Contributed by Raul Moncayo, Ph.D.
Raul Moncayo, Ph.D. Most recently is the author of the book The Practice of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. He is a founding member of the Beijing Center for Freudian and Lacanian Research. He is a personal analyst, supervising analyst, and training director. He has been on the Faculty of many academic Institutions and is a Supervising Analyst at the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in Berkeley, California. He also has a private practice in which he provides psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, consultation, and supervision.
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In Zen Buddhism, practicing meditation leads to the light and heart of wisdom beyond wisdom. Buddhas awaken to the realization that consciousness, perception, sensation, and feelings are all empty. In the Heart Sutra, the arhat Śāriputra asks the Buddha how one practices with wisdom. The Buddha, who was in deep samadhi, asks Avalokiteśvara to explain it to him. The Buddha does not want to explain the unexplainable, but in the form of Avalokiteśvara he can condescend to explain it to living beings. Avalokiteśvara is chosen because wisdom in Buddhism is a wisdom of the heart. But does a bodhisattva dwell in Nirvana, or do only the arhats? Arhats are ascetics who live in the woods and practice concentration away from everyone else. Is zazen, or Zen meditation, truer than a concentration practice performed in isolation?
In addition, does Buddhism present the world as an illusion, including scientific knowledge? Are Buddhists beyond the world and yet inside the illusion of the world? Dōgen said we have to wake from a dream within a dream.
Experiencing the Unknowable
In The Idea of the Holy, the German philosopher and theologian Rudolf Otto writes that while the concept of “the holy” is often used to convey moral perfection, it contains another distinctive element beyond the ethical sphere, for which he coined the term numinous, based on the Latin numen (“divine power”). In Zen Buddhism, the radiant light or the numen that makes a person a new being is a divine power called the “empty holy nothing.” When Bodhidharma came to China, he was summoned by Emperor Wu, whose name means a “no” that is also a “yes,” except that the emperor did not understand the meaning of his own name. So when he asked Bodhidharma who he was, Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know,” and when the emperor asked him, “What is the highest meaning of the holy truths,” or of holiness, Bodhidharma said, “Emptiness, nothing holy.”
In Immanuel Kant’s philosophy, a noumenon refers to a thing-in-itself, an object that exists independently of our perception and is fundamentally unknowable to us, while a phenomenon is the world as experienced in an ordinary sense and can be known objectively. This contrasts with Lacan, who considered das Ding, or the thing-in-itself—the “no-thing”—as a form of direct experience of the unknowable, or a form of unknown-knowing. For Lacan, this is the faculty needed to know the unknowable.
The term numen is etymologically unrelated to Kant’s noumenon, a Greek term Kant used to refer to an unknowable reality underlying sensations of the thing. Otto explains the numinous as an experience or feeling not based on reason or sensory stimulation, representing the “wholly Other” to the ego. Otto argues that because the numinous is irreducible, it cannot be defined in terms of other concepts or experiences, and that readers must therefore follow their own minds until they reach the point at which “the numinous” in them begins to stir. In other words, our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught; it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind. The things-in-themselves are perceived directly, without distortion or delusion. This way of perceiving belongs to the realm of Suchness or samadhi, and to non-perception. This is the realm of noumena in direct experience.
Holiness and Emptiness
For Rudolf Otto, the feeling of the holy may at times come like an abrupt wind, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deep reverence. It may pass over into a more settled and lasting attitude of the spirit, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of everyday experience. However, in Zen Buddhism, there is no duality between the holy and the profane, samsara and nirvana, monastic practice and everyday life. Eventually, if the spirit dies away in meaningless ritual in everyday life, formal meditation has also failed.
The holy has its crude, barbaric antecedents, and it may also be developed into something beautiful, pure, and glorious. For example, sin and sacredness are both related to the primal crime of murdering and eating the primal father (Freud’s Totem and Taboo). It is also linked to primitive sacrifice. Otto describes the sacred as a mystery (mysterium) that is at once terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans). The joy of a text is an enigma that some people can also express in ordinary language and sentences. Otto felt that the numinous was most strongly present in the Old and New Testaments, but that it was also present in all other religions. This is why it is relevant to discuss the presence of the holy in Zen Buddhism, a non-theistic religion. The Idea of the Holy is Otto’s most famous and influential book, and its conception of the holy had a significant impact on the history of religions and other disciplines. The book’s two major contributions were its emphasis on “an experiential approach, involving the description of the essential structures of religious experience,” and an “anti-reductionist approach, involving the unique numinous quality of all religious experience.” Prominent 20th-century scholars who praised the book include figures such as Mircea Eliade.
