The Dissolution of Self and Other in Chan Buddhism

·期刊原文
Person as Narration: The Dissolution of Self and Other in Chan Buddhism

By Peter D. Hershock
Philosophy East and West
volume 44, Number 4
October 1994
P.685-710
(C) by University of Hawaii Press

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P.685

Granted the premise that things and the world
comprising them exist in some nonarbitrary and not
purely subjective sense, persons are almost
unavoidably taken to be relatively autonomous
individuals who can enter into relations both with
one another and with other similarly existing parts
of the world. That is, persons are typically thought
of as living in the world, as standing out from it
as unique and well-defined entities or processes
dwelling or at least centered at this or that
location--the site from which they come into contact
with or view all that is other.

But if this premise is not granted and it is
instead held that there is no conclusive evidence of
either independently existing things or an objective
ground for such existence, such a construal of
personhood proves untenable. It is the purpose of
what follows to sketch out an alternative
understanding of persons along lines suggested by
the practical and metaphysical persuasions of East
Asian and particularly Ch'an Buddhism. In short, it
will be argued that a person should be seen as the
intimately ongoing articulation of an originally
ambiguous 'nature'--a process of disambiguation that
is not only both irreducibly karmic and nonlocal,
but an improvisationally achieved correlate of
narrative virtuosity.

Introduction

As the doctrine of anatman or nonself makes
clear, any entitative or essentialist models of
personhood are wholly inadequate as heuristics for
understanding the Buddhist conception of persons.
Not only does the doctrine deny the existence of an
independent and abiding soul or self (the eternalist
option), it unequivocally denies credibility for any
materialist reduction of persons to purely physical
entities that dissolve without remainder with the
demise of the body (the annihilationist option).
Instead, the Buddha insisted on our seeing each
person as an interdependently arisen psychophysical
system comprising the five skandhas of form,
feeling, impulses, perceptions, and consciousness.
Only when these five are in dependent
interrelationship is a person said to arise.
Moreover, it is held that none of the five skandhas
are able to exist in the absence of the other four.
In a particularly apt image, they are said to be
like sheaves stacked together in a field. Remove
one, and all of them tumble down.

Of the various recent commentaries on the Indian
Buddhist concept of personhood, Joanna Macy's (1991)
systems-theory-inspired discussion of the
philosophical ramifications of mutual causality is
arguably one of the most productive, providing a set
of cogent heuristics for exploring the nonabiding or
impermanent nature of persons as well as their
emptiness

P.686

or lack of an ultimate and definitely existing core.
For Macy, persons must be seen

in terms of relations, rather than substance,
[so that] personal identity appears as emergent
and contingent, defining and defined by
interactions with the surrounding medium. (P.
108)

Critically, this involves realizing that a person
should not be understood as a thing that has
experiences--the Cartesian ego, for example--but as
"inseparable from its experience... an agent
[inseparable] from the thinking, saying, and doing
we attribute to it" (ibid.). Persons are understood,
then, as higher-order systems having characteristics
which can be predicated of none of the subsystems
comprised in their organization.

However, while Macy's systems model is
especially suited for exploring the ramifications of
the profoundly psychological orientation of much of
the Indian Buddhist tradition--emphasizing the
centrality of experience and the polarity of
person-as-system and
environment-as-surrounding-medium-it is not
altogether clear to what extent it can function as a
satisfactory hermeneutical tool when we move to East
Asian Buddhism, where such an orientation is largely
unshared. Most succinctly put, the systems model
fosters seeing persons as individuals, which, even
if they are not strictly isolated in or from their
environments, are at least taken to be identifiable
as discrete organizing centers or nexuses of
experience. According to such a view, a person is
first and foremost a psychophysical system in
complex interrelation with other such systems and
with which he or she may be bound up in the
constitution of some higher-order system. The
systems model also entails recognizing the
emotional, social, societal, political, cultural,
and spiritual dimensions of personhood--each of
which is seen as a field of systemic relations--but
the core of personhood is the psychophysical system
that has emerged as a particular organizing nexus on
that field of systemic relations referred to as the
environment. Indeed, it is only with the presence of
such personal systems that even more highly ordered
and complex system like families, clans, and
societies can be realized. While each of these is
explicitly viewed as being irreducible to the sum of
its parts, they nevertheless are taken to evolve
with the systemic organization of more basic,
self-maintaining, and self-organizing systems. In
this sense, the systems model is still fundamentally
atomistic in its operational premises. Persons are
necessarily unique axes of organization--both
physical and experiential --existing in a world to
which they are open and yet from which they are
manifestly disparate.

What we have, then, is a model of personhood
that accords rather well with the early Buddhist
analogy by means of which a sentient being is
compared to a banana tree or to an onion, which can
be peeled down layer by layer without ever coming to
an essential core. But like that

P.687

image, the systems model of personhood also retains
a lingering identification of personhood with a
gathering about this central absence. That is, even
if the core is empty in the sense of being
nonsubstantial, it functions as a kind of pivotal
essence-substitute by allowing a continued
identification of persons with discrete and
individuating locations or perspectives.

The ramifications of this are manifold. For
example, under the aegis of such an identification,
it is natural to presume that Naagaarjuna is simply
indulging in rhetorical exaggeration when he claims
that the Buddha taught the Dharma for the purpose of
relinquishing all views (MK 27.30). That is, as long
as it is presumed that persons are centered on the
experiences of the psychophysical system,
Naagaarjuna's claim can only be intelligible as a
reference to the cessation of those perspectives
that are habitually or erroneously maintained, since
positionality itself is inescapably constitutive of
who we are. Relinquishing all views is, in a word,
unimaginable. Similarly, when the Buddha remarks
that he eschews taking a stand on either 'is' or
`is-not', and further asserts not only that
"sa.msaara is of the nature of thisness and
otherwiseness" (SN, vv. 752-753), but that the end
of suffering entails realizing that-- regardless of
our sensory circumstances--we are "not 'here',
'there', or 'in-between'" (Udaana 8), it is assumed
that this has to do with refraining from ontological
commitment, with not getting trapped by absolutes of
any sort. In each case, what remains unexpunged is
the tendency to identify the centrally biased and
hence horizon-making structure of experience with
that of personhood--a schism of the world into a
central 'here' and a variously complex periphery
that is 'out there'.

In their proposal of a focus-field model for
representing personhood in the Confucian tradition,
Hall and Ames (1987) provide a significant
alternative to the prioritization of the interior
and psychological dimension of human being in our
conception of persons, and one we would expect to
have particular relevance in the unfolding of the
Chinese Buddhist understanding of persons. To begin
with, it ostensibly allows relationality and not
individuality to be seen as ontologically basic. It
is not that various systems--say individual sentient
beings--enter into relations and so give birth to
families and other social or societal systems, but
that such individuals are abstracted from the same
field of relations out of which these 'higher-order
systems' have also been abstractly identified. A
marked advantage of such a model is that it enables
us to see relationality in fully reciprocal or
horizontal terms rather than hierarchically vertical
ones, and to avoid some of the implications of
localized importance attendant to the systems model.
For Hall and Ames, persons do not enter into
relationships, but are constituted solely by them.

