Being and Ambiguity: Philosophical Experiments with Tiantai Buddhism

By Brook Ziporyn

Being and Ambiguity is a brilliant work of philosophy, filled with insights, jokes, and topical examples. Professor Ziporyn draws on the works of such Western thinkers as Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Freud, Sartre, and Hegel, but develops his main argument from Tiantai school of Chinese Buddhism. This important work introduces Tiantai Buddhism to the reader and demonstrates its relevance to profound philosophical issues.

Ziporyn argues that we can make both of the claims below simultaneously:
This book is about everything. It contains the answers to all philosophical problems which ever shall exist. This book is all claptrap. It is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind.

These claims are not contradictory. Rather, they state the same thing in two different ways. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vise versa. All interchanges of any kind - conversations, daydreams, sensations - are not only about something but also about everything.

Thus, this book concerns itself with no less than the nature of what is and what it means for something to be what it is. It provides a new approach to the basic Western philosophical and psychological issues of identity, determinacy, being, desire, boredom, addiction, love and truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Court
• Release date: Oct 28, 2015
• ISBN: 9780812699272

Book preview

Being and Ambiguity

To order books from Open Court, call toll-free 1-800-815-2280, or visit www.opencourtbooks.com.

Open Court Publishing Company is a division of Carus Publishing Company.

Copyright © 2004 by Carus Publishing Company

First printing 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Open Court Publishing Company, 315 Fifth Street, P.O. Box 300, Peru, Illinois 61354-0300.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ziporyn, Brook, 1964-

Being and ambiguity: philosophical experiments with Tiantai Buddhism / Brook Ziporyn.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8126-9927-2

1. Tiantai Buddhism--Doctrines. 2. Philosophy, Buddhist. I. Title.

BQ9118.3. Z56 2004

294.3'42042--dc22

2004010772

For my brother

It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

Everyone is aware that life is parodic, and that it lacks an interpretation.

Thus lead is the parody of gold.

Air is the parody of water.

The brain is the parody of the equator.

Coitus is the parody of crime.

Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

— GEORGES BATAILLE, The Solar Anus¹

Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited and with an introduction by Allan Stoekl, translated by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovittt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., Theory and History of Literature, vol. 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS TIANTAI?

PART ONE

NEO-TIANTAI BASICS: ENFRAMEMENT, COHERENCE, AND AGENCY—THE THUSNESS AND OTHERWISENESS OF ALL COHERENCES

What Else Is There?

Meaning à la Mode

More to Come

Quiddity Qua Quaddity: Oneness, Coherence and Agency

Perception, Conceptualization, Imagination

Properties Are Theft

Centrality: Local Coherence as Global Incoherence (Intersubsumption)

Four Ways of Being Thus and Otherwise: Impermanence, Illusion, Tertium Quid, Asness

Transpositions of the Four Ways

Omnicentrism

The Process of Transformative Recontextualization: Setup and Punch Line as the Basic Categories of All Possible Experience

Enchantment, Disenchantment, Reenchantment

Asness as All-pervasion

The Transcendental Unity of Apperception and the Principle of Charity

Content and Category in Kant and Tiantai: A Priori Categories and Inherent Entailment

Natural Law as Global Incoherence

Sense, Reference, and Private Language

Composition, Temporal Succession, and Contrast

On the Fire Not Burning Itself

The External World(s)

Categories of Asness and Their Attributes: Summary of Part One

PART TWO

DESIRE AND THE SELF: TOWARD AN ETHICS AND PSYCHOLOGY OF CONSTITUTIVE IMPOSSIBILITY

Presence as Hyper-absence; Absence as Hyper-presence

Correspondence and Coherence: Epistemological Implications

Control and Its Lack: Practical Implications

Unavoidable, Unobtainable

The Cunning of Cunning

What It Is Like: Being as Cunning, Cunning as Metaphoricity

Non-X Is Just Like X, Only More So

Can’t Get No-Satisfaction

Rival Centers and Reversibility: Desire and Aversion

Desire to Be

Aversion

A Note on Crawling through the Desert

The Self: Subject and Object, Punch Line and Setup

Identity as Constitutive Impossibility (as All-pervasion)

The Good as the Intersection of Two Impossibilities

Krug’s Pen Revisited

Pleasure and the Self

Freedom

More about the Will

Full Exertion: Repetition, Intensification, Meaninglessness, All-pervasion

Language, Mindfulness, and the Obvious

Adequation, Openness, Moretoitivity, Energy

The Desire of Desire: The Intersubsumption of Self, Affect, and Object

Bad Faith versus the Innocence of Becoming: The Moral Benefits of Inherent Evil

Ethical Layering

Personality as Symptom and as Pregnancy

Buddha Sive Time Sive the Inscrutability of the Other . . . Or: The Samadhi of Not Knowing What You’re Doing

Sive . . .

Boredom, Anxiety, Narrative, Addiction, and Love: Human Time

Death and Embarrassment

PART THREE

HERMENEUTICS AND AUTOEROTICS: TRUTHS AND OTHER HIDDEN PARTS, AND HOW THEY WELCOME THEIR DEMISE

Why There’s Anything: Habituation and Solidarity, with Some Reckless Reasoning about Entropy and the End of the Universe

Atomicity, Otherness, and Violence (Co-starring Whitehead, Levinas, and God)

Eroticism and Continuity, with Bataille

The Rival and the Double: Oneself as One’s Own Indigestible Kernel

Beauty, Harmony, and the Mystical

Humor

Sex and Drugs

Catharsis and/or Addiction: Asness, Art, and the Repression Hypothesis

The Limits of Sublimation

Hegel and/or Zen

The Revolutionary Impulse and Revolutionary Charisma, with Gotama, Jesus, Nichiren, Lennon, Dylan, et al.

