A Delightful Discussion: The Case Against Buddhism

A Delightful Discussion: The Case Against Buddhism

Glenn Wallis, the author of A Critique of Western Buddhism: Ruins of the Buddhist Real had an interesting discussion with professor Charles Hallisey of Harvard Divinity School March 11, 2019 (Youtube). He wrote much about his non-Buddhist approach that follows François Laruelle’s non-philosophy for the tools it offers.

“All forms of philosophy (from ancient philosophy to analytic philosophy to deconstruction and so on) are structured around a prior decision, but that all forms of philosophy remain constitutively blind to this decision. The 'decision' that Laruelle is concerned with here is the dialectical splitting of the world in order to grasp the world philosophically. Laruelle claims that the decisional structure of philosophy can only be grasped non-philosophically. In this sense, non-philosophy is a science of philosophy. Laruellean (non)ethics is "radically de-anthropocentrized, fundamentally directed towards a universalized, auto-effective set of generic conditions[1]."

Some emblematic concepts of Laruelle’s non-philosophy are also used in Glenn’ non-buddhism. “Non-”, the principle of “sufficiency”, “decision”, etc., to which Glenn added the “Feast of Knowledge”, corresponding to the second “constructive” part of the book, going back to the Real and “wresting” vital potentialities from the “ruins” of Buddhism. These terms were discussed and explained during Glenn’s conversation with Charles Hallisey, that can be watched on Youtube or read on the website of the Center for the Study of World Religions.

This sort of practice is like a continuous struggle, and Charles Hallisey likens Glenn to the first potential human follower the Buddha met after his Awakening, Upaka the Ajivaka, who was not sufficiently impressed to follow him, but who is imagined to have kept thinking about what the Buddha told him. Upaka’s story can be found in the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, and it’s a, perhaps unintentionally, funny story, which also shows Buddhism’s, and the Buddha’s sufficiency and appeal to authority. I will insert Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s rendering of it.

“Within the Ariyapariyesana Sutta, the Buddha says:

Then, having stayed at Uruvela as long as I liked, I set out to wander by stages to Varanasi. Upaka the Ajivaka saw me on the road between Gaya and the (place of) Awakening, and on seeing me said to me, 'Clear, my friend, are your faculties. Pure your complexion, and bright. On whose account have you gone forth? Who is your teacher? In whose Dhamma do you delight?'

When this was said, I replied to Upaka the Ajivaka in verses:

'All-vanquishing,
all-knowing am I,
with regard to all things,
unadhering.
All-abandoning,
released in the ending of craving:
having fully known on my own,
to whom should I point as my teacher? [4]

I have no teacher,
and one like me can't be found.
In the world with its devas,
I have no counterpart.

For I am an arahant in the world;
I, the unexcelled teacher.
I, alone, am rightly self-awakened.
Cooled am I, unbound.

To set rolling the wheel of Dhamma
I go to the city of Kasi.
In a world become blind,
I beat the drum of the Deathless.'

'From your claims, my friend, you must be an infinite conqueror [ananta jina].'

'Conquerors are those like me
who have reached fermentations' end.
I've conquered evil qualities,
and so, Upaka, I'm a conqueror.'

When this was said, Upaka said, 'May it be so, my friend,' and — shaking his head, taking a side-road — he left.

- Translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Sufficiency

Buddhism didn’t forgive Upaka’s implicit declination to submit to the Buddha’s authority, and already the Ariyapariyesana Sutta has him take a “side-road”, not the direct path to Awakening offered to him. Other rumours[2] about Upaka were to follow in the Pāli tradition. Sufficient Buddhism didn’t want to encourage Upakism.

When not giving in to sufficiency, real practice is a struggle. Charles Hallisey quotes the American philosopher and poet Charles Olson from his book review of Melville’s The Fine Hammered Steel:

“In the year Melville was born, John Keats walking home from the mummers play at Christmas 1819-- and afterwards, he had to listen to Coleridge again-- thought to himself, all that irritable reaching after fact and reason. It won't do. I don't believe in it. I do better to stay in the condition of things, no matter what it amounts to-- mystery confusion doubt.”

And Charles adds:

“Let me just point out there's no commas between those words. Olson is pushing the English language. Mystery confusion doubt is not three separate things but one thing. It has power. It is what I mean by negative capability. That statement of Keats walking home, thinking to himself all that irritable reaching after fact and reason, it won't do. I don't believe in it. I do better to stay in the condition of things, no matter what it amounts to.”

As Charles comments, Buddhists have known this too, and developed various ways to approach the Real, often negatively (no-self, emptiness, dependent origination…), but these were captured in the different forms of Buddhism (x-buddhism) in sufficient and often authoritarian traditions, where meekness is a perfection I’d add…, and where the Real is not left as “mystery confusion doubt” and loses its power.

Glenn: “Non-Buddhism is Buddhism, minus sufficiency. It's using Buddhist ideas, Buddhist first names for the real, no-self emptiness, dependent origination, and so forth, but minus the sufficiency”.