But the focus-field metaphor itself
unfortunately seems to retain much of the objective
and binary feel of any centrist conception of

P.688

personhood. On the one hand, it implies the
possibility of determining by observation that a
person is this focusing of the field while / the
observer am yet another. In effect, the language of
focus and field requires the admission of a
metaperspective from which it can be determined what
is being focused--the field of relationships.
Something acts as an 'outsidestander'. Moreover, the
metaphor continues to represent the person as a part
of the world, as a limited phenomenon on the perhaps
infinite ranges of the field. In short, persons are
still seen extrinsically, as objectifiable 'things'
arising on or out of a surrounding field of
relations. Such a model thus shares some of the
guiding presuppositions of J. Mohanty's discussion
of persons in terms of layers of selfhood, according
to which some relations---like those with family
members--are closer to the core of who we are, while
others--like those with other individuals sharing
our birthday--are significantly less so. A person is
still taken to be a relatively coherent center in
the midst of an encircling world, and the
discrimination of near and far is still understood
as crucial to who and what we are. Persons are
not--as shall be maintained below--entire worlds,
but aspects or focuses within them.

What seems to be missing from such models is a
recognition of the fact that the world is neither an
objective context for personal existence, nor a
merely subjective or ideal construct. That is, the
systems and focus-field models fail on the one hand
to embrace explicitly and unmitigatedly the priority
of orientation rather than being or existence--an
embrace crucial at least to Mahaayaana Buddhist
metaphysics---and on the other to appreciate fully
the indispensable role of karma or dramatic
interplay in any adequate depiction of personhood.
And so, while it is widely admitted that a Buddhist
model of personhood must reflect in some measure the
processive nature of all things, none of the
prevailing models fully enough addresses the
irreducibly dramatic quality of sentient
impermanence. It is in correction of such
shortcomings that the present narrative model of
personhood is offered.

Suffering and Narrativity

Insofar as the themes of both karma and
impermanence are crucial to the Buddhist account of
suffering, as a means of initially illustrating the
direction in which I think it appropriate to move in
coming to an effectively Buddhist (and later a
specifically East Asian Buddhist) understanding of
personhood, I would like to take a look at an
extremely rich story about suffering that appears in
the Theriigaatha(vv. 213-223).

Once, there was a young woman named Kisagotami,
the wife of a wealthy man, who had apparently lost
her mind because of the death of her child. Carrying
the tiny corpse, she wandered from house to house in
her village, begging her neighbors to give her a
medicine capable of reviving the baby. Finally,
someone referred her to the Buddha, who was staying
at Jevatana.

P.689

She approached the Buddha and, throwing herself
at his feet, begged his assistance. He agreed to
help, and told her that in order to heal the child,
he needed four or five mustard seeds from a house
where no son, father, mother, daughter, or slave had
died. Thanking the Buddha, Kisagotami set out, going
from door to door in search of a house where death
had never entered. Finally, she reached the very
outskirts of town without having found a family that
had not been visited by death. She returned to the
Buddha and in his quiet presence her mind cleared.
She understood the meaning of his words and from
that day on was one of his devoted followers.

According to our usual set of presuppositions,
the point of this story is that suffering is
universal, that grief is an experience common to all
of us, and one that is inevitable given the nature
of sentient being. I would submit, however, that
among these presuppositions is a belief in the
objectivity of identity and hence in the reality of
essences or universals--a belief that finds no
purchase in the scheme of either early Buddhism or
the Ch'an tradition to which we shall later turn in
some detail. In fact, a consistently Buddhist
interpretation of the story suggests that there are
two alternative and profoundly practical
implications of Kisagotami's trip through her
village. First, she is made to realize that there is
no free zone where impermanence and suffering do not
reach. This is not to say that impermanence or
suffering are everywhere the same, but only that
there is no place in the world where one can go to
avoid being confronted with change or crisis.
Superficially, this means that no happiness can last
indefinitely, that no good situation can be
maintained forever. But at a more profound level,
the ubiquity of impermanence guarantees that no
gridlock is intractable--that no matter how
hopelessly stuck or stricken we feel, this bondage
is also something arisen only in passing. All
situations are negotiable.

Secondly, and for us most importantly,
Kisagotami learns that suffering always occurs in
the context of a communally articulated life story
or narrative. The Buddha does not simply tell her
that everyone experiences such grief, but asks her
to go from house to house inquiring of the
inhabitants of each whether death has occurred
there. It might be supposed that this is only a
pedagogical device, a way of forcing a "hands on''
realization. But that hardly suffices. We have to
recall that Kisagotami is not just "a woman," a
faceless player in a generic tale, but someone known
with greater or lesser intimacy by everyone in her
village. When she knocks on a door and asks if a
death has occurred in the home, rather than being
answered with a brusque yes or no, her own pain will
call forth that of the neighbor she meets.

In all likelihood, she is invited into the house
and haltingly told or reminded how the eldest son--a
boy named Sanjaya--was to have been married just a
year ago. On a routine hunting trip, he had slipped
down into a ravine and broken his back against a
boulder lodged in the

P.690

limbs of a fallen tree. He had died a month later in
the very room in which they are speaking. She would
be told about the sadness of the son's
bride-to-be--a teenage girl who is perhaps
Kisagotami's own younger cousin or niece. She would
hear about the effect the death has had on Sanjaya's
brothers and sisters, about how his father still
cannot smile even though laughter has returned to
the house among the youngest children, the ones with
the shortest memories. All of these people would
have names and birth dates, distinctive traits, and
dreams. They are friends and relatives whose life
stories include and are included in her own. in this
sense, suffering is in actuality neither objective
nor subjective, but profoundly and irreducibly
personal and shared. By entering the homes of her
neighbors and asking about the intimate fortunes of
their families, Kisagotami effectively dissolves the
principle barrier thrown up between herself and her
life-companions by her grief-induced madness. She
opens herself to their stories, entering back into
them in full reciprocity by reincluding them once
again as active participants in her own. As we shall
see somewhat later, understanding personhood as a
centerless field of dramatic interplay provides the
very context that saves Huang-po's use of i-hsin or
one-mind from being seen as driving Ch'an praxis
into the awkward position of inculcating a belief in
some sort of absolute universal--the sort of
position which is arguably taken up in recent
commentaries influenced both by D. T. Suzuki's
interpretations of Zen and Blofeld's
essentialism-biased translation of Huang-po's major
treatise.

Now, one of the implications of the personal
nature of suffering is that its power is not a
function of its being an event, but of its
meaninggenerating role in a person's life. What
happens is decidedly less important than how it
ramifies among all those whole stories that are in
even some very small way included in and inclusive
of our own.

In actuality, whenever we speak of "my
suffering," we are not merely making an assertion
about a generic transformation of consciousness that
we are at this point accidentally enduring. Rather,
we are speaking the names of all our friends,
relatives, and enemies and the relations established
with them through the particular intentions we have
formed, the karma we have created. In this sense,
while suffering is irreducibly personal, unlike the
pains which afflict us all from time to time, no
suffering is in reality "mine"--something I can
possess or dispossess. And so, while suffering is
always uniquely embedded in a history in which I am
a principal player, it is never mine alone but
always ours. The true 'locus' of suffering is not
the objective, so-called "natural" world of
individual 'people' and 'things', but the fathomless
intimacy of narration. Thus, it is never merely my
experience that is marked with distress and gone
awry, but the entire drama--the world as a
whole--from which both 'you' and 'I' are only
artificially (if often for apparently 'good'
reasons) abstracted.

