If nihilism were a section in a botanical garden it would have many varieties. And were we to try to identify one mark of nihilism shared by all of its varied forms, we would be hard pressed to explain it. Philosophers have certainly tried to get at the essence of nihilism, enough to explain it coherently sans the verbosity.
Last year, nosing through my online library in the dead of night trying to get a concise grasp of the essence of nihilism I chanced to stumble on this.
“But if nihilism is anything, it is first of all a problem of the self. And it becomes such a problem only when the self becomes a problem, when the ground of the existence called "self" becomes a problem for itself. When the problem of nihilism is posed apart from the self, or as a problem of society in general, it loses the special genuineness that distinguishes it from other problems” (Nishitani Keiji, Graham Parkes, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, 1)
I realized I had struck pay dirt. I had been trying to find a way to explain what I was sensing at a gut level for a long time, that in the hands of Western Buddhists, especially in the last twenty years of so, Buddhism has been moving towards nihilism at a fairly rapid clip.
Condensing what Keiji and Graham said about nihilism even further, nihilism is a problem of the self when the self becomes its own problem. Taking a bit of a leap from this, Buddhism doesn’t shy away from the problem of self. Much of modern Buddhism, in fact, denies self in one way or another. Along with this comes, by implication, a denial of an absolute beyond the sphere of phenomena. There is no absolute Mind, no Tathagatagarbha, no Buddha-nature and so on. Obviously, according to this contemporary Buddhist view, any Buddhism which finds anything positive such as an absolute Mind or a Buddha Self, ain’t real Buddhism. It is crypto-Vedantic Buddhism!
Without bringing forth my arguments with evidence that original Buddhism did not deny the self except to point out what was not the self, I wish to dwell a little on the matter of why the self has become such a problem for itself which, let’s face it, is the seed of nihilism. Before I begin, keep in mind I am offering nothing final. These are just adumbrations on my part as to why the self has become its own problem.
First of all, we can’t really define the self in only one way. Yes, there are many definitions of it that range from the psychological to the metaphysical. We can even say of the self, it’s the bearer of our pains as when Nietzsche’s Zarathustra looked into a mirror and screamed at the sight of himself who said, “I saw not myself but the mocking, leering face of a devil.” Suffice it to say, the self is always a witness to what it cannot often bear to look at as regards itself—even, ironically, itself! Again, the self is its own problem, especially, when it must face its callous arrogance, shame, anger, and sadness. It is not unlike Freud’s id that blindly strives to gratify its instincts in total disregard of the higher truth—then has to face itself, sober, the next day looking over the damage.
As we might expect, the self also becomes more and more of a burden to itself, over time—a heavy burden that it cannot so easily lay down and walk away from. As expected, the self tries to unburden itself from the pain of itself devising many clever strategies for doing so from rugged individualism and drug abuse, to sadomasochism, just to name a few.
Eventually it all boils down to finding a way that we can feel good about ourselves thereby covering up the problem with the self. There are many ways to do this. We can avoid the problem of the self by developing self-esteem (superbia), or using sexual promiscuity, binge eating, even getting loaded on alcohol and/or drugs. Not only can we escape from the self, we can also escape from the whole matter of the self, itself, or so we believe.
The final way to escape from the self when the self becomes an overwhelming problem for itself is through religion. This I inject, is perfect nihilism. Let’s not forget that Christianity had nothing good to say about the self. The self meant selfish, or self-interested motives. The Oxford English Dictionary cites this 1680 use of “self: “Self is the great Anti-Christ and Anti-God in the World.”
In this light, it shouldn’t be surprising to realize that much of Buddhism’s alleged denial of the self is no stranger to the Christian West. Christian mystics already understood “self-naughting”, or "self-abandonment" where is stripped away all personal initiative the I, the Me, and the Mine.
As with the Christian tradition of self-naughting, Buddhism in the West teaches the doctrine of the Non-Self. This means all that is ego is tossed out. The self is erased. So what is left? In the words of the late Zen master Philip Kapleau we reach a “state of unconditioned subjectivity, I, selfless I, am supreme.” Paradoxically, Zen master Kapleau is telling us there is a selfless self—a supreme selfless I! This does beg credulity because it is simply absurd.
Modern Buddhism, it can be argued, religionizes nihilism with the doctrine of Non-Self. In other words, the problem of the self with itself, which epitomizes nihilism, is solved in modern Buddhism by just declaring there is no self. Moreover, Buddhism even works against transcendence by introducing the concept of the Void. Perish the thought we find out that Buddhism teaches the Self, immortality, and the eternal nature of the Buddha (which it does). Perish the thought, again, that the so-called Void is only the voidness of accidents, signs, marks, and phenomena—not the voidness of the Buddha-nature or our true Self.
Nihilism, it needs to be said, is actually overturned by Buddhism. What is the self in us we so despise is actually Freud’s id and Buddhism’s satkaya which stands for the Five Aggregates of the corporeal person. The problem of the self is solved by recognizing that the self is greater than the corporeal self, or the id. It follows from this that in the practice of Buddhism we learn to distinguish our higher self from the temporal psychophysical body which we wrongly believe to be our self. And by means of deep meditation, we find the true non-void ground of existence which is deathless and the Buddha-nature or Self.
Your posts are interesting, but what you say contradicts many Theravada monks who understand Pali very well. Why would they be so off base on such an essential concept?
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1650166777 | September 07, 2009 at 11:11 PM