Boredom or Truth: A Critique of Critique

Onany, Interpretation, and Love: Truth and the Libidinal Community

Proof that All Previous Errors Have Spoken This Truth, and Vice Versa; Or: How to Believe Everything You Read

Invitation to a Recantation

INDEX

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to three astute readers of early versions of this manuscript. David Levin, my colleague in the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University, took the time to read and comment upon a still rather rough-and-ready version of the text, and his encouraging words and subtle appreciation of some of the finer points involved in the discussion not only greatly improved the finished manuscript, but gave me the courage to continue with this somewhat risky—not to say insane—project, as did his own example of combining broad-mindedness, extensive scholarship, and intrepidity as a thinker. Another of the rare living American philosophers whose work harmonizes rigorous thinking and adventurous experiment, Andrew Cutrofello, also provided me with invaluable encouragement and suggestions for improvement, with the inimitable synthesis of unassuming clarity and true profundity of thought that is distinctive to him. Finally, my least-convinced and longest-standing reader, fan, and heckler, Alan Cole, refused as always to let me get away with anything, providing stubborn resistance to the most basic premises of the argument, forcing me to torture them into the of course incontrovertibly apodictic and all-victorious form in which they now appear here. On the other hand, the pleasure he took in some of the more idiosyncratic and perhaps clownish sideroads I took in playing out the hand was as gratifying to me as the few points I was able to get him to swallow without reservations. All three of these readers made this an incomparably better book than it would have been without their interventions, and, knowing what a burden it can be to devote the time and energy to force-feed oneself a colleague’s torturously irrelevant alternate universe, I can only thank them again for their patience, good-will, and encouragement.

Preface

Suppose a book published at the beginning of the twenty-first century proclaimed in its first sentence: This work contains the answers to all philosophical problems which have hitherto existed and which ever shall exist. All other books are included in and superseded by this book, which finally reveals the absolute truth about the universe and its application to all possible facets of human experience. The crucial paradigm shift has been discovered which reduces to irrelevance all the bitter struggles of past and present philosophers and theorists in all fields; this discovery has been made by me and explicated in the work you are now holding. Whatever conversations you have hitherto been having with yourself and your alter-selves are picked up here, tweaked into a slightly better vocabulary, integrated with all other conversations so that it is revealed that all were about each other, and resolved into a far richer set of possibilities and vistas of new experience than you had dared hope for. All possible phenomena are given the optimal explanation as to their meaning, origin, function, end, and value by this work. There is much to be grateful for in the fact that such claims are nowadays immediately taken as irrefutable signs of crankdom, found only in fanatical and naïve street-corner tracts or deliberately obscurantist New Age self-help manuals. The consensus of modern intellectual conscience seems to be that such self-advertisements, whether explicit or implicit, are to be consigned to the ranks of sinister ideological posturing, which ignore both the epistemological revolutions of the past two hundred years, and the relativizing thrust of self-historicization that came in their wake. For ethical as well as intellectual reasons, this kind of self-mythologization, still possible, say, for Spinoza and Leibniz, and also, more complicatedly but nonetheless unmistakably, for Hegel or Schopenhauer, has been thoroughly discredited, and appears ludicrous to us now. All things considered, most concerned parties have no trouble agreeing that this is an enormous boon which is to be applauded, and for which we latter-born cynics have much to be grateful.

But now suppose that you had in your hands an ostensibly philosophical work, concerned with all the big questions of being, presence, experience, nothingness, time, value, and so on, which began by stating: "The following work is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind. It is just a bunch of crap assembled in a totally contingent manner, according to my whims and sensations of a particular time as conditioned by the weather, my diet, my chemical mood swings, my love life, what was on TV that day, and moreover by a person, myself, who is through and through a contingent jumble of influences, who can see and think only as his organs of perception and thought, created chaotically by particular historical and natural forces beyond anyone’s or anything’s control, allow him to. This is just how things happened to seem to me at a particular time, and this was determined not by my insight into eternal or universal truths of some kind, but merely by the accidental tangle of conditions that constitute me. There is nothing universal or objective in what follows: it is a bunch of impressions which have no binding force of any kind, and no predictable applicability to any other things in the world besides the appearances from which it sprang. We might consider the book in question as a work of art, of fiction, or poetry, in that case. It might lay claim to a form of truth, perhaps even a higher form of truth, as an aesthetically incisive or accurate portrayal of someone’s personal experience at a particular time. It may even be that this would be what is left of philosophy in some quarters, a new conception of the vocation of the writer who wishes for some unknown reason to seriously consider the big useless eternal questions, but who wants to do so without entangling himself in the self-deception and questionable ethical position of claims to objectivity, and the authoritative power claims that go with it. This would seem to be the obvious alternative to the braggadocio know-it-all-ism of the classical truth" approach caricatured above, and one that successfully avoids its most troubling embarrassments.

On the other hand, it seems there is still, to most readers, something rather unsatisfying about this position as well. Why, they might ask, should I read this and take it seriously any more than I should spend my time studying transcripts of your daily calorie intake, or x-rays of your intestinal functions? What does it have to do with me, or anyone else, what you saw or felt at some particular time? Given the contingency and particularity of your subjective experience, and the impossibility of ascertaining its relation to any objectivity and hence to any link to my own subjectivity, why, in a word, should I care or consider what you think?

Perhaps one might answer that the value of such a work could lie in precisely its thorough actualization of that contingent particularity, as an artist might claim a particularly refined sensibility which allows her to render the concrete contingencies of her life in a way which reveals something profoundly important about her—something which might be called her truth or her universality, but which need not be so called—something which is open to the reader as a spur for reapplication to other specifics, although it does not restrict the range of what these applications will turn out to be. But this intuition arguably still contradicts the radicality of the initial claim to pure contingency and meaninglessness; it posits something in the place of truth, or something better than truth, which it is delivering, but the exact nature of this relation between the contingent, contextualized impressions and this looser form of their applicability, and what kind of guarantee it has, remain unsettled. Most readers, I suspect, will probably find this sort of proclamation just as unsatisfactory as the claim to have discovered universal truth once and for all.