P.691

As persons, and consistent with the Buddha's
denial of the existence of any beginning to the
cycle of birth and death, we did not come to be at
such and such a time and place, but rather are
continually coming about as the unfolding of a
complex of relations not only between the members of
a gradually articulating cast of characters--the
primary of which is a nominally singular
narrator---but between various times, places,
actions, and levels of meaning as well. Contrary to
the experience-biased intuitions of any centrist
construction of both the person and of sociality,
such a life story is not the product of the
narrator--the 'I' or ego referred to in Buddhism as
"the self"---who gradually asserts him/herself as
the most important character in each of our tales
and who expends most of his/her efforts in
commenting on and plotting the course of the
narrative's unfolding. The subject to whose
experiences we seem to be uniquely privileged is, in
fact, but a single aspect of who we are as
narration. lust as a movie cannot be identified with
or reduced to the musings of a voiced-over narrator,
but necessarily includes other characters, a unique
group of settings and locales, a soundtrack, and so
on, a person is a whole irreducible to even the sum
of all its parts, much less to the "one" we usually
refer to as "me" and the subnarratives it constructs
in justification of its purported existence apart
from or independent of others.

There is necessarily, then, a tension involved
in speaking about narration and our 'selves' in a
single breath. In part, this is a function of the
recursiveness of narration itself, and in part a
consequence of our 'realistically' informed belief
that stories are intentionally constructed out of
logically and temporally prior facts or happenings.
As a world, narration folds back on itself at many
points, each typically identifying itself as a
'self' or 'I' apparently situated directly in the
midst of things. Indeed, the very languages we speak
are dialects of the 'self'--dialects wherein subject
differs from object, where qualities adhere or
inhere, where stories are told and listened to by
storytellers and their audiences. We must, however,
try bearing in mind that this tension between the
stories we tell about, and in construction of, our
'selves' or identities as 'persons' who live in 'the
world' and the narration or world/person of which
'you' and 'I' are simply abstract parts is itself a
function of the hubris and confusion that underlie
existential objectification and the belief that we
are selfsubsisting individuals. And so, while there
may be times when grammar and stylistic
considerations insist that we speak of narration as
if it were something 'we' do and not that out of
which 'we' arise, in actuality the very distinction
of whole and part, of creator and created, is--for
the Buddhist--entirely spurious. Once again, all
differences are made.

Narration, in the sense in which it will be used
here, is therefore not to be understood as relating
in the sense of telling, but rather of being brought
into intimate connection, of healing or making
whole. In conse-

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quence, the suggestion that we see persons as
narration is not of a piece with narrative models of
the self like that recently proposed by Paul Ricoeur
(1993) , where what is essential is the
definition--the identification--of who it is that
speaks, acts, recounts about him- or herself, and is
the moral subject of imputation (p. 16) . For
Ricoeur, it is indeed imperative that we move away
from the philosophy of the subject--the exclusive
constitution of the self in terms of what "I
am"--but only to the extent that we realize that
identifying our own selves depends on the presence
of and our interaction with others as necessary
context. Narration is thus made a function of the
storytelling ego who identifies him- or herself as
the center through a juxtaposition or interaction
with others who remain steadfastly positioned at one
or another level of circumference. Contrary to such
persuasions, a fully Buddhist articulation of who we
are as persons entails nothing short of removing the
very presumption of ontological difference, of the
distinction of 'self and 'other'--in short, of
relinquishing all of the horizons by means of which
we identify our own 'selves' and those of 'others'.
As will be argued below, as narration the ideal
person is seen by Ch'an not as some 'one' acting in
the world, but as that unprecedented conduct by
means of which entire worlds are healed: a
bodhisattva, a buddha.

Now, to be sure, the stories 'we' tell settle or
fix what is otherwise unsettling and are thus
unavoidably derivative of the ever-burgeoning
narration out of which 'you' and 'I' as identifiable
beings or individuals have been carefully if not
always consciously abstracted. In short, our various
tellings allow us to decide what we shall claim as
our own. But while telling may therefore function as
our primordial means of ascertaining or
comprehending 'the world' by fixing it in the
`self-articulated forms of concretely told
narrative, the narrative movement or conduct out of
which we have chosen to identify our 'selves' as
more or less discrete beings is by no means
prohibited from blossoming in unabated creativity.
The constant reference in the Mahaayaana texts
favored by Chinese Buddhism to the interpenetration
of myriad buddha-lands is in this sense a means of
denying the ontological status of different places
and articulating instead the realization that our
'world' is a single and limiting construal of the
'same' narration that a buddha constitutes as a
realm in which everything without exception is
continuously accomplishing the buddha-work of
enlightenment. As such, conduct is the irrepressible
unfolding of new worlds that our self-spoken and
'self'-articulating stories only imperfectly and
obscurely mirror.

And so, while as selfish individuals we tell
stories about who we are, selecting these or those
events as useful and rejecting others as out of
character for the constitution of our 'persons',
there is another 'level' at which there is no 'one'
telling the story, at which we are truly persons and
not merely 'self'-articulating 'persons'. As a
useful analogy, think of story-

P.693

tellers ('persons' or 'selves') as being like dots
strung out along one side of a strip of paper and
their narratives as wavy, often overlapping lines on
the opposite side. A person--narration or world in
the fullest sense--is the folding of this paper into
a Mobius strip, a process by virtue of which the
opposition of 'teller' and 'tale' is completely
dissolved, rendered a function of point of view. As
the analogy suggests, whether we are the same or
different from our narration is a matter of
orientation. As 'selves' we differ not only from
each other, but from the lives we lead, the actions
we undertake, the decisions we make. In the
terminology of Ch'an, as 'selves' or 'persons', we
live yu-wei, while as persons we enjoy a liberating
absence of all such horizons, living wholly without
precedent or wu-wei. Thus, as terms of art,
narrative--a thing told and hence which
decides--will be associated with the doings of the
self, while narration-what we will later describe as
a mode of envaluation--will be allied with the
harmony-realizing improvisation of Buddhist
personhood. Narratives distinguish 'selves' while
narration fosters the timely--that is,
dramatic--interpenetration (t'ung) of all things,
the realization of what Ch'an master Huang-po refers
to as i-hsin, or "one-mind."

To reiterate, if persons are the ceaselessly
dynamic interrelation of all of a story's characters
and actions into a recursively structured and
constantly evolving whole, they cannot be held to be
located at or identified with any particular form,
place, or time. Persons are not located in
narratives. They are not a character, but rather the
coming together of all the characters, all the
actions, all the places and events that occur as
what we refer to as "the world." Insofar as our
karma sets the overall topology of our ongoing
experience, there is nothing that we are not
responsible for, nothing which we can point to and
say "that is not me." As narration, our distinction
of inside and outside is purely dramatic. In
actuality, there is no outside, and the only
complete answer to the question "Who am I?" does not
entail our being opposed to or separated from
others, but is simply the meaning or ramifying of
everything that has and is coming about.

What is actually 'given' are not others arrayed
about a real and central self, but
interpersonality-the fundamentally ambiguous
interpenetration and continual reorienting of
narratives that (being recursively articulated) are
incomplete and thus not purely or intrinsically
subjective, and that (because they emerge only
between the twin horizons of birth and death) we can
never stand outside of in order wholly to objectify
as 'things' (dharmas). In other words, what is
'given' is the normally excluded and inherently
dynamic middle between subject and object or
individual and collective-what we have been
referring to as conduct, the movement of our
narration as a whole.

As a prelude to exploring the nature of conduct
more fully and in a specifically Chinese Buddhist
context, it is advisable that we consider this

P.694

claim more fully. In particular, what does it mean
to claim that persons are in actuality neither
'here' nor 'there', neither 'this' nor 'that'?

