REPLY TO THE CRITICS OF MY CRITIQUE OF BUDDHISM

The Buddhist edifice is necessarily inconsistent; there is no neutral universal Buddhist theory

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Kim Murphy’s critique of my reading of Buddhism is the last in the long series of Buddhist replies to my work, and since he brings together many of these other reproaches in a very systematic way, I think it deserves an answer. The only part of his critique that I really don’t like is how he, after quite correctly stating that my account of Buddhism “has, for more than two decades, been widely criticized by scholars of religion and comparative Eastern and Western philosophy,” specifies that I was criticized for my “persistent oversimplification of a diverse and internally complex tradition consisting of at least eleven strands within Buddhism.”

This is something you can always say about any critique: there are always other approaches; you always have to ignore something. Let’s take an extreme case: if I criticize Nazism, I can always be accused of oversimplifying a complex ideological space, that Hitler’s Nazism was not the same as Rosenberg’s, that Speer’s was not the same as that of Goebbels… (And these differences are real: Hitler himself said about Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century, the main and most systematic deployment of the Nazi vision of the world, that it is not worth the paper it was printed on.)

In contrast to this approach, I will try to prove that not only do I not ignore the different strands in Buddhism, but that these differences form the very basis of my critique – the Buddhist edifice is necessarily inconsistent; there is no neutral universal Buddhist theory (and practice). So I am tempted to say that Murphy is doing exactly what he is reproaching me for: ridiculously oversimplifying my presentation and critique of Buddhism. Already the summary of his text perfectly renders the gist of his argumentation: in my Quantum History I conceive of Buddhism:

“as a quietist pursuit of ‘inner peace’ incompatible with human finitude and negativity. I argue that Žižek inherits this caricature from Alexandre Kojève’s flawed or misconceived reading of Early and Mahayana Zen Buddhism, collapsing certain extraordinarily diverse traditions into a monolithic ideology of retreat and emotional pacification. Such portrayals not only ignore the ethical, metaphysical, and socially engaged dimensions of Buddhist thought—from early Theravāda analyses of suffering to Mahāyāna accounts of relationality and modern movements for anti-war and anti-colonial resistance—but also misrepresent the very concepts of nirvāṇa, non-self, and return to the unconditioned states, and equanimity seen in early Buddhism. Rather than denying negativity, Buddhist traditions confront suffering through insight, ethical discernment, and transformative practice. Far from promoting withdrawal, they cultivate socially embedded forms of attention, compassion, and ethical behavior.”¹

I totally agree with the last sentence in this quote – yes, Buddhism doesn’t deny or ignore or eliminate negativity; it “confronts suffering through insight, ethical discernment, and transformative practice.” But the aim of this confrontation is to contain the destructive aspect of negativity (by way of diminishing suffering), not to elevate it into the founding principle of reality. Murphy goes on elaborating this reproach:

“By presuming from the outset that Buddhism seeks a transcendence of negativity, he cannot perceive the tradition’s rich discourse on the transformation – not the elimination – of the forces that generate suffering. The non-self doctrine is not a metaphysics of dissolution but a phenomenological claim about the instability and conditioned nature of the aggregates of experience. Likewise, nirvāṇa is not the annihilation of subjectivity but its reconfiguration: a mode of perceiving and acting unbound by the compulsive tendencies that give rise to suffering. Far from aiming at a state of unworldly calm, major Buddhist traditions … situate liberation precisely in the thick of worldly contingency.”

Murphy then goes on to substantiate his reproach by providing a series of particular cases that confirm his reading of Buddhism. In the encounters and dialogues of the early Chan monks, “there are riddles and paradoxes, frustrations, and rhetorical violence, which signal not a flight from contradiction but rather an intense purification in its depths. This, I argue, is Buddhist equanimity, which is not the same as detachment or inner peace. Similarly, tantric forms of Vajrayāna Buddhism elevate the most intense traumatic, emotional, and perceptual states—fear, desire, aversion—into opportunities for realization, precisely because they reveal the mind’s capacity to transmute negativity rather than evade it. In these traditions, therefore, finitude is not overcome; it is inhabited more fully.”

Things get problematic (for me, at least) when Murphy refers to the Fire Sermon (Ādittapariyāya Sutta), in which nirvāṇa is described as “the extinguishment or ‘cooling’ of greed, hatred, and delusion, a metaphor for ending reactive behaviors rather than achieving emotional numbness.” Murphy then goes a step further and mentions the Pali Canon, which claims that “the Awakened, Enlightened being only experiences suffering on the level of the body, but not a mental form of emotional suffering attached to ego-derived suffering in Freud.” With this last claim I emphatically disagree: no, the ultimate suffering is spiritual. Incidentally, I never even mention Kojève in this context, and Kojève’s reading of Hegel is totally incompatible with mine, plus Heideggerian finitude is for me not the ultimate horizon of our thinking. I repeatedly point out that finitude is necessarily, in its very notion, supplemented by immortality in the sense of undeadness – negativity (the Freudian “death drive”) is Freud’s name for its opposite, for immortality.