It would seem then that in our millennium-beginning moment we have a beautiful epistemological double bind on our hands: neither the claim to universal truth nor its denial its making any sense to us. It is not just that both alternatives are unjustifiable; more seriously perhaps, they have both become morally repugnant. It would seem that the only way to endure walking into the Babel of a bookstore or library, or even glancing through a record shop, a magazine rack, faces on a bus or pictures in a newspaper without being driven to despair is to somehow block out the overabundance of superfluous viewpoints. Most obviously in the case of books, some poor schmuck has poured his heart and soul into each and every one of these things, is convinced that he knows what’s what, at least what’s important and possible if not what’s true and false, and is screaming the world he sees from the rooftops. The traditional way to avoid this almost surreal but nonetheless ordinary fact—the simultaneous superimposition of so many contrary subjectivities, and hence so many contrary worlds—has been the first attitude adduced above: the belief in a single objective truth, one perspective which is correct as opposed to all others that are wrong. Aside from the one truth, all the other views are mere falsehood and hence ultimately negligible. I describe this as morally repugnant with tongue only partly in cheek; we are so used to this commonsense view of conflicting opinions that we no longer feel what an affront and an outrage it is to regard another subjectivity and its world in this way, and the cost of doing so. It has begun to be noticed that the notion of objectivity per se is a mode of imposing the hegemony of one perspective over others, and that this is, at least among other things, a form of violence; we have grown too morally sensitive to tolerate these outrages called objectivity and truth. In the end, this marks a decisive advance in our respect for subjectivity, let us say for experience, for life, for being in any sense, per se. And, to make it clear once more, this is something I can only heartily applaud.

On the other hand, in the shadow of the old notion of truth, and in its absence, all eggs having been put in the basket that has now been swiped away, we are left with a chaos of conflicts where any possible structuring or arrangement, indeed any mutual regard or embrace of conflicting viewpoints, is viewed suspiciously as another surreptitious establishment of a power relation; we do not have any idea of how two different and contradictory viewpoints can be related to each other unless one is right and one is wrong, or both are wrong, or perhaps, at best, that each is partially right, whatever that might mean. The consequence of the moral fanaticism that will protect us from the tyranny of truth then becomes a fragmental chaos of solipsistic universes, forbidden any contact with one another; the atomistic assumption that in fact underlay the mutually exclusive picture of truth and falsehood here rears its head in another form. It is not only the impossibility but also the desirability of each of these two alternatives that has now come into question; would it really be such a good thing to have all the answers? We think not. But would it be such a good thing not to have all the answers? No again. What we want perhaps is both to reinstate the mysteriousness of all quiddities and to be at home in them in their mysteriousness, and, more importantly, in the mysteriousness of our knowing anything about them, of their coherence. It would seem to me that only a simultaneous preservation of ineluctable coherence and ineluctable mysteriousness would do justice both to our experience and to our aspirations. But how can this be achieved?

But whenever we encounter this kind of irresolvable dichotomy, where either half seems to be unsatisfactory, where the answer bounces back and forth endlessly without any apparent chance at settling one way or the other, we can be confident that we have here a bad pair of categories—that is, a false dichotomy—which needs to be transcended. Many have intuited as much for some of the great battles waged through the history of philosophy—that the reason the questions of freedom versus determinism, for example, or materialism versus idealism, are irresolvable is that there is something wrong with the categories by means of which the question is posed in the first place. One of the main concerns of this work will be to apply a rigorous justification for this intuition, and indeed extend its application to all contrary positions. The case at hand at the moment is the epistemological one. The presupposition that any claim must be either universally or objectively true or just a bunch of contingent, context-dependent subjective appearances is the source of the problem. In the fashionable phrase, we need a new epistemological paradigm here, one which does not make this presupposition, one which can allow the full and audacious claim to be making a statement of eternal and universal validity while at the same time acknowledging that one is just spouting groundless claptrap in reaction to the obscure needs of the current situation. We may think here of Kierkegaard’s famous remark about Hegel’s Logic: If this had been prefaced by the words, The following is all only a thought experiment, it would have been the greatest work of all time; as it is, it is merely laughable. Nowadays we are most comfortable saying of any philosophical work that it is first and foremost a thought experiment, a working through of a line of thought to see where it leads and, in the best empirical spirit, to allow it to either function or fail to function as a catalyst for further experiments. That is what I want to say here too, not only because it is prudent, but also because it so nicely describes the intuitive sense we have of what we are doing when we philosophize; not necessarily plumbing the depths once and for all, but playing around with some ingredients to see what will happen. We are rightfully wary of hanging too much on what we come up with, of making everything that comes up in the mix into an earnest assertion of a conviction that must be defended to the death.

In the work that follows, however, I want to explore a paradigm that has as one of its greatest advantages the ability to combine these two apparently irreconcilable positions. That is, what we have here is a thought experiment one of whose conclusions is to knock out the supports from under the distinction between thought experiment and earnest assertion. For, as I hope will be clear soon enough, what we come up with here resembles a thought experiment in that it comes with a willingness to adopt alternate approaches instead, indeed insists on them, and that it is guided in its concrete choices first and foremost by a mere pragmatic interest in where it will lead. On the other hand, the picture that emerges resembles the earnest assertion in that it brings with it a risk that puts the contours of our entire lived world at stake and, more crucially, entails seeing this picture as ineradicable from the real world outside of our speculations, and in this sense as binding and inescapable. How these two opposed epistemological positions will prove to be not only compatible but also in fact identical will be, it seems to me, one of the more interesting aspects of this particular experiment/assertion. This identity, as one might expect, has far-reaching consequences, not the least of which is the anticipation that, when the day inevitably comes when I may say of this work, Oh yeah, that was all claptrap, I don’t know what I was thinking of when I wrote that (and this day will come, whether on my senile deathbed or just on the verge of sleep, if not more dramatically as a conversion to some other ideology), this will in no way refute what is said here, but will rather exemplify it, such that if and when this particular way of thinking does appear in my experience again, or anyone else’s, it will see these refutations as versions of itself. But what this might mean will become clearer, it is hoped, as we proceed.

