9

ABSTRACT

Much of the Western tradition can be understood in terms of increasing
self-  consciousness  about the difference between culture and nature.
The problems that anthropology  has recently discovered  about culture
parallel  what Buddhism  claims  about  the problem  of the individual
self.  We alternate  between  the  promise  of technological  progress
(freedom  through self-grounding)  and yearning for a return to nature
(security through regrounding).  Since both are impossible  for us, is
there is any third alternative?


    It is very  remarkable  that  we should  be inclined  to think  of
    civilization  --  houses, trees, cars, etc.  --  as separating man
    from  his  origins, from  what  is  lofty  and  eternal, etc.  Our
    civilized environment, along with its trees and plants, strikes us
    then as though it were cheaply wrapped in cellophane  and isolated
    from everything great, from God, as it were.  That is a remarkable
    picture that intrudes upon us. (Wittgenstein)(1)


Wittgenstein's  ignorance of the history of philosophy  was not always
an advantage, yet sometimes  it helped  him to see what the rest of us
tend to see through.  Although the epigraph  may be taken in different
ways, for me it brings into question a distinction so fundamental that
it  is  extremely  difficult  to think  about  --  because  we  almost
inevitably find ourselves thinking with it: the dualism between nature
and culture.  This is a bifurcation  which has taken and continues  to
take many different  forms, but which may be traced  back to the Greek
distinction between phusis and nomos, nature and convention.  Was this
conceptual antinomy a liberating discovery, because it deprived social
and  ideological  structures  of  their


                               10

necessary  and  'atural' character, or was  it a thought-construction
that we today find ourselves  constrained  by? Or both? Such questions
reveal how inescapable the dualism has become for us: even the attempt
to understand it becomes expressed in terms of it.
    Much  of the  Western  tradition  can  be understood  in terms  of
increasing self- consciousness about the difference between nature and
convention/culture, and the dialectic whereby each alternately becomes
preferred  to the other.  Hesiod  (8th  C.  BCE?), who stands  not far
inside the threshold  of literacy, already  distinguishes  between the
traditional agricultural  life he praises --  in the Golden Age of the
past  --   and  the  technological  innovations  that  Protagoras  and
Anaxagoras would later praise -- which may lead to a golden age in the
future.  These temporal orientations  became enshrined  as part of the
fixed pattern: those who yearn for nature  evoke the past, while those
who privilege  culture have high hopes for the future.  Then as today,
nobody is satisfied  with the present.
    The  fifth   century   brought   not  only   the  democratic   and
imperialistic aspirations of Periclean Athens but also the first plans
for reorganizing  society  along  more rational  lines.  As Democritus
expressed  it, nature is not simply  inborn but may be implanted  with
education and training.  The most enthusiastic  proclamation  of human
ability  to control and transform  the natural  is found in Sophocles'
Antigone  lines 332-375, although  these verses close with the warning
--  the first  of many  since  --  that  this  possibility  is a mixed
blessing.  Like so many other conceptual tensions, that between phusis
and nomos was addressed  and not quite resolved  by Plato: the simpler
life of earlier pastoral  society was more conducive  to goodness  and
happiness, yet it lacked philosophy (Laws 679e) -- itself a product of
the growing alienation  between  social custom and natural order.
    The Cynics may be viewed as a radical  reaction  to this split: in
response to the unsatisfactory  nomos that their reconstructing  Greek
society  offered, they  preferred  to live  naturally, dog-like  (Gr.,
kunikos).  Unfortunately  for them, the attraction of such a lifestyle
was  at the same  time  its impossibility.  Once  convention  has been
recognized  as convention, you cannot go home again, for the essential
condition of someone truly "close to nature" is that one does not know
one is close to nature.  The paradox has dogged us ever since.
    Closer  to our time, but no less determined  by this dualism, such
figures  as  Diderot,  Rousseau,  Herder,  the  Romantics,  and  later
Spengler