While some interpret Zen Buddhism as emphasizing direct experience and rejecting abstract concepts like “holiness,” others view it as a path to awakening and enlightenment, which can be seen as a form of spiritual realization or holiness. Emptiness is a direct experience and presence, not an abstract concept.
For philosophers, the numinous is how the light of truth reaches us. But Otto believes truth is not experienced as a state of being, so thought is a form of relative truth that is not received in itself, only as representation.
Heidegger refers to experience as a medium but does not have a category for immediate experience. Here, truth is outside knowledge, and the absolute leads to the fear of truth. For Heidegger, knowledge is a fixed goal as well as a sequence of progressions. Consciousness of self and self-consciousness are essential moments of truth for both Hegel and Heidegger, while for Buddhism self-consciousness is a moment of ego and relative truth, not absolute truth. For Hegel, experience is the capitalized Being of beings. In that case, experience would be essentially spiritual experience. Being is the experience through which subjects become subjects and therefore become objects and objective. Heidegger, of course, has no notion of unconscious experience, because experience does not have to be conscious or necessarily have an object. In theology, consciousness is equivalent to the No. Is consciousness the same as spirit, and is spirit always conscious, or can there be unconscious spirit, like the spirit of God? Only Christianity defines the spirit as the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Trinity. The third person is unsubstantial, rises from the dead, and can appear as a bird flying in midair in the middle of a sunset.
Revisiting Christian Notions of the Holy
The personal biblical God is holy and commands humans to strive for holiness, meaning to be set apart and distinct. This is a form of dualism between the few and the many. The few are the leaders, who must be holy and of good character. Apparently, in Islamic dualism, God is holy, but man is sinful, unholy, and violent.
In other areas, why are we so fond of protecting the purity and helplessness of children? Some people object to this because children can be childish brats. Being childlike—or angelic and God-like—is different. In this case, a future of peace must be secured for childlike children at all costs. Unlike Buddhas, we cannot see God’s face, but God’s face appears in the face of Buddha, in the face of our children, and in the purity of the madonna col bambino (mother-child) fusion.
I remember that when I was three or four years old, my mother would put me to bed and read and sing to me. She told me that when she used the word holy, I asked her why God had so many holes. In modern physics, they speak of black holes, and the later Lacan spoke of true and false holes in the mind. The holy is not a circle, or an infinite line that becomes a circle; the holy is the hole inside the circle. Instead of phallic enjoyment, Lacan spoke of an Other and holy feminine enjoyment.
The void is the name for a physical object otherwise known as the emptiness of space. In this void the light manifests, like suns shining in space, or like gentle suns shining in the internal and external space of our minds. Light is always associated with the dark, and the dark is always associated with the light, and both can be either good or bad. This is unlike the West, where light is good and dark is bad.
Jesus taught that children are precious, and that entering the kingdom of God requires childlike humility and trust. In Hasidic Judaism, children’s hair is not cut until age three, because they
believe that children’s souls are in heaven until then. From three to five is when the Freudian Oedipal phase begins, and the life of conflict begins and continues.
So biblical heaven is in this world, not the next. The same with hell, which lasts at most a lifetime. Tibetan Buddhism is similar in holding that after death, rebirth happens into a new human or animal form depending on our deeds in this lifetime. In Buddhism, there is no God intervening; instead, there is the immanent law of karma. Karma is based on the eight consciousnesses of mind, which for all practical purposes are unconscious. This consciousness is not a soul and does not die with death; it lives on. In monotheism, it is God and the angels who intervene to punish or reward. In rebirth, God would make the decisions, except that there is free will to choose which parents to be reborn to.
God is hidden and does not appear in Tibetan rebirth, as God does in Judaism, but Buddha does for Buddhists. Since representations of consciousness have died after death, which consciousness would choose the parents to be reborn to? This seems to indicate that there is no free choice before birth. Supposedly, before rebirth, subjective representations choose which loving sexual act between a man and a woman they will enter. Reproduction is at the heart of the creation of the universe and all beings.