Category: Buddhism

Kerouac October Quotation #30: The Holes in Jesus’ and Buddha’s Bags

Vanity of Duluoz, Book Thirteen, X, pp. 274-276, ellipses and bold emphases added:

Kerouac again.  .  .  .Mad Dog creation has a side of compassionate mercy in it . . . we have seen the brutal creation send us the Son of Man who, to prove that we should follow His example of mercy, brotherly love, charity, patience, gave Himself up without murmur to be sacrificed.  Otherwise we would have taken his example lightly.  Seeing that He really meant it right down to the cross, we are impressed.  [. . .] But we cant be redeemed "unless we believe," it says, or follow His example.  And who can do that?  Not even Count Leo Tolstoy who still had to live in a "humble hut" but on his own lands even tho he had signed over his "own lands" of course to his own family, and had the gall then, from that earthly vantage point of vaunt, to write The Kingdom of God is Within You.  If I, myself, for instance, were to try to follow Jesus' example I'd first have to give up my kind of drinking, which prevents me from thinking too much(like I'm doing in awful pain this morning), and so I'd go insane and go on public debt and be a pain to everybody in the blessed "community" or "society."  And I'd be furthermore bored to death by the knowledge that there is a hole even in Jesus' bag: and that hole is, where He says to the rich young man "Sell everything you have and give it tothe poor, and follow me," okay, where do we go now, wander and beg our food off poor hardworking householders?  and not even rich at that like that rich young man's mother? but poor and harried like Martha?  Martha had not "chosen the better part" when she cooked and slaved and cleaned house all day while her younger sister Mary  sat in the doorway like a modern beatnik with "square" parents talking to Jesus about "religion" and "redemption" and "salvation" and all that guck.  Were Jesus and young Mary McGee waiting for supper to be ready? While talking about redemption?  How can you be redeemed when you have to pass food in and out of your body's bag day in and day out, how can you be "saved" in a situation so sottish and flesh-hagged as that? (This was also the hole in Buddha's bag: he more or less said "It's well for Bodhisattva sages and Buddhas to beg for their food so as to teach the ordinary people of the world the humility of charity," ugh I say. No, the springtime bud I talked about with rain dew on its new green, it's the laugh of a maniac.  Birth is the direct cause of all pain and death, and a Buddha dying of dysentery at the age of eighty-three had only to say, finally, "Be ye lamps unto thyselves" — last words –"work out thy salvation with diligence," heck of a thing to say as he lay there in an awful pool of dysentery.  Spring is the laugh of a maniac, I say.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

Kerouac October Quotation #17: Kerouac on Buber

Some of the Dharma (Viking 1997), p. 382:

Martin Boober — with all his fancy veins sticking out of his forehead he still wont face the final truth — of Nil Substantum — the Jews are proud of being a "person" — as tho it was some great achievement — The old Hasidic saying "For my sake the world was created" reflects the Jew's profound inability to detach himself from ego-self-belief — the final depersonalized Aryan Indian blank truth and highest perfect final fact of Everything-is-Emptiness is beyond their best scribes — Yet, in truth, one must know there are no Jews no Indians, nothing to discuss, only everything's alright forever and forever a n d f o r e v e r . . . .

After his Buddhist phase, Kerouac makes his way back to Christianity which is a 'middle path' between the nihilism of Buddhism and the thisworldly positivism of Judaism.

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

Robert Gray e-mails:

Dear Bill,

I am appreciating Kerouac month. Here is something on Buddhism in Buber's I and Thou that may be of use.

Nor does he [Buddha] lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. His inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You . . . . All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself — the delusion that spirit occurs in man. In truth it occurs from man – between man and what he is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, he must draw into man that which is not man, he must psychologize world and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit.  ( pp.140-141 / part 3 : Tr.Kaufmann, Ed: T&T Clark Edinburgh 1970)

Thank you for reminding me of these Buber passages which I had planned eventually to discuss.  The context of the above quotations is a section of I and Thou that runs from pp. 131 to 143.  Here are some quickly composed thoughts on this stretch of text.

