Monday, August 24, 2009

nirvâna mondays



False imagination teaches that such things as light and shade, long and short, black and white are different and are to be discriminated; but they are not independent of each other; they are only different aspects of the same thing, they are terms of relation, not of reality. Conditions of existence are not of a mutually exclusive character; in essence things are not two but one. Even Nirvana and Samsara's world of life and death are aspects of the same thing, for there is no Nirvana except where is Samsara, and no Samsara except where is Nirvana. All duality is falsely imagined. ___DT SUZUKI---

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8 comments:

  1. marsAugust 24, 2009 at 9:49 PM

    Genau!

    http://www.wayneholland.org/nothingness.htm

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  2. sheilaownscommunismAugust 24, 2009 at 10:13 PM

    "The target on which we should focus...is the very ideology which is then proposed as a potential solution - for example, Oriental spirituality (Buddhism), with its more 'gentle,' balanced, holistic, ecological approach (all the stories about how Tibetan Buddhists, for instance, when they dig the foundations of a house, are careful not to kill any worms). It is not only that Western Buddhism, this pop-cultural phenomenon preaching inner distance and indifference toward the frantic pace of market competition, is arguably the most efficient way for us fully to participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity - in short, the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism. One should add that it is no longer possible to oppose this Western Buddhism to its 'authentic' Oriental version; the case of Japan provides the conclusive evidence. Not only do we have today, among top Japanese managers, a widespread 'corporate Zen' phenomenon: for the whole of the last 150 years, Japan's rapid industrialization and militarization, with its ethics of discipline and sacrifice, have been sustained by the large majority of Zen thinkers - who, today, knows that D.T. Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the America of the 1960s, supported in his youth, in 1930s Japan, the spirit of utter discipline and militaristic expansion? There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of the authentic compassionate insight: the attitude of total immersion in the selfless 'now' of instant Enlightenment, in which all reflexive distance is lost, and 'I am what I do,' as C.S. Lewis put it - in short: in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity - perfectly legitimizes subordination to the militaristic social machine...

    "The crucial feature here is how militaristic Zen justifies killing in two ultimately inconsistent ways. First, there is the standard teleological narrative that is also acceptable to Western religions: 'Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things which are incompatible, killing and war are necessary.' It is thus the very force of compassion which wields the sword: a true warrior kills out of love, like parents who hit their children out of love, to educate them and make them happy in the long term. This brings us to the notion of a 'compassionate war' which gives life to both oneself and one's enemy - in it, the sword that kills is the sword that gives life. (This is how the Japanese Army perceived and justified its ruthless plundering of Korea and China in the 1930s.)

    "Of course, all things are ultimately nothing, a substanceless Void; however, one should not confuse this transcendent world of formlessness (mukei) with the temporal world of form (yukei), thus failing to recognize the underlying unity of the two. That was socialism's mistake: socialism wanted to realize the underlying unity directly in temporal reality ('evil equality'), thus causing social destruction...

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  3. sheilaownscommunismAugust 24, 2009 at 10:13 PM

    "[T]his 'teleological' justification (war is a necessary evil performed to bring about the greater good: 'battle is necessarily fought in anticipation of peace') is accompanied by a more radical line of reasoning in which, much more directly, 'Zen and the sword are one and the same.' This reasoning is based on the opposition between the reflexive attitude of our ordinary daily lives (in which we cling to life and fear death, strive for egotistic pleasure and profit, hesitate and think, instead of directly acting) and the enlightened stance in which the difference between life and death no longer matters, in which we regain the original selfless unity, and are directly our act. In a unique short circuit, militaristic Zen masters interpret the basic Zen message (liberation lies in losing one's Self, in immediately uniting with the primordial Void) as identical to utter military fidelity, to following orders immediately, and performing one's duty without consideration for the Self and its interests. The standard antimilitaristic cliché about soldiers being drilled to a state of mindless subordination, and carry out orders like blind puppets, is here asserted to be identical to Zen Enlightenment. This is how Ishihara Shummyo made this point in almost Althusserian terms of direct, nonreflected interpellation:

    Zen is very particular about the need not to stop one's mind. As soon as flint stone is struck, a spark bursts forth. There is not even the most momentary lapse of time between these two events. If ordered to face right, one simply faces right as quickly as a flash of lightning.... If one's name were called, for example, 'Uemon,' one should simply answer 'Yes,' and not stop to consider the reason why one's name was called.... I believe that if one is called upon to die, one should not be the least bit agitated.

    "Insofar as subjectivity as such is hysterical, insofar as it emerges through the questioning of the interpellating call of the Other, we have here the perfect description of a perverse desubjectivization: the subject avoids its constitutive splitting by positing itself directly as the instrument of the Other's Will. And what is crucial in this radical version is that it explicitly rejects all the religious rubble usually associated with popular Buddhism, and advocates a return to the original down-to-earth atheist version of the Buddha himself: as Furakawa Taigo emphasizes, there is no salvation after death, no afterlife, no spirits or divinities to assist us, no reincarnation, just this life which is directly identical with death. Within this attitude, the warrior no longer acts as a person, he is thoroughly desubjectivized - or, as D.T. Suzuki himself put it: 'it is not really he but the sword itself that does the killing. He had no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically its function of justice, which is the function of mercy.' Does not this description of killing provide the ultimate illustration of the phenomenological attitude which, instead of intervening in reality, just lets things appear as they are? It is the sword itself which does the killing, it is the enemy himself who just appears, and makes himself a victim - I am not responsible, I am reduced to a passive observer of my own acts. Attitudes like these indicate how the famous 'Buddha's gaze' could well function as the support of a killing machine..." - Zizek, Slavoj. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2003. 26-29.

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  4. AnonymousAugust 24, 2009 at 10:27 PM

    ya, but this isn't to ignore the consequential new set of realities brought by things like night and day, or life and death. reality is the inclusion of everything (all imaginations and their biased realities), itself unbiased to even the "enlightened." judgmental attitudes that would command a sense of universal "reality" are the i guess "false imagination"... but "duality" could imply balance, which exists beyond the attempts of imagination anyway. but ya i like this, is this is an excerpt? (like button)

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  5. AnonymousAugust 24, 2009 at 10:35 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. AnonymousAugust 24, 2009 at 10:41 PM

    i take it back andy it was worth the whole read, blogs are totally appropriate for long essays... but still, u should be paying royalites with "excerpts" like that. jesus

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  7. sheilaownscommunismAugust 24, 2009 at 10:46 PM

    That's precisely what I love about this blog. I can quote at length from all my favorite authors, and if they sue me, then they're not the communists they say they are!

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  8. AnonymousAugust 24, 2009 at 11:33 PM

    this got me thinking of how communism is not different from capitalism, but rather they are a relationship tracked on individuality... individual betterment is natural for any animal, however projected or conceived... so its a point of focus. capitalists could argue that the pretense of equal value is the ultimate false bias, since competition is natural 'survival of the fittest'... perhaps communism is the self-righteous attempt of mankind to separate itself from beast. so maybe its this distinction that capitalism vs communism really hits on: who do i feel morally obligated to the betterment of? who do i include in my pride? assuming we are lions.

    its like when i pull up and im first in line at the red light, and theres that homeless guy coming up to my window, n suddenly i feel more responsible to help him out than i did if i made the green. maybe id rather save some of that money for whom in reality i actually care about, yknow?

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