                                11


(to mention only a few) contrasted  the organic  and genuine  with the
artificiality   and   superficiality   of   conventionality,   seeking
spontaneity  and sincerity  in place  of sterile  rationality.  On the
other side, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Condorcet  and Comte (to mention only a
few) expressed  almost unbounded optimism in the progressive  capacity
of human  beings  to understand  and control  the  laws  of their  own
development.  Even closer to home, because  still largely  determining
the  ways  we think  about  our  own  "nature"  Freud  emphasizes  the
importance  of the socially-constructed  ego and superego  controlling
the  anomic  urges  of  libido  instinct;  Marcuse  and  Norman  Brown
celebrate eros unbound.
    Is the Internet liberatory  or alienating? Are humans the rightful
stewards  of nature, or is it better to "let things be" and allow each
species  its  own intrinsic  value? Should  economic  policy  minimize
government  control of the "free market",or does the marketplace  need
to  be  carefully  regulated?  Should  liberal  education  instill  an
appreciative awareness of the long and rich tradition that has made us
what we are, or should it train us to think critically  --  more often
than not, to uncover  the multifarious  ways that tradition  disguises
itself  as natural  and  inevitable? The  tropes  shift, and  what  is
culture in one context becomes  nature in another, yet consciously  or
unconsciously  we continue to line up on both sides of issues that are
none  the  less  important  for  reconstituting  the same  fundamental
dialectic.
    Inescapable for us, perhaps, but not universal.  In fact, it seems
to me that the significance  we have  come to place  upon  the duality
between  phusis  and nomos  is distinctively  Western, because  almost
uniquely  Greek  in  origin.(2) Historically,  the  distinction  became
important  due to the  sophists, whose  privileged  position  in Greek
society  allowed  for the development  of a new transcendental  vision
radically   different   from  those  that  arose   in  other   ancient
civilizations.
    In most premodern societies the sociopolitical  order is validated
by sacralizing  it.  Rulers are gods or empowered  by them;  to revolt
against secular authority, therefore, is to challenge  divine power as
well.  Occasionally,  however, contrary  transcendental  visions  have
succeeded  in distinguishing  a sacred  dimension  from the political.
What social conditions encouraged the development  of such alternative
perspectives?
    "Transcendence," whether it takes the form of divine revelation or
    of theoretical  cosmology, implies a search for authority  outside
    the


                              12

    institutionalized  offices and structures of the seeker's society.
    Even its most concrete  form, the law code, implies a transfer  of
    authority  from  the  holders  of  office  to  the  written  rule.
    Transcendental  impulses  therefore  constitute, by definition, an
    implicit  challenge  to traditional  authority  and indicate  some
    dissatisfaction  with it....  [N]ew transcendental  visions are...
    likely to be presented  by persons in a precariously  independent,
    interstitial  --  or at least  exposed  and somewhat  solitary  --
    position  in society;  they are therefore  particularly  likely to
    occur in societies sufficiently differentiated to have specialized
    social  roles  with distinct  bases  of authority, but not complex
    enough   to  have  integrated   these   roles   into  functionally
    differentiated structures.(3)

This fits the main examples of transcendence that come to mind. In the
case  of  Hebrew  monotheism, "interstitial"  prophets  such  as Amos,
Isaiah   and   Jeremiah   developed   the  ethical   transcendentalism
established  by the Mosaic covenant;  Max Weber drew attention  to how
their  precarious  independence  was  supported  by their  ability  to
prophesize  in towns and then withdraw into the hills.  In the case of
India, Louis Dumont has pointed out a two-stage process: Vedic rituals
became  so complicated  that  the role  of specialist  priests  became
exalted; then later there appeared "a full-fledged and peculiar social
role    outside    society    proper:    the    renouncer,    as    an
individual-outside-the-world, inventor  or adept  of a 'discipline  of
salvation'  and  of its social  concomitant, best  called  the  Indian
sect."(4)

    The  case  of  axial-age  Greece  differs  decisively   from  both
the  above.   Humphreys   finds  the  necessary  precondition   for  a
transcendental perspective on society in the privileged and relatively
independent  position  of its intellectuals, especially  the sophists,
whose special  linguistic  skills  provided  "the ability  to recreate
social  relationships  and  manipulate  them  in  thought."5  In  this
instance, however, what Greek  intellectuals  offered  was less  a new
vision  of the divine  than a new vision  of the secular  --  in other
words, they discovered or created what became our distinction  between
the sacred and the secular. Instead of reforming the Homeric pantheon,
with its unsatisfactory  vision of life and the afterlife, they sought
to displace it by distinguishing logos from mythos.  Thought liberated
itself  from  myth  and  superstition,  thereby  establishing  another
ambivalent  duality  whose  consequences  we still  benefit  from  and
struggle  against.  Or, more  precisely, another  aspect  of the  same
phusis - nomos

                                13


dialectic,  since  nomos  and  logos  both  serve  to  demystify   and
subordinate  what had previously  been taken for granted  as "natural"
Thales founded philosophy  when he did not use the gods to explain the
world. Solon did not get his new laws from them. Pericles did not even
mention them in his funeral oration. Greek drama reduced their role by
emphasizing  human motivation  and responsibility.  Socrates cited the
gods only to justify a quest for wisdom that did not otherwise  depend
on them.

