buddhism

Prophesy and Silence

/ Simon / 1 Comment

As part of our ongoing dialog over leftist praxis and AI, Nicolas Villareal recently put forward an article regarding the position of prophesy in theology and the question of the future. In it Villareal points toward prophesy as a universal of religion on a par with Herbert’s statement regarding the religious concern for the condition of the soul. Villareal argues prophesy is necessary for the formation of an ethic at social scale, saying, “In our everyday lives we can make decisions based solely on what we deem is a virtuous action, or whatever animates our personal cosmologies, but when we seek to affect the whole of the social world, changing the very foundations of society and the processes which shape people’s souls, there is a deeper set of consequences and difficulties. It is at this juncture that we must consult prophecies,” before arguing, contra Benjamin, that the character of the angel of history is that of a destroyer, that there will be an end to history and that it will be entropic, so entropic, in fact that “History will end with the end of destruction, on one level of abstraction or another.” This is a logical position to reach when you attempt to reassert a position for the timeless into one’s metaphysics such as by tracing the position of a single electron throughout the duration of all time.

There is quite a lot that is very fascinating here to discuss on topics theological, ethical and metaphysical but, as this discussion has largely centered around the position of theology within praxis, I think it might be best to begin by interrogating the claim that prophesy is a theological universal.

We can start by interrogating prophesy directly. We can start by looking at Acts 1:7 which reads, “When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power.”

It is not for you to know.

This fundamental anxiety is something which Kierkegaard grappled with in Fear and Trembling and it is from his chosen pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio, that we see a universal counter-principle to prophesy within religion in the form of silence. Religion arises, to no small part, out of the silence of the gods. People, posing questions to being itself receive back nothing, there is no answer to the prayer. For Kierkegaard this silence was critical to any true display of faith. In Fear and Trembling de Silentio speaks of a story from Aristotle regarding the Delphic Oracle. In it a man is due to be married when the auguries warn that the wedding will bring him grave misfortune. He makes a decision in light of the prophesy to forego the wedding and the vengeful family of his bride conceal temple goods among his possessions, dooming him to death for his transgression.

De Silentio details some choices the suitor could have made and suggests, “shall he keep silent and give up celebrating the wedding? In this case he must embroil himself in a mystifictition by which he reduces himself to naught in relation to her. Aesthetics would perhaps approve of this. The catastrophe might then be fashioned like that of the real story, except that at the last instant an explanation would be
forthcoming–however, that would be after it was all over, since aesthetically viewed it is a necessity to let him die … unless this science should see its way to annul the fateful prophecy.”

And so what we have here is prophesy as doom. The words of the Oracle are order-word, words that, “bring immediate death if they do not obey, or a death they must themselves inflict, take elsewhere.” Here the prophetic order-word of the Delphic Oracle literally brings the immediate death of the suitor whether he obeys or no. Marry and suffer misfortune. Heed the prophesy and die. The only hope for the suitor lies not in prophesy but in silence.

For de Silentio it is not merely the destructiveness of prophesy that brings him to prefer silence but also that he sees silence as the wellspring of faith. He describes silence as a method whereby a doubter can transform his silence to guilt and thereby absolve himself of the sin of his doubt, “Even the New Testament would approve of such a silence,” he announces.

Silence provides a barrier to knowability but not to meaning. Faith is not to be found in any sort of majoritarian meaning but in silence: “It is not as though Abraham would thereby become more intelligible, but in order that the unintelligibility might become more desultory. For, as I have said, Abraham I cannot understand, I can only admire him.”

Abraham’s duty to God exceeds any sort of ethic and it is this strange aim of de Silentio to divide the concept of duty to God directly from any intelligible ethic. Abraham doesn’t serve God because he knows it to be good. He does not have the comfort of prophesied knowledge to guide him. Abraham serves God because it is to God he owes his ultimate loyalty irrespective of ethical concerns. Meanwhile these machine gods of capitalism talk too much, as do their priests.

