After rejecting the dualism of Sāṅkhya-Yoga, in chapter 5 I suggested an affinity between Buddhism and Vedānta in several ways. But the most important differences between them have not been resolved. As a starting point, we may ask why these two traditions rather than a single tradition arose in India — and traditions that are not just inconsistent with each other but diametrically opposed in their ontological categories. T. R. V. Murti summarizes this situation and the contrasting views of each party:
There are two main currents of Indian philosophy — one having its source in the ātma-doctrine of the Upaniṣads and the other in the anātma doctrine of Buddha. They conceive reality on two distinct and exclusive patterns. The Upaniṣads and the systems following the Brahmanical tradition conceive reality on the pattern of an inner core or soul (ātman), immutable and identical amidst an outer region of impermanence and change, to which it is unrelated or but loosely related. This may be termed the Substance-view of reality. . . .
The other tradition is represented by the Buddhist denial of substance (ātman) and all that it implies. There is no inner and immutable core in things; everything is in flux. Existence (the universal and the identical) was rejected as illusory; it was but a thought-construction made under the influence of wrong-belief. This may be taken as the Modal view of reality.297
In this chapter, the disagreement between the Brahmanical “substance” view and the Buddhist “modal” view is analyzed by considering five categories: self, substance, time, causation, and “the Path.” We examine the conflicts of all-Self versus no-self, substance versus modes, immutability versus impermanence, the Unconditioned versus “only-conditionality,” and no-Path versus only-Path. That these positions are so diametrically opposed, each the mirror image of the other, suggests our approach. Both the Substance-view and the Modal-view are extreme positions, each trying to resolve these problematic relations by conflating one term into the other. Our question is whether they end up with the same thing.
The five sections that follow consider these relations, one by one, in order to answer that question. The general approach is dialectical, but in a different sense than that of Mādhyamika. Nāgārjuna uses dialectic to demonstrate that, since each of these terms is dependent upon its opposite and hence relative, any philosophical position affirming only one of them can be shown to be meaningless. My intention is rather to demonstrate that both extremes, in trying to eliminate duality, result in much the same description of nonduality — just as one may travel east or west halfway around the world to arrive in the same place. The problem, as Nāgārjuna implied, is that linguistic categories are inherently dualistic and thus inevitably inadequate when we try to use them to describe nonduality. The natural tendency, therefore, is to eliminate one or the other of the dualistic pair, yet, whichever one is removed, the resulting descriptions end up equivalent. The final section of this chapter applies this dialectical pattern to evaluate the more contemporary deconstruction of Jacques Derrida.
As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things. Become pure till you neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things.
— Eckhart
In order to arrive at being everything
Desire to be nothing.
— John of the Cross
The not-self of Buddhism eliminating the self, or the Self of Advaita swallowing the not-self: which is an accurate description of the Iiberation experience? Does enlightenment involve shrinking to nothing or expanding to encompass everything? A helpful hint is found in an unlikely place, the Notebooks 1914–1916 of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world’s being my world.(12.8.16)
Here we can see that solipsism coincides with pure realism, if it is strictly thought out. The I of solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and what remains is the reality co-ordinate with it.(2.9.16)
At last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.(15.10.16)298
The terms and problems Wittgenstein deals with in these passages are different from ours, but his conclusions are nonetheless relevant to our inquiry into the nature of nondual experience. Buddhism may be seen to emphasize the nothing, the extensionless point that shrinks to nonexistence, while Śaṅkara emphasizes the unique world which remains. But, viewed thus, they may be seen to be describing the same phenomenon.
It is well known that all versions of the spiritual path, including of course Sāṅkhya-Yoga, Buddhism, and Advaita Vedānta, emphasize nonattachment. One should not identify oneself with any physical or mental phenomenon. In other words, one learns to relax and literally “let go of” everything. But what happens when one does this? The sense of self “shrinks to an extensionless point,” and when that point abruptly disappears, “what remains is the reality co-ordinate with it.” On the one side nothing, not even the extensionless point, is left; this is the Buddhist anātman, the absence of an ontological self. On the other side remains everything, the whole universe, but transformed since it now encompasses awareness within itself; this is the nondual Brahman of Vedānta.
This will become clearer if we reflect on the implications of the koan meditation process. In contemporary Zen, the two best-known techniques are the koan method of the Rinzai school and the shikan-taza (just sitting) method of the Sōtō school. The Sōtō approach will be discussed in the fifth section; what is relevant here is the Rinzai technique for working on a koan such as “Jōshū’s Mu,” the first case of the Mumonkan and one of the best known of all koans. The main case is also one of the shortest:
A monk in all seriousness asked Jōshū: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature, or not?” Jōshū retorted: “Mu!”
The koan-point — the problem of the koan — is: What is “Mu”? The monk of the story seems to have heard that, according to Mahāyāna philosophy, all sentient beings have (or, as Dōgen would put it, are) Buddha-nature, but he could not understand how a half-starved mongrel could have the same nature as the Buddha. Literally, mu, like the original Chinese wu, is by itself a negative particle. Within ancient Chinese cosmology, wu sometimes refers to the Void from which the universe originated. But it is a mistake to take Jōshū’s cryptic answer as denying the Buddha-nature of a dog, or as making any conceptual statement about Buddha-nature or the origin of the universe or anything else. The value of this dialogue as a koan is that, once this point is understood, little room is left for speculation. There is nothing left for the conceptualizing mind to grasp.
The old way of working on this koan must have been very frustrating, which is why it could be so effective. The Zen master pressed the student for the correct answer, rejecting all his attempts. Eventually the student would run out of replies, and then he might be encouraged simply to repeat the sound “Muuuu . . .” over and over again. Nowadays the process is usually shortened. Students are informed at the beginning that all conceptual answers are unsatisfactory, and they are instructed to treat “Mu” as a kind of mantram, to be repeated mentally in coordination with the breathing. The thought or, rather, the internal sound of “Mu” is used to eliminate all other thoughts. In his commentary on this koan, Yasutani Hakuun-rōshi elaborates:
Let all of you become one mass of doubt and questioning. Concentrate on and penetrate fully into Mu. To penetrate into Mu means to achieve absolute unity with it. How can you achieve this unity? By holding to Mu tenaciously day and night! Do not separate yourself from it under any circumstances! Focus your mind on it constantly. . . . You must not, in other words, think of Mu as a problem involving the existence or nonexistence of Buddha-nature. Then what do you do? You stop speculating and concentrate wholly on Mu — just Mu!
. . . At first you will not be able to pour yourself wholeheartedly into Mu. It will escape you quickly because your mind will start to wander. You will have to concentrate harder — just “Mu! Mu! Mu!” Again it will elude you. Once more you attempt to focus on it and again you fail. This is the usual pattern in the early stages of practice. . . . Absolute unity with Mu, unthinking absorption in Mu — this is ripeness. Upon your attainment to this stage of purity, both inside and outside naturally fuse. . . . When you fully absorb yourself in Mu, the external and internal merge into a single unity.299
Notice what is not encouraged here. One should not cultivate a blankness of mind, in which no thoughts arise, nor should one try to push thoughts away, which divides one into two — that which is pushing the thoughts away and the thoughts pushed away. Instead, the principle is to concentrate on one thing — in this case, “Muuuu . . .” in order to become absorbed into it and literally become one with it. It is important to see how such a practice is implied by the claim of nonduality developed here. If the sense of duality is a delusion, then nothing needs to be attained. Only that illusory sense needs to be dispelled, and the way to do that is to concentrate on something so wholeheartedly that the sense of an I that is doing it evaporates. The principle here was summarized by Dōgen in the first fascicle of his Shōbōgenzō:
To learn the Buddhist Way is to learn about oneself. To learn about oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to perceive oneself as all things. To realize this is to cast off the body and mind of self and others.300
What distinguishes this from an Indian mantram is the seeking quality generated by the need to solve the koan. Usually (although not always) it is emphasized that “great doubt” is necessary. Great doubt here refers to a state of perplexity which becomes so intense that it is experienced physically as well as mentally, and which functions to block conceptualizing.
When working on Zen, the most important thing is to generate the I chin (“doubt sensation”). What is this doubt-sensation? For instance: where did I come from before my birth, and where shall I go after my death? Since one does not know the answer to either question, a strong feeling of “doubt” arises in the mind. Stick this “doubt-mass” onto your forehead (and keep it there) all the time until you can neither drive it away nor put it down, even if you want to. Then suddenly you will discover that the doubt-mass has been crushed, that you have broken it to pieces. (Po-shan)301
It would be interesting to contrast this “great doubt” with the Cartesian doubt that stands at the beginning of modern Western philosophy. Briefly, the main difference seems to be that Cartesian doubt is something the self has, whereas the great doubt becomes something the self is: the self becomes so preoccupied with its koan that it literally “forgets itself” in its puzzlement. So Cartesian doubt has the effect of reifying the sense of self, while the great doubt leads to the evaporation of that sense of self.
Another way to understand this technique is to see it as working to “produce” precisely that “unsupported thought” recommended in the Diamond Sutra and discussed in chapter 4: “a thought that is nowhere supported” because it is just “Muuu . . .”
At the beginning of Zen practice, there are many distracting thoughts and it is difficult to focus on “Mu,” but if the student perseveres then the stream of inner dialogue eventually weakens as “Mu” grows stronger. The sense of self is slowly attenuated as the mental phenomena that sustain it — desires and expectations, ideas about oneself, and so on — fade away. Eventually meditation deepens to become samādhi, in which “both inside and outside naturally fuse” because there is no longer an awareness of duality, of an I that is reciting “Muuuu . . .” There is only “Muuuu . . .” This stage is sometimes described by saying that now “mu” is doing “mu.” Without the attendant sense of an I, it is just “mu” that sits, “mu” that stands up and walks, “mu” that eats. If one perseveres, there may arise the sensation of hanging over a precipice and dangling by a single thread. “Except for occasional feelings of uneasiness and despair, it is like death itself” (Hakuin).302 The solution is to “let go” by throwing oneself completely into “Muuuu . . .”
Bravely let go on the edge of the cliff.
Throw yourself into the abyss with decision and courage.
You only revive after death.303
Kenshō, the first stage or glimpse of Zen enlightenment, occurs when the student does “let go” of himself. “All of a sudden he finds his mind and body wiped out of existence together with the koan. This is what is known as ‘letting go your hold’” (Hakuin).304 Dōgen described it by saying that one’s body and mind drop away, and thereafter there is an empty, “fallen-away” body and mind. Here the Zen master may help by cutting the last thread. An unexpected action, such as a blow or a shout or even a few quiet words, may startle the student into letting go. Many of the classical Zen stories tell of students being enlightened by such actions. What happens in such cases is that the shock of the unexpected noise or pain penetrates to the very core of the student’s being — that is, it is experienced nondually. When Yün-men (Jap., Unmon) broke his ankle, he was enlightened because he forgot himself and everything else as his universe collapsed into one excruciating but empty pain.
It can hardly be coincidental that similar techniques are found in Yoga and Vedānta. The stages of meditation discussed above also describe the last three stages of the Yogic path, according to the Yoga Sūtra: dhārana, dhyāna and samādhi. Patañjali distinguishes the last two as follows:
Dhyāna is the uninterrupted concentration of thought on its object. This itself turns into samādhi when the object alone shines and the thought of meditation [i.e., the thought that “I” am doing it] is lost, as it were.305
As described above, in Zen practice “mu” is often treated like a mantram to be recited internally. The most common mantram in India is the “sacred seed word” Om, highly recommended in the Upaniṣads:
When a Vedic teacher wishes to obtain Brahman, he utters Om; thus desiring Brahman, he verily attains Brahman.
By making the body the lower piece of wood, and Om the upper piece, and through the practice of the friction of meditation, one perceives the luminous self (ātman), hidden like the fire in the wood.306
Om, unlike Mu, is usually recited aloud, but this need not be a significant difference. In a Zen sesshin students sit together and such noise would be a distraction. Even then, Zen students have sometimes been encouraged to vocalize Mu, especially if they stay up late the last night to continue their practice uninterrupted. A more serious difference is that Zen students now are usually told that the sound mu itself has no meaning; that is, one should simply concentrate on “Muuuu . . .” without having any other thoughts about it. In contrast, the Upaniṣads present Om as the primordial sound from which the universe arose. It is not only a verbal symbol of Brahman but has great power in its own right. To repeat Om, therefore, is to attune oneself to the ground of the universe. From the Zen point of view, any such meaning can only be a distraction from the process of single-mindedly becoming one with that particular sound. But it is doubtful whether, in actual practice, the difference is very great. If one persists in reciting Om for a long period, eventually the sound tends to lose its connotations and become a “pure” sound divested of any meaning — at which point there would be no difference between reciting Om and reciting Mu.
Finally, the following description of Advaitic meditation brings out its similarity to both Yoga and Zen:
Usually the mind is concentrated on the object of meditation through a symbol. In deep meditation [dhyāna] the mind becomes focused on the object and stays still without flickering like a steady flame of (candle) light in a windless cell. This culminates in samādhi, which closes the gap between the meditator and the object of meditation, his innermost self, and unites the two. In meditation there is the tripartite distinction of the meditator, the object of meditation, and the act of meditation; in other words, of the knower, the knowable, and the process of knowledge. But in samādhi this distinction subsides. The three are fused into an integral consciousness. The less marked the distinction, the deeper is the samādhi. (Satprakāshānanda)307
The assumption necessary for all these techniques is the nondualist claim that the ontological self is a delusion, and that this delusive sense of self is the fundamental duḥkha (frustration) which distorts our experience and disturbs our lives. Contrary to all schools of ego psychology, such a self can never become secure because its very nature is to be insecure. As mentioned in chapter 4, the sense of self is not a thing but a lack, which can conceal its own emptiness only by keeping ahead of itself — that is, by projecting itself into the next thought, action, and so on — which process is craving or desire. We see later in this chapter how these two aspects of the sense of self — ceaseless deferral and ceaseless desire — generate time and causality.
