Pod Insights Philosophize This! Episode #235 ... The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism - Byung Chul Han About this episode Today we talk about one of Han's earlier books where he offers an alternative to classic western ideas about subjectivity. We talk about Zen as a religion without God. Substance and emptiness. Alternatives to the reified self. Dwelling nowhere. Original friendliness. And death as an event we desperately try to control. Hope you love it! :)
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West, this is Philosophize This, patreon.com/philosophizethis, philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. I hope you love the show today. So by this point, we've done three episodes on Byung Chul Han, and it can start to seem like the guy might just be a negative person, like in general. Guy needs a, like, an edible arrangement sent to him or something, cheer him up a bit, you know? I mean, think of all the criticism this guy brings into a room, my god. Always complaining about something going on in modern society. Apparently, we all live in a digital panopticon if you're him. Something that most of us, I guess, don't even know that we're in, let alone us being capable of finding a way out of it. He says we have very little that binds or connects us together anymore as a species,
0:45 Speaker 00 that we have no shared understanding of truth anymore, or of community. We don't even have shared stories to tie our lives together, that's what we talked about a couple of episodes ago. In fact, I saw an interview with him one time. He said, "It's impossible to be someone who's thinking and paying attention to the world right now, and to not be pessimistic about it." But is this statement, telling the full story of the work of Byung Chul Han and all that he has to say, is it possible that this statement is true, in a way? He does look out at the world and feel very pessimistic about where most things are headed, but that he also thinks there are certain choices people can make in life, certain ideas someone can pay attention to, where there's actually a lot of hope for an individual that's willing to put in the time and effort. In 2002, long before Byung Chul Han ever got famous for his criticism of the digital
1:28 Speaker 00 panopticon we live in, he wrote a book about Zen Buddhism. And being someone that's so well-versed in both Mahayana Buddhism, as well as German idealism and most of Western philosophy, this book instantly became a respected, cross-cultural dialogue, where he uses ideas from Zen Buddhism to show the limitations of many of the core ideas that are at the foundation of the modern Western subject. What I'm saying is, by the end of this episode, we're gonna understand how the burnout society, and being trapped in a digital panopticon, is something that's uniquely possible when your view of the world is rooted in a traditional Western type of subjectivity. We're gonna look at the ways we often view ourselves in the West that amplify the effects of the burnout society, and we're gonna look at how he thinks Zen Buddhism offers a great
2:11 Speaker 00 alternative to it, that might be able to give someone a less lonely, anxious, or depressed way of relating to the world. Now, out of respect to anybody out there that hasn't listened to the other episodes we've done on Byung Chul Han, let me give you the, uh, the one-paragraph correspondence course on what he's talking about here, the traveler's pamphlet version of this. The Burnout Society was a book he wrote in 2010. He says that in the late 1980s, something big changed about what it is to be a person living in the Western world. The shift in economic policy towards the direction of neoliberalism turned everybody into essentially a little personal corporation. Where now that we've deregulated things and the government's out of your way, the only person stopping you from being a billionaire is you. It's your ability to work hard and become more valuable in the marketplace.
2:56 Speaker 00 In other words, instead of controlling people by telling them what they can't do, like a king or queen may have done in the past, now people are controlled by telling them they can be whatever they want to be. You just have to constantly self-improve. Life then becomes an endless cycle of self-improvement, optimization, and personal branding. Even people's love life gets reduced to just doing things that improve your market value, like you're some kind of a product that's being sold. All of this, so you can get better friends, a better job, your worth as a person is equal to the value you provide in the marketplace. We've all heard this message before. If you don't like something about your life, well, learn a new skill, become more valuable. That's how you can manipulate the world around you and shape it into the world you want it to be. And if you happen to get sick, you know, if one day your, your brain stops working well
3:41 Speaker 00 and you can't provide value anymore, well, you're mostly just forgotten about and left to rot inside of your double-wide trailer while the rest of the world just moves on and tells you, you should have prepped for things better, sorry. Now, because improving things about yourself is an endless cycle you can be in, what this leads to is a higher level of narcissism in people on average, and an increase in behaviors people usually brand as mental illness. Whether it's anxiety, depression, the point is, in the burnout society, there's something going wrong with your brain when you feel these things. Certainly nothing wrong with the world your brain is trying to function in. In fact, your whole life becomes one giant ego-driven project in the burnout society, and most people around you become either things that are instrumental to your goals, or competition that stands in your way of having your dream life and identity.