For Derrida this silence extends beyond the text as given and at least to the signature by which the book was signed: de Silentio. “This pseudonym keeps silent, it expresses the silence that is kept. Like all pseudonyms, it seems destined to keep secret the real name as patronym, that is, the name of the father of the work, in fact the name of the father of the father of the work.”

But names are a slippery thing and Derrida puts no more weight behind the patronym than LeGuin does in A Wizard of Earthsea. Rather Derrida suggests this act of self-naming is ultimately more meaningful than the legalities of patronym. The power behind a name comes from the, “secret name by which one calls oneself.”

It is almost as if Derrida were to create a minor language out of the pseudonym. If we treat the patronym as prophesy – a statement at birth that this person is destined for this experience – then this self-secret name, the pseudonym and the silent name in the heart of a subject becomes the undoing of that order-word. We see Paul Attreides too attempting to escape the face of his father in the names Usul, Muad’dib. And his visions are uncertainty. He sees history as an ever-unfolding topology of rise and fall. The doom of Muad’dib is that prophesy fails to become an order-word because of what must be kept silent. When Leto II arises, robed in the name of the father of the father of his work, he brings with him the golden path and the peril of prophesy once more.

In Herbert’s cosmology prophesy presented the risk of stultification. A people who knew too clearly the path before them would be complacent or fatalistic. Likewise, the doom that comes to Aristotle’s suitor comes from fatalistically denying his bride for fear of prophesy. Is, then, prophesy a true universal of religious experience or is it the method by which social power harnesses the mystic impulse of the masses?

The way you can go isn’t the real way.
The name you can say isn’t the real name.
Heaven and earth begin in the unnamed:
name’s the mother of the ten thousand things.
So the unwanting soul sees what’s hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul sees only what it wants.

LeGuin’s treatment of the Tao Te Ching touches on this idea of the divine as the silent and the hidden. This is an odd text: a political and spiritual treatise for kings rendered into an anarchist metaphysics, the great surpassing of Heidegger in a short translation assembled hodge-podge from other translations. Le Guin obliterates the idea of an original root text here and instead takes her meaning where she can find it. It is, as translations go, one marked by a kind of desultory elimination of meaning, so occupying contradiction as to become a cypher. Of the first verse, Le Guin said ” A satisfactory translation of this chapter is, I believe, perfectly impossible. It contains the book. I think of it as the Aleph, in Borges’s story: if you see it rightly, it contains everything.”

But if this is so, why translate at all? If this passage, seen right, allows one to see everything why not simply write, “道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。无名天地之始；有名万物之母。故常无欲，以观其妙；常有欲，以观其徼。此两者，同出而异名，同谓之玄。玄之又玄，众妙之门,” and say, this contains within it the universe? But, of course, this is LeGuin toying with her readers. “I believe that the Aleph of Calle Garay was a false Aleph,” the story says before detailing other possible false manifestations of this totality. “Does that Aleph exist, within the heart of a stone? Did I see it when I saw all things, and then forget it? Our minds are permeable to forgetfulness; I myself am distorting and losing, through the tragic erosion of the years, the features of Beatriz.” The silence of the forgotten creates doubt in the most total of all visions. And the act of translation, if we take Le Guin at her word, necessarily reduces the meaning of the statement. Otherwise a perfect translation would not be impossible. It is, perhaps, that a maximal quantity of meaning is necessarily harmful to intelligibility. If one did, in fact, see everything, all at once, how would they possibly remember it? The name you can say is not the real name. The careful ordering of meaning in the patronym collapses in the face of the secret name.

Marx, certainly, cautioned against the pride of prophesy writing against, “recipes for the cook-shops of the future,” as it would depend on knowledge that was unavailable. And this presents us with a dilemma: the act of prophesy necessarily cuts off avenues to the future. The act of giving voice to this or that future necessarily attempts to render Abraham understandable again at whatever cost to our faith.