■ ■ ■ ■
We are now ready to return to the comparison between Buddhism and Śaṅkara. What is experienced through these meditations, as Wittgenstein implies, is the evaporation of the self, and what remains is the world without a self. Hence it is a radically transformed world. The familiar, everyday world of material objects was formerly balanced by an ego-consciousness that was supposed to be observing it. The disappearance of that discrete consciousness requires a new explanation of what awareness is. The awareness that was previously understood to be observing the world is now realized to be one with it. No longer do “I,” as the locus of consciousness, see something external. Rather, the nondual, self-luminous nature of the world stands revealed. When we want to describe this experience, what shall we say? My point is that this phenomenon can be described either as no-consciousness or as all-consciousness. Early Buddhism chooses the former, claiming that consciousness is nothing more than all those things that are experienced. Śaṅkara opts for the latter, insisting that all those things are the manifestations of consciousness. Buddhism says there is no self, there is only the world (dharmas); Śaṅkara says the world is the Self. To say that there is no self, or that everything is the self, are then equally correct — or false, depending on how one looks at it. Both descriptions amount to the same thing. What is clear in each case is that there is no longer a duality between an object that is observed and a consciousness that observes it, or between the external world and the self which confronts it. Neither tradition is denying one side of the dualistic relation in order to assert the other relative side. Both are attempts to describe nonduality, and because each makes absolute a relative term, neither is more or less satisfactory than the other. In fact, they imply each other in response, which is why Buddhism and Vedānta developed in relation to each other. One would expect that a metaphysics based on denying the subject — the element of stability in a statement — would result in a more fluid and dynamic view of reality than a metaphysics that denies the predicate, and that too we find in the contrast between Buddhism and Vedānta.
Why there are these two contradictory ways of trying to describe nonduality is now obvious. Just as our usual understanding of experience is dualistic, so is the language that expresses this understanding. An attempt to describe the nondual experience will naturally tend to eliminate one or the other term. Western mystical experience too is often classified into two parallel types: the “inward way” of withdrawal from the world and the “outward way” of merging into the One. For example, Rudolf Otto, in his comparative study Mysticism East and West, emphasized the divergence between the mysticism of introspection and that of unifying vision and commented that “to the non-mystic their extreme difference is striking.” Yet he concluded his book on these two types by acknowledging that for the mystic there is no such duality, although Otto himself was unable to go beyond “the contrast between inward and outward.”308 Perhaps here also the difference is merely in description rather than in experience.
But why is there no Brahman in Buddhism? Early Buddhism refers not to a monistic One but to a plurality of dharmas, which later Buddhism emphasized are relative and hence śūnya, empty of any self-nature. As we have seen, in Mahāyāna śūnyatā not only refers to the absence of a self but becomes the most fundamental “characteristic” of reality. In function it is the category which corresponds most closely to the Vedāntic concept of Brahman, serving as the standard by which the reality of phenomena is negated. But how can śūnyatā be reconciled with Advaita’s “One without a second”?
My answer to this is prompted by the remark of a contemporary Zen master: “Essentially, there is only one thing . . . not even one.”309 The interesting implication of this statement is that if there were only one thing, with nothing “outside” it, then that one would not be aware of itself as one. The phenomenological experience would be of no thing / nothing. To be aware that there is only One actually implies that there are two: the One, and that which is aware of the One as being One. That is because awareness of a self implies another from which it is distinguished — just as a child, for example, acquires a self-identity only as he or she gains a sense of what another person is. In brief, one thing requires another; it is a thing because it is distinguished from something else.
This implies that, if Brahman is truly One without a second, it cannot be experienced as One. And this is suggested by the much-emphasized claim that the ātman of Vedānta is not self-conscious in the Cartesian sense:
He is never thought of, but is the thinker; He is never known, but is the knower. There is . . . no other thinker than He, there is no other knower than He.
Through what should one know that owing to which all this is known — through what, my dear, should one know the Knower? — (Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad)310
Śaṅkara explains what this means:
That which is unknown can be made known and requires proof, but not the self (the knower). If it be granted that the self requires proof, then who will be the knower (because the self becomes one of the knowables, and without a knower there can be no application of proof)? It is settled that the knower is the self.311
What makes this equivalent to Mahāyāna is that a self which can never be objectively experienced, because by definition it is the experiencer, can just as well be described as śūnya. However, then this will be not a nihilistic emptiness (which was Śaṅkara’s mistaken criticism of Mādhyamika) but a śūnyatā that can be cherished as the Buddha-nature essence of all things.
■ ■ ■ ■
So there are two paradoxes: to shrink to nothing is to become everything, and to experience everything as One is again equivalent to nothing — although a different sense of nothing. These paradoxes provide the common ground where the two opposed traditions meet. From the differing perspectives of the Substance-view and the Modal-view, different metaphysical systems are derived. But we may still wonder why they opt for those respective perspectives. Why does Vedānta prefer to speak of the One and Buddhism of emptiness?
Perhaps the answer to this lies in the nature of philosophy itself. In referring to Brahman as the One without a second, Śaṅkara tries to describe reality from outside, as it were, because that is the only perspective from which it can be described as One. And this of course is what philosophy generally tries to do: to look upon the whole of reality objectively and comprehend its structure, as if the philosophizing intellect were itself outside that whole. But the view of the Buddha is that we cannot get outside reality and experience it as an object; our efforts as well as our viewpoints are inevitably contained within that whole. Thinking and its conclusions are events in and of the nondual world, although they are carried on as if they were outside, an independent and fixed measure. We should remember that the Buddha was not really a philosopher, although we inevitably try to force him into that mold. As he never ceased to insist, he was interested only leading others to the experience of nirvana. Of course, Śaṅkara too emphasized the intuitive experience of Brahman and pointed out that philosophy has a role only from the empirical standpoint. But the Buddha was not interested in philosophy even from that empirical perspective, except insofar as philosophical statements could be conducive to the attainment of nirvana. From his perspective, philosophy is only so many words and conceptual structures; if one accepts them as accurate descriptions — clings to those ideas — they act as an obstruction to enlightenment. Meditation is learning how to let them go. Philosophically — from the fictional “outside” — we might say that there is only One Mind which encompasses all, but we must remember that phenomenologically there is no such thing, because, as we have seen, such a One Mind could not be aware of itself as a self-contained mind in the sense that each of us is self-consciously (but delusively) aware of his “own” mind.
What does this imply about how attaining nirvana/mokṣa would be experienced? Only fools rush in where Buddhas fear to tread, but the above analysis implies that there would not be a sense of merging into the One. Instead, it would seem to be a disintegration, although not an annihilation. The boundaries of my ego-self, which distinguish me from others, would simply dissolve as “my mind” was realized to be not something separate from the world but a “focal point” of the world. It would be a loss of all tension and dualistic effort, a relaxation of the whole being. Letting go of all those things previously clung to, one would become the everything that in fact one always was. According to Sāṅkhya-Yoga, the puruṣa in its true form is ubiquitous. The arhat, said the Buddha, is “deep, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the mighty ocean.” The Vedāntic Brahman is an infinite pure consciousness pervading everywhere.312
Another disagreement between Vedānta and Buddhism is indicated by Murti’s terms to distinguish the two main traditions, the Substance-view and the Modal-view. Śaṅkara exemplifies the former extreme. Static Nirguṇa Brahman, without any attributes, is the only Real and hence the changing phenomenal world of particulars is unreal (māyā), just the illusory appearance of Brahman. In diametric contrast, Buddhism provides the extreme Modal-view. Reality is dynamic and momentary; objects are analyzed away into clusters of interacting and constantly changing dharma-attributes that inhere in no substance, permanent or otherwise.
I defer until the next section the temporal disagreement between immutable Brahman and impermanent dharmas, in order to focus on the conflict between Substance-view and Modal-view. The issue is whether either extreme is tenable by itself, given that substance and mode are independent terms that seem to have meaning only in relation to each other. Just as the elimination of subject (or self) transforms the object, and vice versa, so one cannot eliminate the reality of modes without transforming the concept of substance, and vice versa. It is revealing that this points precisely to where the problem arises for each tradition, and in order to make themselves consistent these two opposed traditions end up asserting what amounts to the same thing.
In order to deny the reality of all impermanent phenomena-attributes, Śaṅkara is reduced to defining substance so narrowly that it ceases to refer to anything — to be anything. Absolutely nothing can be predicated of Nirguṇa Brahman, which can only be approached through the via negativa of neti, neti: “Not this, not this . . .” Although Śaṅkara would deny it, his Being, “that vacuous infinitive of the copula” (Schopenhauer), ends up as a completely empty ground, an unchanging Nothing from which all phenomena arise as an ever-changing and hence deceptive appearance.
Buddhism, of course, faced exactly the opposite problem. The elimination of any substance gives dharma-attributes nothing to inhere in. Thus early Buddhism tends towards conceiving of dharmas as self-existing substances, a view that Mahāyāna refutes by pointing to their interdependence. Mahāyāna in turn resolves the problem by emphasizing and finally hypostatizing śūnyatā, the emptiness that signifies the lack of any self-nature to things and that came to be looked upon as their “true nature.”
From the perspective of Buddhism, Vedānta reifies this emptiness into an unqualified substance which, since it has absolutely no characteristics of its own, cannot really be said to be. From the perspective of Vedānta, Buddhism ignores the fact that some such ground is necessary, for, as Parmenides pointed out, nothing — not even appearances — can arise from nothing and it is meaningless to deny all substance: something must be Real. This is the point of Śaṅkara’s only telling criticism of Mādhyamika: “It is not possible to negate the empirical world without the acceptance of another reality” (Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II, ii.31). For the Advaitin this lack of a substance seems (Buddhist denials notwithstanding) nihilistic, or, to say the least, unattractive in comparison with an eternal, immutable, all-encompassing Absolute. As in the previous section, this conflict too may be resolved by understanding the difference between an ontological perspective and a phenomenological one. Ontologically we may agree with Advaita that there must be something. There is no logical necessity to this — from a purely logical standpoint there could be absolutely nothing — but the simple fact that there is experience contradicts such an ontological nothing. Yet at the same time there is no phenomenological necessity for there to be something — no a priori need for that Real to be anything objective that can be experienced. This is the point of intersection between the conflict of categories, and from there we can see how the two approaches had to meet: attributeless Brahman purified itself into emptiness as śūnyatā was reified into that which gives birth to all phenomena. The inner dynamism in each tradition led to much the same understanding of nonduality.
Of course there is still a difference in emphasis. Although the Nirguṇa Brahman of Advaita cannot be characterized in any positive way, Saguṇa (“with attributes”) Brahman is most essentially pure cit, that is, nondual consciousness. It is surely no coincidence that this is also the main point of difference between Mādhyamika and Yogācāra, and the synthesis between them which occurred later related the two in the same way. Yogācāra idealism became accepted as a phenomenal, “lower-truth” description of the “higher truth,” an account of why the absolute truth is inexpressible: “no truth has been taught by any Buddha, for anyone anywhere.”
All beings are impermanent, which means that there is neither impermanence nor permanence.
— Nāgārjuna, Śūnyatāsaptati
The categories of permanence or impermanence cannot be applied to unborn things.
— Gauḍapāda, Āgamaśāstra313
One of the more interesting parallels between Eastern and Western philosophy is the same disagreement within each regarding the nature of time. More precisely, it is an ontological disagreement expressed in terms of time: Is ceaseless change the “ultimate fact” or is there an immutable Reality behind or within such impermanence? The importance of this issue can hardly be exaggerated. In the former case, nothing escapes from the ravages of time; in the latter, time itself is in some sense illusory and unreal.
For both East and West, the answers given to this question have been fundamental to the subsequent development of philosophy and hence of civilization itself. In ancient Greece, this disagreement found its sharpest expression in the Presocratic difference between Heraclitus and Parmenides.314 Heraclitus claimed that the cosmos is a ceaseless flux, which he understood metaphorically as an ever-living fire. Because of this, we cannot step into the same river twice — a view amended by his disciple Cratylus, who argued that we cannot step into the same river even once, since it is changing as we dip our foot into it.315 In contrast and perhaps in response, Parmenides argued that “what is” is whole, immovable, unborn and imperishable — hence nontemporal — in sharp distinction from “what is not,” which is literally unthinkable. This implied another distinction: one should not depend on the senses, which present the illusion of change, but evaluate with reason.
Plato’s “synthesis” was to combine these two alternatives into a hierarchical dualism favoring Parmenides. For example, the Timaeus distinguishes the visible world of changing and hence delusive appearances from the invisible and timeless world of mental forms that can be immediately apprehended by the purified intellect. His nod to Heraclitus is to grant the sensory world a derivative reality — things are the “shifting shadows,” as it were, of forms — thus setting up a “two-truths” doctrine which would have been anathema to Parmenides. How mystical Plato was — what he meant by the “purified intellect” and its “immediate apprehension” — is a controversy which may never be settled,317 but Western thought has yet to escape from the intellect-versus-senses duality that he reified. Few still accept the reality of such immaterial forms, but in a sense all the subsequent history of Western philosophy, until very recently, has been a search for the Being hidden within the world of Becoming. Even science is a “footnote to Plato,” for the same dualism can be observed in its enterprise of extracting atemporal (e.g., mathematical) truths from changing phenomena. In many ways contemporary Western culture has reversed Plato’s hierarchy, but we nonetheless remain largely determined by it.