And the following should be said about this work itself as well: This work contains the answers to all philosophical problems which have hitherto existed and which ever shall exist. Moreover, this work is completely devoid of objective validity of any kind. I hope in the following pages to make clear how I can make both these claims at the same time and, moreover, why I hold them to be ultimately, not two contradictory positions, nor even two harmonious aspects of the situation which compensate for one another, but two different ways of stating one and the same thing. To be objective truth is to be subjective claptrap, and vice versa. The omnicentric presuppositions of this claim, as well its epistemological, ontological, phenomenological, and axiological consequences, will be elucidated in the pages that follow. It is hoped that the specialness of the epistemological situation that follows from this will be appreciated in good time; I will be, like everyone else, twisting the world to fit my paradigm and projecting my own obsessive concerns into universal principles, but it should be kept in mind that this is all I am claiming to do, and moreover all I am claiming can be done—but what is much more, also that this is the means by which universal truths are delivered, universal in a peculiar sense to be defined below. So when I give an analysis of, say, desire, I will enter from an angle that has to do with where and when and how I am; but we will try to pursue these projections to the point of their breakdown into universality.

Before getting to the meat of the matter, some words should be said about the sources of the ideas to be developed here. More strictly, although this may seem nitpicky and precious at this stage, we should perhaps describe these rather as the precedents of whom one might presently choose to see this work as an intellectual descendant, since the conceptual category of a single finite set of identifiable causal sources for a set of ideas, and indeed for any datum of experience, will be among the things the work itself will have occasion to call into question below. Be that as it may, it is certainly worth pointing out that most of the main strains of thought in these pages have made their appearance and been developed in the course of my professional duties as a Sinologist, as A. C. Graham once wryly/pathetically put it when trying to compose a philosophical work of general, non-Sinological import. In my case, the most central by far of the influences relevant to this study is the classical Tiantai tradition, by which I mean the thought of Zhiyi, Zhanran, Zhili, et al., of course, as interpreted by me. I have devoted a previous work to elucidating some features of the way I understand their thought, mainly within the confines of a standard intellectual historical framework, focused especially on the question of value paradox and omnicentrism in Tiantai thought, with, however, a few more general considerations interspersed here and there, and addressed head on at the end. The present work may in a certain sense be considered a continuation and expansion of the latter aspect of that work, and indeed is consistent with it to such an extent that I would not hesitate to call this a work of Neo-Tiantai philosophy—the only one in existence, so far as I know. Indeed, I may have occasion to use the locution in the Neo-Tiantai view . . . in the following pages, which is to be understood as an evasive way of saying in my view, or in the view developed in this book. This work, however, is not a technical Sinological, Buddhological, or intellectual historical study; it is an attempt to isolate, restate, and develop the kernels of a handful of the most distinctive ideas and insights from the Tiantai tradition, using methods and applied to problems which were of no interest to the classical Tiantai theorists. The methods will be, with some misgivings, the old-fashioned ones of deduction and induction, phenomenological description, logical proof, and occasional rhetorical hand-waving—in short, all the stock-in-trade of the Western philosophical tradition. My misgivings in using these methods derive not from their irrelevance to the classical Tiantai project—for what has that to do with us?—nor any Tiantai scruple about one-sided theorizing at the expense of practice, another concern which we will allow ourselves freely to embrace or diverge from as we deem appropriate, but because it could be convincingly argued that all these techniques are functions of the first of the two epistemological positions caricatured above, that is, the claim that I am in possession of unique philosophical proofs to which I will now compel my readers to assent. To attempt to prove something is, in an important sense, an attempted act of violence on alternate perspectives in the name of a particular notion of objective truth—as exclusive of its opposite, as demonstrable, as commanding obedience. The last point is particularly important; objectivity as a standard which must be obeyed, which must be accorded with, on pain of being simply in the wrong, is one of the central notions to be called into question in the epistemology to be expounded in the pages to follow. The moral implications of this notion of truth—you must adopt this position whether you want to or not, because the facts prove that it alone is the right one, and that truth is supposed to provide some secure refuge from the shifting unpredictability of appearance and opinions—are parasitic on notions of the relation between obedience and rightness, and of truth and appearance, which are, in my view, far from obvious and worth far less than they cost.

Nonetheless, invoking the second view caricatured above, I too am a child of my time, and the fact is that this traditional kind of argument is more convincing, clearer, more easily deployable and applicable in new contexts, than mere dogmatic assertions and finely-wrought epigrammatic insights. Systematic exegesis has the advantage of spelling out a pattern of connections, which the reader can internalize by tracing its contours in operation after operation, thereby actually learning a new skill, the skill of applying the same operations on new material. This, rather than the use of an arsenal of arguments meant to compel submission, is the intended effect of the almost anachronistic or atavistic creation of what looks like a system in this book, in spite of the fact that this particular system is centered on an attempted demonstration of the felicitous impossibility of any complete or unilaterally coherent system.