In the end, perhaps we are all fools for treating religion as a monolith when there are clearly majority and minority threads running throughout it. Religion is a field of contestation for political power. And those people who would assume power will find the order-word of prophesy a tool to their liking. For those who would rather destitute power the mystical silence that speaks to the unknowable of the divine will serve far better.

Intelligibility is not coextensive with meaning. Meaning requires an ecstatic apprehension to be grasped fully. It also requires mortality, as Borges so plainly says in The Immortal, “Homer composed the Odyssey; given infinite time, with infinite circumstances and changes, it is impossible that the Odyssey should not be composed at least once… Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past.” Immortality is anathema to meaning.

Meaning is not found in the hyper-legibility of AI that Villareal proposes but is rather found in the brief ecstatic moments that break even the reverie of the Immortals, “the ancient elemental pleasure of the rain.” Meaning isn’t found in the legible text of a complete set of all words and their relationships to other words but in the silence that follows when a body experiences the world.

“Action introduces the known (the manufactured); then understanding, which is linked to it, relates the non-manufactured, unknown elements, one after the other, to the known. But desire, poetry, laughter, unceasingly cause life to slip in the opposite direction, moving from the known to the unknown. Existence in the end discloses the blind spot of understanding and right away becomes completely absorbed in it,” Bataille says, pointing out that these forms of beauty that make life worth living depend not on legibility. There’s no words to a laugh. And Beauvoir reminds us, ” If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only of they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”

If we are to look to the Angelus Novus as a destroying angel then we must ask whether our project is tied to raising up a power or to striking one down. We have seen the fruits of prophetic revolution. In nearly every case it has turned back around to embrace capital and a hierarchy of powers. True Communism may, as they say, have never been attempted but Thich Nhat Hanh situated true communism in the silent contemplation of the Sangha saying of Buddhist monastic life, “we are the true communists.” Perhaps we should consider whether the theology operating the mechanical Turk of historical materialism might better be a silent, secret, invisible one: a mystical theology that has no truck with prophesy as the construction of limits that it is.

Perhaps the puissance of a revolution that can bring down the order of things is one that exceeds limits, that takes the world whole. The Denma Translation Group describes taking whole, an ontological concept from the Sunzi, as a perspective on the word as a “multitude of shifting, interrelating aspects.” This is in keeping with a classical Chinese metaphysics that describes reality as the fluid interplay between forces. The Denma group counsels us to treat objects as ever-shifting interactions. This is, again, the constantly transforming topology of Muad’dib’s vision which we must contrast with Asimov’s psychohistory.

At first blush it might seem as if Hari Seldon’s great science were taking the universe whole. The first axiom of pyschohistory was that a population had to be sufficiently large to be treated probabilistically, in a manner akin to Brownian motion. This movement of particles has been a fascination of metaphysicians and physicists alike at least since the time of Lucretius who saw in the flitting of dust particles within the air a satisfactory response to the fallacy of the prime mover. For Lucretius, an atomist, it was sufficient to suggest that the atoms moved themselves. Einstein later demonstrated that the dance of particles was the result of one particle being acted upon by many other smaller particles. this is inconvenient because it tends to reintroduce the problem of the prime mover. This is a tendency Meillassoux argues against, saying, “our claim is that it is possible to sincerely maintain that objects could actually and for no reason whatsoever behave in the most erratic fashion, without having to modify our usual everyday relation to things.” In other words: Leucretius was right. When you eventually get to something monadically small, so small there is no more sense of fluid to jostle it around in, objects move themselves. Meillassoux considers the most common responses to Hume’s questions regarding causality unfounded. Dismissing both Popper’s view as insufficient to addressing Hume’s complaint and also saying, “the nature of the problem is actually unaffected by the question of whether or not natural laws will turn out to be probabilistic.” This introduces contingency back into the microscopic realm of very small particles, Einstein be damned. Meillassoux, in fact, seeks to out-Hume Hume, saying of the great skeptic, “The self-evidence of this necessity is never called into question. This is obvious in the case of the metaphysical and the transcendental solutions, since they both proceed by trying to demonstrate its truth, but what is less obvious is that Hume too never really doubts causal necessity – he merely doubts our capacity to ground the latter through reasoning.” Meillassoux proposes that there is no reason to assume physical laws operate the same in all places and in all times just because they operate here and now. Specifically he argues that the assumption “If the laws could actually change without reason – i.e. if they were not necessary – they would frequently change for no reason,” is a logical stretch to say the least. Meillassoux then spends considerable time working through how contemporary set theory demonstrates how one cannot create a totality of all possible sets since any totalization would infer the possibility of a further set still greater. (After Finitude, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011, pages 99-106)