Of course, the Eastern parallel to this is found in the opposition between the impermanence of the Buddhist Modal-view and the immutable Brahman of the Vedāntic Substance-view. But when we look for a resolution of these two extremes, we find a view of time very different from Plato’s: a “middle way” that denies not only the dualism of Plato’s synthesis but also the two original alternatives. Rather than accepting the reality of both permanence and change by combining them in a hierarchy, I follow Mādhyamika in criticizing and dismissing them both by revealing their conceptual interdependence. This leaves a paradox denying the very dualism that the problem takes for granted. One way to express this paradox is to say that, yes, there is nothing outside the flux of change, but there is also that which does not change. Rather than being a contradiction, the first alternative implies the second, because in this case to make time absolute and to negate it turn out to be identical.
The arguments in the previous two sections were dialectical. Simply to make either term absolute by eliminating the other does not work, because each half of the duality is dependent upon the other. If one is negated, so must the other be. If permanence and change are susceptible to the same approach, what does this imply about the possibility of another way of experiencing time?
Consider a solitary rock out of an ocean current, protruding above the surface. Whether one is on the rock or floating past it, it is the relation between the two that makes both movement and rest possible. Obviously, the current will be measured by the rate of movement past the rock, but the rock can be said to be at rest only if there is something else defined as moving in relation to it — a point made in physics by emphasizing the relativity of perspective. Analogous to this, the concept of impermanence — “time changing” — also requires some fixed standard against which time is measured, although “temporal juxtaposition” is very different. I am able to determine that precisely one hour has passed only because, in looking at a clock, I compare the hand positions now with my memory of where they were before. Conversely, the concept of permanence is dependent upon impermanence because permanence implies that which persists unchanged through time — while other things change. But what is the phenomenological significance of this interdependence?
In Indian philosophy, the rock represents more than permanence and unchanging substance; it also symbolizes the self. For both Vedānta and Buddhism the self is that which does not change, although of course they disagree about whether this concept corresponds to anything actually existent. But what is more important for us is that they agree in denying any dualism between rock and current. They negate this dualism in opposite ways. Buddhism denies that there is any rock, asserting that there is only a flux. The rock is a thought-construction and the sense-of-self might better be compared to a bubble which flows like the water because it is part of the water, or because it is what might be called a function of the water. In contrast, Advaita denies that there is anything really flowing. Change cannot be completely ignored, but ultimately it is subrated as illusory with the realization of immutable Brahman. But notice that neither Buddhism nor Advaita affirms the rock in relation to the current. Both deny the self-existence of the rock as jīva, an ego-self counterposed to something objective. Vedānta does this by making the rock absolute: the rock negates the flux by expanding to incorporate it — phenomena are māyā because they are only transient name-and-form manifestations of Brahman — but the rock can do this only by divesting itself of all rocklike and all other characteristics.
In terms of the analogy, then, Advaita and Buddhism end up with much the same thing. Whether the rock disappears or expands to encompass everything by becoming nothing, all that can be experienced in either case is the water flowing, although devalued to a greater (māyā) or lesser (śūnya) degree. But now the dialectic reverses. If there is no rock at rest relative to the water (permanence), what awareness could there be of any current (change)? If everything is carried along together in the current, then phenomenologically there is no current at all. This is the crucial point, to which we shall return in a moment.
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The Buddhist claim of impermanence does not accept time and change as we usually experience them. For all its schools, saṁsāra is literally the temporal cycle of birth and death which is in some sense negated in nirvana. For both Advaita and Buddhism, as in the “illuminative” traditions generally, time is a problem, and not an abstract problem but a very personal and immediate one. One way to express the basic anxiety of our lives is in terms of the contradiction between permanence and impermanence. Despite the efforts we make to deny our temporality, we are all too aware of aging and death; yet on the other hand, “we nevertheless feel and experience that we are eternal” (Spinoza).
The genesis of this problem is in the ways our minds usually work. “Time is generated by the mind’s restlessness, its stretching out to the future, its projects, and its negation of ‘the present state.’”318 But there is no future without a past. Our expectations and intentions are determined by previous experiences — more precisely, by the seeds (vāsanās) and mental tendencies (saṁskāras) that remain from them. As we have seen, Vedānta and Buddhism both emphasize the role of memory “wrongly interpreted.” Identifying with memories provides the illusion of continuity — a “life history” — necessary to reify the sense of self. Thus past (memories) and future (expectations) originate and work together to obscure the present, usually negating it so successfully that we can hardly be said to experience it — which is ironic, of course, since from another perspective all experience can only be in the present: “No man has lived in the past, and none will ever live in the future” (Schopenhauer). But the ceaseless stream of intentionality devalues the present into simply one more moment in the sequence of causal relations, as an effect of past causes and a cause of future effects. For example, thinking (as we saw in chapter 4) usually consists of linking thoughts in a series, but this misses something about the origin and nature of this thought because it is understood only in logical (which in effect is also temporal) relation to other thoughts.
The consequence of this devaluation of the present is that time becomes objectified via a reversal that takes place. Instead of past and future being understood as a function of present memories and expectations, the present becomes reduced to a single moment within a “time-stream” understood to exist “out there” — a container, as it were, like space, within which things exist and events occur. But in order for time to be a container, something must be contained within it: objects. And for objects to be “in” time, they must in themselves be nontemporal — i.e., self-existing. In this way, a delusive bifurcation occurs between time and “things” generally, as a result of which each gains a spurious reality.319 The first reified “object,” and the most important thing to be hypostatized as nontemporal, is the I, the sense of self as something permanent and unchanging. So the “objectification” of time is also the “subjectification” of self, which thus appears only to discover itself in the anxious position of being a nontemporal entity inextricably “trapped” in time.320
The best philosophical expression of this intuitive notion of “objective” time is found in Newton’s conception of an absolute linear time which flows smoothly regardless of what events occur, and which is infinitely divisible. This goes beyond the devaluation of the present and eliminates it completely. The present becomes a durationless instant — or rather, a mere dividing line — between the infinities of past and future. But such a conception, although no more than an extrapolation from our “common-sense” view, is still too counterintuitive, and time was rescued (but only psychologically) by the “specious present” (an ironic term indeed) of E. R. Clay and William James.
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If we are thus trapped in time, how can we escape? The paradoxical nondualist solution is to eliminate the dichotomy dialectically by realizing that I am not in time because I am time, which therefore means that I am free from time.
Much of our difficulty in understanding time is due to the unwise use of spatial metaphors — in fact, the objectification of time requires such spatial metaphors — but in this case a spatial comparison is helpful. We normally understand objects such as cups to be “in” space, which implies that in themselves they must have a self-existence distinct from space. However, not much reflection is necessary to realize the the cup itself is irremediably spatial. All its parts must have some thickness, and without the various spatial relations among the bottom, sides, and handle, the cup could not be a cup. One way to express this is to say that the cup is not “in” space but itself is space: the cup is “what space is doing in that place,” so to speak. The same is true for the temporality of the cup. The cup is not a nontemporal, self-existing object that just happens to be “in” time, for its being is irremediably temporal. The point of this is to destroy the thought-constructed dualism between things and time. When we wish to express this, we must describe one in terms of the other, by saying either that objects are temporal (in which case they are not objects as we usually conceive of them) or, conversely, that time is objects — that is, that time manifests itself in the appearances that we call objects. We find beautiful expressions of this in Dōgen. “The time we call spring blossoms directly as an existence called flowers. The flowers, in turn, express the time called spring. This is not existence within time; existence itself is time.”321 This is the meaning of his term “being-time” (uji):
“Being-time” means that time is being; i.e., “Time is existence, existence is time.” The shape of a Buddha-statue is time. . . . Every thing, every being in this entire world is time. . . . Do not think of time as merely flying by; do not only study the fleeting aspect of time. If time is really flying away, there would be a separation between time and ourselves. If you think that time is just a passing phenomenon, you will never understand being-time.322
Time “flies away” when we experience it dualistically, with the sense of a self that is outside and looking at it. Then time becomes something that I have (or don’t have), objectified and quantified into a succession of “now-moments” that cannot be held but incessantly fall away. In contrast, the being-times that we usually reify into objects cannot be said to occur in time, for they are time. As Nāgārjuna would put it, that things (or rather “thingings”) are time means that there is no second, external time that they are “within.”
This brings us to the second prong of the dialectic. To use the interdependence of objects and time to deny only the reality (svabhāva) of objects is incomplete, because their relativity also implies the unreality of time. Just as with the other dualisms analyzed earlier — self and object, substance and modes — to say that there is only time turns out to be equivalent to saying that there is no time. Having used temporality to deconstruct things, we must reverse the analysis and use the lack of a thing “in” time to negate the objectivity of time also, for when there is no “contained” there can be no “container.” If there are no nouns, then there are no referents for temporal predicates. When there are no things that have an existence apart from time, then it makes no sense to speak of things as being young or old. “So the young man does not grow old nor does the old man grow old” (Nāgārjuna).323 Dōgen expressed this in terms of firewood and ashes:
We should not take the view that what is latterly ashes was formerly firewood. What we should understand is that, according to the doctrine of Buddhism, firewood stays at the position of firewood. . . . There are former and later stages, but these stages are clearly cut.
Firewood does not become ashes; there is the “being-time” of firewood, then the “being-time” of ashes. If there are no nontemporal objects, then the present does not gain its value or meaning by being related to past or future: each event or being-time is complete in itself. But how does this free us from time?
Similarly, when human beings die, they cannot return to life; but in Buddhist teaching we never say life changes into death. . . . Likewise, death cannot change into life. . . . Life and death have absolute existence, like the relationship of winter and spring. But do not think of winter changing into spring or spring into summer.324
Because life and death, like spring and summer, are not in time, they are in themselves timeless. If there is no one nontemporal who is born and dies, then there is only birth and death. But if there are only the events of birth and death, with no one “in” them, then there is no real birth and death. Alternatively, we may say that there is birth-and-death in every moment, with the arising and passing away of each thought and act. Perhaps this is what Heraclitus meant when he said that “both life and death are in both our living and our dying.”325 Dōgen: “Just understand birth-and-death itself is nirvāṇa. . . . Only then can you be free from birth-and-death.”326
In temporal terms, this paradox can be expressed in either of two apparently inconsistent ways. We may say that there is only the present: not, of course, the present as usually understood — a series of fleeting moments that incessantly fall away to become the past — but a very different present that incorporates the past and the future because it always stays the same.
We cannot be separated from time. This means that because, in reality, there is no coming or going in time, when we cross the river or climb the mountain we exist in the eternal present of time; this time includes all past and present time. . . . Most people think time is passing and do not realize that there is an aspect that is not passing. (Dōgen)327
Dōgen’s “eternal present of time” — which may fruitfully be compared to the “standing now” (nunc stans) of medieval Western philosophy — is eternal because there is something that does not change: it is always now. Alternatively, this nondual way of experiencing time may be described as living in eternity: again, not eternity in the usual sense, an infinite persistence in time that presupposes the usual duality between things and time. There is an “eternity on this side of the grave,” as Wittgenstein too realized:
For life in the present there is no death.
Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world.
If by eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but nontemporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present.328
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So the eternity we seek has always been “with” us — closer to us than we are to ourselves, to paraphrase Augustine, for all that we need to do is to “forget” ourselves and realize what we have always been. But because of the habitual restlessness of our minds, we are now not able to experience the present — to be the present — and so we overlook something about it. What would such a nondual experience of time be like? Not the static “block universe” that has been unfairly attributed to Parmenides, for my point here is that the immutability of the Now is not incompatible with change. There would still be transformation, although experienced differently since one is the transformation rather than an observer of it. Such change would be a smoother, more continuous flux than we are familiar with, since without anxious thought-construction and thought-projection the mind would not be jumping, staccato-fashion, from one perch to another in order to fixate itself. In one way, nothing would be different: “I” would still rise in the morning, eat breakfast, go to work, and so on. But at the same time there would also be something completely timeless about all these activities. As with the wei-wu-wei, “in changing it is at rest” (Heraclitus, frag. 84a). In place of the apparently solid I that does them, there would be an empty and immutably serene quality to them. The experience would be not of a succession of events (winter does not turn into spring) but just-this-one-effortless-thing (tathatā) and then another just-this-one-thing.329
So Heraclitus/Buddhism and Parmenides/Vedānta are both right. There is nothing outside the incessant flux, yet there is also something that does not change at all: the “standing now.” What transcends time (as usually understood) turns out to be time itself. This breathes new life into Plato’s definition in the Timaeus: time is indeed the moving image of eternity, provided that we do not read into this any dualism between the moving image and the immovable eternity. In Buddhist terms, life-and-death are the “moving image” of nirvana. This paradox is possible because, as with all other instances of subject–object duality, to forget oneself and become one with something is at the same time to realize its emptiness and “transcend” it.
That which, taken as causal or dependent, is the process of being born and passing on, is, taken non-causally and beyond all dependence, declared to be nirvāṇa.
— Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamikakārikā
As long as a man persists in the belief in causality he will find the working of cause and effect. But when attachment to causality vanishes, cause and effect become nonexistent.
— Gauḍapāda, Āgamaśāstra
The same dialectical approach has been used in each of the three previous sections. In the controversies over Self versus nonself, substance versus modes, and immutability versus impermanence, we have seen that simply to make either term absolute by eliminating the other is unsatisfactory, because the two terms are interdependent. We may grant the Mādhyamika point that both Vedānta and Buddhism are finally inadequate as descriptive systems, but more interesting at the moment is that, when developed and made self-consistent, the Substance-view and the Modal-view intersect in their claims about nonduality. The importance of this can hardly be overemphasized. It means that, rather than the opposition between these two traditions weighing against the view that they are describing the same experience, their congruence offers considerable support to the possibility of that experience.