A similar consideration is relevant to the application of these ideas to topics well outside the concerns of classical Tiantai thinkers. It is not that I am trying to reconstruct what, say, Zhili would say if, per impossibile, he decided to write an essay on sex, or the nature of pleasure or humor or time, or academic customs of the early twenty-first century; I apply these patterns of thought here because these are issues I am concerned about, and because immersion in Tiantai ways of thinking has sometimes suggested ideas about these subjects which I believe to be potentially useful to contemporaries with similar concerns, and which have not been otherwise developed. Indeed, I make no claim to be faithful to the Tiantai tradition, because obviously in some respects I am and in some respects I am not, however one may choose to define that orthodoxy. Biographically, it so happens that most of these ideas took shape in the process of trying to puzzle out what the Tiantai writers were trying to say, and I would be delighted to give them credit for whatever insights may have emerged thereby, which I certainly would never have come by otherwise. Nonetheless, there are obviously many other important influences to be owned up to here. In the first place, the central epistemological insight on which this work is based can really be credited to Zhuangzi, as I interpret him (controversially, however, among my Sinological colleagues), which very likely had something to do with the fuller development of this position in the classical Tiantai works themselves.² The Laozian invisible center too is a crucial category for us, in the form given it, again, in its expanded Tiantai version. Closer to home, the ultimate philosophical concerns that inform this discussion have been formed largely by traditional Western philosophical categories and interests, and the lens provided thereby—forged by extended entanglements with the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Sartre, Polanyi, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and, above all, the unlikely duo Nietzsche and Hegel—has much to do with what aspects of Tiantai thought have seemed especially important to me, and have suggested a way to think out their implications which in many ways is deeply foreign to that of the Tiantai thinkers themselves. I say all this, at the risk of appalling self-indulgence, out of a perhaps misguided sense of obligation and desire for frankness, although the question of influence is not one that particularly interests me personally. Nor would I be displeased if specialists in Western philosophy, committed Buddhists and/or Buddhologists and Sinologists all found this work initially an unwieldy addition to their own discipline, being neither fish nor fowl—it’s not Buddhism, it’s not philosophy, it’s not scholarship—but which will be at least enjoyable or interesting enough to provoke a long enough engagement to allow other aspects of its strangeness, its seeming insouciance, its effrontery and so on to dawn. I hope this book will, to use the language developed within, become its own punch line, and that its indigestibility in each of its parent disciplines will prove the setup of a joke that ends with it playing the role of a useful contribution to each.

See my article, How Many Are the Ten Thousand Things and I? Relativism, Mysticism, and the Privileging of Oneness in the ‘Inner Chapter’, in Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourses on the Zhuangzi, ed. Scott Cook (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2003).

This book is divided into four main sections. The first is the Introduction, which gives a somewhat technical overview of the Buddhological background and doctrinal development of the classical Chinese Tiantai school, singling out those aspects of both which are relevant for our purposes here. Readers with a special interest in Buddhism will find this section useful at least in making plain where the connections lie and how we got from there to here, interpreting which old tropes in what way, although its approach may strike them as idiosyncratic and selective, to say the least. It is not, and does not purport to be, a history of Buddhist thought as such, or even of classical Tiantai thought, but does help to ground the following discussion in its sources, and might also satisfy the curiosity of those who wonder what this odd recurring word Tiantai refers to and where it came from. Readers uninterested in these background issues can, I think, skip this Introduction without thereby missing any of the main premises of what follows.

"Part One: Neo-Tiantai Basics" presents the fundamental philosophical claim of the book, building it, as it were, from scratch and from the ground up. Here an attempt is made to construct a fairly rigorous ontological and epistemological argument that will be presupposed as the basis of the rest of the discussion. No familiarity with or acceptance of any other thinker or tradition is assumed, but the ideas of a few thinkers are invoked here and there for clarification, to make the nuances of the Neo-Tiantai position stand out in contrast, rather than to discuss these thinkers themselves, as later parts of the book do. The topic under discussion here, broadly speaking, is the most general question imaginable: what is the relation of determinacy to indeterminacy, or coherence to incoherence, and what does this imply for how we are to understand what it means for something to exist? In other words, what is it to be something, or for something to be there, and to be what it is? This part of the book may be experienced by some readers as somewhat difficult, focusing as it does more or less exclusively on abstract philosophical issues.

"Part Two: Desire and the Self: Toward an Ethics and Psychology of Constitutive Impossibility" attempts to draw the psychological and ethical implications from the ontological and epistemological conclusions of Part One. A theory of the self, the will, desire, the Good, the body, the personality, identity, possession, experience, and so on, are what are at stake here. Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche make important cameo appearances.

"Part Three: Hermeneutics and Autoerotics: Truths and Other Hidden Parts, and How They Welcome Their Demise is the spiciest section of the book, where the previous conclusions are pushed a bit further in order to comment on cultural and social issues of various kinds, from sex to God to humor to mysticism to aesthetics to standards of truth in our current cultural situation, taking a final crack at the metaphysical and epistemological issues along the way, and initiating a Neo-Tiantai response to such figures as Freud, Bataille, Whitehead, Hegel, Heidegger, and Levinas, among others, and also to deconstruction, the Zen tradition, and certain forms of historicism. Probably this section is the one that is the most fun to read, and for certain readers it might not be a bad idea to lower oneself gradually into these waters by starting with this section, to see where the rest is really heading and whether the conclusions are attractive enough to merit expending the time and attention required by the dialectics of Part One, which, I hope, will prove that this fun is actually there to be had—albeit only by means of rather radical redefinitions of what is meant by proving, fun, having, and actually there."

Introduction

WHAT IS TIANTAI? THE CLASSICAL TIANTAI SCHOOL AND ITS PLACE IN/PLACEMENT OF TRADITIONAL BUDDHIST THOUGHT

I should briefly explain the intellectual history of Buddhism, where the Tiantai school fits into it, and how it reads that history, before going on. What is the Tiantai school?¹ And what is Buddhism in the eyes of the Tiantai school? It is no small hint about the nature of this school of thought to realize that in this case these two questions ask for the same answer. Tiantai, as I mean it here, is a school of Chinese Buddhism, expressed definitively in the works of three figures, Zhiyi, Zhanran, and Zhili, who lived in China between the sixth and eleventh centuries of the common era. It is a school that provided a distinctive hermeneutic approach to the massive Buddhist canon that had come into China. This approach, known as the classification of teachings, was based on a reading of a very peculiar Mahāyāna Buddhist text known as the Lotus Sūtra (Saddharma Puṇḍarīka Sūtra). Without getting bogged down in the technical details of the case, this text was read as providing a way both to harmonize the contradictions noticed in the vast array of differing doctrines taught in the canon, and to distinguish itself from them, precisely by virtue of this harmonization. But to see the importance of this, we must take a quick tour through the history of Buddhist thought, in terms of the themes that will become prominent in the Tiantai reading of that tradition, which rereads these doctrines as more or less obscure expressions of its own.