Nonduality and Its Implications for Buddhist
Personhood

Of the many teachings of the Mahaayaana that
were imported into China from the later Han dynasty
onward, none came to enjoy either a wider or more
profound currency than that of nonduality.
Especially as appropriated by Ch'an, what nonduality
means is not merely refraining from ontological
commitment, from making determinate statements about
the nature of things existing or not existing, but
the virtuosic responsiveness of a bodhisattva who
has realized the lack of any difference between
sa.msaara and nirvana, between his or her mind and
that of the Buddha and all the patriarchs. The
achievement of Ch'an nonduality, far from
representing a mere eschewal of intellectual
commitment to any identifiable 'this' or 'that'-the
abstract apprehension of some universal
sameness--signifies the lively birth of a
buddha-world in which distances both spatial and
temporal have become so relativized that they no
longer act as barriers or even segregating horizons
(ching). In short, it may be understood as the
achievement of unlimited skill in means (upaya),
unlimited virtuosity in improvising the liberation
of all 'beings'. The literature of the Hua-yen
school-the theoretical counterpart of Ch'an--is thus
luxuriant with descriptions of what we must refer to
as instantaneous travel or influence, of macrocosms
fitting comfortably in microcosms, of lands where
even Maara--the nearest Buddhist equivalent to
Satan--is found doing the buddha-work. All of which
indicate not only the miraculous nature or
disposition (hsing(a)) of the Mahaayaana Buddhist
cosmos, but the remarkable extent to which the
importance of location or perspective is maximally
attenuated therein.

Crucially, the alliance of the impermanence and
interpenetration of all things strongly suggests
that the world must be understood as both originally
ambiguous and profoundly surprising. That is,
insofar as there are at no level any simple,
autonomous existents and since any thing 'involves
and is involved by' all things, no matter how stable
or full of momentum the present world configuration
appears, this is only appearance. Just as the
relationships obtaining among all the events
previously related in a story can be completely
inverted or transformed with a particularly radical
twist of plot, the Mahayana cosmos and the meaning
of its occurrences can shift direction instantly and
in ways that are entirely unanticipated. Change need
not be serial--a matter of spreading influence--or
cumulative, but can be realized immediately
throughout an entire world configuration, much as a
shift in perceptual gestalt transforms the 'vase'
into 'two women in conversation' without any line
being redrawn or individually interpreted.

P.695

It is not, then, that ambiguity is a function of
our imperfect sensory or cognitive faculties. To the
contrary, all certainty, all definition, is
ultimately conventional or chosen. In this light, it
is not coincidental that the awakening of the sixth
patriarch, Hui-neng, occurred with his listening to
a recitation of the Diamond Sutra, the philosophical
crux of which is the realization that

[this] is not a ['this'], we only refer to it as
["this"],

where [this] represents that which precedes
definition as an object of our concern, ['this']
stands for that which is constituted as such an
object via our projection of horizons for what is
presently taken as relevant in deciding what is, and
["this"] is the symbolic or verbal designation by
means of which we identify ['this'] for others.
Liberation is not an escape from the world, but a
relaxation of the boundary conditions projected for
existence--a relaxation which returns the world to
its originally surprising fluidity, which makes it
possible for an illiterate and fatherless peasant
child to realize the absence of any difference
between his mind and that of the buddhas and
patriarchs. Granted that, for the Chinese, knowledge
or realization (chih) was typically construed not
merely as insight (knowing that), but necessarily as
a responsive enactment or performance (knowing how)
(see, for example, Hansen 1981, pp. 322 ff), what
Hui-neng enjoys upon hearing the Diamond Sutra is
not mere insight but a total transformation of
conduct, of the way his world is going as a whole.

We can approach this distinction with somewhat
more precision, perhaps, by noting that there are no
words in the Chinese language that directly parallel
the terms in which nonduality is spoken of in
Sanskrit---sat (existence, being) and
asat(nonexistence, nonbeing). In fact, the words
used to translate sat and asat-yu and wu-are
decidedly relational and highly relative in flavor,
establishing a continuum between having (yu) and
not-having (wu). Instead of the inviolable cleavage
asserted with the maintenance of the dichotomy of
sat and asat and the possibility it opens up of
conceiving things in terms of identity and
difference, yu and wu represent poles of inclusion,
indicating that the primary ontological concerns of
the Chinese are at once pluralistic and
nonindividualistic. For the Chinese, it is not the
case that being grounds the possibility of having or
including and the evaluations these evidence, but
inclusion as such--the manifestation of valued
relationships--which opens the potential for what we
refer to as "being."

Thus, for the accomplished Chinese Buddhist,
nonduality actually connoted a refusal to stand
anywhere along the entire spectrum Funning from
having to not-having, from possessing to lacking,
from holding on or back to grasping for. Rather than
just refraining from making categorical statements
about the nature of things and the world they
constitute,

P.696

nonduality entails opening up completely-dissolving
the horizons segregating what is preferred and what
is not, what is 'mine' and what is 'yours', and thus
removing any hindrance to our readiness for
awakening (tun-wu) . Granted this, Pai-chang's
suggestion (HTC 119.442a) that enlightenment is
nothing other than perfecting the path of offering,
or danaparamita, is not merely a way of valorizing
generosity or charity for solely moral purposes; it
is a metaphysically cogent way of insisting that
enlightenment means actively eschewing the
demarcation of what is 'within' and what is
'without', what is 'self' and what is 'other',
without falling into the trap of seeing this
emptiness as a blank and insentient void.

It is not the case, then, that Pai-chang's
declaration that the path of enlightenment is one of
not-making or selecting anything--of conduct that is
wu-wei (HTC 119.425a)--implies a quietist restraint
from all involvement with others and activity in the
world. To the contrary, the indicated realization of
nonduality must be understood as an orientation of
conduct away from the restrictions imposed by
precedent and regulation and toward the
improvisational virtuosity of unmitigated
responsiveness. In such a light, Lin-chi's
insistence that we must kill 'the Buddha' if we meet
'him' on the road is not witless iconoclasm, but a
profoundly metaphysical caution that any ostensibly
objective difference signals a shattering of
nonduality, the projection of difference-making
horizons and the concomitant appearance of a virtual
self--that central locus about which all such
horizons are manifestly arrayed.

And so, in sharp contrast with the banana tree
analogy, the image most commonly associated with
emptiness (Chin k'ung, Skt `suunyataa) in the East
Asian Buddhist tradition is that of the sky--an
image which orients us 'outward' rather than
'inward', toward the field rather than the figure,
toward the public and interpersonal rather than the
private and psychological. In short, emptiness is
not seen primarily in terms of an intrinsically
absent core, but as the unlimited expansiveness of
our interrelation. It is not the nonkernel which
remains when the layers of selfhood have been peeled
back in ever tightening sets of circumstance, but
what obtains when all identifying and
differentiating horizons are dissolved. To the
extent that Chinese Buddhists affirm the emptiness
of persons, we would anticipate this leading us away
from precisely the kind of individuating emphasis on
psychological perspective encouraged both by the
Indian Buddhist and by systems-theoretical modeling
of persons. Indeed, it is just such a reorientation
which is expressed in both Huang-po's teaching of
i-hsin (one-mind) and Lin-chi's declaration that
realizing our buddha-nature is conducting ourselves
as true persons without any position or rank (wei).
Most importantly for our own conversation, it is
only by fully appreciating the profoundly
metaphysical implications of this reorientation that
Hui-neng's remark that "it is precisely Buddhist

P.697

conduct/practice (hsing(b)) that is the Buddha" (PS,
section 42) can be properly understood as requiring
us to see enlightenment as social in nature-the
realization of a uniquely variegated and
unprecedented buddha-world--and not as a
fundamentally private experience or state of
consciousness. In this sense, i-hsin does not refer
to a realm of abstracted unity like that ostensibly
proposed by the Vedic articulation of Brahman, but
rather to a dramatically evolving world whose unity
is a function not of exclusive self-identity but of
harmoniously articulated concourse or
flowing-together. I-hsin is not, then, a practical
reduction into the brilliant anonymity of universal
existence, but should be seen as virtuosic
communication-the centerlessly creative narration of
all things.