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The fourth disagreement that we will consider — really a fourth expression of the same basic disagreement — is over the category of causality. Can the parallel contrast between the unconditioned Brahman of Vedānta and the “all-conditionality” (pratītya-samutpāda) of Buddhism be subjected to the same dialectical resolution? Can causality be made absolute and then negated in the same way that time has been? An affirmative answer will not be surprising, given the interdependence between temporality and causality. Just as time requires that the past cause the future, so causality requires that the cause precede the effect. They are two aspects of the same delusive bifurcation, and our plight can be expressed in either terms. Even as we feel that we are (or should be) timeless but realize we are mortal, so we feel that we are (or should be) free, although we know that our lives are physically and psychologically determined. In order to deconstruct any of these dualisms fully, we must deconstruct the others as well.
Śaṅkara’s account of causality constitutes part of his more general māyā doctrine, according to which all phenomena (including space and time) are due to the indescribable and indefinable ajñāna (delusion) superimposed upon Brahman. Like Nāgārjuna before him, his examination (e.g., in Brahmasūtrabhāṣya II.i.14–20) concludes that we cannot derive the real nature of causal relations from the series of discrete cause-and-effect phenomena. As a Vedāntin, however, Śaṅkara decides that the true cause of all effects must be Brahman, which provides the permanent substratum that persists unchanged through all experience. All effect-phenomena are merely illusory name-and-form superimpositions upon Brahman, the substance-ground. Since Brahman is the only real and any phenomena existing distinct from it are illusory, this is a version of satkāryavāda: the effect preexists in the cause. But to distinguish this view from that of Sāṅkhya (which identifies cause and effect in a different way, by granting the reality of prakṛti, a material substratum that does not change although its forms vary), Śaṅkara’s theory of causality is more precisely labeled satkāranavāda (or vivartavāda), since the effect (māyā) has a different kind of being from the cause (Brahman).
This amounts to a denial of causal relations as we know them: the relation between two discrete phenomena — cause and effect — is deemed incomprehensible and unreal. In predictable contrast, the emphasis in early Buddhism seems to be completely the opposite. Rather than negating causal relations in favor of an immutable Self, Buddhism dissolves the self and everything else into an impermanent sequence of cause-and-effect phenomena. We see this most clearly in the crucial doctrine of pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination), in which each of the twelve factors is conditioned by and conditions all the others. Pratītya-samutpāda might be called “all-conditionality” because it explains all phenomena by locating them within a set of cause-and-effect relationships, according to the formula “when X exists, then Y arises.”
Yet in this case we find a duplicate of the controversy between all-conditionality and the Unconditioned within Buddhism itself.330 The problem of causality is especially important in the Mādhyamika dialectic, but at first glance there seems to be a contradiction in Nāgārjuna’s analysis. On the one hand, causal interdependence is clearly a crucial concept, so important that Nāgārjuna identifies it with the most important concept śūnyatā: “We interpret the dependent arising of all things (pratītya-samutpāda) as the absence of being in them (śūnyatā).”331 The undeniable relativity of everything is the means by which self-existence (svabhāva) is refuted. At the same time, however, Nāgārjuna redefines pratītya-samutpāda in such a way as to negate causality altogether. This is apparent even in the prefatory dedication of his Mūlamadyamikakārikās, in the eight negations that Nāgārjuna attributes to the Buddha:
Neither perishing nor arising in time, neither terminable nor eternal, Neither self-identical nor variant in form, neither coming nor going; Such is pratītyasamutpāda . . .332
Consistent with this, the first and most important chapter of the Kārikās concludes that the causal relation is inexplicable, and later chapters go further to claim that causation is like māyā. “Origination, existence, and destruction are of the nature of māyā, dreams, or a fairy castle.” The last chapters seize on this issue as one way to crystallize the difference between saṁsāra and nirvana, and what is perhaps the most important verse of all (XXV.9, the epigraph to this section) distinguishes between them by attributing causal relations only to saṁsara. In his commentary on the previous chapter, Candrakīrti defines samvṛti (the lower truth) and duḥkha (suffering) in the same way: “to be reciprocally in existence, that is, for things to be based on each other in utter reciprocity, is samvṛti.” “It is precisely what arises in dependence that constitutes duḥkha, not what does not arise in dependence.”334
How are we to understand this obvious contradiction? That is, how do we get from interpreting pratītya-samutpāda as dependent origination to what has been well described as “nondependent nonorigination” and, what is more, reconcile the two? Following the line of argument used in the previous sections, I claim that all-conditionality is phenomenologically equivalent to a denial of all causal conditions. That is, a view so radical as to analyze things away into “their” conditions offers an interpretation of experience which becomes indistinguishable from a view that negates causality altogether. Again, the argument is made in two steps. Looking at the commonsense distinction between things and their cause-and-effect relationships, Nāgārjuna first uses the latter to “deconstruct” the former and deny that there are any self-existing things. Less obvious is the second stage, which reverses the analysis. The lack of “thingness” in things implies a way of experiencing in which there is no awareness of cause or effect because one is the cause/effect. Things and their causal relations stand or fall together, because our notion of cause-and-effect is dependent on that of objectively existing things. As with the previous dualisms of Self and nonself, and so on, the basic problem is that this bifurcation is untenable. Nāgārjuna shows that it is delusive by demonstrating how, once it has occurred, it is not possible to relate the two terms back together again without a contradiction. The inconsistency in our ordinary way of understanding objects is that they are taken to be both self-existent and causally contingent.
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In order to understand the Mādhyamika critique, we must remind ourselves of what is being criticized. This is our ordinary, commonsense understanding of the world, which sees it as a collection of discrete entities (including myself) interacting causally “in” space and time. Nāgārjuna attacks more than the philosophical fancies of lndian metaphysicians, for there is a metaphysics inherent in our everyday view. It is one or another aspect of the commonsense view that is made absolute in systematic metaphysics. This commonsense understanding is what makes the world saṁsāra for us, and it is saṁsāra that Nāgārjuna is concerned to “deconstruct.” This is why we must beware of making Mādhyamika into an “ordinary language” philosophy by interpreting śūnyatā merely as a “meta-system” term. By no means does the end of philosophical language-games “leave everything as it is” for Nāgārjuna, except in the sense that saṁsāra has always really been nirvana.
It is the consequence of prapañca “thought-projection” that I now perceive the room I am writing in, not nondually, but as a collection of books and chairs and pens and paper . . . and me, each of which is unreflectively taken to be distinct from the others and to persist unchanged unless affected by something else. Just as space and time, if they are to function dualistically as containers, require something understood to be nonspatial and nontemporal for them to contain, so the causal relation is normally used to explain the interaction between things that are distinct from each other. If causality explains the interaction among things, then things must in themselves be “noncausal,” and by no coincidence this is precisely our commonsense notion of what an object is: a thing whose continued existence does not need to be explained — once created, it “self-exists.” The objectivity of the world (including the objectification of myself) depends upon this dualism. This constitutes saṁsāra because it is by hypostatizing such “thingness” out of the flux of experience that we become attached to things — again, the primal attachment being (to) the sense of self. In causal terms, the conclusion of chapter 2 is that what we experience as objects are thought-constructed automatizations, a shorthand way of remembering that our perceptions tend to have a certain stability, which allows us to relate them together causally and form expectations.335 But in the automatization process we forget that objects are a “causal shorthand” and we create the delusive bifurcation between objects and their causal relations — corresponding to the bifurcation between objects and their appearances.
The point about the effect of prapañca is important because without it one might conclude that Nāgārjuna’s critique of self-existence (svabhāva) is a refutation of something that no one believes in anyway. But one does not escape his critique by defining entities in a more commonsense fashion as coming into and passing out of existence. There is no tenable middle ground between self-existence independent of all conditions — an empty set, since there are no such entities — and the complete conditionality of śūnyatā. Nāgārjuna’s arguments against self-existence (e.g., MMK chaps. I, XV) demonstrate the inconsistency in our everyday way of “taking” the world. We accept that things change, yet at the same time we assume that somehow they also remain the same — necessary if they are to be “things.” Recognizing this inconsistency, other Indian philosophers have tried to solve it by making one of these absolute at the expense of the other. But the satkāryavāda Substance-view of Advaita and Sāṅkhya emphasizes permanence at the price of not being able to account for change, while the asatkāryavāda Modal-view of early Buddhism has the opposite problem of not being able to provide the connecting thread necessary for continuity. Nāgārjuna arranges these and the other solutions that have been proposed into a “tetralemma” which exhausts the possible alternatives and then rejects them all. Any understanding of cause-and-effect that tries to relate these two separate things together can be reduced to the contradiction of both asserting and denying identity. He concludes that their “relationship” is incomprehensible and unreal.
It does not suffice to answer this Hume-like critique of identity336 with an “ordinary language” rejoinder that we should become more sensitive to the ways we use our permanence-and-change vocabulary, for the Mādhyamika position is that our usual experience is deluded and this ordinary use of language is deluding. As the first prong of his attack, Nāgārjuna refutes our everyday distinction between things and their causal relations simply by sharpening the distinction to absurdity. If things are self-existent, then they must be distinguishable from their conditions, but their “existence” is clearly contingent upon the conditions that bring them into being and eventually (when those conditions no longer operate) cause them to disappear. If it is objected that one cannot live without reifying such fictitious entities, at least to some extent, the Mādhyamika response is to agree. The lower truth is not negated altogether, but it must not be taken as the higher truth, as a correct understanding of the way things really are.
So the first stage of the Mādhyamika critique negates the bifurcation between things and their causal relations by using the latter to deconstruct the former. This repeats the early Buddhist rejection of substance, but it is only the first step. Now the critique dialectically reverses and employs the deconstructed thing to deny the reality of causal conditions. Just as things are dependent upon their causal conditions, so the category of causality turns out to be dependent upon things. Our concept of causality presupposes a set of discrete, “noncausal” entities, for it is their interrelation that we explain as causation. A collection of self-existing objects does not make sense unless they are related together in some way. As mentioned in chapter 3, our commonsense notion of compulsion is one thing pushing another. Cause-and-effect requires some thing to cause and some thing to be effected. If this is so, then a complete conditionality so radical that it “dissolves” all things must also dissolve itself
In order to make this point, it will be helpful to transpose the argument from the too-general category of causal conditions to the more specific one of motion-and-rest. Nāgārjuna analyzes motion and rest in chapter 2 of the Kārikās, immediately after his initial treatment of causality, and it is clear that the second chapter is meant to apply the general conclusions of chapter 1 to a particular case. The other advantage of shifting to motion-and-rest is that we may illuminate what is otherwise a puzzling chapter. The basic problem is that it is not always clear what Nāgārjuna is actually doing in chapter 2. Like Zeno, he denies the reality of motion, but this is not done to assert a Parmenidean immutability, since rest is also denied. As a result, Nāgārjuna has been criticized for making an “arid play on words” that “resembles the shell game” in its logical sleight-of-hand — that is, he is accused of basing his argument on subtle distinctions between words that have no empirical referent — and for committing the fallacy of composition in arguing that what is true for the parts (in this case, traversed, traversing, and to-be-traversed) must be true for the whole.337 But such criticisms miss the point of Nāgārjuna’s arguments. Their import is that our usual way of understanding motion, which distinguishes the mover from the act of moving, simply does not make sense, because the interdependence of mover and moved reveals that the hypostatization of either is delusive. Nāgārjuna’s logic in stanzas 2–11 demonstrates that once we have reified a distinction between them, it becomes impossible to relate them back together again — a quandary familiar to students of the mind–body problem, the result of another reified bifurcation. The difficulty is shown by isolating this hypostatized mover and inquiring into its status. In itself, is it a mover, or not? That is, is the predicate moves intrinsic or contingent to this mover? The dilemma is that neither way of understanding the situation is satisfactory. If the mover in and of itself already moves, then there is no need to add an act of motion later; the predication of such a second motion becomes redundant. But the other alternative — that the mover by itself is a nonmover — does not work either because we cannot thereafter add the predicate, it being a contradiction for a nonmover to move. In neither way can we make sense out of the relation between them. It follows that the mover cannot have an existence of its own apart from the moving predicate, which means that our usual dualistic way of understanding motion is untenable. To summarize this in contemporary terms, Nāgārjuna is pointing out a flaw in the everyday language we use to describe (and hence our ways of thinking about) motion: our ascription of motion predicates to substantive objects is unintelligible.
At first encounter the above argument is unconvincing. The options seem so extreme that we suspect there must be some middle ground between them. Of course we cannot accept a double-movement, but is it really such a contradiction for a nonmover to move? What else could move? But no such appeal to everyday intuitions, or to the ordinary language that shapes and embodies them, is successful against the Mādhyamika critique of those intuitions, which spotlights the inconsistency that is ignored (and that to some extent must be ignored, of course) in daily life. One can elaborate on this by applying the logic that was used earlier to deconstruct the difference between things and their causal relations. Just as (the general rule) complete interdependence dissolves the thing into its relational conditions, with no residue of substance remaining, so (a specific case) the “completeness” of movement — the fact that no part of me stays unmoved in the chair when “I” go to lunch — means that no unchanging and hence no self-existing thing remains to move. Our way of thinking about the relation between mover and moving is another instance of the dualistic and deluding “contained–container” metaphor. Again, Nāgārjuna needs only to sharpen the dichotomy. Despite our intuitions, which want to postulate some “unchanging core” in order to save the mover, there is no middle ground between a self-existent, unmoving thing and the compete dissolution of the thing that does the moving. Understood in this way, it becomes obvious why his arguments work just as well against the intelligibility of rest. The bifurcation between the thing and its being-at-rest is just as delusive, for the same reasons.