A more detailed and technical account of philosophical aspects of Tiantai Buddhist can be found in my previous work, Evil and/or/as the Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

An account of early Buddhism from this perspective highlights certain aspects rather than others, and suggests a reading of its structural problematic that differs in some ways from more straightforward interpretations. The most important precedents for Tiantai thought discoverable within earlier Buddhism are the doctrines of the Four Noble Truths, Dependent Co-arising, Momentariness, Emptiness, Two Truths, Nonself, and the Middle Way. The Four Noble Truths proclaimed by the Buddha in the Pali canon can be read as an uncomplicated diagnosis and prescription: there is suffering, its cause is the presence of desire for what is not the case, and hence this suffering can be eliminated by eliminating the desire through a program of discipline, concentrated awareness, and wisdom. But the description of what constitutes this suffering and its range (it applies to all conditioned events, including experiences of pleasure and happiness) and the analysis of the desire that is its cause suggest a more intricate picture.

The desire in question is described as three types of craving: (1) the craving for certain experiences, for pleasure; (2) the craving for being, that is, to have a particular identity, to be one determinate entity rather than another; (3) the craving for nonbeing, that is, not to be some particular thing, or, as it is sometimes interpreted, to get rid of certain experiences, to have them cease to be. The first of these, the desire for pleasure, appears quite straightforward, a familiar condemnation of hedonism as leading to long-term frustration and sorrow; but close attention to its deployment suggests, as some interpreters have pointed out, that what is at stake here is not really the occurrence of the psychological event desire for pleasure but the second-order attitude toward this event: in fact, the solution to the problem is described as lying in the letting go of desire (i.e., a clinging to some particular object or experience) but rather the clinging to this desire itself. Clinging to desire introduces a more complex motif that in fact feeds into the questions of temporality and selfhood, the centerpieces of early Buddhist thinking. This is implicit even if we speak simply about the desire for any specific experience, for example, for pleasure. If pleasure is desired, not just enjoyed and renounced, repeatability and availability of some past state are demanded. One would otherwise not have any particular object or desire, even the recognizable object pleasure. Implicit in the desire for the repetition of this precise event in the future is a desire that oneself, the prospective enjoyer of it, will also persist to that time, and even that the desire that wants it will still be there. If the desired experience is obtained but the desire for it is gone, or the subject who was supposed to enjoy it is gone, the desired object is no longer desirable. Hence, desire for pleasure is also always an implicit desire for persistent selfhood, attachment to these desires as possessions of this self, which are supposed to benefit this self some way. The desire for repeatability is a process whereby objects are reified as targets of grasping and, correlatively, the self as the power to be a possessor, a master, a determiner, who owns the previous pleasure (as his experience) and thus must be in a position to make it available to himself again. More crucially, it is not really the pleasure that is desired in this scenario, but rather precisely the power to make it available to oneself again, the power to create an exact repetition, which means the power to transcend time, to be unconditioned. One does not want a pleasure that is forced upon one, or that one is unable to escape from at will. Desire for pleasure is disguised desire for power, for unconditional selfhood. It should be stressed that the first experience of any given pleasure is not what is meant here. Desire presupposes memory, that is, the intent to repeat a pleasure, repetition. All desire is desire for repetition, and this is precisely will to selfhood, to the possession of the power to recreate some specific experience, to have control over it.

What is really wanted in the first type of desire for pleasure, then, is self-being, that is, power, autonomy, self-mastery, ownership, control, unconditioned continuity. But this is precisely the second type of desire, the desire to be, to be something or other definitively, or to be a self, an owner and possessor of experience, an independent and free subject and agent. The third type of desire, for nonbeing, also reduces to a desire to be, whether interpreted as desire not to be something in particular (a reverse form of desire to be something in particular) or desire to get rid of some experiences (a reverse form of the desire for pleasure). Desire to have, desire to be, desire not to be: all these are ultimately desire to be a self, a particular being with an unconditional identity, and the power to determine its own nature, attributes, and experiences.

But the doctrine of dependent co-arising, the main pillar of early Buddhist theory, shows that this is precisely what is impossible. For this doctrine is perhaps most easily summed up by an interpretive boiling down of the treatment given in the early scholastic formulation from the Visuddimagga: it is not merely an assertion that all things are causally conditioned, but rather more specifically that no single cause gives rise to a single effect, nor does a single cause give rise to multiple effects, nor do multiple causes give rise to a single effect, but that in every occurrence, multiple causes give rise to multiple effects. This is enough to establish the nonself teaching which is the central soteriological and, later, ontological principle of all Buddhism, along with the other marks of existence: Impermanence and Suffering. For a self would be either a singular cause or a singular effect, a one which is in sole control of its effects, or which could emerge an unambiguous singular result of a set of causes. It would be, in a word, a master and owner of its experience. Desire is the endeavor to create a single effect through a single cause: my self, acting alone, wants to produce precisely this experience and no other. But this is doomed both because no single self acting alone can create any single effect; it always needs other conditions, by definition outside its control, and it always produces something more that the single effect it wanted.

Desire is present as a dissatisfaction with the total phenomenal reality of the present moment, with a given set of what there is. But this desire is itself a part of aspect of this moment, this there is. A dividedness of the moment appears here, constituting the subject-object split, a tension tied to the aspiration to be the absolute sole master of this moment. Desire is a demand for reality to be otherwise, but it exempts itself from this desire for change. It wants part of reality to change, but another part of reality—itself—to stay the same: it demands its own survival into a future moment, to be the enjoyer of the object it has desired when it finally arrives. This is also viewed as impossible, given the Buddhist idea of universal impermanence, applying equally to the subject and to the object, neither of which can possibly persist identically from one moment to the next. Here we have a fundamental division or split in experience, the subject-object split, which is seen as a ceaseless matrix of suffering.