Karma and Conduct: The Ontology of Chinese Buddhist
Personhood

By itself, the claim that it is Buddhist conduct
that is the Buddha entails seeing the ideal Buddhist
person in terms of conduct and not according to
individually possessed marks or states of
consciousness. But it does not require us to admit
that the original nature (pen hsing) of such persons
must be seen as irreducibly dramatic narration. The
necessary linkage between the relational nature of
personhood and the dramatic nature of narration may,
at least in East Asian Buddhism, be established by
the doctrine of karma.

In very brief, the function of karma in the
conceptual scheme of Buddhism is to undermine the
belief that each of us exists as individuals in a
world that is both objectively real and disparate in
its origins from our own intentions and knowing.
According to the doctrine, the circumstances in
which we find ourselves cannot be divorced from our
intentions and actions, but are understood instead
as a function thereof. That is, the world is not a
realm into which we are accidentally born or thrown
in a Heideggerian sense, but rather an expression of
who we are. And so not only the other people with
whom we have relationships, but the historical and
cultural settings for those relationships and the
particular quality of their unfolding are all our
responsibility.

While the Buddha was clear in denying that this
responsibility should be construed in an absolute or
megalomaniacal sense--claiming, for example, that
Brahma was not the creator of the universe, but was
simply deluded into thinking so because he was the
first being to appear in this world cycle--it is
nevertheless the case that who we are and the world
we live in are functionally inseparable. If we had
different karma, we would be living in different
circumstances, in a world otherwise configured. And
so, if we did not share intentions conducive to the
realization of a world in which there occurs a
crisis in Somalia, an ongoing tragedy in Sarajevo,
and a string of apparently senseless murders of
foreign tourists on Florida's highways, we would
simply have been born in 'other'

P.698

worlds. These may be thought of in terms of parallel
universes, birth in other solar systems, or what
have you. That is not particularly important. The
karmic point is simply that our intentions are
constitutive of what-has -come-to-be and how, and
that there is no line demarcating what we are and
are not responsible for.

I would submit that for the Buddhist, this means
that our world is irreducibly dramatic. Like the
English "drama," which derives from the Creek draein
('to act' or 'do') and which later came to be
associated not only with deeds generally but with
performances displaying the manner in which our
choices determine the meaning of our always jointly
articulated lives, karma not only implies purposive
action but also the inescapable meaningfulness of
our purposes for how things have already and will
yet come about. In short, whatever is occurring is
doing so not because of some initial conditions and
the working on them of objective laws (whether fixed
and absolute or merely statistical), but because of
the quality of the relationships being realized, the
problems and blockages being worked out. Hence the
Buddha's remark that

of deeds done and accumulated with deliberate
intent, I declare there is no wiping out. That
wiping out has to come to pass either in this
very life or in some other life at its proper
occasion. Without experiencing the result of
deeds so done, I declare there is no making an
end of dukkha (crisis) . (Anguttara-nikaaya
V.292)

It is not, however, that karma amounts to a
system of individual retribution or payback (L re +
tribuere)--a sort of "eye for an eye, tooth for a
tooth" balancing of behavioral credits and debits.
Such a conception may not be wholly inaccurate when
applied to the Hindu tradition as exemplified, for
example, by the Bhagavad-giitaa, but it profoundly
distorts the preferred uses of the term in a
Buddhist context. To begin with, the Buddha's
insistence on the selflessness and impermanence of
all things prohibits our seeing any individual agent
as the maker and undergoer of karma. When, for
example, Sati suggests that consciousness is the
"feeler who experiences the fruit of deeds," the
Buddha declares him woefully misguided, since
consciousness--the locus of experience--is itself
empty or dependently arisen (MN I.259-60). At the
same time, the Buddha steadfastly denied that any
deeds are without experienced consequences. In other
words, karma should be understood as a nonlinear
conditioning of the topology of experience as such.

Granted that the Buddhist concept of karma is
explicitly conditional rather than deterministic and
hence involves not merely volitional action but the
occurrence or flowing together of complexes of
intentional acts, their consequences, and the
specific characters or natures of the various
participants in their occurrence (see, for instance,
the Anguttara-nikaaya 1.249 and the
Mahaa-kammavibha^nga-sutta [MN III.207ff]) , and
granted as

P.699

well that any consistently Buddhist ontology places
value prior to being, the importance of volition
(cetana) should not be construed as due to its power
or influence as such but because it marks a decision
among relative values--the projection of what is
liked and desired, disliked and avoided, or left
quite out of consideration. That is, since they do
not mark the incursion or expression of new values,
actions which are not volitional will not further
condition the unfolding and enfolding of our
relationships. In a word, they do not precipitate a
diversion or reconfiguration of the meaning of what
is coming about. Intentional acts, on the other
hand, mark the investment of new values, the
creation of new relational pathways, or the further
intensification of old ones.

In light of all the above, karmic fruit--the
result of volitional activity --is arguably best
viewed less as individually determined retribution
as it is the conditional arising of dramatic
resolution in conduct. In short, karma is not simply
a paying back, but a resolution of relationship,
literally a process which allows us to be once again
freed or loosened (L re + solvere) from a binding
connection. Karma brings about the opportunity truly
to relinquish our ignorance. To pick an example from
our own tradition, Hamlet's dilemma should be seen
as quintessentially karmic, involving as it does not
only his own character, with its strengths and
weaknesses, but those of his family members and the
various other nobles with whom he is implicated in
the political upheaval of the times, the history of
the Danish people, the climate of their land, and
the unique architecture of their self-preservation.
Especially in light of the Confician virtues
informing the Chinese Buddhist's sense of rulership,
what Hamlet is confronted with is not merely a
question of either avenging his father's death or
not, but of finding out who he truly is and what it
means to be an authentically human heir to his
father's throne--a person capable of setting the
entire kingdom in order or disarray simply by
adjusting his own bearing or orientation (see, for
example, Analects XV.5) . Karma implies the
opportunity of learning how the manner in which
things have come to be configured is intimately a
function of our own motives, our hopes and dreams,
our longings and fears, and the profoundly tragic,
comedic, and at times even poetic relations these
nurture or retard.

What the doctrine of karma decisively rules out
is accepting the premise that some things just
happen--are a matter of chance or luck rather than
occur as a function of choices made by everyone
implicated therein. It is no accident, then, that in
choosing a term to translate the Sanskrit "karma,"
the Chinese did not select (for instance) tso--which
has the connotation of making or doing and implies
individual activity--but yeh--which refers at once
to both our estate and all that contributes to its
acquisition and maintenance. For the Chinese, this
places under the umbrella of karma not only the
physical/geographical context in which we grow up,
but a cultural and social one as well, since

P.700

the concept of yeh explicitly involves our
occupation, business, or profession and so implies
what kinds of people we meet and work with and in
what capacities, the kinds of status we enjoy or are
barred from, the kind, of risks and challenges we
encounter, the tools we use, the education to which
we and our relatives are entitled, the range of
possible partners eye have in marriage, and so on.

