Slouching Toward Gautama: Toward a Buddhist Politics of Freedom

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By Zach Dorfman
The Montréal Review, September 2011
Zach Dorfman is the assistant editor of the journal Ethics & International Affairs, a quarterly academic journal of moral philosophy and international relations published through the Carnegie Council in New York. He previously served as an editorial assistant at Tikkun Magazine, a bimonthly devoted to the intersection between progressive politics and religious life. His most recent essay, "A Diaspora of the Mind," was published in Zeek Magazine.

"All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as religious, are due to the 'objects' of our consciousness, the things which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with ourselves."

--William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

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There is a central teaching in certain schools of Mahayana Buddhist metaphysics that all phenomena are shunya, or empty of inherent existence. Things only exist in their relation to one another, through the myriad arising and cessation of causes and conditions. Subject and object, self and other, the one and the many: all becoming simultaneously through some spontaneous irruption. Life, which presents itself as so dense -- like some gossamer web of being, solid from a distance -- is in fact far more delicate than we credit it to be. Causes beget causes and what we thought we knew, what we knew we knew, recedes into a distant mental space that nevertheless maintains an aura of familiarity, like the bedrooms of our infancy. This place is all silhouettes and shadows, lacking one piece of recognizable furniture, but it nevertheless has the capacity to absorb us completely.

While such terrible complexity underlies even the most simplest-seeming of objects, and we may not be able to identify the essential or inherent qualities or causes of any given phenomena, they nevertheless appear to us as solid, real "things." The central teaching of this school of philosophy is also its central paradox: phenomena arise interdependently, but they are empty. Emptiness, or shunyata, characterizes all objects, all beings, and all processes. Where we see stability, there is only unyielding flux. The essence of phenomena is to have no essence at all, except the provisional meanings that we individually and collectively ascribe to them: there is no "there" there. Seemingly impregnable from the outside, objects cannot withstand analysis. They disappear in the web of their own relations. Our most coveted possessions, spaces we've furtively made our own, the ideas of people we've loved and lusted after, all dissolve to the touch. This fact doesn't make these mental objects any less real, or their emotional force any less intense. It just means we have to take these ideal types for what they are, and, secure in the fact that they are fleeting -- transitory -- accept that we are no different.

But there is another layer to this paradox. Straining for an unattainable mental object, we end up preserving the world as it is. Sometimes a cup is just a cup.

More: http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Toward-a-Buddhist-politics-of-freedom.php