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So far, we have effected only the first stage of the dialectic, both in the general analysis of causal conditions and this more specific instance of motion-and-rest. We have deconstructed the thing which moves / is caused, and what remains is a constantly changing world of causal interactions. The second stage of the dialectic is easy to state but harder to understand. Granted, if there is only cause-and-effect, then there is no thing that causes and nothing that is effected; but if there is nothing to cause / be effected, we will not experience the world in terms of cause-and-effect. Implicit in our concept of change is the notion that a thing is becoming other than it was, so unless one reifies something self-existent and noncausal (cf. nontemporal) in order to provide continuity through these different conditioned (cf. temporal) states, there is nothing outside the changing conditions to be changed. The concept of change needs something to bite on, but the first stage of the dialectic leaves nothing unconditioned to chew. If a colleague I join for lunch cannot be called the “same” person I spoke with earlier, because there is no substratum of permanence to “him,” then it also makes no sense to say that he “has changed.” As with birth-and-death, if there is only coming-and-going — with no thing that comes or goes — then there is no real coming-and-going. Without a contained there can be no container. As the bifurcation dissolves, the poles conflate into a whole that cannot be represented; it remains philosophically indeterminate, since language, in order to describe at all, must distinguish subject and predicate, mover and moved, cause and effect.
Nonetheless, we must try to get some sense of what such a way of experiencing would be like. Otherwise it will remain unclear how, except by some logical sleight-of-hand, all-conditionality can be phenomenologically identified with no-conditionality. I attempt to satisfy this need with the help of a well-known Zen story. The following example discusses the causal relations of a nondual physical action, but what is said may be applied just as well to the causation of nondual sense-perception and nondual thought.
Lin-chi was a monk in the monastery of Huang Po. Three times Lin-chi asked the Master, “what is the real meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the West?” and each time Huang Po immediately struck him. Thereupon, discouraged, he decided to leave and was advised to go to Master Ta-yü. Arriving at his monastery, Lin-chi told Ta-yü of his encounters with Huang Po, adding that he didn’t know where he was at fault.
Master Ta-yü exclaimed: “Your master treated you entirely with grandmotherly kindness, and yet you say that you don’t know your fault.” Hearing this, Lin-chi was suddenly awakened and said: “After all, there isn’t much in Huang Po’s Buddhism!”338
What did Lin-chi realize that awakened him? If (again rushing in where Zen masters will not tread) we distort his experience into an idea in order to gloss this story, we may say that Lin-chi must have realized that Huang Po had been answering his question. The blows he had received were not punishment but a demonstration of why Bodhidharma came from the West. On the commonsense level the answer to Lin-chi’s stock question is obvious: Bodhidharma was bringing Buddhism to China. But this is a relative lower-truth explanation. Since this is a Zen question designed to initiate a dialogue, it goes without saying that what is sought is the higher truth, and on that level there is no “why.” For the deeply enlightened person, each experience is complete in itself, the only thing in the universe, each action is “just this!” Without prapañca thought-projection everything is perceived afresh, for the first time. As Bodhidharma walked from India there was no thought of why in his head; “he” was each step. In the same way, there was no why to Huang Po’s blows: “he” too was that spontaneous, unselfconscious action. Lin-chi’s sudden realization of this overflowed into his exclamation. “So, there isn’t much to Buddhism after all!” (Only “just this!”) Upon returning to Huang Po, he demonstrated that his understanding was more than just an intellectual insight by not hesitating to give Huang Po a dose of his own medicine.
The paradox that makes the above story relevant to this section is the fact that, at the same time, Bodhidharma’s and Huang Po’s actions are intentional. Huang Po’s blow may be immediate and spontaneous, but there is also a reason for it. It is not a random or irrelevant gesture, but a very appropriate response to that particular question, drawn forth by that situation. If we translate this point about intention back into our more general category of causality, here we have a case of an act which is both completely caused (perfect upāya, “skillful means”: glove fitting hand tightly, to use the Zen analogy) and yet is also uncaused. This paradox is impossible according to our usual understanding of causality, which uses that category of thought to relate together the supposedly discrete objects into which prapañca carves the world. That understanding would apply to the story in question if Huang Po, prapañca-deluded, were to perceive Lin-chi dualistically: Lin-chi is sitting there, a person-object that needs to be enlightened, and I, Huang Po sitting here, am the person who will try to enlighten him. Then “my” blow is reified into a deliberated effect that I hope will cause Lin-chi’s awakening.
But if, as all schools of Buddhism agree, there is no self to make these causal relations among things, then that understanding of the situation cannot be correct. So Huang Po must have experienced it differently and causality must be understood differently. Causality is not denied. On the contrary, without the sense of self and other prapañca-reified objects to serve as a counterfoil, it expands to include everything. (Applying causality to the mental realm as well results in the doctrine of karma.) From the perspective of Mādhyamika’s all-conditionality, which deconstructs all self-existing things, Huang Po’s blow is part of a seamless web of conditions that can be extended, as in Hua Yen, to encompass the entire universe. As one interstice in the infinite, interdependent web of Indra, the blow reflects or rather manifests everything everywhere. But if every event that happens is interdependent with everything else in the whole universe, what a different way of experiencing is involved! It suggests a Spinozistic acceptance of whatever happens, as a product of the whole, but more deeply it implies the irrelevance of causality as usually understood. We find ourselves in a universe of śūnya-events, none of which can be said to occur for the sake of any other. Each nondual event — every leaf-flutter, wandering thought, and piece of litter — is whole and complete in itself, because although conditioned by everything else in the universe and thus a manifestation of it, for precisely that reason it is not subordinated to anything else but becomes an unconditioned end-in-itself. As argued in chapter 3, the dualism between freedom and determinism becomes deconstructed at the same time. If “liberty or freedom signifies properly the absence of opposition,” then such unimpeded interdependence implies freedom, since there is not only no thing that does the event but also no other to oppose it. If it is the self-caused universe-as-a-whole that makes every event happen or, better, that is the event, then whenever anything occurs it occurs freely. In this way, the Absolute or higher truth for Mahāyāna turns out to be every event that ever happens in the whole universe. That is why the Buddha could “turn the wheel of the Dharma” just by twirling a flower, and why Huang Po could teach by striking Lin-chi.
But what does all this imply about the way the Buddha twirled that flower? How did Huang Po experience his own action? Because he did not perceive the situation dualistically, the action was not “done by him.” That the blow was appropriate to the situation was not due to any prior deliberation, however quick. On the contrary, the action was so appropriate precisely because it was not deliberated, just as the best responses in dharma-combat are unmediated by any self-conscious “hindrance in the mind.” Then why did Huang Po strike rather than shout “ho!” as Ma-tsu often did, or utter a few soft words, as Chao-chou probably would have done? This is the crucial point: he does not know. (“Not knowing is the most intimate” said Master Lo-han, precipitating Wên-i’s awakening.) His spontaneous actions are traceless, “like the tracks of a bird in the sky.”339 They respond to a situation like a glove fits on a hand because whatever “decisions are made” (if that phrase can be used here) are not made by “him.” If one nondualistically is the cause/effect, rather than being a hypostatized self that dualistically uses it, then there is not the awareness that it is a cause/effect. It is experienced as free, whole, and “traceless.” Without the interference that the self creates, Indra’s all-encompassing web of causal conditions is indeed seamless. When “the bottom falls out of the bucket” and the barrier between consciousness and subconsciousness dissolves, thought and actions are experienced as welling up nondually from a source unfathomably deep — or, what amounts to the same thing, from nowhere.
In order to bring all this down to earth, the most important question is whether Huang Po experienced his blow as determined (caused) or freely done (uncaused). The answer is: both. If the action were dualistic, done by an ego-self, as we usually understand it, this would be impossible. But it is not a contradiction for one whose acts are śūnya. We are reminded of Nietzsche’s description of his own inspiration (quoted more fully in chapter 4): “Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity.” The act is determined because it is not the act of an ego-self, whose only role is to let itself be absorbed into the process. The act is free because it flows spontaneously from somewhere much “deeper.” The paradox of involuntary freedom points to another aspect of wei-wu-wei, action that is no action when it is experienced as springing up nondually from a boundless, unknowable source which one is, as it were, “plugged into.” “As it were,” because all such metaphors — springing up from, plugging into — are inescapably dualistic. Again and again, our attempts to describe nonduality must bump up against the limits of language.
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So there turn out to be only two alternatives: either cause-and-effect relationships between discrete thought-constructed objects, manipulated by/manipulating a thought-constructed subject, or nondual all-conditionality (pratītya-samutpāda) that is experienced as unconditioned freedom (tathatā). In order to move from the first to the second alternative, the hierarchy that causality constructs must collapse into an interpenetration in which each event is equally conditioned by the whole and manifests that whole as the only thing in the universe. Causal relations form a hierarchy because the most important hypostatized thing is me, the subject who craves other objects and needs an understanding of causal relationships in order to manipulate circumstances and obtain what he wants. All-conditionality, in completely negating anything to be attached to, offers no practical utility, because there is no longer any object to be obtained nor any self to crave it; whereas a hypostatized self that wants to obtain some other hypostatized thing will need to construct a causal chain of events leading to it. Because each event in such a chain is experienced not in itself, but only for the sake of the next, and the next, and so on, the śūnya nature of each is overlooked in our eagerness to obtain the objectified goal. This dissatisfaction with each particular event in hurrying to the next is essential to the sense of self, which is why causality is the root category of thought and thus the one most in need of deconstruction. Man is a cause-seeking creature, said Lichtenberg. We look for compulsion in the world and therefore find it, because freedom explains nothing and gains us nothing.
This way of resolving the time and causality paradoxes (only-time is no time, all-conditionality is the Unconditioned) is important for understanding the trisvabhāva (three natures) doctrine of Yogācāra too, and thus the general relation between Mādhyamika and Yogācāra. The prapañca-world of discrete objects causally interacting “in” space and time corresponds to the parikalpita-svabhāva, the “imagined nature.” Only-time and all-conditionality correspond to paratantra-svabhāva, the interdependent or “other-dependent nature.” The unconditioned Eternal Present corresponds to the pariniṣpanna-svabhiāva, the absolutely-accomplished nondual nature. Read in this way, Vasubandhu’s Trisvabhāvanīrdeśa, for example, is completely consistent with the Mādhyamika approach. For both Mādhyamika and Yogācāra, an understanding of all-conditionality, with its negation of the self-existence of discrete things, is the crucial hinge whereby we move from delusion to enlightenment.
We are finally ready to return to Vedānta and relate this to the Advaitic analysis of causal relations. The significant point is that, despite the ontological differences, there is no disagreement between Mahāyāna and Vedānta over the noncausal nature of the nondual experience. Since Brahman is qualityless and imperceptible, there is no phenomenological difference between a Mahāyāna interpretation of Huang Po’s blow and an Advaitic one. In both cases, the arm movement is experienced nondually, with no bifurcation between a self-conscious subject and “his” action. In both cases, therefore, that mysterious śūnya action is involuntary yet free, inexplicable in terms of efficient causality and having no reality in itself (nor of course does Huang Po or anything else). The only difference is that Mahāyāna stops here, while Advaita asserts that there must be an immutable ground that is the source of all the changing phenomena. But since this source by definition cannot be experienced, the difference is reduced to a more abstract (although not trivial) one of emphasis. Concluding that phenomena are illusory māyā seems to devalue them somewhat more than if phenomena are merely śūnya without any Brahman “behind” them. To repeat a point made in chapter 2, the difference becomes one of attitude toward the nondual experience rather than anything in the experience itself. The Advaitin, distinguishing between Brahman and māyā, will be more eager to negate the phenomenal world than the Buddhist Bodhisattva, for whom there are only empty forms and events.
If anyone imagines he will get more by inner thoughts and sweet yearnings and a special grace of God than he could get beside the fire or with his flocks or in the stable, he is doing no more than trying to take God and wrap His head in a cloak and shove Him under the bench. For whoever seeks God in some special Way, will gain the Way and lose God who is hidden in the Way. But whoever seeks God without any special Way, finds Him as He really is . . . and He is life itself.
— Eckhart
When we want something, normally we know well enough what needs to be done to get it. But what if the object I desire is something that can never become an object, because it is prior to the subject–object dichotomy? What if it can never be an effect, because it is always unconditioned? What if it can never be gained, because it is unattainable? Then I find myself in a dilemma. If I make no effort to do anything, it seems that the result will also be nothing and there will be no progress toward the desired goal. But to the extent that I exert myself to attain it, I don’t, for in this case all effort seems to be self-defeating. This is the paradox of spiritual practice, for, as we have seen, ātman, Brahman, nirvana, Buddha-nature, and so on, are unobjectifiable (because nondual), unoriginated (beyond causal and temporal relations), and hence unobtainable. How can we escape this double bind?
Our treatment of the Advaitic all-Self versus Buddhist no-self controversy included a discussion of one form of Zen practice: the Rinzai technique for working on a koan such as Jōshū’s Mu. That was illuminating, but it ignored this very pressing problem, which may be summarized as follows: expecting a nondual experience to happen to you is still dualistic and therefore self-stultifying. In response, we must distinguish between two perspectives on practice: the phenomenal view, according to which we move from delusion to enlightenment, and the essential view, according to which there is no dualism between delusion and enlightenment — or between phenomenal and essential.