“But [Upaka the Ajivaka] did not want to be captured. All of these gurus trying to sell me a bill of goods, I'm going to resist. I'm effective. I'm going to think about it for the rest my life. I'm going to resist it. So Buddhism does something as a particular form of ideological capture that seduces the person-- captures the person's desire for happiness, whatever, nirvana, stress-- lack of-- freedom from stress or whatever, whatever all this stuff it promises, an ideological system promises.

It captures the human being's desire, brings the human being into an institutional system of subject formation. You're captured. There's a lot more going on there with this. There's also this kind of conceptual, emotional, affective capture that happens.

This is what disturbs me about Buddhism and about unitary systems of thought. So the “non-” is, what happens once you perform certain operations on the Buddhist material? The point is not to say, oh, Buddhism, just a bunch of nonsense, or it's just another-- just another authoritarian monster. The point is to see what is of value there, to wrest vital potentialities of humans."

Decision

Glenn: “[...] Secular Buddhist conceit is that it's all about empiricism and the methodology of science. And this idea is in Buddhism that Buddhism presents the idea of the all, the sutta of the all, the sabba sutta, it says that everything I know, I know through my senses. And anything beyond that is another sort of eminent critique here that anything beyond that is going to get you into trouble.

Buddhism has this idea that it's about phenomenality about imminence. And yet in order to really establish that fact sufficiently such that Buddhism is not just another ruly participant at the Great Feast of Knowledge but is actually-- has a kind of mastery and regency and aristocracy that is required for it to be Buddhism, it requires a transcendental concept in which the imminent principle is grounded, and that I took as the transcendental concept in Buddhism, the Dharma.

The Dharma is this kind of vault of cosmic knowledge that gives warrant to Buddhism's claims of phenomenality and imminence. That's a real, real problem. Science could never do such a thing. Science would be no longer science. If it grounded its imminent-- if it grounded its observations of imminence, of the imminent world, in some sort of transcendental signifier, that would not be science. It would be some sort of visionary science, maybe a new agey science or something.

I hope that makes sense. The decision is the fact that Buddhism wants to be a system of knowledge that explains the phenomenal world, the world imminent to human beings. And yet, in order to do that and to have its status as a unitary, specular system of thought, it has to ground that in the transcendent something, and I call that something the Dharma. Does that makes sense?”

Charles Hallisey adds an interesting example. Remember the conversation took place in March 2019…

“To give an example, a friend of mine who's an activist in Israel, he tells a story about trying to help some Palestinian farmers on the West Bank to get to a well with their sheep. They've been given by court order that they have-- they have a right to the water in this well. Was there with them, and almost immediately, security forces show up. And they say, you can't be here. He pulls out the judgment of the court. And he says, the judgment says that they have a right to the water in the well. The soldier says, they have right to the water in the well, but they don't have a right to be on this land over here. And my friend says, this is crazy. What do you think they're going to do? Helicopter over to the well with the sheep? How are they going to get to the well if-- you know? And so the commander says to him, crazy? Yeah, it's crazy. Those shepherds are crazy. You're crazy. I'm crazy. Those rocks are crazy. The rock-- the well is crazy. Everything here is crazy. That's why I follow orders. And one of the things he would say, that's decision. When everything is crazy, you say I follow what something else is saying.

And then one of the things you could say, oh, the real comes to us in this guise as mystery confusion doubt. Our response always is going to have recourse to decision to try to overcome that. And the confidence in sufficiency will say, of course.”

The Real

Glenn: “[Non-buddhism] is a neologism that means Buddhism that has gone through-- has been run through, minus the decision and sufficiency and so forth. I mean, no self, emptiness.”

After the critique, and staying clear from decision and sufficiency, the Real remains as something “unnamed” and “deeply productive”, in that it makes “human culture produce forms of practice”: psychoanalysis, sociology, economics, … and Buddhism… “constantly making statements about the nature of the Real”.

“Something that's unnamed. But it's something that is deeply productive, and human culture produces forms of practice-- psychoanalysis, sociology, economics, whatever-- that tries to identify just what this is.”

“[Buddhism] starts telling us all about what emptiness is. Emptiness never remains empty. It's all this fullness of life, et cetera, et cetera. It talks about no self, which is a beautiful concept. It starts explaining the nature of subjectivity, rather than selfhood, that we're formed through material causes as human beings. And then all sudden, Buddhism starts telling us the nature of the self.”

Instead of Buddhism and systems of thought pointing the arrow into the Real, human pain that’s part of the Real points in the other direction and produces Buddhism, but is "unrepresentable to Buddhism".

Glenn: “Laruelle has this beautiful experimental text. It's called, "On the Colors of the Black Universe.[3]"

And in there he talks about the earth. The earth is out in which we live. It's the material forms of everything that we all know. Within this-- on this earth, there are worlds. He always used a capital W. A world is a kind of ideological overlayering of the earth. It's a world that you can be captured, you can be interpolated into.