What karma signified for the Chinese was not,
then, the just desserts of an individual's behavior,
but rather the prosperity and way of life of an
entire family--quite literally, the qualitative
integrity of its entire world. It is never just
'your' or 'my' experience that is marked by
suffering or harmony, but our entire world that is
gone awry or faring well. Ultimately, there is no
center to identify as an objective locus of personal
subsistence. Who we are is not answerable in terms
of some specific focus, but in terms of the movement
of our world as a whole. Thus, when the Buddha
denies taking a stand or adopting any fixed locus,
it is the propensity of the Chinese Buddhist to
understand this not simply as entailing the
relinquishing of habitual perspectives, but as
pointing out that persons in the truest sense have
no location at all--an understanding reinforced by
the fact that the Chinese word for person (jen) is
itself neither singular nor plural. It is hardly
surprising, then, that Pai-chang says that if one is
liberated, a thousand follow and that if one is
confused, ten thousand are deluded (HTC 119.425a).
Our fortunes are irreducibly communal. What occurs
for any 'one' of us necessarily affects us all.

In a similar vein and echoing the Buddha's own
words, Huang-po makes it quite clear that it is
precisely the "Tao (path) that has no location which
is called Mahayana mind. This mind is not present
inside, outside, or in-between. In actuality, there
are no 'locations' " (T 2012.382c). Later, in
speaking of "supreme enlightenment"---the province
of a truly Buddhist person or buddha-Huang-po says
that it means having no place to anchor. It is
"conducting yourself as all the buddhas have...
responding without any fixed perspective" (T
2012.383b). As the wording of this claim suggests,
conduct cannot be taken to be synonymous with
behavior. In the service of at least verbally
marking their incommensurability, it may be noted
that the word "conduct" derives from the Latin
conducere (com together + ducere to lead) as its
past participle and so can be understood as "having
been led together," suggesting the further Buddhist
gloss of "evident karmic connection." In this sense,
conduct arises conditionally as mutual articulation
or personal expression. Since "conduct" is also
cognate with "conduce" and "conducive," we also can
include within its connotational field helpfulness
or contribution. Conduct is thus best seen as a
contributory or furthering relationship. By
contrast, "behavior" proceeds from the Middle
English be thoroughly + have to hold oneself, and
thus implies individuality rather than communality,
possession rather than contribution, and a
reflexive,rather than a

P.701

radiating and appreciative concern--a concern which
gathers and holds value rather than offering it.

All of this is implied by hsing(b), the Chinese
term that has been rendered throughout our
conversation as "conduct." Originally, hsing(b) had
the primary connotations of walking or walkways and
doing in the sense of working. Indeed, of the twenty
or so most common terms incorporating the hsing(b)
radical, fully half have the meaning of a road,
marketplace, or thoroughfare. Walking connects us,
establishing and maintaining in the most concrete
fashion possible our ongoing interrelation. No path
or thoroughfare proceeds from wilderness or desert
to more of the same, but only from family to family,
from village to village. Our roads and the markets
lining them are evidence of the diverse manners in
which we are continually being led together, the
unique ways in which we benefit from and share in
one another's labor. In short, hsing(b) is the
primordial means of our mutual contribution or
furthering. Not surprisingly, the secondary meanings
of hsing(b) include business or trade-meanings, it
will be recalled, that are held in common with yeh
or karma.

Moreover, since hsing(b) was also used as a
translation of both sa.mskaara -habitual
dispositions--and bhaavanaa--Buddhist
practice-conduct in a Chinese Buddhist context does
not refer to one particular type of being led
together or karmic connection. Like the English
"length," which entails both shortness and longness,
the Chinese hsing(b) or conduct entails the entire
spectrum obtaining between relationships that are
binding and those that are enlightening. In short,
the nature of conduct is a function of orientation:
polarized on the one hand toward establishing,
maintaining, or undermining universally adhered-to
structures of regulated behavior with an aim of
realizing agreement, and on the other toward
establishing, maintaining, or undermining jointly
improvised and harmonious narratives--what we shall
term the societal and the social, respectively. In
the former, our relations with others are taken to
be external in nature, and communication is
understood in terms of discourse--literally the
flowing apart of those present, their articulation
as distinct individuals or 'selves'. In the latter,
relations are understood as internal or in terms of
interpenetration, and communication is not an
exchange or influence but concourse--flowing
together in creative integration or harmony.

Thus understood, conduct is the original nature
(pen hsing) to which Hui-neng directs us in his
exhortation for us to look into our own nature and
become buddhas (PS, section 2). Oriented societally,
conduct spawns 'sentient beings' with all their
conflicts and attempts at agreement, all their
conventions for making certain that matters don't
get out of hand and evidence instead an order based
on abiding principles. Oriented socially, conduct is
the flowering of incomparable buddha-lands, the
furthering of the bodhisattva life, the virtuosic
improvisation of intimacy.

P.702

In the former, we find 'individuals' and the
various, encircling 'worlds' of their concern ranged
about them. In the latter, we participate in the
campestral generosity of authentic personhood, in
the true suchness (chen ju) of unhindered and
unhesitating enlightenment.

In keeping with the vocabulary being developed
over the course of our conversation, conduct may be
understood as the always ongoing, nonlocalized
reorganization of an entire world as such, or
"narrative movement." As such, conduct neither
refers to nor ultimately depends on what is
psychological or subjective--our likes and dislikes,
experiences, intentions, and so on. Indeed,
experience is not the necessary prelude to conduct,
but rather what is culled from it by the
discriminating functions of the six senses. At the
same time, conduct is not something purely
objective--the states of our bodies, our
environment, and their interaction--from which we as
independent observers can deduce the nature of
reality. Instead, conduct should be seen as what
remains when the discriminating standpoints from
which subject and object are determined have been
entirely eschewed--in short, as the realized meaning
of karma.

As an experienced 'fact', the difference of self
and other is as manifestly incontestable as the
difference between sunrise and sunset. For better or
worse, and for all its naturalness, it is also just
as much a function of point of view. As long as we
are confined to the surface of the earth, we cannot
but see the sun as rising and setting. We cannot but
view dawn and dusk as temporally and spatially
discrete events. And yet, once we attain a
sufficiently high perspective (though by no means a
view from nowhere), it is possible to see--all our
ordinary experience to the contrary--that sunrise
and sunset form a single golden ring, wedding the
dark and light sides of the planet. Dawn and dusk
are inseparable.

Likewise for 'self' and 'other'. The assumption
that a person should be identified as a central
gathering of--to use J. Mohanty's felicitous phrase
--various "layers of selfhood" is, at bottom, no
more justified than the long held belief that "all
roads lead to Rome" or that the earth is at the
center of the universe. To extend the analogy, the
Buddhist claim that persons are both temporally and
spatially indeterminate amounts to a 'Copernican
revolution' whereby it is seen that not only is the
experienced centrality of our place in the world
without any ultimate ontological basis, but the
gathering with which we identify our selves is
actually a learned process of simply divorcing that
over which "I" cannot exercise direct control. Thus,
just as Copernicus exploded the determinate
centrality of the earth in the heavens and helped
eventuate the realization that there is in fact no
center of the universe, a consistently Buddhist view
of personhood exhorts us to relinquish our hold on
our selves as the focus of all that we experience.
As suggested by Hui-neng's assertion that it is
precisely Buddhist conduct/practice which is the
Bud-

P.703

dha, this entails nothing less than realizing that
enlightenment amounts not to a change in the status
of a given individual, but to the transformation of
an entire world.

Ch'an Enlightenment: Realizing the True Person of No
Rank

To the extent that our conduct is oriented
societally, the world we realize shall be one that
nurtures the appearance of separate and horizonbound
individuality: sa.msaara, the realm of "thisness
and otherwiseness." If, however, our conduct is
social, the world we realize shall be one in which
there is nothing that cannot accomplish the
buddha-work: the Pure Land, the realm of nonduality.
Now, granted the ambiguity of the Buddhist cosmos,
the disparity of these worlds cannot but be seen as
a function of our karma. That is, they ultimately
depend on nothing more substantial than the nature
of our intent or orientation.

