A Critique of Western Buddhism by Glenn Wallis

Author:Glenn Wallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

This statement, of course, leaves unsaid just what this foreclosed and unrepresentable Real is, but it still contains essential information. There is something about engaging in this very practice of naming that implicates x-buddhism in a certain kind of operation. We saw in the previous section how this operation works. What x-buddhism names pertains to the ostensible constituents of reality (personhood, consciousness, causality, matter, etc.). The pertinence of its names is phenomenologically verifiable; for the naming, being a naming of the world, is a purely immanent practice. However, in order to establish an incontrovertible and unitary sufficiency for this naming as uniquely x-buddhist, it must be grounded in another name—an exclusively x-buddhist name—that is transcendent to the empirical naming. If it is not thus externally grounded, as the guests at The Great Feast of Knowledge remind our Buddhist agents, Western Buddhism must be said to be engaging in a completely different kind of operation than it says it is; namely, that of a nondecisional science-thought or of an insufficient non-buddhism. Such an operation requires no transcendentally englobabling operator, such as The Dharma. With the cancellation of this operator’s warrant, resistance ceases. For, it never entailed resistance to the Real because x-buddhism fashions itself as precisely an organon of the Real. Rather, it evidenced a refusal to accept the fact that the Real cannot be articulated and dominated—englobed—within x-buddhism’s system of representation. Recall that the man from the country wholly accepts “the law.” That acceptance is what hails him to the impassable portal. Catalyzed by his idealized vision of the law, he acts and thinks as he does, vainly hoping and scheming and waiting. As long as the man holds that vision, named “the law,” to constitute the law’s reality, he is incapable of any other response. What he is thereby resisting, however, is the foreclosure of the law to any sort of “entry.” That which has received the name of the law is as indifferent to this naming as it is to the man’s vision and even less so to his longing. Until he realizes this facet of the law, he remains the interpellated subject of the ideological vision, and not that of what he so desires. Like the identity of an individual, the identity of a system of thought pivots on one’s response to the Real’s foreclosure. Acceptance engenders a (materialist) science-thought and science (in Laruelle’s sense) while resistance engenders (idealist) decision and a hallucinated World. It is in this manner that resistance to the One or the Real is productive.

Of what would nonresistance to the Real be productive? What, in other words, would it mean to think with the Real or from the One? When Buddhism expounds on emptiness, no-self, dependent origination, The Dharma, and so on, it is thinking the Real. It is doing so, of course, by thinking toward the Real:

Buddhism → the Real

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