Early Buddhist tradition suggests three possible ways to eliminate this tension: indulgence of desire, suppression of desire, and the Middle Way. The first two of these are, on this account, doomed to failure. The first strategy, that of ordinary hedonistic life, is to fulfill the desire, to indulge it, to get rid of it by providing what it asks for, by obtaining the demanded pleasure. But this necessarily fails because, first of all, the particular object is not really lastingly fulfilling; it is conditioned, impermanent, a series of events rather than a single thing that persists through time. Hence, the image desired cannot really match up to the real which is later attained, since both are unique temporal occurrences. The experience is never the same; at the very least it is a repetition, modified by the previous memory, plus many other new conditions. But inattentiveness, ignorance, crudity of attention, allows the willed repetition to appear successful in normal worldly experience. The external conditions are close enough to the original set to allow a result that crude ignorance can construe as the same as the original desired result. This ignores the difference between the desired and the attained, and also the fortuitous similarity of conditions that allow them to appear identical. I ignore all the conditions that enable me to have this experience, attributing it only to my own agency, and also the ultimate conditionality and hence passivity of this apparently active agency itself—my desire, which I am laboring to satisfy, is conditioned by the previous experience of pleasure. Moreover, I ignore the difference between what I finally obtained and the previous experience that defined my desire for it. This inattentiveness is what allows the illusion of genuine unconditionedness, freedom, mastery, selfhood to arise. Thus does action (karma, apparently successful action) plus ignorance (inattentiveness) reinforce the view of self. This sense of selfhood in turn motivates further action, for having defined myself as this determinate and yet unconditioned self, I am predisposed to find pleasure in those things which serve this sense of control and displeasure in those which contradict it, and act to confirm, consolidate, or enhance this sense of my own power to own these things. And so the cycle perpetuates itself.

Second, what is really wanted in desire for specific pleasures is, as we have seen, selfhood, mastery, power, autonomy, ownership, control, eternity, which is likewise impossible. The fulfillment of the desire reinforces the splitting of the moment as a habitual structure; it reestablishes the subject-object split in a new form for the next moment. The sense-of-self in turn conditions desire—either, if construed as an absolute self, to verify and exercise this putative master, or if construed as a conditional self, to meet its particular determinate needs for sustenance, of goals, commitments, projects. It establishes a set of sensitive organs for contact, predisposed to find some things congenial and others not, leading to new feelings of pleasure and new volitions, hence more sense of separate self.

Note that here what seems to be an expression of freedom is seen as really only a further bondage. To satisfy this desire is not to satisfy your self—the absolute independent agent of freedom—but to satisfy your master, an other. The apparently purely active agent is in reality also conditioned, hence passive, suffering in its root sense. Moreover, this desire hides itself, reinforces the tendency for inattentiveness. It is painful, and we have a vested interest in not seeing our own pain, since it contradicts our pretension to absolute selfhood. Pain is humiliating to our sense of autonomy. Moreover, this desire hides itself, reinforces the tendency for inattentiveness. It is painful, and we have a vested interest in not seeing our own pain, since it contradicts our pretension to absolute selfhood. Pain is humiliating to our sense of autonomy. Moreover, this desire transforms itself into the subject-object relation, that is, a neutral, free, wise self seeing an objectively valuable object, which it wants, it thinks, because of that objective value, not because of its own desire as a conditioned aspect of itself. All desire is thus the desire to be unconditioned, to be master, owner, and enjoyer who can freely conjure up the desired thing into existence; but this desire itself is conditioned, is not owned by me or anyone else, cannot be freely conjured up or eliminated. As Schopenhauer says, interpreting Spinoza, people believe they are free because they can do what they wish, but ignore the fact that they cannot wish whatever they wish. It is conditioned by the experience of pleasure, by its disposition in relation to objects, by the structure and relation of particular sense organs and objects, by its retention of remembered images of objects and so on. Every particular act of volition is conditioned by the organs that instantiate it and its pleasure/pain relations that pertain thereto. Not only do I not own this desire to be master, not only does any other person or agent or being not own it, but it does not even own itself. Even if it succeeds, it fails; for to succeed in the project of being an unconditioned master is only further undermined the more it is accomplished, if the desire to do so itself is just one more conditioned thing, one more imposition from outside, one more form of servitude, with no single cause and no owner. No single cause, neither I nor anyone else, including itself, is in a position to make it what it is.

Given these difficulties, the second way of dealing with this tension of desire is the ascetic attempt to eliminate or suppress it entirely. But the early Buddhist tradition insists that this is equally hopeless and impossible. For the desire to get rid of desire is simply one more desire, setting up a vicious circle of desiring to not desire and so on. Moreover, the original desire is a conditional entity, and will continue to arise as long as its conditions are present. Adding one more condition—the desire to destroy it—will not eliminate it; the only thing that can eliminate it is to remove the conditions of its arising. And again, if eliminated, the desire remains unseen, unexamined, hence its conditions become even more hidden, and thus further entrenched. On top of all that, since the real desire is not for this particular object, but for selfhood, power, mastery, the suppression of any particular desire will be useless—it will simply change forms to find another way to prop up the notion of a self.