Meillassoux’s eventual conclusion is that, “Kant’s belief in the necessity of laws is thereby revoked as an instance of aleatory reason’s unwarranted pretension to reach beyond the limits of experience.” But, of course the limits of experience are the very thing that Leftist consciousness raising exercises such as those of Fisher and the previous attempts of Acéphale seek to go beyond.

And so we can begin to see the flaws in Hari Seldon’s mathematical prophesies. He depends on the assumption that a totality of possible sets of future histories as the basis of his predictions. This assumption regarding randomness does not hold true. Of course most of Asimov’s further axioms regarding Psychohistory attempt to limit it further but mostly by proposing limits of consistency such as the consistent response of humanity and the presence of only humanity as sentient beings within the universe. These do nothing to counter the critique that Seldon’s account of randomness among vast populations would not necessarily have predictive power.

And then there is the Mule.

This is the point at which the Foundation books tip their hand regarding the ideological assumptions that underpin their fantastical science: Asimov wants to herald the potency of the individual. In fact, throughout the books from Second Foundation onward this becomes the principal discourse: how a single, individual subject might upset probabilistic mathematics and invalidate prophesy.

But, of course, this individual subject is precisely the object voided by the soul of subjective multiplicity. Rather we have a subject who can be divided infinitely. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche may not have understood the mathematics underlying the inference but there is a mathematically unknowable self lurking under the set-theoretical assumptions of Meillassoux.

Villareal suggests the role of prophesy is to, “remember the future as we would the past.” But the consistency of the past is no more secure than the consistency of the future. As with the face of Borges’s lover the past is a changing place from the perspective of the future we now occupy. Our shared referent in Sartre certainly codified that existence comes before essence, that what we see as the essential ontological character of a being arises only as a result of that being having a real existence. But this same ontology argues we can never see an object in its totality, not because of Meillassoux’s computations of the non-total character of sets of infinities but rather simply because every object arises into being as an infinite sequence of appearances. We may be able to mathematically grasp infinities but they still don’t fit in the mind of a normal subject.

And so if we are to salvage prophesy at all it will depend on shattering normativity. The Delphic oracle chewed oleander and inhaled cave fumes to bring upon them the prophetic state: a consumption of poisons that must have brought her perilously close to the limit that is death. Sunzi’s council to take whole depends on a simultaneous occupation of two dissimilar ontological perspectives. One must see the army both as a mass that operates as a body but also as an ever-flowing interplay of relationships each of which is impactful in its particularity. To be a sage one must observe both of these perspectives simultaneously and without a process of dialectical flattening. Dividual subjects in their interrelation and the mass bodies they form both in the process of individuation and in the process of mass formation require the attention of a liberative politic. It isn’t enough for a vanguard to take it upon themselves to say, “the future must go this way” but rather to raze the debris that blocks the view of an infinity of disparate possible futures. This requires a fundamental break from the very idea of norms. Any leftist prophet must be so estranged to the normative as to seem alien. In short: if we are to salvage prophesy we must shatter the normative limits of the prophetic subject.

For Bataille, “What one calls ‘being’ is never simple, and if it has a lasting unity, it only possesses it when imperfect: it is undermined by its profound inner division, it remains poorly closed and, at certain points, attackable from the outside.” This is to say that the normative subject was to be seen as contingent. This might seem good news if we want to salvage any role for prophesy within our project except that we must, to achieve this limit-breaking non-normative self engage in the torturous process of bringing about inner experience and this runs counter to project.

