Open Enlightenment

The Room

I’m not fond of the word ‘enlightenment’ and would prefer something like Nishida Kitaro‘s expression that is translated as ‘religious consciousness’. This would make it clear that what we’re talking about is not a personal attainment but a way of seeing that beings us into alignment with the Absolute. However, its disadvantage is that ‘religious consciousness’ still sounds like a state of mind. And – of course – it contains the endemically misunderstood word ‘religion’. But its biggest disadvantage of all is that if I talked about ‘religious consciousness’ then people might think, ‘Oh, that’s what he means. I thought for a moment he was talking about enlightenment, but of course that would be ridiculous!’

You have to experience enlightenment to know what it means. Someone who says that enlightenment is ‘boundless compassion’ probably hasn’t experienced it, although they may have experienced boundless compassion. Someone who says enlightenment is ‘a perfectly still and tranquil mind’ probably hasn’t experienced it, although they may have experienced a perfectly still and tranquil mind. It sounds stupid to say it, but only a person who has experienced enlightenment has experienced enlightenment, rather than what they suppose the effects of enlightenment to be. If a person who hasn’t experienced enlightenment experienced enlightenment, the discovery that it’s only the realisation of the Absolute (and not any of Its relative effects) would probably disappoint them, because it takes someone who has experienced enlightenment to appreciate what enlightenment is.

So what the hell is it, then?

Well, imagine that there is a room and the room is a metaphor for your experience. In the room are furnishings and objects and these are your experiences. While they are in the room they are part of your awareness. Yet the person who has experienced enlightenment sees how the removal of everything from the room is not the absence of experience, but the experience of absence. The person who has experienced enlightenment can see how the emptiness of the room is what enables things to appear inside it. These things include the person who has experienced enlightenment, who recognises himself as something that can appear in the room because the room is empty. The person who has experienced enlightenment sees how the room appears simply the way it already is, because it’s so empty that even he isn’t in it.

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The Absolute Versus The Relative

The description of enlightenment as the realisation of the Absolute is one of my favourites. Its advantages include the implicit notion that enlightenment is not something a person ‘has’ or ‘is’; not a state or feeling, but the arrival at a form of understanding.

Yet enlightenment as ‘realisation of the Absolute’ has distinct drawbacks. It might lead someone to imagine it is the adoption of an idea, or a particular version of the idea of the Absolute. Another disadvantage is that by identifying enlightenment with the Absolute it implicitly encourages us to draw a dualistic contrast between it and the relative.

The Absolute includes but transcends the relative, so it’s not a dualistic relationship. But not until the process of enlightenment is well under way can we begin to experience this relationship in anything but an intellectual and dualist sense. And yet I still think the notions of Absolute and relative are among the most useful tools we have for speaking about and teaching enlightenment.

This impression was confirmed when I recently read a translation of one of the final works of the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), who offers some valuable ideas for understanding enlightenment (or ‘religious consciousness’ as he tends to call it) in terms of the realisation of the Absolute, but with some important safeguards that prevent this model from degenerating into dualism.

In a sense, however, realising dualism is just as important as realising the Absolute. Nishida writes on how religious consciousness does not begin until we gain an inkling of the contradiction implied by the very notion of a self – that part of the world we pretend is separate from or is looking out on the rest of it (Nishida 1987: 66). Although some might reject outright the model of Absolute versus relative as too dualistic for the purpose of conceptualising enlightenment, Nishida is reminding us here that the manifest absurdity of duality is what fuels the whole enterprise of enlightenment. Duality is such a stupid way of seeing the world that it’s its own best argument against itself.

Nothing gives us a better handle on the stupidity of duality that the supposed dualism between the relative and the Absolute, because if the Absolute were conceived as the dualistic counterpart to the relative (its ‘opposite’, for example, or its ‘complement’, ‘shadow’, ‘avatar’, or any relationship whatsoever) it would therefore be in a relation to the relative – i.e. relative itself – and instantly, by definition, non-Absolute.

The attempt to think dualistically about the Absolute demonstrates immediately that the Absolute requires a completely different kind of logic in order to be conceptualised correctly. As Nishida puts it:

[T]he absolute is not merely non-relative. For it contains absolute negation within itself. Therefore the relative which stands in relation to the absolute is not merely a part of the absolute or a lesser version of it. If it were, the absolute would indeed be non-relative, but it would no longer be the absolute either. A true absolute must possess itself through self-negation. The true absolute exists in that it returns itself in the form of the relative. The true absolute One expresses itself in the form of the infinite many. God exists in this world through self-negation. (Nishida 1987: 69)

Wow…

(Now go back and read that again – slowly, this time…)

In other words, then, the relative has nothing to do with the Absolute (because otherwise the Absolute would be relative to it). The true Absolute, therefore, is non-relative because it negates its own nature, which it does by expressing itself as the relative.

This is the most stunning, the most beautiful description of the radical, bottomless emptiness of Emptiness, the most succinct description of why it can be said that ‘Emptiness is Form’ that I’ve yet come across. It’s also a vivid evocation of precisely what the enlightened mind sees and experiences when it meditates upon Emptiness.

Too bad that Nishida’s writing isn’t more widely read for what it manifestly is: his report on his own experience. Part of the reason for this is the position he occupies in the standard version of the history of ideas. He was among the first eastern thinkers to adopt western ideas and express himself in the style of western academic philosophy. For this reason he is often read in the West as another western academic philosopher – that is, someone who seeks to understand experience through the medium of ideas – albeit those ideas are a little more exotic than average, with their ‘Zen’ trappings and references to thinkers with funny-sounding names that we don’t read over here.

In the translation of Nishida that I own, the editor’s closing essay is revealing in this respect. Peppering his argument with the usual post-modern buzzwords, the editor takes issue with the idea that Nishida’s non-dualism can only be understood within a tradition of eastern mysticism. Yet he never entertains the possibility that Nishida might simply be describing stuff he has experienced. Instead, Nishida’s work is viewed as a kind of linguistic exercise, which has ‘obvious parallels’ in the work of western poets – such as Shakespeare, Milton and Wallace Stevens – and with the work of post-modern philosophers such as (oh, for Fuck’s Sake) Jacques Derrida.

The only thing this clueless argument demonstrates is the possible pitfall of trying to teach enlightenment as realisation of the Absolute. Of course, all models are fallible, but without an appreciation of the non-dual logic of the Absolute as deep and as subtle as Nishida’s, it’s all too easy for post-modern wind-bags to strand themselves in the shallows of rhetoric and ideas.

Source

Nishida Kitaro (1987). Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Translated and edited by David A. Dilworth. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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