The former view was presented in the first section of this chapter; here I present the latter by considering the views of Śaṅkara and Dōgen on the relation between practice (samādhi, yoga, zazen, etc.) and enlightenment (mokṣa, nirvana, satori, etc.). Once again, their views about this relation seem to be diametrically opposed. Later Advaita came to incorporate yogic practices that cultivate samādhi, but Śaṅkara himself does not recognize the necessity for any practice, except perhaps for those “of inferior intellect.” In contrast, for Dōgen, zazen is nothing less than enlightenment itself. But both are reacting against the same problem, the thought-constructed dualism between practice as means and enlightenment as goal, which objectifies the nondual Self / Buddha-nature into something that, insofar as it is understood to be something separate from us, can never be attained. Both came to the same insight about the necessity to overcome this bifurcation; the difference between them is in how they overcome it. The two main ways are to subsume the means into the ends, or vice versa. Śaṅkara, in denying the need for any practice, exemplifies the first. Dōgen, arguing that zazen is enlightenment, prefers the second. More important than this difference, however, is that in both cases we end up with a nonduality between the two terms, which might be called “the path of no-path.” But the emphasis is certainly different, as we shall see: For Śaṅkara, no-path is indeed the path, while for Dōgen no-path is very much the path.
It comes as no surprise that this mutual understanding about the paradox of practice reflects their agreements regarding the nature of nondual experience — namely, that it “transcends” both temporal and causal relations. One profound implication of this is that all possible means are severed from any ends. In the thought-constructed everyday world we can and to some extent must ignore this, but the consequences for spiritual life are inescapable. It means that no religious practice — be it ritual, prayer, yoga, zazen, or anything else — can ever cause or lead to enlightenment, because enlightenment is understood as that experience which cannot be characterized by such temporal or causal relations. From this perspective, we can see that the usual attitude toward spiritual practices is therefore not a solution to the problem but simply another version of the problem itself. Any method or technique understood to lead to an enlightenment experience maintains the very present → future, cause → effect dualism that it is trying to escape. Projecting such a thought-constructed goal into the future sacrifices the present at its altar and thus loses the now, which is the only possible locus for liberation. The crucial insight for both Śaṅkara and Dōgen is that there is nothing to attain, which is not to deny that this insight is something that must be realized clearly. The difference between attainment and such realization is that only now can I realize I am that which I seek. Since it is always now, the possibility is always there, but that possibility becomes real-ized only when causal, time-bound, goal-directed ways of thinking and acting evaporate, to expose what I have always been: a formless, qualityless mind that is immutable because it is nothing, that is free because it is not going anywhere, and that does not need to go anywhere because it does not lack anything.
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There is no dissolution, no birth, none in bondage, none aspiring for wisdom, no seeker of liberation and none liberated. This is the absolute truth.
— Gauḍapāda, Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad
For Śaṅkara, liberation (mokṣa) is realizing the true nature of the Self (ātman), which is identical with the ground of the universe (Brahman). As we have seen, the distinctive feature of Śaṅkara’s Advaita is the way it understands the relationship between this spiritual ground and the concrete phenomenal world we live in — or understand ourselves to live in. Śaṅkara resolves the issue in one bold stroke by denying that there is a phenomenal world. There is only ātman/Brahman, which is and always has been unconditioned, unoriginated, all-pervasive, devoid of any modifications, self-effulgent and ever-content. Anything that seems different from this — including all temporal and causal relationships — is māyā, and such experience is avidyā, delusion involving “ignore-ance” of Brahman.
As a preemptive strike this is a brilliant solution to the problem of creation, but it creates its own problems, notably the difficulty of accounting for the nature of māyā, which is left unexplained in a never-never-land neither inside (no delusion in Brahman!) nor outside (nothing outside!) the Absolute. However, it determines what the nature of liberation must be for Śaṅkara: since there is only ātman/Brahman, nothing needs to be attained or done. Śaṅkara devotes much effort to refuting the Mīmāṁsā view that the purport of the Vedas is to inculcate dharma, defined in this instance as “that which, being desirable, is indicated by Vedic injunction.”340 On the contrary, says Śaṅkara, no action is necessary to realize Brahman, and no action can be required of one who has realized Brahman, for that realization puts an end to all activity by revealing the nondual true Self as that which never acts. At best, Vedic rituals can only lead to a better realm of saṁsāra, never salvation. Śaṅkara even denies that such Vedic statements as “the Self alone is to be meditated upon” are genuine injunctions, because “except the knowledge that arises from that dictum . . . there is nothing to be done, either mentally or outwardly.”341
Actions can produce effects in one of four ways: something is produced, acquired, modified, or purified; none of these can apply to Brahman, which has no origin, cannot be attained, is immutable, and transcends any possible defect. “Even if Brahman were different from oneself, there can be no acquisition of Brahman, since being all-pervasive like space, It remains ever attained by everybody.”342 Like the sixth Ch’an patriarch, Śaṅkara does not accept even the metaphor of the Self as a mirror whose inherent brilliance needs to be cleaned by rubbing, “for no action can take place without bringing about some change in its locus” and that would make the Self subject to impermanence.343 Like seeing a rope in the grass as a snake, we “bind ourselves without a rope,” and eliminating such delusions is what reveals the awareness of Brahman, or (less dualistically) Brahman-awareness, which does not develop in stages or degrees, does not come from any other place, and (unlike the dirty mirror) has never been obscured, although It has been unnoticed in our preoccupation with apparently objective phenomena. It is not necessary to get rid of the body, for the Self has always been bodiless; “the idea of embodiedness is a result of false nescience.”344 This explains jivanmukti, how complete liberation is possible even before physical death: because there is no real embodiment to escape.
Nevertheless, most of us do not know this unattainable Brahman; instead, we suffer due to our many delusions. How can we eliminate them and realize the ever-present Self? This brings us back to the question of practice. According to Radhakrishnan, “Śaṅkara accepts the principle of the yoga practice, which has for its chief end samādhi . . . which consists in withdrawing the senses from everything external and concentrating them on one’s own nature.” These and the various outer limbs of yoga “bring about the rise of true knowledge.”345 This is accurate as an account of Gauḍapāda, and in Śaṅkara’s voluminous corpus a few passages can be cited to support such a view. But Advaitic assimilation of such practices occurred commonly after Śaṅkara, for the main tendency of his thought is to resist the necessity for any practice or means for the realization of Brahman. He does not deny that they can sometimes be of limited value, as in his comment on Gauḍapāda’s approval of yogic practice — “for those of inferior intellect.” Meditative repetition can be helpful because “people do not always understand the first time.”346 Karmic factors may be stronger than the operation of knowledge and interfere with it; then, he says, “there is need to regulate the train of remembrance of the knowledge of the Self by having recourse to means such as renunciation and dispassion; but it is not something that is to be enjoined, being a possible alternative.”347
It is clear that the limited value of such practices lies in their tendency to re-collect the mind from its preoccupation with various sense- and thought-objects, to help it focus itself. But liberation is that unconditioned and unconditionable moment when the mind becomes aware of itself as a formless, qualityless, nongraspable consciousness, which is what it has always been. Here, as so often with such matters, we bump up against the limits of language. To say “the mind becomes aware of itself” implies a reflexive process, whereas for Śaṅkara realization is just the opposite: the sense of self is the result of just such reflexivity, and liberation occurs when the mind stops trying to grasp its own tail.348 At that instant, it is not the case that bonds are broken: rather, one realizes that there never were any bonds to be broken. Such liberation can be eternal only because it never had a beginning.349 This implies — the logic is inescapable — that from the liberated point of view there is not even such a thing as liberation. As Gauḍapāda concludes his commentary on the Māṇḍukyōpaniṣad, “all dharmas [here, selves] are ever free from bondage and pure by nature. They are ever illumined and liberated from the very beginning.”350 Śaṅkara agrees:
Brahman cannot logically be a goal to be attained. The supreme Brahman can never become a goal which pervades everything, which is inside everything, which is the Self of all. . . . For one cannot reach where one already is. The well-known fact in the world is that one thing is reached by something else.351
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Subhūti said to the Buddha: “World Honored One, does your attainment of Supreme Enlightenment mean that you have not gained anything whatsoever?” The Buddha replied: “Just so, Subhūti, just so. I have not gained even the least dharma from Supreme Enlightenment.”
— Diamond Sutra
There is no ignorance, no end of ignorance, and so forth, until we come to, there is no decay and death, no end of decay and death; there is no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end of suffering, and no path; there is no wisdom, no attainment and no non-attainment.
— Heart Sutra
We find no disparagement of practice in Dōgen. On the contrary, zazen (he emphasizes that other techniques such as nembutsu, sutra reading, penances and rituals, etc., are unnecessary) is elevated to the status of enlightenment itself — without, however, denying the importance of his own experience under Ju-ching in China. The heart of his teaching is this shusho itto (or ichinyo), “the oneness of practice and enlightenment.” Whereas Śaṅkara resolves the delusive dualism between means and end by denying the need for any practice, Dōgen resolves the same dualism by incorporating enlightenment into practice. In both cases the duality collapses, because without a means we cannot objectify the end, and if there is no end then the means becomes more than a means.
Śaṅkara allows us no comfortable refuge in any technique where we can feel secure, having delegated to it our responsibility to realize and having thought-projected the wonderful, resolving-all-problems event of enlightenment sometime into the future. For Śaṅkara, practice becomes sharply concentrated into the simple need to realize, which can happen only now, which does happen when we cease objectifying liberation into an effect that will occur. Dōgen does not deny enlightenment, but he transforms zazen so that it is no longer self-stultifying. The type of zazen he recommends is shikan-taza, “just sitting,” which is characterized by awareness that is without any striving for a goal. The mind dwells serenely in its formlessness, and since it is precisely this formless, goalless character of the mind that needs to be realized, such practice is not to be distinguished from its goal.
Although arising from Chinese Mahāyāna philosophy, the problem that came to obsess the young Dōgen evokes Śaṅkara’s Advaita just as much: if, according to both exoteric and esoteric schools of Buddhism, we are already endowed with the Buddha-nature by birth, why do we need to seek enlightenment and engage in spiritual practices? If we are all “originally enlightened” (hongaku), why do we need to acquire enlightenment (shikaku)? Dōgen finally realized the answer to this in China, and he expressed it in Bendōwa, his first work in Japanese and one of his most important writings. Replying to the question of why someone who has realized the Buddha’s Dharma should need to do zazen, he says:
In the Buddha Dharma, practice and realization are identical. Because one’s present practice is practice as realization, one’s initial negotiation of the Way in itself is the whole of original realization. Thus, even while one is directed to practice, he is told not to anticipate realization apart from practice, because practice points directly to original realization. As it is already realization in practice, realization is endless; as it is practice in realization, practice is beginningless. Thus Śākyamuni and Mahākāśyapa were both taken and used by practice within realization. Bodhidharma and patriarch Hui-nêng were likewise drawn in and turned by practice in realization. The way of maintaining the Buddha Dharma has always been like this.352
The first thing to notice about this seminal passage is a profound agreement with Śaṅkara: the need for practice is not due to any lack or defect in “original enlightenment,” for there is absolutely nothing that needs to be produced, acquired, modified, or purified. In the Shōbōgenzō Dōgen tirelessly emphasizes this point. “As for the Buddha way, when one first arouses the thought [of enlightenment, which initiates one’s practice], it is enlightenment; when one first achieves perfect enlightenment, it is enlightenment. First, last and in between are all enlightenment” (Sesshin sesshō). If the first thought of enlightenment is understood as a seed, then full enlightenment is the fruit, but Dōgen denies this relationship: “There is no time of the past or present when the truth is not realized. Therefore, although the unenlightened standpoint may be presupposed, root, stem, branch and leaf must simultaneously realize Buddhanature as the very same whole being” (Busshō, “Buddhanature”). In the same fascicle, Dōgen reinterprets the Nirvāṇa Sūtra. It is not that all sentient beings have the Buddha-nature, for that is still dualistic; they and even nonsentient beings are the Buddha-nature. It is not that enlightenment will occur “when the time comes,” for “there is no time right now that is not a time that has come.” Just as there is nothing but ātman/Brahman for Śaṅkara, there is nothing but Buddha-nature for Dōgen. “My” Buddha-nature is not something hidden that awaits polishing, nor a potential that will manifest itself sometime in the future: “There is no Buddhanature that is not Buddha-nature fully manifested here and now.”353
Up to this point, then, we see a remarkable agreement between Dōgen and Śaṅkara that we are all “originally enlightened” (Dōgen) and that liberation is eternal (Śaṅkara). But this of course does not resolve Dōgen’s puzzle about the relation between original and acquired enlightenment. On the contrary, it seems to make the problem more acute, and we can almost hear Śaṅkara asking the obvious question: “Yes of course; but then why do we need to practice? If Buddha-nature is not something that needs to be acquired, transformed, produced, or purified, because it is already completely manifested, then what is the point of doing zazen?”
Immediately after discussing the oneness of practice and enlightenment in the Bendōwa (quoted above), Dōgen considers what he calls the “Senika heresy.” According to it, the way to escape birth-and-death is to realize that your mind-nature is eternal and immutable, for the body is only its temporary form. “Those who fail to grasp this are ever caught up in birth and death. Therefore, one must simply know without delay the significance of the mind-nature’s immutability. What can come of spending one’s whole life sitting quietly, doing nothing?”
