Bernard Faure, Chan
Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition.
Princeton University Press, 1993.
It was inevitable
that poststructuralist theory would sooner or later penetrate Zen studies. Now
that the inevitable has come to pass, in the person of Bernard Faure, it is
idle to argue with the fait accompli.
All Zen scholars will have to revise their hermeneutics in light of The Rhetoric of Immediacy (Princeton,
1991) and its sequel here reviewed. These are significant books: they
articulate the original insights which contemporary intellectual culture can
bring to Zen, but they also betray the blindness of a frenzied academia to all
that Zen stands for. It is the Zeitgeist that speaks.
Faure has mastered a
vast literature and every page of his book is bursting with ideas. He wants to
open ‘the field of Chan/Zen studies to the questions raised in other academic
disciplines’ and he does so with the greatest aplomb. But his ulterior aim of ‘bringing
Chan/Zen closer to the mainstream of Western thought’ (3) is less happily
conceived. There is a dimension of Zen which contradicts this mainstream as a
powerful challenge to Western rationalism. This is never allowed to emerge in
the course of Faure’s busy methodological reflections. The otherness and
autonomy of the Zen tradition are smoothed away.
Postmodernism, which
claims to allow a free play of interpretation, here turns out to be an
enveloping hermeneutic which forces the texts to correspond to its categories.
For all its championing of ‘heterology’ and ‘polyvocality,’ such writing
remains reductive and monological. What is terrifying about this book is the
possibility that it may mark the opening of a new epoch in Zen studies, their ‘coming
of age’ as a thoroughly positivistic discipline. Just as positivist exegesis
makes itself blind to the spiritual force of biblical texts, Faure prohibits
all references to Zen religion or spirituality as pre-scientific. The
criticisms I want to make here are undercut and discredited in advance by Faure
as ‘Suzuki-ism’ and ‘Orientalist’ mystification. He has immunized himself
against such criticisms by enclosing himself in a quasi-idealist cocoon, from
within which the spiritual and physical reality of Zen can be seen only as a
rhetorical and ideological reality-effect.
One is dazzled and
dizzied by the performance of this light-footed Hermes, who glides from ancient
Buddhist texts to contemporary philosophical ones, opening up hundreds of
possible paths for the renewal of Zen studies. Racing to ‘put a girdle round
about the earth in forty minutes,’ he never stops long enough to argue in
detail any one of his suggestions. The ‘Faure effect’ is that of a
bibliographical whirlwind, a busy switchboard, in which figures as diverse as
Dogen and de Man (144), Barthes and Bodhidharma (131), Musil (The Man without
Qualities) and Linji (‘the common man of no rank’) (262), are thrust into
fleeting surrealistic conjunctures. The pace and tone are as remote as possible
from those of Zen. Faure is a self-conscious theorist, often signaling biases
implicit in his own positions. Whether this auto-commentary makes explicit
limitations and contradictions which were genuinely inevitable, or whether it
is a matter of covering his traces after venturing on thin ice, is difficult to
decide, but one suspects that longer reflection might have won him a secure
critical distance in regard to his sources. As it is, he abandons himself to
every theoretical possibility that crops up, and can pull himself up only by
adding extra pirouettes. After this saturation bombing, scholars need no longer
rack their brains to find connections between Buddhism and postmodernism. They
must take these connections for granted, and do what Faure has not done: choose
one Zen text or topic and apply to it one line of poststructuralist
questioning, in a patient and methodical investigation.
