O critică la adresa seductivității Budismului

Urmărind ultima emisiune, mi-am amintit de un fragment pe care l-am citit acum ceva vreme, fragment ce se potrivește mănușă cu subiectul discuției lui Edi. Citatul propus aparține filosofului Slavoj Žižek și constituie o critică adusă budismului, curent a cărui seductivitate face din ce în ce mai multe victime. Precizez că textul este unul stufos, destul de greoi, dar care merită din plin atenția cititorului. Bold-uirile îmi aparțin.

”Chesterton also correctly linked this dark core of Christianity to the opposition between Inside (the immersion in inner Truth) and Outside (the traumatic encounter with Truth): “The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards.The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.” Here he is referring to the wellknown difference between the way the Buddha is represented in paintings and statues, with his benevolently peaceful gaze, and the way Christian saints are usually represented, with an intense, almost paranoiac, ecstatically transfixed gaze.This “Buddha’s gaze” is often evoked as a possible antidote to the Western aggressive-paranoiac gaze, a gaze which aims at total control, and is always alert, on the lookout for some lurking threat: in the Buddha, we find a benevolently withdrawn gaze which simply lets things be, abandoning the urge to control them. However, although the message of Buddhism is one of inner peace, an odd detail in the act of consecration of the Buddha’s statues throws a strange light on this peace. This act of consecration consists of painting the eyes of the Buddha.While painting these eyes, the artist cannot look the statue in the face, but works with his back to it, painting sideways or over his shoulder using a mirror, which catches the gaze of the image he is bringing to life. Once he has finished his work, he now has a dangerous gaze himself, and is led away blindfolded. The blindfold is removed only after his eyes can fall on something that he then symbolically destroys. As Gombrich dryly points out, “The spirit of this ceremony cannot be reconciled with Buddhist doctrine, so no one tries to do so.” But isn’t the key precisely this bizarre heterogeneity? The fact that for the temperate and pacifying reality of the Buddhist universe to function, the horrifying, malevolent gaze has to be symbolically excluded. The evil eye has to be tamed. Is not this ritual an “empirical” proof that the Buddhist experience of the peace of nirvana is not the ultimate fact, that something has to be when east meets west excluded in order for us to attain this peace, namely, the Other’s gaze? Another indication that the “Lacanian” evil gaze posing a threat to the subject is not just an ideological hypostasis of the Western attitude of control and domination, but something that is operative also in Eastern cultures. This excluded dimension is ultimately that of the act. What, then, is an act, grounded in the abyss of a free decision?

Recall C. S. Lewis’s description of his religious choice from Surprised by Joy—what makes it so irresistibly delicious is the author’s matter of- fact “English” skeptical style, far removed from the usual pathetic narratives of mystical rapture. C. S. Lewis’s description of the act thus deftly avoids any ecstatic pathos in the usual style of Saint Teresa, any multiple-orgasmic penetrations by angels or God: it is not that, in the divine mystical experience,we step out (in ex-stasis) of our normal experience of reality: it is this “normal” experience which is “ex-static” (Heidegger), in which we are thrown outside into entities, and the mystical experience signals the withdrawal from this ecstasy. Citește mai mult din acest articol