But beyond all of this is the black universe. It's empty, it's dark. It contains all things, right? And yet it is nothing, and nothing adheres to it. In a way, that's a way of talking about a human Real. It must be foreclosed because if it's not foreclosed, you just start introducing new kinds of ideology masked as truth or something like that.”

The Feast of Knowledge

Glenn: “I have a concept in here-- a conceit, really-- called the Great Feast of Knowledge. And I imagine in this Great Feast of Knowledge that the Buddha, and the bodhisattvas and the arhats are all arrayed in their attire and their weapons, their conceptual weaponry. And then they come to the Great Feast of Knowledge, where all the disciplines of human culture, in biology and literature and the arts and sociology, all sitting around having conversations and discussions about, what is desire? And they all discuss it from the different perspectives.

At the door-- at the door of that Great Feast of Knowledge, the Buddha and his entourage, they have to put all their attire in the cloakroom. And they have to walk in there stripped of all their aristocracy and the regency that we all know the Buddha presents himself with. This is another idea of stripping of sufficiency. And he goes and he talks to, say, biology about the nature of desire, how it must-- desire functions like this, this is what it is, this is its cause. These are the ramifications of desire. These are how you can ameliorate it.

And biology says, why would you want to do that? Desire is what propels life, desire is this powerful reproductive force, et cetera, et cetera. So the Great Feast of Knowledge is another way of talking about the stripping of sufficiency.”

Tools (conclusion)

Glenn: “As I mentioned in the introduction, I found the work of contemporary French thinker Francois Laruelle offers unusually effective tools for dismantling authoritative forms of thought, excising their mother lodes of sufficiency, and de-potentializing their subjugating force. Equally, however, Laruelle offers tools for reconstituting humanly useful fictions or fabulations from this dismantled material. And I just want to say that I use those tools for a kind of decimation or dismantling of Buddhism. But I'm always careful to say throughout, the purpose of dismantling or creating a ruin from this exquisite edifice called Buddhism is to see it in a more creaturely light. There you go.”

“O bhikṣus and wise men, just as a goldsmith would test his gold by burning, cutting, and rubbing it, so you must examine my words and accept them, but not merely out of reverence for me.” – Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra

MàJ15122023 For a recent article by Glenn where he further develops "non-buddhism", "Great Feast of Knowledge", "The Principle of Sufficient Buddhism", "the Real" and "Axiomatic Animal Liberation" 
Sorry, Charlie! A Non-Buddhist Argument for Animal Liberation, also in Tricycle. 

 

***

[1] Through Wikipedia: Erkan, Ekin (2019). "A Biography of Ordinary Man: On Authorities and Minorities" (PDF). Cincinnati Romance Review. 46: 119–123.


[2] “We hear that after this meeting Upaka went to the Vaŋkahāra country and there, having been attended to by a certain Cāpā, a hunter's daughter, fell in love with her and married her. Thereafter he made his living selling the meat the hunter killed.

This Cāpā, who had apparently admired Upaka as long as he had been an ascetic, began to despise him for having been entrapped by her and endlessly ridiculed him to the end that he left her and making his way to Savatthi, he found the Buddha and entered the order. It was said he became an Anagamin and being reborn in the Aviha Realm reached Arahantship there almost immediately. Cāpā too, apparently joined the order and became an Arahant.

Her life story has a slightly different version of Upaka's meeting with the Buddha. It ends:

The ascetic, discerning the omniscience and great mission of the Master, was comforted in mind, and replied:
'Friend, may these things be! Thou art worthy[18] to be a conqueror, world without end!'

Then, taking a by-road, he came to the Vankahara country, and abode near the hamlet of the trappers, where the head trapper supplied his wants.” Encyclopedia of buddhism.


[3] Du noir univers dans les fondations humaines de la couleur, François Laruelle

Au commencement il y a Noir –| l'homme et l'Univers plutôt que le philosophe et le Monde. | Autour du philosophe tout devient| Monde et lumière; autour de l'homme tout devient Univers et opacité. | L'homme, qui emporte l'Univers avec lui, est condamné, sans qu'il en connaisse la raison, au Monde et à la Terre, et ni le Monde ni la Terre ne peuvent lui dire pourquoi: seul l'Univers lui répond en étant
noir et muet. | Noir n'est pas dans l'objet ou dans le Monde, il est ce que l'homme voit dans l'homme, et ce dans quoi l'homme voit l'homme. | Noir n'est pas seulement ce que l'homme voit dans l'homme, il est la seule « couleur » inséparable de l'étendue hyperintelligible de l'Univers. | Solitude de l'homme-sans-horizon qui voit le Noir dans le Noir. | L'Univers est sourd et aveugle, nous ne pouvons que l'aimer et l'assister. L'homme est l'être qui assiste l'Univers.”

Incomplete. French publication “Du noir univers: dans les fondations humaines de la couleur,” in La Décision philosophique 5 (April 1988): 107-112.)