The first part of
the book describes the gradual sighting and constitution of Zen as an object of
study and criticizes the Orientalism that has shaped Zen studies, so as to
overcome the contradictions of a ‘discourse that represses its own historicity’
(5). One or two historical points seem dubious. Given the papal condemnations
of Jansenism, it can hardly be right to suggest that the most fundamental cause
of the condemnation of Chinese rites (1742) and the suppression of the Jesuits
(1773) was the Jansenist hostility to the Jesuits (26). Many of the criticisms
made of figures such as Matteo Ricci are rather obvious now, but Faure claims
they can alert us to analogous blind spots in our own attitudes. One wonders if
the monitory value of this critique of Western Orientalism is all that great,
even if it is true at a popular level – but surely not at a scholarly one – that
‘most people who look toward Eastern religions (and Zen in particular) are
convinced of the failure of rationality and are searching for an “authenticity”
that the West has supposedly lost’ (6). Orientalism may be the wrong target to
tackle; the deeper source of misunderstanding of Zen, in the past and today, is
arrogant rationalism. To brand as an Orientalist everyone who sees a spiritual
or contemplative depth in Zen is a formula for hermeneutical suicide. Faure’s
critique of Zen studies entails a hermeneutic of suspicion directed at Zen
itself, one that leaves no room over for a hermeneutic of reappropriation. His
method of dealing with an ancient religious tradition cannot be recommended to
ecumenists, for it is that of Samson with the Philistines: careless of the
destructive consequences for his own discipline, he pulls down three pillars by
which Zen stands or falls, namely, the notions of tradition, spiritual
enlightenment, and truth.
(i) Tradition. Faure
notes ‘a continuity between Chan and Zen,’ but points out that ‘there are many
historical, cultural, and doctrinal differences as well, and these differences
are not merely superficial: they would surely affect the “essence” of Zen, if
this term had any referent’ (3). His stress on the variety of Zen languages and
cultures is welcome, as is his dynamic conception of tradition: ‘Tradition is
not a clearly defined, ahistorical, entity: if it exists at all outside the
mind of a few people, it is as a fluid network of relationships, an ongoing
process’ (121). His dismantling of the ‘white metaphor’ of tradition, which
imposes an idealized homogeneity on history, masking its contingencies and
discontinuities, opens up the possibility of bringing out the heterological,
nomadic or ‘interstitial’ dimensions of the Zen story (9). He wants scholarly
writing on Zen to become ‘multivocal and nonlinear, aware of the powerful
effects of their own rhetoricity’ (10). But he is obliged despite himself to
speak of this nomadic Zen as a tradition, and this evidently entails some form
of continuity that cannot be reduced to logocentric delusion. In that case, it
is no longer necessarily an ahistorical delusion for Zen Buddhists to imagine
that they are following in the footsteps of the Buddha himself.
I did not find a
single reference to one feature of the tradition that could temper Faure’s
radical anti-essentialism, namely the physical basis of Zen practice. This
gives the Zen tradition a continuity comparable to the continuity of swimming
throughout the centuries. There may be a great variety in the ideology of
swimming, the images and rhetoric associated with it, the way in which swimming
races are organized, the variety of strokes and methods, but none of this takes
away from the essential identity of the practice. Faure seems to shy away from
these basic facts when he dismisses Winston King’s judgment, based on
experience of meditative practice in Burma and Japan, that Theravâda and Zen
meditation are ‘similar in function and experience, although certain features
of technique, modes of expression, and emotional flavour vary with their
respective cultural context,’ on the ground that it ‘tends to reinforce claims
that Theravâda and Zen are the earliest, that is, purest forms of Buddhism’
(44).
One can maintain
that Zen reinvents the Buddhist tradition as Augustine or Luther reinvents the
Christian one, and that in this sense there is no invariant essence running
throughout Buddhist history. But this should not blind us to the undeniable
historical phenomenon of the transmission of Buddhist wisdom. The dependence of
Zen on what went before is as obvious as that of Christian theology on the
Bible or Western intellectualism on the Greeks. Zen invention never occurs de novo, but only by drawing on the
abundance of the tradition in a sophisticated way. An autonomous spiritual or
theological creativity, sustained by tradition, is not recognized by Faure, who
‘explains’ Zen discourse in sociological, psychological, or literary critical
categories.