4:27 Speaker 00 So to Byung-Chul Han, no wonder somebody would burn out in that sort of environment, and no wonder somebody would feel alone. This is the burnout society that he paints a picture of in the book. But Han would say, there's a glimmer of hope here. Because to find yourself in this place, where all that stuff I just described resembles your life in some way, that means that you've had to have accepted certain premises about who you are and what the world is, that are not necessarily the way you need to be looking at it. That being born into the Western world often means inheriting certain ways of seeing things that allow this view of the world to even make sense to you in the first place. In this book we're talking about today, titled simply "The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism", Byung-Chul Han peels back the layers of six different ways we typically see things in
5:08 Speaker 00 the West, that steer us in the direction of this lonely, burned-out, anxious, depressed kind of existence. And even on the Table of Contents page, you can start to get a feel for where the conversations in this book are going to be going. Listen to the titles of the six chapters. Chapter one is called "A Religion Without God", then there's "Emptyness", "No One", "Dwelling Nowhere", "Death", and "Friendliness". Each one of these chapters makes a case for some area that the Western subject spends most of their life endlessly grasping for something, where they're trying to make things in this area more stable and permanent than they actually are. So just remember, as we go throughout these chapters, there's always going to be some stability that we're usually grasping for, and that through Zen, there's going to be a totally different way to be seeing the thing.
5:51 Speaker 00 Now, Han begins the book with maybe the thing that's the most obvious people grasp for stability in: the existence of an ultimate creator that's responsible for the maintenance of the universe. I only say this is the most obvious, because a lot of these chapters are going to be things that are not very obvious, not things we typically think about too often in our day-to-day. Anyway, Han's talking in chapter one about God, though. He says, "A belief in God brings you a kind of ultimate guarantee that changes the way you see things a lot." I think that's a pretty uncontroversial thing for him to say. I mean, if you believe in a god, it changes the way you see pretty much everything in life, right? It should, at least. Especially, Han would say, if the picture of the god you believe in is the classic image that we typically have of a god in the Western world, where god is the ultimate
6:35 Speaker 00 source of meaning, and every command about how we should be acting in our lives morally flows from this ultimate source of meaning. In other words, Verhan, it's not so much about the belief in God as much as the belief in some sort of transcendent entity that we're all beholden to, one that we all owe ourselves and our behavior to every second of every day. Because consider the similarities between this way of thinking about God and the way most people approach their lives in relation to the burnout society. Instead of every moment of their life being monitored by a God, now every moment's monitored by metrics and data that track how efficient they're being. Instead of feeling guilty that God's really disappointed in me because I didn't follow his rules today, they feel guilty if they're not self-improving enough with every second that they have.
7:20 Speaker 00 They always feel like they should be doing more. Again, this is a classic Western way of relating to some ultimate moral authority, and it primes people to fit right into this neoliberal economic setup that we have. But Han's gonna say we don't need to necessarily be looking at religion in this way. And he's gonna make this point by refuting something that was said originally about religion by Hegel all the way back in the 1800s. Remember, this book is a dialogue between certain ideas from Western philosophy and Zen Buddhism. And he says that Hegel, when examining all the world's religions back then and trying to get to something similar among all of them, Hegel says that every religion out there relates to some absolute that functions like a God. Now, sometimes, he says, depending on the religion, the absolute just is a God.
8:03 Speaker 00 It's a being that exists somewhere, that created everything and gives people moral direction. It's pretty simple in those cases. But sometimes, like in Buddhism, Hegel says, Buddhism is also a religion that has an absolute at the foundation of it, something they call nothingness. But then the goal of Buddhism, he says, is for somebody practicing it to recognize the limitations of the ego, and then to dissolve their individual existence into that absolute of nothingness. Nothingness, then Hegel says, functions more or less like a God in Buddhism, even though there's no belief in an actual being that's maintaining the universe. But Han's gonna say that this misses the entire point of most Buddhism, and that this is especially true when we're talking about Zen as a particular subchapter of Buddhism.