    One does not escape  the gods so easily, however.  Psychologically
they serve a crucial function.  We ground ourselves  in a mythological
worldview  because it organizes  the cosmos for us: it explains who we
are, why we are here, and what  our role  is in the  larger  order  of
things.  Even if that vision is in some ways inadequate --  as Homeric
religion certainly was --  its disappearance  is likely to make things
worse, because the liberation  of logos also liberates  the anxiety of
freedom,  from   the   realization   that   there   is   no  "natural"
transcendental order sacralizing our way of life.

    The  psychoanalyst   Otto  Rank  divided  our  anxiety   into  two
complementary  fears.  "Whereas  the  life  fear  is anxiety  at going
forward, becoming  an individual, the death  fear is anxiety  at going
backward, losing individuality.  Between  these two fear possibilities
the individual  is thrown back and forth all his life."(6) This can be
expressed  just  as well in terms  of freedom: we feel the need  to be
free, but becoming  free  makes  us more  anxious  and therefore  more
inclined  to sacrifice  that  freedom  for security, at which  time we
again feel a need to be free... In short, our two great needs, freedom
and security, conflict. With regard to the relationship between nature
and culture, this issue is primarily  a problem  of meaning: to accept
one's  culture  as natural  implies  that  the meaning  of my life  is
decided  for me, while  the freedom  to discover  or construct  my own
meaning is to embrace a vertigo resulting from the lack of an external
--  i.e., a "natural" -- foundation.



    If this  dialectic  can also  be true  for whole  societies, it is
consistent  with what we now know about  the "harmonious  Greeks"  and
helps to explain why Athenian  democracy  collapsed.  Since Burckhardt
and  Nietzsche  it  has  become  obvious  that  the  Greeks  were  not
Apollonian   but  profoundly   anxious   and  troubled, "an  unusually
energetic,  restless,  turbulent   people,  given  to  excess  ",  who
idealized  harmony  and balance  because  it was a virtue  they rarely
achieved. As Thucydides put it, they "were born into the world to take
no rest themselves, and to give none



                                14


to others."(7)
    The cultural  flowering  that  continues  to awe  us is easier  to
appreciate in retrospect.  Because it so fundamentally  challenged the
old ways, such an explosion of creativity was profoundly disturbing to
most people  at the time.  Many progressive  thinkers  were tried  for
heresy:  Anaxagoras,  Diagoras,  Socrates,  probably  Protagoras   and
Euripides;   Plato  and  Aristotle  wisely  absented  themselves.   As
Euripides  realized, "the gain  which  has  accrued  to man from  his
newly-found independence" is that "he has no firm ground to stand on,
and is helplessly  exposed to the hazards of life."(8) Unsurprisingly,
there was "an undeniable  growth of anxiety and dread in the evolution
of Greek religion."(9) This anxiety was alo projected externally. When
Athens  became  democratic, it became  not less but more imperialistic
and genocidal, as the Peloponnesian  War demonstrates, which is to say
that collectively the Athenians'impulses  towards greed and domination
may actually  have been increased  by the fact that they had evolved a
new mode of self-governance.(10)
    The  fourth   century   (which   began   with  Socrates'execution)
increasingly  came to emphasize personal freedom and "self-indulgence"
as the integrity  of the  polis  declined  in favor  of the individual
advancement which came to preoccupy those who controlled economic life
and many of those who controlled  political affairs.  Plato's Republic
and Laws present a reaction to this: the increasingly  jaundiced  view
of an old man who has observed  the development  and  the failures  of
personal   liberty,  for  without  self-control   freedom  had  become
libertinism.  Aristotle  is almost as critical  of the new polities in
which he lived, for "in these extreme  democracies, each man lives as
he likes --  or, as Euripides  says,"For any end he chances  to desire
'".(11) The democratic experiment in self-government had not worked to
resolve the increased anxiety that the increased individualism  of the
"democratic  personality"  generated, for tthe self-governance  of the
demos clearly did not entail the self-governance of the self.