Since neither the fulfillment nor the elimination of desire is of any use, or even possible, according to the early Buddhist tradition, the Middle Way between them is proclaimed. What is this Middle Way? It is neither indulging nor destroying the desire. Rather it resides in being mindful of the desire, closely attentive to it. This means: (1) Seeing the desire; (2) Knowing there is desire as a present explicit fact—that is, no longer as tacit, hidden, flooded into the apparent desirableness over in the object or the future, but as a positive present state pertain to one’s own body-mind; (3) Seeing it as arising, dwelling, vanishing—as temporal; (4) Seeing it as involving displeasure, as leading to and resulting in displeasures of various kinds; (5) Seeing it therefore as conditional, as nonself, as not entirely subject to my will as a sole agent; (6) Releasing, relinquishing the desire, no longer clinging to it, considering it mine or me, controlled by me, coming from self, benefiting self, establishing self, reinforcing self or in any other way affecting my putative self, as a unitary and unconditioned agent and owner of experience. Since ignorance about this was one condition of the arising of the desire, this attentiveness removes one of the necessary conditions of its arising. Deprived of it, the desire fades and ceases. We have let the desire be what it is, be itself—i.e., conditioned, impermanent—and this allows its fading, rather than indulging it or destroying it. What then, on this reading, is the early Buddhist solution to desire, inasmuch as it all reduces to desire for selfhood and thus inevitable frustration? Neither the elimination of desire, nor the indulgence in desire, but the Middle Way. This means the awareness of desire, and the letting go of desire—not its annihilation, which is impossible, but simply letting it be an entity in its own right, letting it be itself, which is to say, an impermanent, unsatisfactory, nonself, conditioned and co-arising thing, which arises and fades in accord with conditions which are not in the control of any single agent. This endeavor to be mindful of the process of desire’s arising and perishing is of course still a desire of sorts, situated, as it were, between the active and passive modes. But this particular desire, the practice of Buddhism itself, is regarded in early Buddhism as a raft, temporarily exempted from the critiques of clinging and desire because of its putative ability to overcome all other desires and finally also itself, in that in the end it too is to be let go of, when no longer necessary.

This is, in nutshell form, the early Buddhist notion of liberation. This plays out, especially in later Abidhammic literature, into the theory of momentariness, holding that the ultimate constituents of reality are extremely short-lived mental and physical events which are nonself and impermanent. In the earliest version, these events have a definite, but very short, duration. Later the circle is closed and in the Mahāyāna it is asserted that they arise and perish simultaneously—they are literally instantaneous. This amounts to a very radical temporalization of reality which is also designed with a mainly soteriological intent, with an eye again to the problem of clinging: for these instantaneous events cannot be objects of desire because they could not possibly be possessed, they are literally gone as soon as one becomes aware enough of them to desire them. Desire to possess (i.e., to be a possessor, a self) is a category mistake, for there are no things (possessables), only events. It is to be noted in this connection that there is no term in this literature that strictly corresponds to the concept of things, or for that matter even of phenomena, with its basic meaning of a showing or shining forth. Instead, the basic elements of experience are designated as dhammas. The same word is used to denote the behavior proper to a particular caste or role, and in its prescriptive sense the same word is used for the Buddhist teaching as a whole. As such, this term can perhaps be translated as regularities, here descriptively as indicating what is objectively found in the world of experience. This implication will be of some use to us in our discussion of coherence in the pages that follow.

The same problem can also be approached by means of the Five Aggregates doctrine: what we normally call our self is made up of impersonal momentary processes which can be generally categorized as belonging to five groups: Form, Sensation, Memory/Perception, Volition, Sense of Self (consciousness in the sense of a subject aware of an object). What we have here is a Sensation/Desire/Reification/Self-Identity feedback loop. A certain disposition of a conditioned entity, that is, the sensitive material, tissue, or chains of events that we call our experience of existence in the world—physical organs contacting objects, giving rise to pleasant or unpleasant feeling—is conditioned by, among other things, ignorance. Ignorance here means above all nonmindfulnesss, not knowing this as a conditional, composite aggregate process, which would imply also knowing it as suffering, impermanent, momentary, nonself. Nonmindfulness of this fact conditions memory, classification, judgments of repeatability, sameness and difference, reiterability, perception, identification as object, reification, detemporalization (in the terms we are to develop below: de-as-ification). With this, we have a condition for volition, as if something could be done about or to this object (which is an error: no such object persists to be acted upon, and it is not repeatable). This is an indispensable condition for what we normally call consciousness, that is, a sense of self existing over against these objects which it has before it to manipulate, acquire, eliminate, avoid, and so on. This in turn further disposes the sensitive tissue in some particular way rather than another, so that it is once again susceptible to pain or pleasure, and to the category mistake which separates itself from this experience creating two separate entities, subject and object. The weak link here is ignorance, which can be overcome by means of mindfulness and attention to just these facts, of impermanence and nonself. Mindfulness of the body as body, of feelings as feelings, of mind as mind (sense of self as sense of self), of objects as objects (the classical Four Foundations of Mindfulness) is thought to be enough to show them to be nonself, impermanent, suffering; this can be further extended to the simple awareness, with nothing added, of sounds as sounds, of sights as sights, of cognitions as cognitions, of volitions as volitions, and so on. In each case, the process itself is to become the focal point of awareness, rather than the means for focusing elsewhere, on a putative object. We will discuss this technique in its Tiantai context extensively below. But the objective even in the earliest texts can be described as simply letting these things be themselves, that is, in this case, impermanent and nonself, nonreified natural processes which arise and perish in accordance with necessarily multiple conditions.

The implications of mindfulness are well expressed in the following passage from the early Buddhist Udāna, a kind of tell-me-all-the-Dharma-while-standing-on-one-foot summary of the Buddha’s teachings:

[Y]ou should train yourself thus: In the seen there will be merely what is seen; in the heard there will be merely what is heard; in the sensed there will be merely what is sensed; in the cognized there will be merely what is cognized.. . . Then . . . you will not be with that. When you are not with that, then . . . you will not be in that. When you are not in that, then . . . you will be neither here, nor beyond, nor in between the two. Just this is the end of suffering.²

John Ireland, trans., The Udāna and The Itivuttaka (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1997), 21.

To unpack the implications of this passage, let us first ask what is implied about ordinary, naïve experience, suffering-laden experience, in this description? Naïve experience would seem to be that in which there is more to the seen than merely what is seen, more to the heard and cognized and sensed than merely what is heard and cognized and sensed, and this more makes it the case that one is with something, which makes it the case