8:44 Speaker 00 First of all, he would say, Zen doesn't ask anybody to dissolve their particular existence into nothingness. No, it just makes the claim that your everyday experience, as it is, is already complete as it is, that you don't need some transcendent thing or a God to give you some ultimate meaning to your experience, or by the way, to create a set of protocols for you about the way you should be acting. See, morality typically in the Western world, he says, is an additive process. We start at a disinterested, morally neutral universe that really doesn't care one way or the other about us. And then morality is when we add on stuff after the fact and then give all sorts of good religious or philosophical reasons for why this morality is justified.
9:27 Speaker 00 But as we'll see throughout the rest of the book, Zen is not about adding anything on to our experience. Zen is about noticing the position you already occupy in the world, which you come to realize is a meaningful position in its own right, one that doesn't need morality tacked on to it for it to be meaningful. We'll talk more about it here in a minute. But one other helpful thing that Byung Chul Han does all throughout this book that'll help you understand the flavor of what he's trying to do here is that he works in famous examples from the history of Zen practice to illustrate whatever's being discussed in the particular chapter. This could be a poem, a parable, a haiku. The point is that in Zen Buddhism, our experience is something that's impossible to fully express through normal language, and that there are going to be certain things about our lives
10:11 Speaker 00 that can only be understood through firsthand experience. And if you wanted the closest thing you could get to expressing these kinds of things, you're going to have to use more poetic forms of communication like these parables, haikus, koans. This is why he uses so many of these throughout the book. And the one for this chapter, when we're talking about Buddhism being a religion without God, is a story from when a monk asked a question to the head of his monastery, named Master Dungshan. It's become a very popular example to reference in these kinds of discussions. The monk asks him a really simple question. He asks, "What is the Buddha?" Master Dungshan replies back to him, "Three pounds of flax. That's what the Buddha is." Now again, keep in mind, this is supposed to feel kind of paradoxical when we first hear it.
10:53 Speaker 00 I mean, a normal person gives you that answer back, you're probably strapping him to the hood of your car and driving him to the emergency room, like, "Three pounds of flax?" I go, "What?" But keep in mind, this is an answer coming from the head of a monastery. It's supposed to challenge the typical ways we think about things in the West. In this case, when it comes to our views of what counts as a transcendent being like God. What Master Dungshan means when he says the Buddha is three pounds of flax is that the Buddha isn't some being that's hidden behind everyday reality, living up in the clouds somewhere where we can't see him. He's saying that reality, in its very suchness as it said, whatever's right in front of you, even three pounds of a fiber called flax that's sitting in a marketplace somewhere,
11:36 Speaker 00 even in that mundane, everyday experience, enlightenment is available to us. Three pounds of flax is an answer. It's supposed to stop us from always grasping for some big metaphysical solution or some being that's going to complete our reality for us. Instead, what this is supposed to do is to get us thinking about the true eminence of things, that again, our everyday experience is already complete as it is if you're paying close attention to it. This is why Hegel's reading of Buddhism is backwards, Han thinks. Zen isn't trying to dissolve the ego. It dissolves the entire need for a master-slave, God-human, dualistic type of thinking that so much of our making sense of the world is rooted in, in the West.
12:18 Speaker 00 To put it a slightly different way, to see your experience more through the lens of Zen Buddhism is to live fully in the eminence of reality as it unfolds. Again, there's no need for a God to complete something about your experience. And again, this is a way of grasping for some kind of ultimate moral authority that leads people to a kind of passive acceptance of their role in something like the burnout society. Now, Chapter 2 moves on from clarifying Zen as a religion without God to the concept of emptiness, or shunyata. We talked about this idea recently in the series we just did on the Kyoto School, Episodes 216 and 217, for anybody that wants more detailed description of what's meant by emptiness. But today, I'm really trying to focus mostly on stuff from this book that's new, things we haven't talked about recently.