His demonstrations
that the Zen tradition is a fictional construct might claim to be an enactment
of Buddhism, dissolving illusory ‘self-nature’ and uncovering ‘emptiness.’ But
such a Buddhist hermeneutic would reinstate the Zen tradition as a ‘skilful
means’ at the level of ‘conventional truth.’ If Faure ‘stops short of
dissolving it into pure ideological discourse – a Buddhist emptiness of sorts,’
and retains Zen as ‘a specific, tangible object of study,’ it is only because
he needs it as a juicy target for deconstructive exercises: ‘the deconstructive
or performative/rhetorical level of discourse needs a metaphysical or
hermeneutical level on which to operate.’ Zen tradition is essentially a
congeries of illusory, ideological constructions: Suzuki’s mythical
Zen-ideology is itself ‘part of the reality it distorts’ and well represents
the way that ‘the tradition itself emerged from the repeated distortion of
previous distortions’ (271).
(ii) Spiritual
enlightenment. No credence is given to the idea that the Zen tradition, in all
its fragility, is a vehicle for attaining and transmitting spiritual
enlightenment. The only enlightenment Faure recognizes is rational insight; to
which the only alternative is irrationalism. He himself seems trapped in the
dichotomy that he uses to discredit Suzuki: ‘Suzuki’s Zen recalls Lévy-Bruhl’s
characterization of the “primitive mind” as illogical (or rather alogical), and
the criticisms leveled at Lévy-Bruhl’s dichotomization of primitive and
civilized thinking might apply to Suzuki’s paradoxical dichotomization of
nondualistic Zen and dualistic Western thinking’ (68). Here the wide-ranging
associations gratuitously stir up of ideological suspicion, and suspicion is
automatically proof of guilt. Faure repeats Mauss’s critique of James: ‘this
theory of religious experience, as source of religion, considers only states
rarely given, exceptional, that is, in last analysis, it rests on a
pathological religious psychology’ (79). To equate rarity with pathology is to
destroy all religion at its root~ and to contradict the fundamentals of
Buddhism, which places such a high value on samâdhi
and prajnâ. Following Steven Katz’s
view that ‘there are no pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences’ (78), Faure
discounts the basic thrust of Zen toward experiential immediacy. A hermeneutics
of Zen experience must of course be aware of contextual mediations, but these
do not diminish the most striking aspect of this experience, any more than the
impossibility of isolating pure sense data diminishes the immediacy of pain
when one puts one’s hand in the fire.
Suzuki succeeded in
communicating the rare but indubitable reality of spiritual experience. Faure
is blind to this achievement. He accuses Suzuki of believing in ‘a facile “fusion
of horizons”’ (113), is not a lack of empathy with Zen a greater hermeneutic
deficiency than the methodological fallacies Faure unmasks? Suzuki is seen as ‘speaking
from within the discursive arena opened by Western Orientalism’ (53) and as
relying on Christian categories even when rejecting them. Faure refuses to take
Suzuki seriously as a representative of Japanese culture, seeing his ‘na(t)ivism’
as a ‘secondary Orientalism’: ‘He simply inverted the old schemas to serve his
own purposes’ (64). Suzuki’s critique of positivism is ‘only’ an expression of
a ‘discourse of modernity.’ It resembles Heidegger’s attitude to the human
sciences, and ‘it may partly explain why the German philosopher saw in the
Japanese scholar an intellectual (or rather anti-intellectual) guide (maître à penser or perhaps à ne pas penser)’ (90). For an adequate
hermeneutics of the Zen tradition, there is much to be learnt from Heidegger,
and especially from his conception of tradition. Faure’s dismissal (not shared
by his mentors Foucault and Derrida) closes off an important Western avenue to
a dialogue with Zen.