For prophesy to be useful to the Left we must suspend ourselves like Odin and the Hanged Man and even then the strongest prophesy we could hope to gain is the ever-fluctuating topography of Muad’dib – no true future-remembrance. But Muad’dib’s visions, even in their mutability, foreclosed upon the future and doomed him to watch his beloved die. Even a contingent prophesy is an order-word that is subordinate to the direct and ecstatic apprehension of meaning and that seals the fate of the subject of prophesy. If we allow the hyper-legible text lists of AI to serve us as an oracle we will be faced with the hollow Kantian prophesies of Hari Seldon but doom lives even in using a mystical mode of prophesy like that of Muad-Dib. For all that his future was a contingent one, an ever-shifting fabric of transforming possibility, his visions doomed him to watch his true love die and to wander the desert, a blind and raving ascetic. Instead we should focus our sights on a true and full apprehension of immediate material conditions. In this immediacy AI is revealed not as a prophet but simply as another weapon in the unending cycle of primitive accumulation. Instead of building utopia in a preordained future we must discover it here and now in the immediacy of falling rain and in the movement of a body of troops around a camp. The future is always spontaneously erupting. We can access a transformed future by setting it free of the chains of prophesy.

Taoism, Buddhism and Dasein – Monk Comes Down the Mountain

/ Simon / 1 Comment
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In 1946 Heidegger and the Chinese academic Paul Shih-yi Hsiao collaborated on a translation of the Tao Te Ching. Hsiao withdrew from the project after translating 8 of the 81 stanzas of the classic citing anxiety over Heidegger’s departures from the text. Carman and Van Norden remark that this was somewhat usual behaviour from Heidegger who felt little need for textually loyal interpretation of any texts. Heidegger, for his part, expressed exceptional love for and philosophical affiliation with D. T. Suzuki and said he felt this Zen theologian and philosopher captured the essence of his philosophy.

Considering these two different accounts we should be careful with mapping any sort of one-to-one relationship between existentialist thought and the metaphysics of Buddhism and Taoism but likewise we cannot ignore that parallels exist.

I also want to briefly discuss why I’m talking about Buddhism and Taoism together here. Principally this is because both Buddhism and Taoism are essential to an understanding of Monk Comes Down the Mountain. He Anxia, the protagonist, is a Taoist monk. His principal moral guides throughout this film are a doctor of Western medicine, a Buddhist abbot and a Taoist recluse. Buddhism and Taoism are different but not necessarily opposed. They are different but non-contradictory and have had an influence over each other. Particularly you can see a Taoist influence on the writings of the Chán patriarchs such as via the focus on formlessness in the Flower Sermon. The Chán focus on the insufficiency of language to communicate the dharma largely echoes the Tao Te Ching when it says,

“The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.”

Whether we look at the Buddhist sense of Dharma or teaching or the Taoist sense of tao or way of being we encounter this fundamental argument that the absolute thing being taught is not entirely communicable from within language – it’s insufficient. However the Flower Sermon is not a universal Buddhist text – it is, in fact, rather explicitly restricted to Chán and its successor Zen. Here it’s important to reflect on how Buddhism, in specific, is non-monolithic. Rather Buddhism has always been rather syncretic, responding to and interacting with local intellectual life. Chán is one of two principal schools of Buddhism that arose in China (along with Pure Land Buddhism) and both were in deep dialog with Taoism, Confucianism and Chinese Folk Religion from the moment they arrived on the scene.

In the 2015 Chen Kaige film Monk Comes Down the Mountain this interrelated nature is brought front and center as it plots the journey of a junior Taoist monk who, after being asked to leave his monastery, goes on a search for teachers who include a doctor of Western medicine, a Buddhist abbot, a Taoist recluse and an opera star.