13:01 Speaker 00 And to describe this chapter in a way that's on theme with the conversation we're having today, Western philosophy typically thinks of the concept of substance in a way that has huge effects on the way we see things and people in the world around us, that just like a belief in God has a huge effect on the way you see the world. Substance is another one of these big things that we're always grasping for, to Byung-Chul Han, trying to turn it into something that's far more stable than what it actually is. He points out how the word substance, which, by the way, originally comes from the Latin translation of Aristotle, the word substance, if you break it down, literally means standing under, substance. And he says, "With this being the metaphor we've had to work with for so long in Western philosophy, of course, we would see the things around us like they are separate standalone
13:44 Speaker 00 objects, and of course, we'd assume that reality is made up of material stuff underneath, where one of our biggest tasks as thinkers is to study it and find the essence to what makes up all this stuff. But this whole way of thinking about the world as a bunch of separate standalone things lends itself really well to the kind of thinking that's common in the burnout society. I mean, think about it. How are we to view ourselves in a world that's like that? Well, we are all separate standalone people that need to brand ourselves and produce value for ourselves. It also, for whatever it's worth, is a way of thinking where things, including the raw materials of the environment, things are these self-contained blocks that can be manipulated and processed. Everything can be owned, and everything can be sold in the burnout society.
14:28 Speaker 00 This is the technological inframing that Heidegger talks about in his work, right? Where everything and everyone becomes an object that's instrumental to some end or to some ego-driven project that someone is working on out there. But chunyata, or emptiness, is going to challenge this way of seeing substance. Because imagine seeing the world where there are no separate self-contained things out there, a world where everything, when we see it, is always sort of bleeding in to everything else around it, meaning always dependent on the things around it for its existence, with those things equally dependent upon it for theirs, a kind of interdependence, you could say. I mean, you could just as easily chop up and make sense of the world in this way, too, right? Byung Chul Han uses a famous line from the Zen master Dogen from around the year 1200 A.D.
15:11 Speaker 00 In something he wrote called "The Sutra of Mountains and Water," Dogen says, quote, "The blue mountains are walking, flowing mountains pass over the water," end quote. And what he's referencing here is the concept of emptiness that we're talking about. See, it's really tempting for us to think of something like a mountain as just some giant, beautiful, rocky, standalone thing that's off there in the distance. But consider how much of what we mean When we say there's a mountain over there is made up by relational processes that all converge together to make up what we think of as being a mountain. Tectonic plates, for example, collide and send that mountain upward. And the ongoing seismic activity there makes the mountain something that's always swaying and moving to some extent, just very slowly. More than that, snow and wind
15:56 Speaker 00 and rain are constantly changing what this mountain is, eroding it down, changing the setting of things. By the way, with the size of the mountain itself affecting those weather patterns in its own right. If it's a mountain like around where I live, then the snow melts eventually, and it creates giant rivers that run for hundreds of miles in all directions. They provide water to the surrounding towns. Animals that live around there then drink from those rivers and then spread the nutrients from the water to the surrounding plants. The examples here are endless. And the point for Dogen is, mountains are not some static hunk of rock that just sits there all day like we might assume with a classic Western view of substance. Mountains walk for Dogen. Mountains flow and pass over the water for him. This sutra is designed to get us
16:39 Speaker 00 outside of the typical abstractions we use to label something like a mountain. What looks like a fixed material substance to us is actually an interdependent flow that's going on, where everything is bleeding into everything else. In fact, you could say it's not even the things that are the most real here in this picture. It's the relational field that allows for any of these things to even appear as things in the first place to us, or chunyata, which, to be clear, this relational field itself isn't a substance. It's pure emptiness, meaning none of these things have their own independent, isolated existence. They all coconstitute each other. Now, you can imagine how if you saw things more in this way, how much harder it would be to operate under the
17:20 Speaker 00 logic of narcissism that fuels so many people's lives in a world like the burnout society. Because if what you are is a set of relationships, where this personal brand you just built a website for is actually something coconstituted by everything and everyone around you, how much harder would it be to see yourself as something that's alone? How much harder is it to see other people as just, you know, heads you can step on as you're crowd surfing through life, where you say, screw where everybody else ends up. I just don't want to be seen as a loser by people. This becomes a bizarre way to be thinking when seen from this other point of view.