Faure makes much of
the journalistic critiques of Etiemble and Koestler and even puts them on the same
level as Suzuki. The ‘Suzuki effect’ is explained in reductive sociological
terms: ‘the success of Suzuki’s work was not related to its literary or
philosophical qualities; it was rather the result of a historical conjuncture
that prompted the emergence in the West of a positive modality of Orientalist
discourse’ (54). Faure uses sociology (chiefly Bourdieu) to debunk, and he does
so without the restraints of the professional sociologist. For instance: ‘Kegon
(Huayan) influenced Chan/Zen by providing it with a theoretical justification
for its irenistic detachment from social problems. The Huayan advocacy of the
harmonious interpenetration of the principle and phenomena is the kind of
abstract and conservative view that one is more likely to take from a dominant
situation’ (60). Claiming that Suzuki was blissfully unaware of the limits of
his own historical context, Faure sees his thinking as ‘ideologically flawed,
informed as it was by his culture, his social status, and his sectarian
affiliations’ (54). Suzuki’s misconstrual of Soto Zen as ‘quietistic’ is
deplored as a ‘sectarian bias’ (55), but it is not noted that Suzuki sometimes
quotes Dogen as a respected Zen authority; few Catholic theologians, even
today, would quote Luther as serenely. Faure notes that ‘the appeal to the “pure”
tradition, to the “essence” of Zen, is a sectarian attitude,’ and concludes
that ‘the assumption that there is an “essence” of Buddhism, a kind of
perennial Dharma to which only “authentic” masters would have access, is to be
rejected as ideologically suspect’ (57). He makes no effort to sift the truth
of what Suzuki is saying from its ‘suspect’ forms of expression. He drags out
the old warhorse, Hu Shih, as a more progressive thinker than the ‘traditionalist’
Suzuki. His account of Suzuki’s reply to Hu’s criticisms leaves the impression
that Suzuki was bereft of a critical historical sense; a fuller account might
have shown that Hu’s pretention to superior historical insight was naive and
condescending.
Suzuki is presented
as an anti-institutional rebel who preached ‘pure spontaneity’ and who later
took fright at the libertarian appropriation of Zen, so that his attitude ‘changed
drastically’ (58). This is to overlook the moralistic and disciplinarian tone
of such early works as The Training of the Zen Monk. Again, is there a real
contradiction between Suzuki’s stress on the ‘ahistorical nature of Zen’ and
his explanation of the uniqueness of Zen through its historical development
(65)? Does the ahistorical nature of Plotinus’s One contradict the historical
uniqueness of the emergence of the idea of the One? Suzuki may downplay
sociocultural determinations and tend to a mystical essentialism, but does this
necessarily render absurd the statement that ‘if there is a God, personal or
impersonal, he or it must be with Zen and in Zen’ (62)? Such statements are too
lofty for Faure’s taste, or rather they have no meaning, since there is no such
thing as Zen, and if there were such a thing it would certainly not have such a
universal or transcendental status. But a little tinkering with the language
Suzuki uses might make them quite tenable. Faure finds a contradiction between
Suzuki’s statement that kôan are ‘utterances of satori with no intellectual
mediation’ and his view of kôan systematization as a necessary evil (60); of
course there is no contradiction here. Faure’s eagerness to see Suzuki’s work
as a mass of contradictions – motivated by ‘a situational reflex to “cash in”
on both sides of every issue’ (65) – arouses the reader’s suspicion; one would
wish to see the point demonstrated in a close reading of the texts.
Rudolf Otto and
Heinrich Dumoulin are characterized as ‘followers of Suzuki-ism’ (64) - as if
only the bad influence of Suzuki could ‘explain’ why these scholars saw a
numinous dimension in Zen! Dumoulin is accused of ‘reductionism’ - a careless
misuse of this word - on the basis of the statement that ‘as a mystical
phenomenon, the satori experience is imperfect’ (64). The claim that ‘Suzuki’s
style does not rival Nishida’s’ (66) suggests that Faure has not read much of
Nishida’s murky prose. If Suzuki is such a mediocre writer, one wonders why his
works are still in print and why they were devoured by writers as talented as
Toynbee, Merton and Heidegger. Faure notes ‘the recurrence of a certain
Orientalist “esprit simpliste” in the interstices of Nishida’s complex thought,’
but he does little to undo simplistic stereotypes when he talks of a ‘Nishida
effect’ and states that ‘Nishida’s disciples have merely amplified tendencies
already present in his work’ (75). This does no justice to the originality of
Hajime Tanabe and Keiji Nishitani. The recent discussion of these thinkers
contradicts Faure’s judgment the Christian and philosophical dialogues with Zen
have been ‘rather sterile’ (85).
