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Selling Enlightenment

How do you ‘sell’ enlightenment?

I was discussing this with someone recently, who made the point that the only way to sell enlightenment is to make an appeal to the ego. ‘Get yourself enlightened,’ we should be saying, ‘because then you’ll be happy beyond your wildest dreams, you’ll realise everything you desire and (if the person happens to be approaching enlightenment from the tradition of western magick) your magical powers will increase to an awesome new level!’

In support of his argument my disputant pointed to an example in the venerable Shinzen Young. In a video entitled ‘After Enlightenment, What’s Left? What’s the Point?’, Shinzen ‘sells’ enlightenment as follows:

As time goes on [after enlightenment], more and more of what’s left is the effortless flow of Emptiness, which doesn’t sound that appealing, until you actually experience it, and then it’s like – well, if you had a choice of living one day that way or living your whole life not that way you’d say: ‘well, I’ll take that one day and you can kill me at the end of the day’. That’s how good the effortless flow of Emptiness is.

It seems Shinzen is presenting enlightenment here as something so damned good he’d rather be dead than not have it. Just look at him in the video! The guy’s sixty-five (oh, he drops that in so incidentally), and he’s sitting there grinning and happy, looking like he’s in his mid forties. If this were an advertisement for cheesecake he’d take a big bite, smile into the camera and say: ‘Mmmmm. You just won’t believe how good this is,’ and we’d all be out buying cheesecake tomorrow.

But it left me feeling uncomfortable, because the more I thought about it the more I realised I wouldn’t trade one day of enlightenment for a lifetime without it. Every time I think about it and weigh it up the answer is the same: No, I choose unenlightenment. Enlightenment for one day is simply not equivalent to a lifetime’s experience of non-enlightenment. So you can stick your cheesecake, Shinzen!

My reaction, I realised, is because like most advertisements this one actually creates the desire it offers to satisfy.

We’re human beings and enlightenment is a natural development of our nature. It’s our birthright. Consequently, there is no lifetime lived without the possibility of enlightenment. The idea that you or anyone could possibly live a life without a chance of getting enlightened is an anxiety-provoking fiction. The potential for enlightenment is with you at every second and only you can realise that potential. There’s no need for you to buy ‘cheesecake’ because you and your life are complete right now without it.

Now don’t get me wrong. Of course, this isn’t to say there’s nothing that needs to be done. (If only that were true…) There may be work to realise our goal; there may even be work to realise that we have a goal in the first place. But what’s certainly the case is that buying cheesecake won’t help, because it’s our effort that will win the day, not some product that someone wants to sell us on the basis of a lie – the lie that we are ever without the possibility of enlightenment.

Honestly, though, I don’t believe Shinzen is selling or intending to sell enlightenment in his video. But advertising and selling are so deeply engrained in our culture that we’re prone to interpret him in this way. Capitalism, in order to sell stuff, is constantly engaged in a process of making commodities out of things, whether they’re material objects, ideas or experiences, and seeking to persuade us of their value. This process of reification runs precisely contrary to the type of insight that leads to enlightenment. I stumbled across a vivid illustration of this a few months ago: an account of a Tibetan Buddhist monk who had his first awakening when his teacher held up a hundred rupee banknote and enabled him to see that its ‘value’ was a completely imputed quality (Rabten 1989: 48). The ‘value’ of the note is in the mind of the beholder, but nowhere in the paper and ink of the object itself. So if awakening is attained by seeing through the imputed value of things, we hit a problem as soon as we try to sell awakening because this involves not only (i) imputing a value to it, but also: (ii) turning it into a commodity or thing; and then (iii) creating a desire in the potential customer for it.

I never imagined it would happen, but for the first time since my student days I feel drawn again to the insights of Karl Marx. One day, Marx had an ‘awakening’: he looked around and realised that there are no ‘things’. With retrospect, a lot of Marx’s ideas seem not to have panned out, but that basic insight is just as true today. There are no computers, fridges, cars, buildings, bridges or roads: there is just stuff that human beings have put together. There are no ‘things’ apart from the effects of the labour of putting stuff together.

Of course, there are profound differences between the Buddha and Marx’s ideas. The Buddha’s concept of ‘dependent origination’ applies irrespectively to all phenomena, whereas Marx’s insights singled out the labour of the working class as the origin of value and the source of all commodities. Labour, for Marx, was reality’s bedrock. But Marx’s ideas are still useful to enable us to understand that if we commodify enlightenment then we are doing the dirty work of capitalism: we are making the fruit of effort seem like a ‘thing’ that someone can ‘have’. If enlightenment is sold on the basis it will solve all problems, then it becomes a kind of dream that in itself may indeed supply comfort – but only to prevent us from seriously examining our lives. Or it may be sold as something ‘exotic’, in which case people may well show up in droves for a weekend of chanting, incense, and a nice sit-down in silence on a cushion – but will return to their working lives too refreshed to actually engage with the reality of their experience.

No buyer ever likes to admit they’ve been swindled or conned. But in the case of enlightenment, unless the buyer realises there’s no value in the hundred rupee note, no commodity they ever needed in the first place, then they’re not getting the real deal. ‘Selling’ enlightenment must somehow allow us to step entirely outside the roles of buyer and seller.