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19:09 Speaker 00 Now, on a related note. Chapter 3 is going to be called "No One." And what it's going to talk about is what we're starting to talk about right here. It offers an alternative to the classic Western idea of the reified self. Or the idea that who you are, your identity, is something that is created by you and is something that's stable to the point that you see yourself as something that exists independent of everything else around you. Zen Buddhism's not going to look at the self like this. Because consider how much you need to be prioritizing your own ego, and only your ego, to see yourself as a personal brand that needs to constantly make improvements on yourself so that you can become more valuable. Also, consider what it sounds like when someone living in something like the burnout society loses their sense of self. What kinds of things do they say?
19:52 Speaker 00 They say, "I don't even know who I am anymore. I can't find my purpose in life. I've lost myself and I need to find my identity again somehow." They say these things, but all of this talking they're doing- Is built on the assumption that the self is something that's not only separate from someone's everyday experience of the world, but it also assumes that the self is something that's stable enough, that all we gotta do is sit down, do some reflection about our lives, and then we can arrive at our identity and who we actually are. What Han might say is that the self isn't something we can grasp at and get a hold of in a totally stable way like this, that the self much more resembles the way we might use a word as a way to reference something in the world. Meaning to Han, we have to think of the self as an abstraction.
20:36 Speaker 00 It's a useful thing for us to use as a reference point in some circumstances, no doubt about it, but to cling to a temporary sense of identity, because you think this identity just is actually you, that's when you cross over into territory where there's going to be consequences, where you see yourself as separate from everything around you more than you actually are. And the point is, this separateness is no doubt something that contributes to the epidemic of narcissism, anxiety, depression, and loneliness that defines many people in the burnout society. Seeing more through the insights found in Zen Buddhism though, Han gives a famous Zen parable in the book about a farmer that's looking for an ox that's gone missing. This example's originally from a Chinese Zen master from around the year 1200, it's a famous example. And in the original book, there's a picture that shows a farmer searching for an ox out
21:21 Speaker 00 in the field, and the text next to it reads, quote, "Until now, the ox has never gone astray. Why then does he need to search for it?" The farmer in this picture represents us, us being people that often search and grasp for a sense of self or for enlightenment. But the point is, whenever you think you've lost your sense of self, whatever it is that you're calling yourself, has never really left you in the first place. To say something like, "I've lost my identity and I need to go out there and find it again", well, no, you always already are you in your everyday experience of the world, if you're looking for it. Every shred of meaning and identity you could ever possibly ask for is already right in front of you. You just may be grasping and blocking your ability to see it clearly.
22:06 Speaker 00 In other words, just like morality, the self is not an additive process in Zen Buddhism. It is about noticing what's already there. And think about how impossible it would be, under this different kind of logic, to see yourself as some kind of neurotic lifelong project that always needs to be improving because you right now is never going to be good enough. Chapter four is going to be called Dwelling Nowhere. I think it's best to begin to make the point he's trying to make in this chapter by starting with a question. Why participate in the burnout society in the first place? Like, what's the promise that's offered to people if they spend their lives constantly optimizing themselves and increasing their market value? Well, people are told that if you become valuable enough, then you can manipulate the world into whatever kind of world you want it to be.
22:50 Speaker 00 Increase your market value, we're told, so you can drive the ideal car you want to be driving. Buy the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood. Eat only, you know, hydroponically grown eggplants that were blessed by a shaman every day from the time they were little saplings. You can do that if you want to. In other words, the promise is become valuable enough and you will never have to be in a situation that you don't want to be in. The world will start to conform to you if you just become important enough to pay to make it happen. But Zen, on the other hand, you know, just as an approach to human experience, it goes in the opposite direction. Remember, under this way of seeing things, our experience of the world right now is complete the way that it is. It doesn't need anything. That's the insight that leads to awakening in Zen.