This is a strange film. This shouldn’t be entirely surprising as Chen has a history of writing and directing movies that make unusual choices. A strong prior example is the critically divisive 2005 fantasy film The Promise which contained stunning and irrealist costuming and set design to frame a story that remains focused on Chen’s perennial topics of sexual desire and its relationship to masculine friendship. These topics are present in Monk Comes Down the Mountain in spades but with an added twist of a focus on and exploration of the master-student dynamic that is central to the Chinese monastic experience and, via a transitory action from that monastic setting, martial arts fiction.

Some of the strangeness comes from a deeper-than-average formal adherence to wuxia structure. Wuxia novels were often quite episodic as a result of their golden age being dominated by newspaper serials. Each episode in a character’s story had to both fit into the overall arc and also be a cohesive tale about that character that could fit into the column inches available for it. But setting a wuxia story in Hangzhou in the 1930s is an interesting deviation since the mid-20th century period that marked the greatest output in the genre was also marked by a desire to look back into the pre-Republican past while most contemporary kung fu stories either followed this same trend or were set in the present. The period between the end of the Zhongshan Incident and the 1970s is at best a loose sketch with a small number of portrayals of Ip Man, Huo Yuanjia and his fictional pupil Chen Zhen standing in for the breadth of the jianghu during the early 20th century. In fact the premise of the Once Upon a Time in China films was largely that Wong Fei-hung‘s generation was the last blossoming of the age of martial arts heroes. But this movie does away with that and suggests, instead, that the heroes were all still there, secluded in temples, performing in operas and playing at gangster just as they had always done just somehow rendered almost invisible by modernity: just acrobats, monks and gangsters in the eyes of the world. Diminished.

In the world of this film no amount of neigong will protect a hero from a bullet in the back.

Another avenue for strangeness is the singular performance given by Wang Baoqing as the protagonist He Anxia. Wang characterizes his monk as a figure whose emotional map is dialed up to eleven. When he is happy (and he is a happy sort so this is often) he grins with his whole face, capers and laughs maniacally. When bored his whole body sinks into objects, his face droops, eyes almost shut. When angry He Anxia is outright and effectively homicidal in his wrath. Wang’s characterization of He seems to be hinting that being raised since infancy in a monastery has left He without normal emotional filters. He is unable to restrain these impulses of various passions because he never experienced enough to even realize he had them. This impulsivity extends into the script.

He’s first mentor upon leaving the temple is another former Taoist monk who abandoned the clergy and became a doctor out of lust. He was so desirous of a beautiful woman he encountered that he changed his whole life to be with her. He’s an older man though and so to support his desire he pays his younger brother, an apothecary, for aphrodisiacs. He isn’t aware his wife is having an affair with his younger brother but He Anxia spies on her while out on an errand and sees her in tryst with the younger brother; he confronts her, tells her she should tell her husband.

She assumes he has told the doctor and comes clean only to learn that He Anxia, just as impulsively as when he’d chosen to follow her, has not told the doctor a thing. The doctor persuades her to break off the affair with her brother which she does but the brother gives her a poisoned aphrodisiac which kills her husband before resuming his affair with her.

The film is clear the wife doesn’t realize the medicine is tainted.

He Anxia murders them both, locking them together in a boat and sinking it to the bottom of West Lake. He watches the light fade in her eyes as she drowns and then flees to a Buddhist temple seeking some understanding of whether what he did is good or evil.

Later he is drugged by the son of a gangster who believes his father has murdered his own best student (he has) and who believes He Anxia has information (he does). The drug loosens He Anxia’s tongue and he tells the other man, “I want to fuck my master’s wife.”