Stressing the
agonistic character of Zen writings, directed against the routinization of the
tradition, Faure calls for a performative scholarship that can match this
dimension of Zen. ‘Many Chan texts still refer to a primordial truth, a
perennial Dharma to which the adept must conform,’ but the best Zen writing
moves ‘toward a performative conception of truth’ (147). This distinction
between ‘logocentric’ and ‘differential’ Zen permits a hermeneutic retrieval of
the radicality of Zen, overcoming its occultation within the Zen tradition
itself (if Faure will permit this Heideggerian way of putting it). But what is
Zen radicality about? Faure refers to ‘a kind of weightlessness, a feeling of
elation’ (149), which suggests a postmodern lightness of being rather than a
rooted spirituality. Perhaps it is not so ‘unfortunate’ that ‘this feeling has
not yet had a chance to pervade Chan/Zen scholarship’ (150).
(iii) Truth. Faure
has little time for the idea of tradition as the transmission of truth. He
transforms a provocative remark of Nietzsche into a dogma: ‘the historical
approach provides an important insight when it rejects the “foundationalist”
position to assert the historicity of truth. According to this model, truth
turns out to be, in Nietzsche’s famous words, “a mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which
have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people”‘
(90). If there is no more to Zen truth than that, then it is an ideological
construct to be dismantled, not a precious tradition that still communicates to
us truths of great importance for human existence. Still, the main emphasis in Faure’s
writing falls on the more promising topic of the performative and historically
embedded character of truth. ‘Chan discourse is not simply reflecting reality
or expressing truths; it is actively producing them’ (149). This insight could
bring about a refinement and revitalization of Zen studies, and even a more
effective practice of Zen, but this is thrown away if one dismisses any
objective goal to Zen practice, seeing it as based more on intellectual agility
than on attunement to the real. The creative achievement of truth is enabled by
prior tradition and is in turn enabling for our own creativity today. Even if
Zen is seen as something as free as an artistic tradition, there is an element
within which such a tradition moves, a certain constant concern, which needs to
be focused. This concern, in the case of Zen, is not language or power or
theories of space and time (see below) but the quest for awakening or
enlightenment, conceived as an experience of true reality.
The second half of
the book attempts a redescription of Chan, taking up the themes of time, space,
language, writing, and selfhood: ‘Much of Chan discourse can be explained in
terms of the emergence (followed by slow erosion and reinscription) of a new
epistemological configuration marked by a certain dialectic of orality and
literacy, a homogenization of space and time that gives primacy to spatial and
visual imagery, and a predominance of rhetoric over hermeneutic’ (272).
The transformation
of Chinese sacred geography brought about by Chan’s interaction with local
cults is part of a larger movement of spatialization of thought, which was also
a ‘delocalization’ (155). The ‘tension between localizing and unlocalizing
tendencies, between a specific place and an abstract space, predates any
polarization into “great” and “little” traditions’ and is essential to the
vitality of Buddhism (156). ‘The ideal space of the Chan monastery was a
negation of the dense and pluralistic space of local religion’ (162). The
phenomenology of Chan space in this chapter might be more convincing if fewer
Western philosophers were invoked and more material was provided from sources.