    The  consequences   of  this  for  Greek  thought  were  profound.
Philosophical  discourse  on freedom  took  a radically  new turn as a
critical  distinction  was made between  outer and inner freedom.  The
Republic  makes a momentous  analogy between  harmony in the state and
harmony  in the soul.  Plato came to conceive  of reason as the master
with  desire  and emotion  as its slaves.  The virtue  of freedom  was
retained by reconceptualizing it in terms of the self-mastery of self-
consciousness. In contrast


                                15

to the incoherent life of the democrat, the psychic tendencies  of the
spiritually  developed  individual  are  harmonized  with  each  other
because they are governed by reason.(12)

    Just  as the sophists  had  realized  that  the state  is nomos, a
construction  which  can  be  reconstructed, so those  after  Socrates
realized that the psyche is a construction which can be reconstructed,
with reason as the master.  And the aggravated  anxiety  that shadowed
increased individualism  required such psychic reconstruction.  Rather
than solving  the growing  problem  with civic  freedom, however, this
aggravated  it: like the merchants and politicians  who retreated into
the  more  private  world  of their  own  self-advancement, those  who
succeeded Plato retreated from committment  to the polis into the more
private  world  of abstract  thought, which  for them became  the only
method  by which  true freedom  might  be gained.

    This encouraged  or aggravated  a third dualism (or a third aspect
to the phusis / nomos, mythos / logos dualism): the split between soma
and psyche, body and soul.  In becoming  more self-conscious, the mind
became  more aware  of itself  as other  than the body yet nonetheless
subject to it, and in particular subject to the same fate. In this way
an anxiety  for freedom  showed  itself.  "Nature"  is from  the Latin
natus, Òb orn Ó, but what  is born  also  dies.  The discovery  of the
psyche  was  or  soon  became  an attempt  to reach  the  eternal  and
incorruptible, to escape the cycle of nature whereby whatever  attains
form is doomed  to decay  and death.  As Santayana  puts it somewhere,
repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve. For
some cultures  this seems to have been enough, but psyche offered (and
greater  self-consciousness   perhaps  required)  the  possibility  of
personal  survival, even as nomos offered the possibility  of symbolic
survival: the continuation of cultural constructs including one's name
and personal influence.

    The parallel is too suggestive to ignore. Is the duality of nature
and culture  that of body and soul  writ large? Soul and society  both
seek to escape the physical constraints  of the natural world, yet all
they can achieve  is increasing  alienation  from that which they are,
from the other perspective, manifestations of. The result is that kind
of marriage  where the couple are not happy together  but cannot  live
apart.  The alienated  mind uses logos to try to subdue  and/or escape
its physical ground;  civilization uses logos-technology to pursue the
same ambivalent  goal by transforming  the natural  world into its own
image -- until everything


                                16


natural is turned into "resources"  to be consumed.  In both cases the
anxiety  generated  by this alienation  generates  projects  that only
increase the alienation (and thus the anxiety).

II

I have gone  on at such length  about  the classical  Greek  situation
because  the seeds  that  sprouted  then  grew to become  trees  still
luxuriant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That brings us to
Christopher Herbert Õs Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in
the Nineteenth  Century13, which  traces  the now problematic  culture
concept back to anthropology Õs reaction against Christian evangelism.
For Wesley and other eighteenth-century  evangelists, the doctrine  of
original  sin describes  the dangerous  state  of ungoverned  (anomic)
desire.  According to this version of the nature vs.  culture dualism,
society  is  Òa n  artificial  restraint  imposed  by  necessity  upon
volatile,  uncontrollably  self-multiplying  individual  impulses  and
desires  which in a state of unimpaired  freedom, could any such state
exist,  would  act  without  limit.  Ó1  4  Herbert  claims  that  the
anthropological doctrine of culture (and of Óc ultural wholeness Ò, in
particular)  evolved as a scientific rebuttal of this myth, although a
refutation  that has never succeeded in fully dispelling  it, since in
other  guises  it  remains  a  leading  paradigm  of  modern  (usually
conservative) social thought.