23:34 Speaker 00 So when the title of the chapter is going to be called Dwelling Nowhere, the point is, what's the opposite of never feeling comfortable unless you can control every aspect about every situation you're in? Well, it would be dwelling nowhere to Han, where home isn't some specific place and it isn't a set of conditions that make you feel comfy all the time. Home is, in a sense, the skill of being completely at ease inside the continual change that's always going on. In other words, instead of always grasping, trying to make the world into exactly the way we want it to be right this second, why not learn to feel at home, no matter what situation you're in, ultimately dwelling nowhere? Han, in this chapter, cites a famous letter written by a Japanese poet named Matsuo Basho,
24:16 Speaker 00 where he writes to a friend, quote, "I wish to live like drifting clouds with a heart that dwells nowhere. Procure for me only things I need not cling to," end quote. This line beautifully captures the point that Han wants to get across here. Western philosophy, he says, usually says that if you want to find someone's dwelling place or their home, look to what's often called their oikos. It's a Greek word, meaning their house or their origin place. You can find examples of what he's talking about here all throughout the history of Western thought. Aristotle, for example, had the whole prudent head of the household that he talks about in the politics, where the ideal citizen is someone who has proper management of their household as the basic unit of what makes politics even work. Heidegger is another example. In his early work sees dwelling like this as Dasein's
25:00 Speaker 00 way of being in the world, where you know, in the sense that Dasein is always grounded in particular projects, relationships. It's home, where it dwells, is a type of being, you could say. And the point is, this is a common way of viewing subjectivity in the West, where there is an Oikos that defines our home. But Basho is going to say in this letter to a friend, that he doesn't ask for anything in this world when it comes to the conditions that make something home. All he really asks for, he says, is a hut made out of spider webs. It's a crazy thing to say. And he says, let that hut be exposed to the wind, let it be destroyed. Because all the conditions we live under, he says, no matter where we are in life, all of them are provisional anyway. Every situation we
25:40 Speaker 00 find ourselves in is already half gone, he says. So on that note, and just to bring all that we've discussed here so far together a bit, imagine a way of going throughout your life, where you're not grasping for a creator, or the perfect set of moral rules to follow, or grasping for the world to be made of things that have fixed, stable identities, or for a stable identity when it comes to who you are. And now imagine not grasping for a set of narrow conditions, that you need to make you feel at home all the time. Like you've arrived at the finish line in your life or something. The thinking for Han is that if there's nowhere that you're dwelling, then everywhere becomes a place you can feel at home in. And what comes from that insight, is a totally different attitude towards the ever-changing world. He says, at that point, it's not about becoming
26:23 Speaker 00 more valuable, so you can manipulate the world into what you want it to be. Now you can welcome whatever, or whoever comes into your life, without having to do all the calculations we normally do, where we wonder, is this situation good enough for me right now? Very common for people to do in the burnout society, you know? Is it warm enough in this movie theater right now? Or should they have definitely made this place a few degrees warmer? Hmm. What a bunch of idiots in the, uh, the movie theater thermostat room. You could be hanging out with some people. You don't necessarily want to be there too much. So you wonder, are these people around me, useful enough for me to be spending this time with them? Am I getting enough out of doing this thing I'm doing, for it to be worthwhile to me? But what comes from this more Zen perspective, is an attitude where
27:06 Speaker 00 every experience that you're having, is something worth welcoming, on the basis of what it is, and that alone. Or even something like doing chores, for example. Famous example from Zen Buddhism is of shoveling someone else's snow during the wintertime. Even in a moment like this, even if you were getting nothing from doing it, other than just helping somebody out with a really difficult task, this too becomes a piece of your experience that's worth welcoming. Because when you're not always grasping, complaining about how I shouldn't be shoveling snow right now, I should just be relaxing. When you stop doing that, you notice that shoveling snow just is the way your existence is relationally unfolding in that moment. And that that in itself is good enough. There's actually nothing missing from that moment.