Although presented as the view of a heretical Buddhist school, a better description of Śaṅkara’s Advaita would be hard to find. Dōgen criticizes it in the strongest possible terms. The gist of his reply is that “the Buddha Dharma from the first preaches that body and mind are not two, that substance and form are not two.” Therefore we should not speak of the body perishing and the mind abiding. This does not limit the Buddha-nature-without-a-second, for Dōgen concludes by emphasizing that the Buddhist teaching is that “all dharmas — the myriad forms dense and close of the universe — are simply this one Mind, including all, excluding none.”354
This difference from Śaṅkara becomes clearer when we consider Dōgen’s own enlightenment experience. During zazen his teacher Ju-ching said “body and mind must fall away” (Jap., shinjin-datsuraku) whereupon Dōgen’s did. This may appear contrary to the Advaitic claim that there is no need to escape the body, since the Self has never really been embodied. But this was not a falling away in the sense that Advaita criticizes as unnecessary, for that would be physical death. What Dōgen experienced thereafter was not an immutable Self voided of any attributes but “the fallen-away body and mind” (datsuraku-shinjin): body and mind now empty, but not further negated or dismissed as avidyā. Many fascicles of the Shōbōgenzō emphasize that enlightenment is as much physical as mental, for with it the duality between them is overcome: “Your whole body is mind in its totality” (lkka-Myōju, “One Bright Jewel”).
This attitude toward the body shows the “other half” of Dōgen’s teaching, which is incompatible with Śaṅkara. We find it embodied in those paradoxes wherein Dōgen affirms both of two apparently contradictory aspects, juxtaposing nondual Buddha-nature with the relative, dualistic aspect of things. Thus there are many prominent passages that emphasize the importance of attaining enlightenment, even though these seem to contradict what is said — often in the same place — about the unattainability of Buddha-nature. The Bendōwa was cited earlier to present Dōgen’s view that practice and realization are identical, but he also distinguishes them there: “The dharma is amply present in every person, but unless one practices, it is not manifested; unless there is realization, it is not attained.” He goes on to quote a Ch’an patriarch: “It is not that there is no practice or realization, only that you should not defile them.” In Busshō, just after emphasizing that everything is the Buddha-nature, he continues: “The Buddhanature is not incorporated prior to attaining Buddhahood; it is incorporated upon the attainment of Buddhahood” and immediately repeats the point.355 Buddha-nature may be as complete in the seed as in the fruit, but we should not confound the two. While the seed lacks nothing, it is only the fruit that realizes that the seed lacks nothing — and yet that realization adds nothing. Each stage is zenki, “the total dynamic working” of Buddha-nature, and as such is not dependent upon any other stage; nonetheless, to ignore completely all temporal and causal relationships is to replace one form of blindness with another.
But what does this difference between Śaṅkara and Dōgen imply for the relation between practice and enlightenment? How does it resolve Dōgen’s puzzle? We find our answer in the story with which Dōgen concludes “Genjō-kōan,” perhaps his most profound and important writing:
As Zen master Pao-ch’ê of Ma-ku shan was fanning himself, a monk came up and said: “The nature of the wind is constancy. There is no place it does no reach. Why do you still use a fan?” Pao-ch’ê answered: “You only know the nature of the wind is constancy. You do not know yet the meaning of it reaching every place.” The monk said: “What is the meaning of ‘there is no place it does no reach’?” The master only fanned himself. The monk bowed deeply.356
The monk’s question was Dōgen’s: If everyone already possesses the Buddha-nature, why is there need for practice? Pao-ch’ê’s answer is to the point, but it is easy to misunderstand. It is not the case that “without the actual movement of the fan the wind’s constancy is only a latent, empty reality,”357 for that amounts to another dualistic view according to which Buddha-nature must be transformed from a state of latency to actuality. If Buddha-nature is fully manifested here and now, we must overcome any notion of duality between wind and master and realize that the master’s fanning himself is the wind’s constancy, that his activity is itself the manifestation of the wind. What did the Bendōwa passage say about Śākyamuni and Mahākāśyapa? They “both were taken and used by practice within realization”; Bodhidharma and Hui-nêng “likewise were drawn in and turned by practice in realization.” The passive verbs take on new significance in the light of Pao-ch’ê’s fanning.
The heart of the Bendōwa passage is the obscure sentence, “As it is always realization in practice, realization is endless; as it is practice in realization, practice is beginningless.” This may now be understood as meaning: “since ‘original realization’ is already implied by and embodied in all our practice, practice is the way that realization actualizes itself endlessly, for our practice is endless. In the same way, since practice is already inherent in realization and ‘original realization’ has no beginning, so our practice too has no beginning.” Thus practice is not a means to the attainment of enlightenment. But that does not mean it is dispensable, for practice is the natural way in which one’s “original enlightenment” manifests itself. In this way Dōgen avoids any dichotomy between practice and enlightenment, means and ends. For Śaṅkara, however, such a view was not possible, because he does not accept any manifestations of Brahman: they are all delusive māyā which obscures nirguṇa Brahman. For the Buddhist, emptiness is not other than form, and Buddha-nature is not to be found elsewhere than in its manifestation as myriad phenomena. Therefore, what is to be realized is not something apart from phenomena — some Absolute that indifferently transcends them — but their true nature which is also my true nature. This leaves each to function freely as ippō-gujin, “the total exertion of a single thing” embodying the whole universe. And for Dōgen zazen is the example par excellence of the ippō-gujin manifesting human Buddha-nature.
When I do not attempt to get anything from my zazen, then it can be realized as the complete, lacking-nothing manifestation of “my” Buddha-nature. This does not deny the reality and importance of enlightenment from the relative standpoint. Done in such a fashion — not seeking or anticipating any effects — zazen in itself gradually transforms my character, and eventually I am able to realize clearly that the true nature of my mind and that of the universe are nondual. Zazen, however, cannot be said to cause this experience: enlightenment is always an accident, as Chögyam Trungpa has said, but practice undeniably makes us more accident-prone. Nonetheless, the way in which this no-seeking mind thereafter cultivates and manifests itself is through practice, for this no-seeking mind can deepen itself endlessly. “We have already been told: ‘It never, never ends.’ Reaching Buddha, it is ever more assiduous” (Nyorai-zenshin).358 Even the empty sky needs to be beaten with a stick; even the Buddha is only halfway there. And since there is therefore no “there,” no final resting point, no-seeking mind is “there” at every moment and always has been.
One senses Derrida is indeed on the verge of someway else, if not a something else, but surely he has not yet broken out of the turn. Derrida is in the turn of language, but he has logically demonstrated language to be not a turn but a labyrinth.
— Robert Magliola359
Our deconstructions of time and causality have enough similarity to the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida that they benefit from a comparison. From the nondualist perspective, the problem with Derrida’s radical critique of Western philosophy is that it is not radical enough: his deconstruction is incomplete because it does not deconstruct itself and attain that clôture which, as we have seen, is the opening to something else. This is why Derrida remains in the halfway house of proliferating “pure textuality,” whereas deconstruction could lead to a transformed mode of experiencing the world.
Any notion of a clôture for deconstruction seems incongruous with Derrida’s project, whose différance, in deconstructing any proffered “transcendental signified,” allows the dissemination of endless supplementation. Nonetheless, I argue for this by contrasting his method and claims with the dialectic used to undermine the “commonsense” dualities between objects and their temporal/causal relations. Earlier in this chapter those temporal and causal relations were used to deconstruct the notion of a “thing” and deny that there is anything self-identical or self-present. Derrida’s demonstration of the ineluctability of différance makes the same point. But that alone is incomplete. We saw that the interdependence of both terms in such dualities implies that the negation of one must also lead to negation of the other. It is the necessity for this second and reverse movement that Derrida does not see. Expressed in his categories, Derrida, although aware that each term of a duality is the différance of the other, does not fully realize how deconstructing one term (transcendental signified, self-presence, reference, etc.) must also transform the other (différance, temporization, supplementation, etc.).
What is the result of this double-deconstruction of “commonsense” dualities? Derrida’s single-deconstruction leads to the “temporary” reversal of their hierarchy, and/or to a discontinuous, irruptive “liberation” from reference grounded in the search for unattainable origins, into the dissemination of a free-floating meaning beyond any conceptual clôture. For the nondualist, this can be only the illusion of liberation, while remaining trapped in a textual “bad infinity” that tends to become increasingly ludic. What is needed is not just “a change of style,” however seductive or frustrating that may be. Rather, the complete deconstruction of such dualities can lead, not merely to their more self-conscious “reinscription,” but to a mode of experience which is not governed by them. The nondualist agrees that such dualities are ineluctably inscribed in language and thus are fundamental categories of thought; however, this means not that they are inescapable, but that their deconstruction points finally to an experience beyond language — or, more precisely, to a nondual way of experiencing language and thought.
In other words, the ultimate irony is that deconstruction ends in the elusive “origin” that metaphysics has always sought and that Derrida believes that he has refuted. They are both right. Philosophy will never come to rest in such an origin, for no “transcendental signified” can be located with/in language, and philosophy is a language game. The rhetorical operations that produce supposedly logical proofs cannot be eliminated. Philosophy, like all language, is basically metaphorical. This is Derrida’s positive and, I hope, lasting contribution. But Nāgārjuna’s deconstruction of thought via language offers a different mode of approach to the problem. “There is nothing outside the text” may be true, but it need not be true. In order to understand this, let us remind ourselves what is the paradigm “transcendental signified,” according to Buddhism: not nirvana, as two centuries of Western commentators have led us to believe, for nirvana is neither transcendental (“the ontic range of nirvana is the ontic range of the everyday world. There is not even the subtlest difference between the two”; MMK, XXV, 20) nor signified (“no truth has been taught by a Buddha for anyone, anywhere”; XXV, 24). On the contrary, the paradigm transcendental signified is the thing — here meaning not only physical objects but also the objectified subject. What most needs to be deconstructed is the apparent objectivity of the world, which is due to taking perceptions as “signs” of the object. The relationship between names and things is the archetypal signifier/signified correspondence, and the nondualist goal is nothing else than its complete deconstruction. Nirvana is nothing other than “the utter dissipation of ontologizing thought,” “the non-functioning of perceptions as signs of all named things” (Candrakīrti).360
Unarticulated and delusive ontological commitments underlie even the most everyday uses of language. Suddenly, language/thought is no longer the means (as according to metaphysics), nor even the end (according to Heidegger and Derrida, in very different ways), but the problem itself. Philosophy cannot grasp what it seeks in any of its categories, but, as language becoming self-conscious of its function, it can learn to “undo” itself and cease to be an obstruction, in that way allowing what we have long sought to manifest itself. This “origin-that-cannot-be-named” has always been the most obvious thing, but all ways of thinking about it — whether metaphysical or deconstructive — can only conceal it by dualistically separating us from it.
Classical Indian philosophy was a quest to determine the Real, understood as that which is self-existent, not dependent upon anything else. Anything that can be shown to be relative to something else is thereby refuted as a candidate. So Nāgārjuna’s task was quite simple: to take all the proposed candidates for Reality and demonstrate their relativity (śūnyatā), leaving nothing — not even śūnyatā, since that term too is relative to the candidates. “Śūnyatā is the exhaustion of all theories and views; those for whom śūnyatā is itself a theory are incurable” (MMK, XIII, 8). Rather than attempt to construct a new theory of language with śūnyatā as the key term, Nāgārjuna, while understanding that ordinary language is full of deluding ontological commitments, accepts it and deconstructs it from within: “Śūnyatā is a guiding, not a cognitive, notion, presupposing the everyday” (XXIV,18). No privileged language is created in this deconstruction, and his goal cannot be expressed or pointed to without the delusive logocentrisms of language; but, like Derrida, Nāgārjuna thus uses it “under erasure,” without committing himself to its categories.
It is here that we find the deepest resonance with Derrida, whose deconstruction also proceeds by demonstrating the inescapable différance infecting all Western metaphysical candidates for a transcendental signified. Deleuze’s cryptic remark about Foucault — that he is a new kind of map-maker, constructing maps for use rather than to mirror the terrain — is equally true for both Nāgārjuna and Derrida.361 The fundamental presupposition of metaphysics — that we can mirror the whole terrain from some Archimedean point of pure, self-contained thought — is the illusion they subvert, and their weapons are śūnyatā/différance. These mirror nothing because they have no referent apart from their subversive function; to fix them within a given system is to use them in ways that suppress that function. Their divergence, as we shall see, is in their understanding of the result of this subversion.
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The nondualist dissolution of self-existing objects “into” time anticipates the critique of self-presence that Derrida makes in textual terms, by showing that every process of signification is an economy of temporal differences:
The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals, which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. . . . There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.362
But, despite realizing that each term of such dualities is only the différance of the other, Derrida does not see the second phase, in which the dialectic reverses. In Dōgen’s “being-time,” lack of self-presence is not incompatible with “the eternal present of time,” because without self-existing objects time is not composed of a succession of “now-moments.” Such moments can only exist in relation to objects, as their successive modulations. The nondualist ends up with a distinction between the commonsense understanding of objectified time and the nonmetaphysical Eternal Now. In contrast, Derrida reacts against the commonsense understanding of the present (as a succession of falling-away moments) by redefining the present in terms of past and future.
Derrida’s most detailed examination of time, and Heidegger, is in “Ousia and Grammē: Note on a Note from Being and Time.”363 Its point of departure is a footnote from Being and Time in which Heidegger, having differentiated his own view of time from the traditional and metaphysical one, argues that the “fallen” conception of time is implicit in all Western metaphysics from Aristotle through Hegel and Bergson. It originates in an aporia found in Aristotle’s Physics IV, in which the nature of time is determined as “nonbeing” because it is composed of a succession of elementary parts — “nows” (nun):
But in order to be, in order to be a being, it [time] must not be affected by time, it must not become (past or future). To participate in beingness, in ousia, therefore is to participate in being-present, in the presence of the present, or if you will, in presentness. (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy)
The circularity of this definition remains “unthought” until Heidegger. For the nondualist, this aporia is merely another version of the delusive bifurcation between things and time. Aristotle’s metaphysical demonstration is only a more explicit determination of the duality already latent in ordinary language. Whether both terms resulting from the bifurcation are taken to be real (both “container” and “contained” being real, as discussed earlier) or the reality of one is used to deny the reality of the other (as with Aristotle) is irrelevant to the main point.
