Beyond Oneness and Difference by Ziporyn Brook

Author:Ziporyn, Brook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Let’s talk about that structure. When I said, “it takes money to make money,” it seemed as if, and it was interpreted as, a serious remark, a real piece of information, perhaps about investment strategies or the like. It had the quality of seriousness, of factuality, of non-ironic information. It does not strike anyone as funny; there is nothing funny about that statement. But, when the punch line comes, retrospectively, that setup is funny. That setup is funny because it has been recontextualized by the pun on the word make, which is made to have more than one identity when put into a new context.

The interesting thing here, most closely relevant to relation of identity between Conventional and Ultimate in the Tiantai Three Truths, is that it is precisely by not being funny that the setup was funny. In other words, if it were already funny, if you didn’t take it seriously for at least a moment, the contrast between the two different meanings of this thing could never have clashed in the way that is necessary to make the laughter, to create the actual effect of humorousness. We have a setup which is serious and a punch line which is funny, but when you look back at the setup from the vantage point of having heard the punch line, that setup is also funny. After all, we don’t say that just the punch line is funny. We say the whole joke is funny. The setup is funny, however, in the very strange mode of “not being funny yet.” It is only funny because it wasn’t funny. This is the sense in which the Third Truth, the Mean, reveals the “identity” between Provisional Positing and Emptiness. Provisional Positing is Emptiness only inasmuch as it is the very opposite of Emptiness, the temporary exclusion of Emptiness. It is by being Non-Empty (i.e., something in particular) that it is Emptiness (i.e., devoid of any unambiguous or unconditionally self-determining self-nature). It is only because it is Locally Coherent that it is Globally Incoherent. Its Global Incoherence is present as Local Coherence, just as Humor is present in the deadpan setup as seriousness. This same form of “identity”—really neither identity nor difference, or both identity and difference—then applies at the metalevel between the Mean itself and the other Two Truths: they “are” the Mean precisely because they are not the Mean, because they are the two opposed extremes.

The same structure is applied in the Tiantai reading of the Lotus Sutra. You’re Enlightened! That is what Mahayana Buddhism keeps saying in one form or another: everyone is Enlightened! Everybody is a Buddha! Samsara is already Nirvana! All Dharmas are Nirvanic! But the way in which you are a Buddha is the way in which the setup of a joke is funny: you are a Buddha precisely by not being a Buddha. By struggling toward buddhahood, toward something else, toward something you are not, but by revisualizing or recontextualizing or expanding awareness, which has been the

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