27:51 Speaker 00 And that's what Han means by dwelling nowhere in this chapter. When you stop grasping all the time, you realize you were already at home all along, no matter where you were. Now, somebody could ask back to this, "Well, okay, but does this mean that people can just treat you horribly, abuse you in whatever way they want to, and you're supposed to just accept it? Like, hey, this is just my place in the unfolding of reality right now, I guess. Can't really do much about it." Well, no. Han's point here, much like Basho's point that he makes in the letter, it's not about becoming passive in your life. The important part here is about the not grasping for some fixed, idealized set of conditions before you can ever decide that you feel at home. You still do stuff. You still respond when people treat you poorly.
28:34 Speaker 00 But the point is, now you're doing it from a place that isn't always defending some ego you have, or clinging to a sense of how the world should be for you in every moment. And by the way, this puts you in a place where you can take action on things and not have it be out of a place of panic, where you think your home's being taken from you in some way. In other words, this allows you to be more clear-headed while responding to the things you want to adjust in your life. There's another example Han gives in the book of a monk that's talking to a student. It's right after dinnertime, and the monk asks his student, "Have you eaten your gruel?" Meaning, have you finished your meal that we just had right now during dinner? The student says back to him, "Yes, I have." So the monk says, "Then go wash your bowl." The significance of this short little excerpt for Han is that even in the mundane,
29:18 Speaker 00 even something as simple as "I just finished eating my meal," can create a feeling inside of us where it's like, "I've completed a task, and now I've arrived at some kind of a finish line." The wisdom in what the monk is saying here to the student is that there is no completed moment going on. All of these moments bleed together into a universe that's always moving. There's always a next thing to do, and even in these small moments, we need to remember to never cling to them for a sense of false stability. The bottom line for this chapter is that Han wants to question the Western idea of being settled and secure all the time, and replace it with a more Zen practice of what he calls "passing through," as though you're traveling somewhere and being at home no matter where you are or what's going on. And for whatever it's worth, yes, if you adopted this kind of attitude, it would come
30:03 Speaker 00 with certain trade-offs, you could say. No doubt, this could lead someone to feel a kind of rootlessness if they were to do it all the time. But what you get in return is what Han calls a kind of hospitality towards the moment, a friendliness towards the world you're living in, that he thinks makes it much harder to feel as isolated as we often do in something like the burnout society. Now, if you remember from when I read the Table of Contents, the last chapter of the book is called "Friendliness." And since that seems to be where we're at in the discussion of all this, I'm gonna skip to the last chapter right now, talk about friendliness, and come back to the way we see death here as a closeout to the episode. So the point he makes in the chapter about friendliness is pretty straightforward. Because we've already pulled back the layers on multiple ways we typically see things
30:45 Speaker 00 in the West, you know, God, substance, the self, and a rigid sense of home, a good question for us now is, what kind of a life can you really have in relation to others if you were successful in reframing all these things through more of a Zen experiential lens? I mean, apparently, I'm no one who's dwelling nowhere.
31:05 Speaker 00 Like, who in God's name would ever want to talk to that guy? In fact, the way that Western philosophers have often thought about this, Han says, that if you don't start with that strong sense of self and who you are, then you lose the foundation that's necessary to be able to relate to people. Or even worse, they say you lack the foundation necessary to have any sort of meaningful conversation about morality that's going to endure. But Han's going to say that when it comes to Zen Buddhism, almost the opposite becomes true. That when you have a strong sense of self that you're clinging to, your life starts to mirror stuff like the classic hero's journey that's used so often in Western storytelling. I mean, think about the implications of starting from this place. If my life is this heroic existential battle that I'm in every day, who am I in battle against?