However, since there is originally not even a
'cosmos', much less a myriad of the individual
'things' it comprises, intention cannot in a
strictly Buddhist sense be understood as
psychological--the tending of a subject toward a
disparate object. As intimated above, in an
inversion of the dispositions of Indo-European
metaphysics, all being or definite existence is, for
the Buddhist, subordinate to value. Intention,
therefore, is perhaps best thought of as
envaluation--as the biasing of awareness itself and
as such. While a full explanation of the rationale
for doing so lies well beyond the scope of our
present conversation, would suggest that there are
two primary modes of such envaluation or
world-elicitation-calculation and narration.

In very brief, calculation marks the path of
discrimination--a mode of envaluation which projects
discrete and fundamentally interchangeable objects
even as it introjects equally discrete perceiving
and thinking subjects. That is, it provides the
transformative context within which a world can be
reduced to a collection of various types of
individuals, opening up thereby the potential for
societality. As such, calculation is the matrix out
of which 'selves' are brought into existence--that
is, into standing out or apart from (ex +
sistere)--and with them the possibility of having
and not-having, of asserting "is" and "is-not."

The overall tenor of calculation is quite aptly
illustrated by reference to the original Latin
root--calcus--which means "pebble" and specifically
refers to the stones used to stand for items being
counted. Calculation depends, that is, on
abstracting--in the sense both of removing an event
or entity from the continuum of experience and of
moving away from unique relations to a scheme of
universals (classes) and particulars (instances).
Such abstraction is, however, necessarily reductive
if 'things' are always made and never simply
discovered--one of the central tenets of Buddhist
metaphysics. Indeed, without setting definite
horizons for relevance, there is simply no
possibility of ever identifying an object as

P.704

such. Counting, developing an account, forwarding a
rationale, weighing risks, and gauging probable
returns--all depend on segregating what is relevant
and what is not, what we must figure in and what we
can discount. Failing to do so puts us in the
position of being unable to achieve closure or
finalize our calculation, of being doomed to an
'irrational' situation. What has no boundaries--in
Buddhist terms, whatever is truly empty--cannot be
pointed out, cannot be counted, cannot be 'mine' or
'yours'.

Thus, Huang-po says that in order to realize
Mahaayaana mind--the mind that has no location, the
mind of a true person and not a mere sentient
being--one must exhaust ch'ing and liang, where
ch'ing is feeling or desire, but also circumstances
or the facts of a case, and where liang is
calculating, measuring, or deliberating. (T
2012A.382b) . That is, to cease calculating is
already to cut off concern for having and not-having
to stop making decisions about the world based on
likes and dislikes. In a word, it is simply and
immediately to respond as needed (ying yung), to
conduct ourselves wu-wei.

By contrast, narration evidences the middle path
or nondiscrimination -a mode of envaluation which is
unremittingly conducive to dramatic resolution.
Rather than fostering the distillation of discrete
and yet ultimately generic subjects and objects,
narration draws analogies, intensifying and not
analyzing relation. That is, narration weaves the
initially disparate into complex wholes without
sacrificing the uniqueness of the relations so
integrated. The shift of orientation suggested here
indicates that while calculating is initially
fragmentive, its direction is toward monistic
finality or closure due to its hierarchically
structured tendency toward abstractive reduction.
Narration, however, is thoroughly assimilative or
holistic, rejecting nothing and yet orienting us
toward an order that is surprisingly open or
continually and dramatically burgeoning.

If it is the case that calculation is a biasing
of awareness conducive to the realization of
sa.msaara and so is productive of effectively
independent subjects and objects, narration should
be seen as conducive to the elicitation of stories,
of dramatically enriching ensembles of relation. The
contrast here is between existence and
interdependence, between living among others and
living with and through them. Whereas factual events
happen decisively in time and at specified
locations, there are in actuality no beginnings and
ends to stories, no boundaries which are not
explicitly a function of selection. Stories thus
imply infinite pasts and infinite futures even
though they cannot encompass them.Narration is
timely, but not fixed in time. It weaves things into
place without itself being placed.

While we may (under the influence of a
calculative bias) think of stories as things that
are handed down, proceeding from one place and time
to another, in fact it is new times and places, new
tellers and

P.705

audiences, that are drawn up into the stories and
brought into harmony or coordination thereby.
Calculatively framed, communication amounts to the
necessarily discursive transmission and reception of
information. To say that we communicate indicates
successful exchange, but not interpenetration. But
this is precisely what is implied in a narrative
context. For example, the title of Huang-po's major
treatise, the Ch'uan-hsin fa-yao, is typically
translated as "The Essential Teaching of the
Transmission of Mind," suggesting that it details
how mind or (via Ma-tsu's "this very mind is
Buddha") enlightenment is moved from place to place.
In fact, while the term ch'uan is often rendered as
either narration or transmission-suggesting that the
two are interchangeable--it actually means relating
in the sense of the spreading of stories, legends,
or (for that matter) rumors. It is the verbally
mediated conjunction or union of the members of a
community. Comprising the radical for person and the
character chuan, which has a constellation of
connotations including sole or unique, being
attached or devoted to, and giving oneself up
entirely to, ch'uan can be seen as the
interpenetration of persons, the realization of
nonduality as communication. Thus, the title of
Huang-po's treatise--the primary teaching of which
is that "all the Buddhas and sentient beings are
just one-mind (i-hsin)," and that this is realized
by having no-'mind' (wu-hsin) or going "beyond all
boundaries, calculations, names, words, traces, and
attitudes" (T 2012A.379c)--is better rendered as
"Crucial Teachings on the Narration of Mind."

It should come as no surprise, then, that when
he was asked for the significance of the term
"middle path," Pai-chang mischievously replied that
it means "boundaries" (pien). After all, "if there
were no boundaries (no horizons), from whence would
the 'middle' come to be?" (HTC 119.424b). If we
didn't project likes and dislikes--external or
objective 'things' we crave and detest--there could
be no 'middle path'. All that would remain is the
campestral generosity of an oceanic mind which
selects nothing. Realizing horizonless intimacy
through a systematic relinquishing of all
impediments to social virtuosity, the practitioners
of Ch'an undertake to refuse nothing on principle,
to project no distinctions which will cause the
narration of which they are a part to splinter into
mutually exclusive subjects and objects. "When a
bodhisattva's mind is like the empty sky,
every-'thing' is entirely relinquished"--that is, no
horizons remain, no possibility of marking some
'thing' or 'individual' off from everything else and
saying what it 'is'.

Then, there is nothing to grasp, nothing to push
away. In accordance with the situation, you
respond to things and 'agent' and 'acted upon'
are both forgotten. This is great
relinquishing.... [I]t is like a blazing torch
right in front of you so that there's nothing
further of 'delusion' or 'enlightenment'. (T
2012.382a)

P.706

With no shadow of 'self' remaining in what lies
before us, enlightenment is simply the realization
of true and clear relationship with others.

It is evident from Huang-po's characterization
of the great relinquishing (ta she) as "according
with your situation and responding as needed'' that
it is not merely a putting away or release--a kind
of rejection--but entails in addition an offering or
giving, a spirit of concern. In fact, the Chinese
term she not only suggests parting with something,
but includes the sense of bestowal, the giving of
alms. In short, the great relinquishing can be seen
as an unhindered embodiment of daanapaaramitaa-as
freely entering the gate of Ch'an enlightenment.
Since what we are giving up in this great
relinquishing are not the tools of our trades, our
food, or our relationships with others, but rather
all forms or distinctions (hsiang), our offering is
not of anything in particular but rather of the
energy that has until now been locked up in the
habitual maintenance of 'self', 'other',
'good','evil,' and so on. With the release of this
energy, we signal our manifest readiness for
creating a pure land--for living the bodhisattva
life.