Later in the film He Anxia comes into the orbit of Zhou Xiyu – a recluse who lives alone in an abandoned Taoist temple. It transpires that Zhou is the former martial brother of the pupil-killing gangster and He’s actions reveal to the gangster that his xiongdi is still alive. The gangster, played by the delightfully hammy legend of Hong Kong cinema Wah Yuen is obsessed with maintenance of the family line and the martial line in one. He has never forgiven his father for teaching Zhou a powerful martial art and not him and so he goes to beat the secret out of Zhou. He fails; Zhou is by far the stronger fighter. But after he leaves Zhou is shot in the back by an unknown assailant. He hovers at the border between life and death. He Anxia brings his new teacher to the same abbot whose advice he sought after killing his last teacher’s unfaithful wife and begs the abbot to aid his teacher with his passing. The teacher reveals he needs to see one man before he dies and the abbot reminds him he can see him in his heart. Zhou agrees and sees a man who is a stranger to the audience smiling beatifically down at him before dying.

This man is the opera star Boss Zha – who is revealed to be Zhou’s former lover. The two met as soldiers some years previously and Zhou saved Zha’s life during a beautiful scene in which they embrace on a bridge as shells explode around them. They retreated from the world together to practice kung fu and when they eventually departed vowed eternal loyalty. Zha finding justice for his lover’s death marks the conclusion of the final episode of the film and brings He Anxia’s story to its conclusion. The film ends by saying in a voice-over narrative, “Only by experiencing good and evil can you truly appreciate the way… The true heart can hold all things, the mountains, plains and rivers and an eternal cosmic universe.”

It’s really only in this moment that all this strangeness, this lumpy, uneven and deeply odd narrative of love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, selflessness and selfishness becomes clear. He Anxia’s moral development depends not just on a naïve man learning to do good things but rather of an empty vessel filling up with all the thickness of the world. He has to experience everything. And now we’re ready to talk a bit about Taoism, Buddhism and Existentialism.

In Return to Tipasa, Camus says, “In the difficult hour we are living, what else can I desire than to exclude nothing and to learn how to braid with white thread and black thread a single cord stretched to the breaking-point? In everything I have done or said up to now, I seem to recognize these two forces, even when they work at cross-purposes… But if one forgoes a part of what is, one must forgo being oneself; one must forgo living or loving otherwise than by proxy. “

The true heart can hold all things; learn how to braid with white thread and black tread a single cord stretched to the breaking point. There is an echo here. Taoism recognizes that the world is absurd. Certainly this film does. In a minor episode a beautiful young woman approaches He Anxia and tells him he is her savior. It transpires she has been unable to bear a child – the husband is probably to blame but nobody wants to admit that. She has been praying to Guanyin at the temple for a son and the goddess used to grant sons but in the last several years the goddess has stopped and nobody knows why.

On the strength of this chance encounter with a stranger He Anxia goes to the Abbot (the same one who guided him through his guilt over his murder, the same one who will later ease his teacher’s passing) and asks why the goddess has stopped granting sons.

The abbot tells him that during the tenure of the previous abbot the monastery allowed men to hide in a secret room beneath the temple to Guanyin. When women came there to pray for a son one of the men would bring her down and help her to conceive one. The abbot says he didn’t think this was appropriate decorum for temple and he locked the secret room. This is why the Goddess stopped answering those particular prayers.

He asks the abbot for the key and the abbot asks why. He says he wants to help a woman and the abbot says yes. He Anxia promises the woman never to see her again after helping her solve her heir-problem. It’s all absurd. The woman is a stranger. She comes to He Anxia by chance. She is the first (and in the film only) person he is physically intimate with. She leaves his life just as suddenly as she entered it and then she becomes an absence in his life.

Sartre situates nothingness in absence. In Being and Nothingness he brings forth the example of a friend to be met at a restaurant. “I say, ‘he is not here.’ Is there an intuition of Pierre’s absence, or does negation enter in only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak here of intuition since to be exact there could not be an intuition of nothing and since the absence of Pierre is this nothing. Popular consciousness, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, ‘I suddenly saw that he was not there.'” Sartre says that the absence of his friend is marked as an aspect in the fleeting faces of all those people who are not Pierre. Being is composed of all these absences marked by the sudden and shocking intrusion of presence when the absence is negated. “the negative judgment is conditioned and supported by non-being.” For Sartre, these early pages of Being and Nothingness are built around the argument that the being of a thing is ontologically primary. That our ability to assign appearances and essences to a being depend first on the presence of the being which is composed of an infinite series of all appearances and dis-appearances of it. The nothingness that marks the absence of a being is also part of that being. 