From a nondualistic perspective, what is most interesting about Aristotle’s passage is that it will allow us to see how Derrida takes for granted the very metaphysical determination of time that both he and Heidegger unsuccessfully attempt to question. Ironically, Derrida quotes passages that seem to point to the second and reverse movement, a move that Derrida himself does not see. One example:
This Hegelian determination of time permits us to think the present, the very form of time, as eternity. . . . Eternity is another name of the presence of the present. Hegel also distinguishes this presence from the present as now.
Derrida introduces Heidegger’s footnote by placing it in its context:
The Note belongs to the next to last section of the last chapter (“Temporality and Within-Time-ness as the Source of the Ordinary Conception of Time”). Time is usually considered as that in which beings are produced. Within-time-ness, intratemporality, is taken to be the homogeneous medium in which the movement of daily existence is reckoned and organized. This homogeneity of the temporal medium becomes the effect of a “leveling off of primordial time.”
For Heidegger, the ordinary (or “vulgar”) understanding of time as a homogeneous sequence of successive “nows,” within which we move, is inauthentic. Authentic, primordial temporality “temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future” because otherwise the full structure of the present is lost: “The ‘now’ is not pregnant with the ‘not-yet-now,’ but the Present arises from the future.”
In accordance with this, Derrida, too, calls into question not some conception of the present but, simply, “the present”:
Has not the entire history of philosophy been authorized by the “extraordinary right” of the present? . . . How could one think Being and time otherwise than on the basis of the present, in the form of the present, to wit a certain now in general from which no experience, by definition, can ever depart? The experience of thought and the thought of experience have never dealt with anything but presence.
Derrida, like Heidegger, is concerned to overthrow the privilege granted to the present, but merely relegating presence into a function of past and future différances misses the deeper point of Nāgārjuna’s critique. What is taken for granted in “Ousia and Grammē” is nowhere obvious there, but it becomes explicit in a much-quoted passage from the earlier essay “Différance”:
Différance is what makes the movement of signification possible only if each element called “present,” appearing on the stage of presence, is related to something other than itself, but is retaining the mark of the past element and is already letting itself be hollowed out by the mark of its relation to the future element, — the trace relating no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by this very relation to what is not; that is, not even to a past or a future considered as a modified present. In order for it [the present element] to be, an interval must separate it from what it is not; but this interval that constitutes it in the present must also, with one and the same stroke, divide the present in itself, thus dividing, along with the present, everything that can be conceived on its basis, that is, every being, — in particular, for our metaphysical language, the substance or subject.364
An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself. But how does an interval function to make the present “be itself”? It can only be by distinguishing one now-moment from another, which is not-yet or already-was. What remains “unthought” in this is the usual and apparently innocuous assumption that the present is a series of such now-moments successively falling away. Doesn’t any such conception of the present presuppose another present that each now-moment successively “occupies”? For what else can determine that one now-moment is now present, while another is not-yet or already-was? But this begins to sound oddly familiar. What did Derrida say about Aristotle’s aporia?
Time is defined according to its relation to an elementary part, the now, which itself is affected — as if it were not already temporal — by a time which negates it in determining it as a past now or a future now. The nunc, the element of time, in this sense is not in itself temporal.
Derrida’s attack on “the privilege granted to the present” should not distract us from realizing that his own conception of time constitutes another version of the everyday and “commonsense” conception of time. Ironically, both are versions of the circular aporia that Derrida criticizes in Aristotle!
This shows us again that it is not only or primarily formal metaphysics that must be deconstructed but also the ontological commitments sedimented in the categories of ordinary language and thus in our everyday, taken-for-granted understanding of experience. Otherwise our analysis, although deconstructing the explicit transcendental signifieds of systematic metaphysics, also reinstates (relever) the implicit, concealed ones of common sense. Derrida concludes his essay by suggesting, “perhaps there is no ‘vulgar concept of time.’”
The concept of time, in all its aspects, belongs to metaphysics, and it names the domination of presence. . . . an other concept of time cannot be opposed to it, since time in general belongs to metaphysical conceptuality.
This is more true than Derrida realizes: because his own con-ception of time, like that of common sense, like any conception, is metaphysical. A view of time, and thus a metaphysics (whether articulated or latent), is unavoidable as long as the delusive bifurcation between time and things has not been eliminated through ending prapañca thought-construction. However much Derrida may “solicit” the history of Western metaphysics, this example suggests that his “de-sedimentation” finally functions to justify a commonsense view which does not become aware of its own metaphysical assumptions. But this does not recuperate Heidegger, for Being and Time just replaces one commonsense view (dispersion in the moment) with another (goal-oriented) in its claim that authentic temporality “temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future.” In a note, Heidegger refers to the traditional image of eternity as nunc stans, but he says that this is derived from the ordinary way of understanding time, hence it “does not need to be discussed in detail.” So he never sees the possibility of “being-time” in Dōgen’s sense.365
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What must be the nature of philosophical discourse that wants to announce the inability of thought and language to re-present reality? Simply trying to represent that inability is self-defeating and “risks sinking into the autism of the closure.” But not to represent at all leaves us either with silence or with a ludic free play of discourse, neither of which in itself is of much help to anyone else. The Mahāyāna solution is to adopt a “double-strategy” which produces a theory about the delusiveness of thought and also dismisses that theory by turning it back against itself. The Prajñāpāramitā contains countless formulations of the following form: “X is X, but it is not really X.” Nāgārjuna’s more rigorous deconstruction is a classic example of how the second strategy devours the first: head swallows tail, and nothing remains — no nirvana, no Buddha, no teaching at all. One result of this was Zen, whose practice negated any theory, even though it was a particular theory that justified that practice and made it possible. Only meditative practice can actually end prapañca and open up a new mode of experience.
Derrida too has a double-strategy, but his works very differently. His first strategy — his theory of why theory cannot re-present — is différance and the grammatological critique of self-presence; the second is the “dissemination” that this opens up, allowing “the seminal adventure of the trace.” Again, the first strategy justifies and requires the second. There is an inevitable tension within both double-strategies, but Nāgārjuna’s deconstruction is finally resolved in a clôture whose silence reveals an alternative to the superimpositions of thought-construction. In contrast, the contradiction within Derrida’s deconstruction, rather than devouring itself, becomes an ambivalent “bad infinity’’ in which what is unsatisfactory about each strategy is disguised by alternately having recourse to the other.
Derrida understands that all philosophy, including his, can only “reinscribe,” but for him the sole solution is to disseminate wildly, in the hope of avoiding any fixation into a system that will subvert his insight.366 One wonders what freedom can be found in such a need to keep ahead of yourself. In contrast, we have the nondualist example of a Zen master, who plays with language — moving in and out of it freely — because he is not caught in it. His laconic expressions emerge from / are one with an unrepresentable ground of serenity, and although they cannot directly point to this ground, there are ways to suggest it for someone else. In comparison with this freedom, to rejoice in being caught in a language that has lost its ability to represent any truth brings to mind Bernard Shaw’s comment on the pleasures of an endless holiday: “a good working definition of hell.”
The same criticism can be made from another direction. Our discussions of causation and time led to paradoxes: if there is only causation, then everything is unconditioned; if there is only time, then there is no time. Derrida’s conception of interpretation and supplementation may be deconstructed into another version of the same paradox: if there is no pure and simple “origin” but only the deferral of supplements (“the trace is the origin of the origin”), then there is no supplementation either, because each supplement becomes its own origin. In one sense this indeed liberates interpretation, but in a more fundamental sense it refutes the possibility of interpretation. If the text disappears under its interpretation, as Nietzsche said, then so must the interpretations. As before, Derrida begins a deconstruction but does not complete it. By turning the deconstructed term back against the deconstructing one, dissemination may be deconstructed into “the end of prapañca.”
Poststructuralism was inaugurated by the linguistic realization that in the functioning of the sign it is not possible to distinguish the order of the signified from the order of the signifier. The role of the signified is played by a set of signifiers. “The ontological consequences for such a view are immense. The rigid metaphysical distinction between empirical signifier and ideal signified becomes obliterated in a general circulation of signs, i.e., in the play of signifiers.”367 The literary consequences are equally immense. The sharp distinction between the original text-in-itself and its interpretations becomes obliterated in a “disseminating” discourse that can “decenter the text” by appending its own commentary as “textual graft.” “The hermeneutic project which postulates a true sense of the text is disqualified. . . . Reading is freed from the horizon of the meaning or truth of Being,” and so on.368 This “liberation” of the signifier also establishes a democracy among them; in the general circulation of signs, they become equal. By eliminating the intentions of the author (another signified “origin”), Nietzsche’s cryptic remark on a scrap of paper — “I have forgotten my umbrella” — becomes “no more or less significant than any other passage.” “Dissemination . . . affirms (I do not say produces or controls) endless substitution, it neither arrests nor controls play.”369
Who likes to stop someone else from playing and having fun? But there is something odd here. Why does one interpret? The original motivation presupposed a search for truth, understood as a signified that language could come to signify. Supplementation and interpretation were necessary because previous attempts to signify this truth were inadequate: the old categories needed to be adjusted or, more radically, new paradigms substituted. But why supplement now, if we are no longer trying to discover some conceptual truth that can be signified? Derrida offers an alternative view of interpretation: there is not only “deciphering to end exile,” but also “affirming play.” If there is no pure origin then there is no exile to return from; but in what sense can such play still be called interpretation, if the chain of supplementation is not rooted in some to-be-signified?
The poststructuralist response is that this objection is based on a confusion. Because other signifiers function as signifieds for each other, there is always reference — not to some mythical origin, but to other supplements. There is only the interpretation of other interpretations. This is why deconstruction is necessarily parasitic: not believing that there is nonmetaphorical truth-in-itself to be signified, it needs as “host” another text that attempts to provide such a signified. Then it is not only the host that makes truth-claims, but also the deconstruction, which gains a derivative truth-signifying ability of its own from its critique of the proffered signified.
The irony in this is that Derrida, while believing that he has refuted any transcendental signified, has in effect reconstituted an equivalent in the truth-claim of the host text, because that is the only way his own deconstruction can make any truth-claim. The motivation behind all interpretation is the belief that there is some truth to be discovered in the text, or — what amounts to the same thing — that some truth is to be derived from criticizing it. As Śaṅkara argued, the demonstration of error presupposes some truth, and whether that truth is a transcendental signified or a function of other signifiers makes no difference. Derrida eliminates the presumed origin of supplementation without realizing that this origin was also the origin of all truth, and this second loss infects all subsequent supplements all the way back to him.370
This is not a difficulty for the nondualist, who realizes that his own deconstruction implies the refutation of all truth as well as error, including any truth that might be called his own. Any conceptual “truth” derived from deconstruction is no less deluding prapañca than error. He does not mind this — on the contrary, he is happy for others to realize the ultimate meaninglessness of his statements as long as they realize the meaninglessness of all others as well.
The purpose of this section has been to show that, although Derrida’s différance constitutes a major philosophical insight, his employment of it does not develop its most radical implications. There is no transcendental signified that language can point to, because every signified is only a function of other signifiers; all we can ever have in language is a general circulation of signs. The importance of this can hardly be overemphasized, but from this sudden checkmate of all philosophy there are two directions to go. One is to make the reasonable but solipsistic assumption that, because language cannot point outside itself, we must remain forever inscribed in its sign-circulation. This may “liberate” the proliferations of dissemination, but such “free play” must be called nihilistic if it is motivated by having nothing else to do.371
The other possibility is that perhaps what metaphysics has sought in language can be found in some other way. Needless to say, contemporary Western philosophy is not sympathetic to such a possibility; but isn’t that too a consequence of the frustration of its own attempt to point outside itself? In language, such a possibility cannot be proven or disproven, but the nondualist Asian traditions that are the topic of this work are predicated on that possibility. Of course, examples are not lacking in the West either.
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Self, substance, time, causality, the path . . . What began as a question in the introduction became the “core doctrine” of part 1 and in this chapter has been elaborated into a full-fledged metaphysical system. Or has it? If I have constructed a metaphysical system, it is a very odd one. Certainly attempts have been made to describe various aspects of the nondual experience, but the main concern has been quite different. Like Mādhyamika — perhaps I should say, as a contemporary restatement of Mādhyamika — I have tried to deconstruct the metaphysics inherent in our commonsense understanding of the world. It has not been an attempt to extrapolate from our experience, but to undo it. The basis of this is the claim that our ordinary experience is not “self-evident,” for what we uncritically accept as common sense is permeated with metaphysical beliefs.
I have characterized the metaphysics of common sense as based on dualistic opposition: in this chapter we have looked at the dualisms of self versus nonself, substance versus modes, immutability versus impermanence, freedom versus conditionality, spiritual ends versus means. In daily life the contradictions within these dualisms are usually apparent only in the various kinds of duḥkha they lead to. But the nondual experience cannot be expressed in these dualisms, and that has prompted attempts to resolve the oppositions. The “great divide” of Indian philosophy has been over which term of each pair to assimilate into the other. More generally, traditional metaphysical systems try to absolutize one aspect of our experience and subsume the others. The alternative chosen here is to highlight these contradictions in order to demonstrate that our taken-for-granted world, based on the confrontation between an anxious self and its unsatisfying object, is thought-constructed. The testimony of Buddhism, Vedānta, and Taoism, among many others, is that what has been thought-constructed may be thought-deconstructed.