Words and Emptiness: an comparison between Zen Buddhism and Lacanian psychoanalysis

Michael Chew

An initial glance at the two disciplines of Zen Buddhism and Lacanian psychoanalysis reveals many seemingly irreconcilable differences. The former is a spiritual worldview whose practices are dedicated to attaining enlightenment, and the latter is a psychotherapeutic method for curing mental illness. Zen methods involve silent meditation, while Lacanian analysis is all about talking. But alongside these differences, the two theories share key similarities; both see the stable, centred, and bounded subject as a dangerous and misleading illusion, an illusion that obscures the fact that the self is coextensive with a greater, more expansive entity the unconscious Symbolic (Lacan) and the unified cosmos (Zen). It is through examining these theories, which emerge from vastly different times and places, and seeing how they speak about similiar concepts, that I hope to illuminate a common thread winding between them. There are many limitations to this kind of inquiry. Firstly Zen Buddhism is not a single doctrine, attributed to a single author, like Lacanian theory, instead having a 2500+ year history, with several different traditions. Lacanian theory, while created for the purpose of training analysts, has sporned entire discourses of theory in the humanities and beyond. Similarly, Zen is largely a practical system for enlightenment, though it itself has precipitated vast quantaties of writing. Secondly everyday existence and selfhood for the two theories would have to be quite different, given that they emerge in different places Lacan in mid 20th century France, and Zen developing over centuries following the teachings of the Buddha over 2500 years ago. Therefore in this survey we will examine only the broadest, most essential concepts of each, and highlight some of the core similarities that can illuminate our journey.

We can start to map out the two theories by exploring how they see the self itself, how they understand the latters relationship with the world, and what practices are required to heal the subject. Along the way we will address the differing philosophical implications and aetiologies that emerge. Lacanian psychoanalysis builds on Freudian theory, using the Freuds narcissistic ego as a starting point, and applies a form of Saussurian linguistics to the structuration of the subject. In this formulation subjectivity emerges through and is bound by three different registers the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The infant starts off embedded in the Real, the natural order of real experiences and objects. It has no corporeal or psychic unity, comprising of different parts, organs, sensations, without co-ordination or integration. In this primordial chaotic state the only unity existing is between the infant and the Real order itself - as undifferentiated neurological and nervous functions render its perception of the world as coextensive with itself. There is an absence of self boundaries, (especially that between its most significant other, the mother). The child emerges from the order of the Real into the human world as a speaking subject through two major splits which separate it from its previous subject position. The first, imaginary identification, is constituted through the mirror phase, which charts the subjective shift in the infants psyche as it first comprehends its reflection in a mirror. 1 The child both recognises the reflection, taking the unified, specular body to be its own, coherent self, and simultaneous misrecognises the reflection, seeing itself as other to the image. The first instance joyfully reveals the mental permanence of the newly selfreflective ego - the second however undercuts this very realisation, creating an alienated relation with the image.2 A narcissistic ego is thus created at whose centre is the other itself. The infant thus forms narcissistic relations with its Gestalt images of itself and its mother. These relations are in the Imaginary register - the pre-linguistic order of mistaken dyadic self-other relations - which do not allow for the separation between subject and
2

If the child had simply recognised its reflection, then the theory would give rise to another version of Freuds realist ego essentially in touch with reality. The act of misrecognition establishes the subject as vacillitating between glimpsing itself and being deluded, a social agent while simultaneous being the subject of ideology. See Grosz 1990:39-40.

object upon which language is built3. The subject become a speaking subject, within culture through the second split - symbolic identification. This is enacted through the paternal metaphor - the act of which names the being and thus replaces it within language as the I.4 In this way the acceptance of a speaking position is preconditioned on the loss of the Real, producing a fundamental gap or lack at the heart of speaking child, hollowing out of the unconscious, and creating a space for desire. Thus subjectivity and the unconscious are structured linguistically within cultural and social Law. Lacans theory radically decentres the Cartesian ego the cogito, that occupied the prime position within Western metaphysics. This critique is a good starting point to turn to Zen Buddhism, as it similarly offers a radical critique of the stable, centred and bounded ego. The most important concept in Zen is buddhata, or buddha nature - reality beyond the self. Reality itself has an inherently transpersonal nature, extending beyond the subject. Buddhata is not a thing (such as a soul or the mind) rather it is the simple fact that every person, in every particular dimension and element, is a part of the cosmos as a whole. The universe is inside us as much as we are in the universe the two are coextensive. This idea as it first emerged challenged the individualistic foundations of self that were becoming prevalent at the time of Buddha around 2500 BC, where the Brahman idea of atma, or soul was becoming a principle of social organisation, an era which perhaps shared a similar zeitgeist to the growing attacks on the automonous ego in Western metaphysics around the time of Lacans writings.5 This state of buddhata, is not the usual, or indeed natural state of being. While Zen generally does not articulate specific stages of subjective development as Lacan does, it does have a mental structure, a structure that outlines how, through conditioning, buddhata is obscured.6 Buddhata is the undivided consciousness known as jnana. All other forms of consciousness are divided, known as vijnana. The latter can be broken up into several parts. Chitta, the conscious organising mind, which cognatises sensations.
3 4

Frosh 1987:34. Grosz 1990:103-4. 5 Brzier1995:35 6 This structure is derived from the buddhist texts the Abdiharma.