It is bottomless; the very progenitor of all things in the world.
In it all sharpness is blunted,
All tangles untied,
All glare tempered,
All dust smoothed.
It is like a deep pool that never dries.
Was it too the child of something else? We cannot tell.
But as a substanceless image it existed before the ancestor.

The Tao Te Ching interprets the Tao as an empty vessel, an uncarved block, a void to be filled. The Way is a being that contains within it all its own nothingnesses; it is, in fact, a nothingness from which all things emerge. For the Tao Te Ching this aspect of being fruiting out of nothingness isn’t merely an ontological process whereby our understanding of what an object is not is a unified part of our understanding of what an object is. Instead it’s a metaphysical nothingness that gives birth to all things. Nothingness is within all things because all things arose from nothingness.

There’s a sense, in the phenomenological existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre that the presence of other objects to a being is an intrinsically shocking thing, almost hostile. But at the same time a subject cannot help but encounter other beings. We are within the world. This is Dasein – this sense that to exist is to be tossed about in a maelstrom of becoming and of appearances. In Nausea, Roquentin describes sitting under a Chestnut tree and says, “I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me.” This direct encounter with the being of the other shocks him but at the same time it digs into the ground against which the word, “tree” or the description of the root, “black,” rests. There is this rupture of the tree being too much, too solid. But being-in-the-world is inescapable. We are not cartesian mind-imps observing everything through a screen. We are buffeted about by being and the vicissitudes of life. Language fails Roquentin in the face of a true encounter with the tree. As Zhuangzi says, “those who understand, do not say. Those who say do not understand.”

This idea – that language creates a barrier to an encounter with the real – remains the point where Heidegger breaks from Taoism and from Ch’an. Both of these older ontologies look at the inability of language to capture the paradoxes and contradictions of being in the world and say that language is the problem; an object must be taken in whole and no words can carry enough meaning to communicate even the smallest object in its entirety. Heidegger, instead, ties himself in knots attempting to describe these phenomenological problems.

Sartre gets closer at times and more distant to this anti-linguistic frame. In Nausea, under the Chestnut Tree, he captures the inability of language to describe being in a true sense. “The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” as Laozi puts it. But even then he returns to the complex formulae of phenomenology in a vain attempt to describe the eternal Tao.

Monk Comes Down the Mountain is a story about the absurd and paradoxical nature of life. Its character, in his wild irrealist mood swings and strange, twisting, life story lives a life every bit as absurd of that of Roquentin, refusing to write his book in a coastal town that doesn’t exist. But being a Taoist work, Monk Comes Down the Mountain understands that the only way to truly and fundamentally apprehend being in all its paradox is to take it all in, to recognize the completeness of being and of the failure of language, even filmic language, to represent it in its wholeness. Recognizing its insufficiency to the task the film, instead of tying itself down in a complex phenomenology, allows its story to drift to metaphor and parable that is purposefully inadequate but is beautiful and strange nonetheless.

Heidegger failed to translate the Tao Te Ching and for all he tried to insert himself into the lineage of Zen he failed at that task too. No nazi can understand the sermon present in a smile and a plucked flower. Nausea fails too and so does Monk Comes Down the Mountain. Nothing can represent being; no work of art can present an essence to being in all its thickness. The essence is contained within the object of being along with its absence. It is but a part of a far greater whole. But where Heidegger’s Dasein gestures in the direction of the field, and where Nausea brushes against its surface, Monk Comes down the Mountain capers and dances, flashes a manic grin and throws itself about in acrobatic maneuvers. Camus said we need to braid with white and black thread stretched taught to the point of breaking and so must the Monk but even this misses the mark. He Anxia doesn’t braid with white and black thread; he is the white and black thread. His heart contains an eternal cosmic universe.