    In response, Herbert, following  Itard and Pritchard, argues  that
culture is less a (dualistic)  system of controls  imposed upon desire
than a system of desire. Anomic desire freed from its "cultural script
" becomes insane not because it violates  prohibitions  but because it
contradicts and frustrates itself:

      [T]he function of culture is not to restrain bestial drives, but
      to consolidate  and articulate  energies that become garbled and
      wholly  ineffectual  when  left  to  find  their  own  track  by
      themselves.    By   its   uncontrollable    fragmentation    and
      multiplication  of  objects,  modern  desire,  desire, that  is,
      conditioned  by the post-Rousseauistic  cult of personal freedom
      from  conventionality, dooms  itself  to frustration.(15)

Anomie, originally understood as a social condition in which norms have

                                17

ceased  acting  effectively  as  restraining  influences,  is  less  a
manifestation   of  unbounded   innate  desires  than  a  sociological
phenomenon created by structural incoherences within a society.

    All of which is helpful for understanding  what happened  in fifth
and fourth century Greece.  Because  his argument  is confined  to the
last two hundred years or so, Herbert does not notice that the dualism
he addresses is only part of a more fundamental nature/culture dualism
which has been constitutive of Western civilization and its burgeoning
self-consciousness.  The parallel between Greek and Victorian times is
rooted in similar declines of belief in religious transcendence -- the
Olympian pantheon as much as the Christian God -- which maintained and
validated  social  norms.  As we can see more readily  (in retrospect)
than Plato  or Aristotle  could, the problem  that arose in the fourth
century BCE was not a liberation  of anomic desire but the collapse of
a nomic system of desire previously maintained by the belief that such
a system was Òn atural Ó, i.e., created  and perpetuated  by the gods.
When social  nomos  could no longer  be understood  as phusis, society
destabilized.   Having  lost  their  unquestioned  belief  in  such  a
sacralizing   ground,  the  Greek  city-states  tried  to  restructure
themselves, as we too continue to try to do, yet self-consciousness of
the  difference  between  nature  and culture  can never  recover  the
unselfconscious  groundedness  that, for better  and  worse, has  been
lost. The freedom that was gained to determine the course of their own
lives, collectively and individually, was equalled by a tragic loss of
security due to the disappearance of a transcendental ground.

    From  my Buddhist  perspective, what is most  striking  about  the
above social problem is how much it resembles  the central problem for
the individual  self, which according to Buddhism is the sense-of-self
Õs  anxiety   due  to  dimly-intuited   awareness   that   it  is  not
self-existing  or "natural"  but a mental construct.  Classical Greece
demonstrates  the similar collective anxiety that arose when a society
became  aware  of itself  as  a construct.  In order  to develop  this
parallel, however, it is first  necessary  to adumbrate  the  Buddhist
approach as I understand it.

    Central to Buddhist teachings  is a denial of the self (an-atman).
Contemporary  psychology  makes  such a doctrine  seem  somewhat  less
perverse  to us today, by providing  some  homegrown  handles  on what
remains a very counterintuitive  claim.  I think Buddhism  anticipated
the reluctant  conclusions  of psychoanalysis: that guilt  and anxiety
are not adventitious  but intrinsic  to the ego.  This is because  our
dissatisfaction


                                18

with life (duhkha) derives from a repression  even more immediate than
death-fear: the suspicion that "I" am not real.  For Buddhism, the ego
is not  a self-existing  consciousness  but  a mental  construction, a
fragile sense-of-self  suspecting  and dreading its own no-thing-ness.
Our problem  arises because  this conditioned  consciousness  wants to
ground itself -- i.e., to make itself real.  If the sense-of-self is a
construct, however, it can real-ize itself only by objectifying itself
in the world.  The ego-self is this never-ending  project to objectify
oneself  in some way, something  consciousness  can no more do than  a
hand can grasp itself  or an eye see itself.
    The  consequence   of  this   perpetual   failure   is  that   the
sense-of-self  has, as its inescapable  shadow, a sense-of-lack, which
it always  tries to escape.  In deconstructive  terms, the ineluctable
trace  of nothingness  in our non-self-present  being is a feeling  of
lack. What Freud called" the return of the repressed "in the distorted
form of a symptom shows us how to link this basic yet hopeless project
with the symbolic ways we try to make ourselves real in the world.  We
experience  this  deep sense  of lack as the feeling  that  "there  is
something  wrong with me," yet that feeling  manifests, and we respond
to it, in many  different  ways: I'm  not  rich  enough, not published
enough, not loved enough, etc. Such anxiety is eager to objectify into
fear of something, because we have particular ways to defend ourselves
against particular  feared things.  The problem with objectifications,
however, is that no object  can ever  satisfy  if it's  not really  an
object  we want.
    In this way Buddhism  shifts our focus from sexual  wishes (Freud)
and the terror of future annihilation  (existential psychology) to the
anguish  of a groundlessness  experienced  here and now.  The Buddhist
solution to the sense-of-self's  sense-of-lack  is simple although not
easy.  If it is no-thing-ness  I am  afraid  of  (i.e., the  repressed
suspicion  that, rather  than being autonomous  and self-existent, the
"I" is a construct), the best way to resolve  that fear is to confront
what has been denied: to accept my no-thing-ness by becoming no-thing.
Meditation  is learning  how to become nothing  by learning  to forget
one's   self,  which   happens   when  I  become   absorbed   into  my
meditation-exercise.  Consciousness  unlearns  trying to grasp itself,
objectify  itself,  real-ize  itself.  For  Buddhism, then,  the  only
genuine solution is a "spiritual" one --  that is, one which addresses
the root problem  by my "letting  go" of myself in order to realize my
interconnectedness with all things.(16)