Comparisons of Chan space with Newtonian space or the transformation of the
perception of nature in nineteenth-century Japan (162) obscure the phenomenon
named in utterances such as: ‘My body is empty and I see myself as no different
from you: how could you destroy emptiness, or destroy yourself’ (163), or ‘The
unlocalized is your mind’ (165). It is very misleading to describe this as ‘a
clean, abstract space that could ideally be embraced at one glance’ (166) or to
equate ‘the clear, haughty vision of the enlightened mind’ with ‘an almost
Voltairian perception of reality’ (167), sweeping away the opaque mediations of
local religion. The slippage here from spiritual freedom to a philosophical
worldview, from enlightenment to Aufklärung,
misses the point of the spatial metaphors in Zen. The conclusion that Chan
masters ‘idealized space as something “beyond any viewpoint, any latency, any
depth, without any true thickness” (Merleau-Ponty)’ depends on an equation of
Zen space – the emptiness which is the goal of meditative striving – with the
unquestioned frame of everyday inauthentic perception in the modern West.
Similarly, the phrase ‘the Chan version of Descartes’s tabula rasa’ (175), which imposes Cartesian coordinates on Chan as
if they had to fit, is redolent of cultural imperialism
The Chan approach to
time also creates homogeneity: ‘all times are equal - and ultimately delusory’
(176). But in practice there is a ‘diversity of temporalities’ (182) in Chan,
an intertwining of linear, circular and stationary conceptions of time. This
discussion covers a motley collection of matters having a temporal aspect -
historical consciousness, discounting of memory, ritual times, metaphors of
germination and maturation; the subject, if it has any real unity, is too
sprawling to be covered in one chapter. In Dôgen, ‘time is described as
perfectly coextensive with the phenomenal world.’ The existential force of this
notion of time-being is missed when Faure describes it as an ‘ontologization’
of time which is also a ‘spatialization’ (187). Dismissing Heideggerians who
make Dôgen an ‘existentialist’ - an account that does not do justice to such a
work as Joan Stambaugh’s Impermanence is
Buddha-nature (University of Hawaii Press) – , Faure (himself a leading
translator of Dôgen!) reduces the Zen master’s thought to a crude Parmenidism: ‘Dôgen
stresses the immutability of things: “As the time right now is all there ever
is, each being-time is without exception entire time... Entire being, the
entire world, exists in the time of each and every now”’ (190); ‘the apparent
changes in our environment mask a fundamental immobility’ (264). Surely the
point is rather to awaken us to a demystified assumption of full present
reality - the whole world is right now! To say that ‘Dogen substituted
permanence for impermanence’ (190) hardly does justice to his subtle dialectic
of permanence and impermanence, calculated to send us back to the present lived
in whole-hearted practice. To cap all this, Faure quotes Ernst Bloch: ‘The
primacy of space over time characterizes reactionary language.’ Any old slogan
will do to beat a Dôgen!
On the relation between
Zen and language, Faure states: Chan ‘was first and foremost a discourse on
practice and a discursive practice’ (195). It is hard to make sense of that ‘first
and foremost’: one might as well say that cooking or swimming or Carmelite
mysticism is first and foremost a discourse. Faure’s discussion of the aporetic
aspects of apophatic theology seems guided by the assumption that there is
really nothing to be apophatic about. He sees this via negativa as a matter of
political strategies, not a concern with die
Sache selbst: ‘the denial of language and its “homeopathic” use appear to
play rather ambiguous roles in sectarian strategies’ (201). He suggests that ‘the
common assertion according to which neither the Dao or awakening can be spoken of
reflects the reluctance of a spiritual or artistic elite to disclose its
esoteric knowledge and constitutes an attempt to preserve its social
distinction and symbolic capital (see Bourdieu)’ (197). If one disbelieves in
any form of insight that cannot be captured in clear and distinct expressions,
this is the only way of making sense of the rhetoric of ineffability.