In this section Buber offers a critique of Buddhism, Hinduism and other forms of mysticism (including Christian forms such as the one we find in Meister Eckhart) which relativize the I-Thou relation between man and God by re-ducing it (leading it back) to a primordial unity logically and ontologically prior to the terms of the relation.  According to these traditions, this  primordial unity  can be experienced directly in Versenkung, which Kaufmann translates, not incorrectly, as 'immersion,' but which I think is better rendered as 'meditation.'  As the German word suggests, one sinks down into the depths of the self and comes to the realization that, at bottom, there is no self or ego (Buddhism with its doctrine of anatta or anatman) or else that there is a Self, but that it is the eternal Atman ( = Brahman) of Hinduism, "the One that thinks and is." (131)

Either way duality is overcome and seen to be not ultimately real.  Buber rejects this because the I-Thou relation presupposes the ultimate ineliminability of duality, not only the man-God duality but also the duality of world and God.  Mysticism "annuls relationship" (132) psychologizing both world and God. (141).  Verseelen is the word Kaufmann translates as 'psychologize.'  A more suggestive translation might be 'soulifies.'  Mysticism drags both God and the world into the soul where they are supposedly to be found in their ultimate reality by meditation.   But spirit is not in man, Buber thinks, but between man and what is not man.  Spirit is thus actualized in the relation of man to man, man to world, man to God.

At this point I would put a question to Buber.  If spirit subsists only in relation, ought we conclude that God needs man to be a spiritual being in the same way that finite persons need each other to be spiritual beings?  Is God dependent on man to be who he is?  If yes, then the aseity of God is compromised.  A Christian could say that the divine personhood subsists in intradivine relations, relations among and between the persons of the Trinity.  But as far as I know Trinitarian thought is foreign to Judaism.  Anyway, that is a question that occurs to me.

The "primal actuality of dialogue" (133) requires Two irreducible one to the other.  It is not a relation internal to the self. 

Buber is not opposed to Versenkung as a preliminary  and indeed a prerequisite for encounter with the transcendent Other.  Meditative Versenkung leads to inner concentration, interior unification, recollectedness.  But this samadhi (which I think is etymologically related to the German sammeln) is not to be enjoyed for its own sake, but is properly preparatory for the encounter with the transcendent Other.  "Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to his encounter — wholly successful only now — with mystery and perfection.  But he can also savor the bliss of his unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction." (134)

Buber's point is that the mystic who, treading the inward path, arrives at the unitary ground of his soul and experiences sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss) shirks his supreme duty if he merely enjoys this state and then returns to the world of multiplicity and diremption.  The soulic unity must be used for the sake of the encounter with God.

Buber seems to be maintaining that Buddhist and other mysticism is an escape into illusion, an escape into a mere annihilation of dual awareness for the sake of an illusory nondual awareness:  "insofar as this doctrine contains directions for immersion in true being, it does not lead into lived actuality but into 'annihilation' in which there is no consciousness, from which no memory survives — and the man who has emerged from it may profess the experience by using the limit-word of non-duality, but without any right to proclaim this as unity." (136) 

Buber continues, "We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth." (136-7, emphasis added)

This prompts me to put a second question to Buber.  If there is no other life, no higher life, whether accessible in this life via Versenkung or after the  death of the body, and we are stuck with this miserable crapstorm of a life, then what good is God?  What work does he do if he doesn't secure our redemption and our continuance beyond death?  This is what puzzles me about Judaism.  It is a worldly religion, a religion for this life — which is almost a contradiction in terms.  It offers no final solution as do the admittedly life-denying religions of Buddhism and Christianity.  Some will praise it for that very reason: it is not life-denying but life -affirming.  Jews love life, this life here and now, and they don't seem too concerned about any afterlife.  But then they don't have the sort of soteriological interest that is definitive of religion.  "On whose definition?" you will object.  And you will have a point.

 
When I think of the vibrant bond between Sal and Dean, I am reminded of Buber's I-You .
Kerouac's restless spirit sought always to renew the I-You in Neal and in life; Both became submerged in I-It.  (Minding the final paragraphs of On the Road)

Well, both Kerouac and Cassady were brought up Catholic and so were steeped in the ultimate duality of man and God; but both occupied themselves with mysticism with its dissolution of the ultimacy of I-Thou.  And so perhaps we can say that the spiritual lives of both involved an oscillation between I-Thou and I-It.

 

 

Nirvana as Asphyxiation

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, tr. R. Howard (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), p. 118:

In the Benares sermon, Buddha cites, among the causes of pain, the thirst to become and the thirst not to become. The first thirst we understand, but why the second? To long for nonbecoming — is that not to be released? What is meant here is not the goal but the way as such, the pursuit and the attachment to the pursuit. — Unfortunately, on the way to deliverance only the way is interesting. Deliverance? One does not attain it, one is engulfed in it, smothered in it. Nirvana itself — an asphyxia! Though the gentlest of all.