Manas, is the censor mind, which organises and keeps passions in check. Alaya is what could be loosely thought of as the unconscious (though without the structuration of the Lacanian unconscious) - it contains all the passions that have developed over time, karma, and mental complexes and archetypes. Normally, like the ego, the manas dominates the whole psyche and struggles to maintain this supremacy, striving to keep things organised in either a self-defensive or self-expansive way. The manas and the alaya together, in the conditioned state, ensure that the citta never gets a clear vision of the blissful jnana that is the fundamental ground beneath this structure. Only when conditioning is abandoned is when the jnana can emerge from below and present true and radiant subjectivity which is empty of an individual subject, encompassing instead all being as one indivisible unity. Viewed in this way, jnana shares conceptual similaraties with the Lacanian Real. It is the primordial underpinning of all reality, that which the ego and development of the self obscures. For Lacan it is something that can never be comprehended directly, instead only through the imaginary and symbolic orders. It holds the lack of lack, pure plenitude, in direct opposition to the lack at the core of the speaking subjects being, which keep the circuits of desire flowing. However for Lacan a healthy existence does not rest on the impossible attainment of the Real, rather the comprehension of the dynamics that the striving and longing itself generates. In Zen the experience of jnana is the goal of enlightenment itself. However, it is fundamentally empty, not in the Lacanian way that generates desire for its filling, but rather in the sense that it lacks an observing, thinking subject. It is the experience that all that the vijnana comprehend, most importantly the self itself, are impermanent illusions that will crumble and decay with time. This is not something to be feared, but merely an expression of the fundamental unity of all things. The fact that this state is normally obscured is due to conditioning. This, in the Zen buddhist sense, simply refers to mentals states or conditions. Conditioning can take many forms. One example is found in the theory of Root Relations, which posits that all mental suffering comes from three bitter roots roughly translated as greed, hate and

delusion, with all wholesome states arise from the direct opposite of these states.7 This seems very different to Lacanian theory, which refrains from outwardly positing any ethical judgements such as these. However there are some similarities they can be read as such greed can be equated to over attachment to things, hate to alienation. These two states compare to the mirror stage the narcissistic relationship underscores the imaginary attachment with itself and others that the subject is trapped through, while alienation is the basis of the essential misrecognition in the mirror. For both theories the dynamic of mistaken attachment serves as a core register that trap the subject in illusionary (or imaginary) need or grasping.8 It is the third Lacanian register, the Symbolic, which seems to offer no comparative ground with Zen. Words are the very basis of psychoanalytic technique; it is through language that the analytic encounter is mapped out. The analysts presence as a listening subject here is to restore the analysand to their latent desire, where it is masked by manifest symptoms. Desire for Lacan is a function of the Symbolic order it is the fundamental lack which marks the subjects inclusion as a speaking subject. Desire is beyond conscious articulation it never speaks but it is always directed at the Other, desiring the others desire, and therefore is intrinsically intersubjective. In contrast, a general suspicion of abstract forms of knowledge, such as words and language, permeates Zen thought and tradition. In the words of the Buddhist text the Vimalakirti-sutra, In itself, the word is less than a thought, and a thought less than the experience. The word is a filtrate, a residue stripped of its best components9. The experience itself is seen as providing a closer grasp of buddhata. However, contradictions and paradoxes are replete in Zen, and the case with language is no exception. Countless Zen students have experienced buddhata or glimses of it while reading a sutra or hearing one being recited. To be diametrically opposed to language

7 8

Located in the Pattana texts. For a further discussion, see Molino1998:293-5. The mirror stage has an interesting correlate in the buddhist theory of object relations, Arammana, which states that all mental states are conditioned by the objects, real or unreal, that hold their attention. Arammana theory states that the most important object that we hold in our mind is the image of us itself. Just as in Lacan though, we cannot truly see ourselves, instead we are dominated by false images, imaginary objects which distort our perceptions of the world. In this formulation it has resonances with psychoanalytic object relations theory. See Brazier 1995:95-107 for a more detailed discussion. 9 Quoted in McPhail 1996:2