Granted that narration allows the realization of
nonduality or the Pure Land, and given that this
means nothing more than a reorientation away from
calculating, there is in fact nothing to keep us all
from realizing that we are buddhas. No distance
needs to be traversed, no time spent. What
distinguishes a buddha and a sentient being is just
the absence or presence of horizons to readiness.

This suggests that the central doctrine of
Ch'an-the teaching of tun-wu or what is usually
translated as "sudden enlightenment"--is not a
declaration of fact about the nature of
enlightenment or the speed with which it is
attained, but is rather a verbalization of the core
practice of Ch'an. If enlightenment is not to be
identified with any particular experience but is
instead given in conduct or narrative movement as a
great relinquishing, taking tun as a primarily
temporal indicator would seem manifestly
inappropriate. In fact, Hui-neng--traditionally
regarded as the first proponent of the "sudden
teaching"---makes it quite clear that it is not the
dharma which is 'sudden' (tun(a) ) or 'gradual'
(chien), but people who are keen (li) or dull
(tun(b)) (PS 16). That is, the distinction being
made is dispositional, not temporal. Some people are
slow--reluctant to divest themselves entirely of the
discriminations which retard the natural resolution
of their karma--and effectively inhibit the clearing
of their narrative, deferring enlightenment by
continuing to make decisions and act on the basis of
their habits for 'what works'. Others are li--people
who are willing and clever enough presently to reap
the fruit of their deeds, to accept and digest their
karma and free all the energy which has until now
been kept bound up in them. Ch'an personhood--the
realization of no-'mind' or one-mind--is thus not a
matter of possessing these or those

P.707

marks or attributes, but rather a function of
narrative and not calculative disposition.

Thus, tun-wu seems best translated not as
"sudden awakening, " but as the "readiness to
awaken." In fact, the character tun has the primary
connotation of bowing the head, to put in order, to
prepare. It signals the moment when we humble our
'selves' in demonstration of our unconditional
willingness to do whatever is needed. According to
Pai-chang, "Tun is the readiness to do away with
misleading thoughts"--thoughts that lead us to
neglect what is right before us. "Wu is awakening to
the absence of anything to be attained"--and, by
implication, of anyone who attains. The recommended
method for accomplishing this is ting or "responding
to circumstances with no-'mind"' (tui-ching-wu-hsin)
(HTC 119.420b) , with no set or habitual
dispositions. In short, far from indicating a flash
of insight or an instantaneous achievement of
liberation, tun-wu should be seen as wholeheartedly
placing our 'selves' entirely in the service of our
originally horizonless narration or world, as
relinquishing all limits to readiness.

Nowhere is this more forcefully articulated than
in the teachings of Lin-chi. Adamantly insisting
that he has nothing to give anyone, Lin-chi
constantly challenges his students to develop the
confidence (hsin) needed to be able to become the
master of any situation, to be able to respond
without any hesitation to whatever comes their way.
Any form of seeking is a waste of time that only
makes more karma and more deeply enmeshes us in the
habits already strangling our original nature, and
any hesitation or doubt is a blockage to the free
flow of energy on which the resolution of narrative
interruptions (that is, suffering) depends.

If you doubt even for an instant, the demon
Maara will enter your mind. When a bodhisattva
has even a moment of doubt, the demons of birth
and death take the advantage. But if you're able
to stop thinking (attain no-'mind') and moreover
don't search outwardly for anything, things just
come and are illuminated (chao). (T1985.499a)

Dispensing with all the usual worries that impede
our readiness to respond freely to the needs of
others, "there is nothing that is not profound,
nothing that is not liberation" (T1985.497c). As
Hui-neng puts it, when the mind dwells on
no-'thing', the Tao freely circulates
(tao-chi-tung-liu) (PS section 14), and there is
nothing special that needs to be done. So even if we
are unable to see our own natures, we need only
"give rise to praj~naa and illuminate with it, and
in the briefest instant all delusive thoughts are
eliminated" (PS section 31) . Nothing else is
necessary.

Relinquishing the horizons of our readiness is
thus the practical or functional equivalent of
giving rise to praj~naa--defined by Hui-neng as
chih-hui, where chih is wisdom or being capable of
conducting oneself in

P.708

an appropriate manner and where hui carries a range
of connotations including favor, benefit, conferring
kindness, according with, and being gracious. As
both Lin-chi's and Hui-neng's use of the term chao
(to "illuminate" or "reflect," but also to "look
after" or "care for") suggests, praj~naa is the
radiantly careful offering of all that comes our
way--the realization of the great, round mirror
wisdom that receives everything without any
discrimination and that without any hesitation or
holding back brightly reflects or returns it. Seen
in this light, the great relinquishing cannot be a
self-centered experience of releasing what is no
longer desired, but is realized as an understanding
kindness or wise beneficence--not something attained
or discarded, but a luminous offering of profoundest
compassion.

Thus, Lin-chi speaks of the truly Buddhist
person as wu-wei chen-jen, which literally means
"having no position genuine person." That is, having
no position or place, no established rank or
perspective, is genuinely human. On the one hand
this plays into the central teaching of Ch'an that
we "accord with the situation and respond as needed"
(sui-shih-ying-yung) --that we relate with others in
a virtuosic and improvisational manner-and on the
other hand it suggests that at a metaphysical level
we must allow that true persons have no set
place--that they do not exist as identifiable
individuals in some equally identifiable or
specifiable location. It is also worth noting the
homophony of wu-wei as without precedent or
nonaction and wu-wei as without position. Action and
precedent-initiated endeavor both imply a central
agent or actor who elects one course of interaction
over others, an agent who indulges in thinking about
his or her circumstances. This, of course, is the
crucial mark of failure for anyone engaging Lin-chi
in dharma combat (fa-chan). Hesitating, considering
options, and discriminating among guiding principles
all indicate a crippling lack of confidence (hsin),
which in the Ch'an tradition is understood as
inevitably rooted in the belief that we are not yet
buddhas, that there is some real, objective
difference between who we are and who the buddhas
and patriarchs are. Having a rank or position
involves judging which courses of action are
appropriate and which are not. In a word, it
involves busying ourselves with the calculation of
alternative consequences for our actions and so not
being free simply to respond as needed, to answer
the calls of others in the absence of objectifying
concern.

As narration, persons can be seen as the
dramatic reunion of what has been calculatedly
sundered, riven by discriminatory intent. In short,
persons cannot exist. They cannot stand out or apart
from the world as either axes of experience or
independent agents. Rather, persons should be seen
as the realization of uninterrupted intimacy, the
limitless offering referred to as "nonduality." And
yet, far from being abstract emptiness --an
emptiness in which nothing occurs--persons entail
every

P.709

manner of timely resolve, excluding no birth or
death, no joy or sadness, no exaltation or irony as
'yours, but not mine'. As a buddha--a true Person
with no rank--our body is an entire cosmos, each
least pore of which is vibrant, teeming with
ambiguity: a story whose improvisation knows no
horizon.

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations are used in the text and in the Works
Cited as follows:

A Anguttara Nikaya

HTC Hsu tsang ching

MK Muladmadhyamakakarika

MN Majjhima Nikaya

PS The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

SN Samyutta Nikaya

T Taisho-shinshu-daizokyu

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P.710

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