I am reminded of Ramanuja's rejoinder to Shankara: "I want to taste sugar, not become sugar." If salvation is destructive of all individuality, what could it be worth? If, on the other hand, salvation is merely entry into a Hinterwelt that reproduces in improved form features of the hic et nunc — as on the puerile Islamic conception of paradise as endless disporting with black-eyed virgins — then (i) what rational person could believe in it, and (ii) how could it solve the fundamental problems that plague us here below? They would simply be reproduced in the hinterworld.

Kerouac October Quotation #13: Buddhist Life Denial

From Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, p. 175, emphasis added:

No hangup on nature is going to solve anything — nature is bestial — desire for Eternal Life of the individual is bestial, is the final creature-longing — I say, Let us cease bestiality & go into the bright room of the mind realizing emptiness, and sit with the truth. And let no man be guilty, after this, Dec. 9 1954, of causing birth. — Let there be an end to birth, an end to life, and therefore an end to death.  Let there be no more fairy tales and ghost stories around and about this.  I don't advocate that everybody die, I only say everybody finish your lives in purity and solitude and gentleness and realization of the truth and be not the cause of any further birth and turning of the black wheel of death.  Let then the animals take the hint, and then the insects, and all sentient beings in all one hundred directions of the One Hundred Thousand Chilicosms of Universes. Period.

Nature is the cause of all our suffering; joy is the reverse side of suffering.  Instead of seducing women, control yourself and treat them like sisters; instead of seducing men, control yourself and treat them like brothers.  For life is pitiful.

Stop.

Kerouac October Quotation #12: Our Boy Gives the Hinayana the Nod

From Some of the Dharma, pp. 174-175:

Hit the makeless null. Whether or not individuality is destroyed now, it will be complelely destroyed in death.  For all things that are made fade back to the unmade.   What's all the return-vow hassle, but a final metaphysical clinging to eternal ego-life by Mahayana Thinkers.  An intellectualized ego-attachment to taskhood.  Hinayana, nay Ecclesiastes, is best.

Companion posts:  A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2.  A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3. 

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place. 

In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence.  That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered.  The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.

Kerouac to Whalen on Buddhism

It's October again, Kerouac month at MavPhil.  Perhaps I will post a quotation a day throughout this wonderful month that always passes too quickly — as if bent on proving the vain and visionary nature of phenomenal existence.

Jack Kerouac finished Some of the Dharma on 15 March 1956.  The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.  By 1959, Kerouac was moving away from Buddhism.  On 10 June 1959 he wrote to Philip Whalen:

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am Not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that sarvam dukkham?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why?  Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had. 

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected; the problem is desire itself.  The soulution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated). 

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' — to hazard an oxymoron — the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent.  Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real and truly important.  But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I reject both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is faulty because incoherent: it presupposes while denying the exstence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be nonexistence.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously –except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

 

Is Everything Always Continuously Changing in Every Respect?

Over lunch today the Buddhist claim that all is impermanent came up for discussion.   Let’s see how plausible this claim of impermanence is when interpreted to mean that everything is always continuously changing in every respect. We need to ask four questions. Does everything change? Do the things that change always change? Do the things that always change continuously change? Do the things that change change in every respect?

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Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions — say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

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Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

Retortion Applied to the Anatta Doctrine

This post is a continuation of the line of thought in Emptiness, Self-Reference, and Assertibility, a post from the old blog which in due course will be revised and deposited here. There you will find a brief explanation of anatta. Retortion was explained in recent posts. See the contents of the Retortion category.  What happens when we apply retortion to the anatta doctrine? Consider the unrestricted anatta thesis (unrestricted in the sense that it applies to absolutely everything including nibbana)

1. All is empty.

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The Anatta Doctrine and its Soteriological Relevance

The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the center of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as 'no self'; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well. On the 'no self' theory, nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or 'own-being,' perhaps not even nibbana 'itself.' If a substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then perhaps we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances. The 'no self' theory would then imply that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. A pervasive ignorance (avijja) infects our ordinary view of the world. It is not an ignorance about this or that matter of fact, but one about the ontological structure of the world and of ourselves in it. This structural ignorance could be described as 'original ignorance.' For it lies at the origin of our uneasy and unsatisfactory predicament in this life in roughly the way in which original sin lies at its origin on a Christian scheme of things.

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