied to this determinate entity to make it reveal its liberating force. But any determinate entity that engages one sufficiently will serve as the object of this practice. For a full discussion, see Ziporyn, Evil and/or/as the Good.
[15] David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, translated by Marilyn Massay, based on the translation of Marian Evans (George Eliot), in The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence S. Stepelevich (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 44-45.
[16] Zhanran, Jingang’pi. 汝無始來唯有煩惱、業、苦而已。即此全是理性三因。由未發心,未曾加行,故性緣、了同名正因,故云眾生皆有正性。既信己心有此性已,次示此性非內外,遍虛空,同諸佛,等法界。既信遍已,次示遍具。既同諸佛,等於法界,故此遍性具諸佛之身,一身一切身,如諸佛之感土,一土一切土。身土相即,身說土說,大小一多亦復如是。有彼性故,故名有性
[17] Mohezhiguan, T46…… 一觀心是不可思議境者. 此境難說。先明思議境。令不思議境易顯。思議法者。小乘亦說心生一切法。謂六道因果三界輪環。若去凡欣聖則棄下上出灰身滅智。乃是有作四諦。蓋思議法也。大乘亦明心生一切法。謂十法界也。若觀心是有有善有惡。惡則三品三途因果也。善則三品脩羅人天因果。觀此六品無常生滅。能觀之心亦念念不住。又能觀所觀悉是緣生。緣生即空。並是二乘因果法也。若觀此空有墮落二邊沈空滯有。而起大慈悲入假化物。實無身假作身。實無空假說空。而化導之。即菩薩因果法也。觀此法能度所度。皆是中道實相之法。畢竟清淨。誰善誰惡。誰有誰無。誰度誰不度。一切法悉如是。是佛因果法也。此之十法邐迆淺深皆從心出。雖是大乘無量四諦所攝。猶是思議之境. 非今止觀所觀也.
[18]Again, the idea is perhaps most clear in texts like the Dasheng qixinlun, which states, “The meaning of enlightenment/awareness (覺jue) is that the essence of mind is free from thoughts. To be free from thoughts is to be equal in extent to the realm of space, pervading all places, the one characteristic which is present throughout the Dharma-realm, which is precisely the Tathagata’s Dharma-body of equality. It is this Dharma-body that is referred to as Original Enlightenment.” 所言覺義者,謂心體離念。離念相者,等虛空界無所不遍,法界一相即如來平等法身,依此法身說名本覺. Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經 [A standard collection of the East Asian Buddhist canon], edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次朗 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭, et al., 100 vols. Tokyo: Taishō issaikyō kankōkai, 1924-1932 (henceforth “T”), 32.576b. This refers to the space-like field of awareness contrasted to “thoughts” (念)–i.e., specific mental events, concepts, perceptions, actively directed toward some focal point, seeking some object of desire. Nian is purpose, thinking, ideas, desires, seeking. To put the contrast most succinctly: the mind of God is nian, nothing but nian, nian writ large, while the mind of original enlightenment is the freedom from nian. It is this same conception of universal mind that is pinpointed by Guifeng Zongmi when he famously declares, “The single word ‘knowing’ is the gate to all wonders.” (知之一字, 眾妙之門) (禪源諸詮集都序, T48.403a). Knowing 知here is not thought, not knowledge, not ideas, not the grasping of essences: it is the space-like, nian-free awareness of the Awakening of Faith, the opposite of the mind of God. The mind that all things arise from is simply “neither existence nor non-existence,” neither any thing nor the exclusion of anything: it is like space which is equally existent where it is absent. It is the opposite of any kind of “mind” or “reason” or “purpose” or “knower” of the God type. We see a similar trend in Surangama Sutra 楞嚴經 and in the teachings of Huineng given in various versions of the Platform Sutra.
[19] T48.379c.
[20]僧問。和尚為什麼說即心即佛。師云。為止小兒啼。僧云。啼止時如何。師云。非心非佛。僧云。除此二種人來如何指示。師云。向伊道不是物。T51.246a.
[21] T48.338c.
[22]能與一切真俗凡聖安著名字。真俗凡聖與此人安著名字不得。T47.498a.
[23]Cf. 秖要爾不受人惑。要用便用。更莫遲疑。T47.497b. Cf. also: 大丈夫漢更疑箇什麼。目前用處更是阿誰。把得便用。莫著名字。T47.500c.
[24] We may perhaps here recall Nietzsche’s dictum in Genealogy of Morals III: Man would rather will nothingness than not will—and indeed that thereby the will is saved.