would fall back onto dualistic thinking, which Zen rejects. Instead, in the words of the great Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki we must examine the living words and not the dead ones10- all words are not to be rejected as such, simply the ones that attempt to fix and categorise the world, which is impermanent. Words and experience interpenetrate each other. We are reminded of the textual basis of the Lacanian critique of the stable subject. Signifiers, or words themselves (as opposed to their semantic meanings), are not fixed to their meanings (the signified), rather they refer to meanings only through the mediation of the entire chain of signifers, which are incessively sliding across each other in a way to continually displace fixed meaning. For Lacan this points to the subject as eternally being spoken through the signifer In Zen the words relationship to buhhata is less programmatic however in it is nontheless an important part of reaching and communicating buddhata, especially through textual forms such as haiku poems. Having seen some of the basic mechanisms and goals of both theories, we turn now to their mechanisms of operation. For both are not simply abstract theories (although they rely on at times very abstract and convulated structures) that exist in themselves instead they describe the real process of living. For both a proper understanding may await the actual doer, rather than the thinker of the concepts doing the analysis, or interpreting the dream in Lacan, and in Zen meditating or grappling with paradoxical statements, or koans. They both offer critiques of dualistic means of thinking; to question established ways of knowing they advance arguments, which are beyond (rational) argument. One example is the very text of Lacan - the prime example being his foundational essay collection Ecrits being constructed halfway between speech and writing.11 This text contains not simply descriptions of the unconscious, but the actual textual style mimics it, avoiding the rational axiomatic exposition of the unconscious, and presenting itself elliptically and obliquely. It is as if Lacan is stating that the only way to comprehend the unconscious it to acknowledge directly it speaking behind any text,

10 11

Quoted in McPhail 1996:5 Lacan 2004:161.

through the very structure of the writings themselves. The unconscious signifier becomes not only the subject matter, but the subject, the speaker of his discourse. This maneourve has resonances with the Zen technique of using paradoxical koans to achieve a splitting of the mind. In this the student focuses on a statement, such as What is the sound of one hand clapping, or situations such as A man dangles over a deep precipice, hanging on only by his teeth. A Zen master appears and asks What is your true self. The koans have no logical answer they challenge the structure of logical thinking and intellectualisation itself. The paradox must be mediated upon so it fills the persons full experience, and the doubting and frustration spreads to upset previous held notions stable structures of mind. An analogy with psychoanalysis is the impasse in therapy sessions where patients block and there is nothing to be done12. Then from this deadlock a sudden insight leaps which shakes the subject to its very core, revealing that previous safely regarded perceptions of the world are illusions, which now no longer grip the subject and can be observed without attachment. Within the analytic context the patient has reached a point where she or he are able to name the Desire which is continually slipping aware from their consciousness and generating symptoms. By naming the Desire, the subject gives it conscious form, allowing it to be analysed.13 Lacan makes clear that this breakthrough is not achieved by the analyst pointing out, for example, that the patient really desires some sexual object, or that the patients ego is supposed to conform to the analysts healthy one through transference, as ego psychoanalysis posits. Therefore, just as it is the dynamic paradox of the koan which helps the student achieve a splitting of consciousness - not the words themselves, and even less so the master who spoke those words it is the patient themself who must engage with their own network of significations. Both processes are not complete, linear progression from an unenlightened state to an enlightened one, but partial and elliptical approaches. The analysis functions not to heal or eliminate desire, but to restore the patient to their desires, which will always keep circulating, beneath their demands. The unconscious cannot speak as itself, and must always rely on the fundamentally alienating structures of language. Similarly in Zen the
12 13

Suler 1993:83. For further discussion see Ragland-Sullivan 1987:121-2.

actual experience of buddhata is necessarily brief having achieved the state of no mind, where the person is freed from the vessimitudes of ego and its attachments to the world, and the separation between subject and object have collapsed to a primal unity, the person returns to the world, to view it in a clarified way, but nontheless still embodied in it. Thus we have seen how the two strands of Lacan and Zen have many overlapping strands despite their outward dissimularities. Both urge the repudiatation of the autonomous ego, and declare that the path to doing so cannot be made of the same philosophical bricks that support the former view, namely rigid dualistic thinking and the subject-object split. We must not forgot of course the vast differences, namely the rationalistic tools of linguistic analysis that Lacan brings to bear on the unconscious, which have no correlate in Zen, and the scope of the treatment, in which analysis is usually considered to respond specific to particular symptoms or character traits. Nonetheless, the scope of analysis is not fixed, and in the words of Erich Fromm, psychoanalysis can be taken further: If one pursues the aim of the full recovery of the unconscious, then the task is not restricted to the instincts, nor to other limited sectors of experience, but to the total expression of the total man it means the disappearance of the polarity of conscious vs unconscious; it means arriving at the state of an immediate grasp of reality, without distortion and without interference by intellectual reflection To be conscious of the unconscious means to be open, responding, to have nothing and to be.14 To which the Zen master would simply smile.
2777 words

14

Molino1998:66.

References Brazier, D., Zen Therapy: Transcending the sorrows of the human mind, John Wiley&Sons, 1995. Frosh, S., The Politics of Psychoanalysis, Macmillan, 1987. Grosz, E., Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, Allen&Unwin, 1990. Lacan, J [trans A. Sheridan], Ecrits:a selection, Routledge, 2004. McPhail, M., Zen and the Art of Rhetoric:An inquiry into Coherence, State University of New York Press, 1996. Molino, A. [ed.], The Couch and the Tree:Dialogues in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism, North Point Press, 1998. Ragland-Sullivan, E., Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, University of Illinois Press, 1987. Suler, J, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Eastern Thought, State University of New York Press, 1993.