Several Chan figures
saw poetry as an upâya, ‘a means for
both the believer to get closer to reality and the Bodhisattva to convey the
truth to others’ (206), and ‘the equation between Chan and poetry became a
commonplace in Japan’ (209). The tension between this and the apophatic line is
resolved by the claim that ‘live poetry is a poetry the language of which is no
longer language’ (211). The strong resonances between these thoughts and
Heidegger’s meditations on die Sprache
are not adverted to by Faure. Instead he discusses koan in terms of Lyotard’s
idea that ‘to speak is to fight... and language acts belong to a general
agonistic,’ and suggests that lesser Chan masters were ‘psychologically
empowered by their confrontations with novices’ (213). They can also be seen as
‘a ludic activity, the parodic purpose of which was too often lost on later
practitioners’ (214). Chan is thus ‘first and foremost a new “art of speaking”’
(216). There is no recognition that the raison d’être of this verbal art is the
production of enlightenment, however pluralistically or contextually conceived.
Chan conceptions of
writing ‘were always dialogical and performative’ (218). The orality of the
Chan dialogues keeps knowledge ‘embedded in the human lifeworld’ (226). One
might see the ‘sudden teaching’ as ‘a resurfacing of aural/oral elements within
literacy,’ or as ‘just the opposite; namely, vision is simultaneous while sound
in sequential, and therefore “sudden” awakening is fundamentally visual.’ This
play of suppositions is rather tenuous, as it the association of the visual
aspect with ‘a kind of total vision of space that, according to Ong,
constitutes a by-product of writing’ (227). Moving from the oral to the
textual, Faure next looks at Chan discourse as ‘a text resulting from a “writing-act”
rather than from a speech-act’; ‘however straightforward and “realistic” it may
appear, the text should be read as a self-referential literary work’ (233),
concerned less with ‘reality’ than its own structural rules. Such a literary
theory opens a paradise to the scholar but scarcely permits a spiritual or
contemplative reading of a text. ‘The relations between one text and others – intertextuality
– and the relations within the text itself – its structural constraints – come
to predominate over the relations between the text and the (inner or outer)
reality’ (234). The discussions of orality and literacy, writing and
logocentrism, are so nuanced as to be self-canceling, and might better have
been replaced by analysis of Zen texts.
‘To what extent can
the emergence of Chan be seen as that of a new (conception of the) self?’
(243). An elaborate discussion of the history of selfhood East and West arrives
at Zen from a Foucauldian angle: ‘The fact that a few rugged “individuals”
denounced this logic [whereby according to Foucault the individual is an effect
of power relationships] within Buddhism does not preclude the possibility that
the Chan/Zen individualization process may by and large have served the growth
of power relationships’ (258). Certainly, Zen selfhood is historically and
culturally inscribed: but is this the central issue? Again, is meditation only ‘a
disciplinary mise au pas of recalcitrant minds and bodies or
conventional selves, in the name of a greater - and forever elusive - self’
(259)? In Zen monasteries, as in the panoptical prisons of Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish, the constant scrutiny exacerbates the monks’s sense of guilt
and subjectivity (260). All is grist to Faure’s mill! Can one see monastic life
as only a fascist indoctrination, ignoring the testimony of monks to the
spiritual freedom they have found? I doubt if such phenomena can be grasped in
terms of an opposition between individual spontaneity and institutional
discipline. Faure sees spiritual freedom merely as what can be snatched from
institutional control: ‘Linji was able to acquire his (relative) freedom by
playing off conflicting networks of power, an achievement possible only during
a limited period of sociopolitical instability - in the interstices of power’
(163). Conversely, ‘Linji’s advocacy of pure spontaneity’ is seen as ‘a denial
of both agent and moral responsibility’ (263). The oppositions are simplistic,
but they are whisked by so swiftly that one can hardly begin to query them.
Zen scholars will
learn much from Faure’s suggestions for new approaches to their
specializations. Indeed they are under an intellectual obligation to explore
the perspectives he has opened up. But their and our loss will be great if they
abandon the primary hermeneutical challenge, that of translating into the
language of today the prajnâ-insight
which is the heart of Zen and which is what most makes its study worthwhile.
Monumenta Nipponica 48 (1993):
521-6.
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