31:50 Speaker 00 Well, all the other people and things that stand in my way as an ego. But it's precisely this becoming no one, or dwelling nowhere, that Han says is actually the thing that makes you an open enough space to be able to relate to the things around you closely. Point is, when you stop trying to dominate or regulate the situations you find yourself in all the time, you start to notice that you're always in what you could call a kind of co-presence with other people in the world. What you also start to notice is that when you're not trying to dominate things all the time, you find that the thing you sort of default to in your experience is what Han calls a kind of original friendliness. When two people come together in a conversation, and there's genuinely no desire on either end to own the other one,
32:33 Speaker 00 or to improve the other one, get something valuable from them that'll benefit some project you have, friendliness is just what experience feels like when you're in this sort of mutual place. Again, it's important to emphasize that for Han, this is not adding on friendliness to our experience, like we might do in the West if we came up with some moral system that said friendliness is good. No, it's about noticing what's already there. When you remove the ways the self is often grasping for only relationships that are useful for some project we're working on, friendliness is what's left. Remember, one of the big points Han makes in several of the books he writes is that what's happened since most of us live in this burnout society of his is the steady removal in our lives of what he calls the genuine other. We live in these little algorithmic pockets
33:17 Speaker 00 where we never have to actually confront the other anymore. We just turn our political enemies into a cartoon so we don't have to actually validate their existence. But again, what about this Zen idea of making yourself a hospitable environment to relate to things honestly? Well, it's in this original friendliness Han is talking about that hospitality towards the world becomes possible for him. Now, the last chapter we're going to talk about today are the ways we often grasp for control over death as an event in our lives. Maybe the first thing to say is that if you're living in something like the burnout society, where the ego is dominating pretty much everything that you ever do, then the idea of your individual life ending is an incredibly scary thing. It's essentially you losing everything you think you are, everything you've ever worked for.
34:01 Speaker 00 You know, if your whole life is some neoliberal project where you're building a legacy for yourself, then to accept the reality that all this could end at any moment, it becomes too painful to consider for a lot of people. Might as well avoid it altogether as a topic. And we do typically avoid it in the West. We don't like to talk about death. It's improper in polite conversation. Heidegger's criticism rings true here, that we relegate death to these distant plots of land that we like to call graveyards, or to these cordoned off buildings we call hospitals that have no parking and limited visiting hours to them. But there's a few different ways that Zen approaches death in a totally different way than this. Han says there's two things we typically do with death in something like the burnout society. We either try to turn it into some kind of transcendent moment, where there's some higher
34:46 Speaker 00 purpose for why we lived and died, or we turn death into a kind of disaster. It's impossible for us to face, so we try to avoid it at all costs. But neither of these really capture what's going on when you see yourself more as something that's relationally unfolding with the world around you. A metaphor that Han uses in the book that's pretty powerful for getting us thinking more in this way is a plum tree. It's a famous haiku written by a poet named Busan. It goes, quote, "The petals flutter down with each, the branch of the plum tree grows older," end quote. Keep in mind, this is a haiku translated from Japanese, so in English it's going to sound a bit choppy like that. But the point it's making is just as strong in any language. Death is just another part of the process you're engaged in here.
35:30 Speaker 00 The same way we can see the life cycle of the plum tree, where every year it gets a little bit older, it blossoms, the leaves fall off of it, and we don't find ourselves grasping for this plum tree to be the, you know, the greatest plum tree ever. It should be the plum tree that's remembered for the rest of time. And should the plum tree get sick and die, we wouldn't think that this is some kind of a disaster that's robbing us of something crucial. In the same way we can see the life cycle of the plum tree, it's possible to view our own lives in a similar sort of way. Death isn't some climax, or some heroic moment where everything's going to culminate in. It's just another part of the flow that we've always been a part of. What happens when you start seeing death more in this way? Is it gives you permission to stop seeing your life like it's just a resume that you
36:15 Speaker 00 have to build. Life is not about building up enough accomplishments to make your death something worthy of your time here. No, once again, life is something you can be living fully right now, in this moment. Now, it should be said, Han never intended for this book to be a full education on any of these concepts from Zen Buddhism. You can spend your entire life studying this way of framing experience, which, by the way, I know several people listening to this have. I know, because I get the emails. And for whatever it's worth, I am truly grateful to have so many smart people in the comments section on Patreon that add to the discussion each episode after listening to it. And full disclosure, personally, selfishly here, I'm really looking forward to the conversation after this episode. Can't wait to learn more from all of you out there.
36:58 Speaker 00 To anyone who decides to contribute in any way, thank you for making a podcast like this freely available to everyone, and I hope you all have a good rest of your week. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.
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