                                19

III

Whether or not one is inclined to accept such a Buddhist  perspective,
it would  be farfetched  to try to generalize  that approach  from the
psyche of individuals to the culture of entire societies --  if recent
anthropological theory had not already done so on its own. There seems
to be deep resonance  between the traditional  Buddhist deconstruction
of the self, as outlined above, and current anthropological  critiques
of the culture concept, and I think the parallels  are too striking to
be coincidental. Here are some of the more obvious examples:

1.The  assumption  of cultural  wholeness, taken  for granted  in much
social theory for generations, is today so questionable  that cultures
are more likely  to be perceived  as masses  of "shreds  and patches",
(17) composites  made up of traits borrowed and adapted from the other
cultures  they have encountered, elements which may or may not be well
integrated  with other aspects.  A well-known  passage  from Kroeber's
Anthropology illustrates this:

    We do not think of our American civilization  as something that is
    particularly   discordant  or  ill-assembled.   Yet  we  speak  an
    Anglo-Saxon  form  of  a  Germanic  language  that  contains  more
    original  Latin than English words.  Our religion  is Palestinian,
    with its specific formulations into denominations  made chiefly in
    Rome,  Germany,  England, Scotland,  and  Holland.  Our  Bible  is
    translated partly from Hebrew, partly from Greek.  We drink coffee
    first grown in Ethiopia  and adopted in Arabia, tea discovered  in
    China, beer first  brewed  in ancient  Mesopotamia  or Egypt, hard
    liquor invented  in mediaevel  Europe.  Our bread, beef, and other
    meats are from plants and animals first domesticated in Asia;  our
    potatoes, corn, tomatoes and beans were first used by the American
    Indians; likewise tobacco. We write an Etruscan-Roman variant of a
    Greek  form  of an alphabet  invented  in or near  Phoenicia  by a
    Semitic people on the basis of nonalphabetic writing in still more
    ancient  cultures;  its first  printing  took place in Germany, on
    paper devised in China.  It is needless to extend the catalog.  We
    no longer feel these things  of foreign  origin  as being foreign;
    they have become an integral  part of our culture....  This is not
    because  modern American  civilization  is particularly

                        20

    polyglot, but because  so far as we can tell such  a condition  is
    typical  of  all  cultures.(18)

This passage  also reminds  us of the importance  of cultural  change.
Insofar  as it emphasizes  field  work, the anthropological  study  of
exotic  tribal societies  has a tendency  to view them diachronically,
yet  cultures  constantly  interact  with  old and  new  environmental
influences, adapt to other cultures, and experience  "cultural  drift"
as they transform according to internal developments.(19)
    Everything  above  applies  just  as  much  to the  sense-of-self,
according to Buddhism, which also emphasizes impermanence (anitya) due
to incessant  transformation  of the self as much as all other things.
Compare  Kroeber  Õs passage  with the following  one from Thich  Nhat
Hanh, a well-known  contemporary  Vietnamese Zen teacher:

    If you are a poet, you will  see  clearly  that  there  is a cloud
    floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no
    rain;  without  rain, the trees cannot grow, and without  trees we
    cannot make paper.  The cloud is essential for the paper to exist.
    If the  cloud  is not  here, the  sheet  of paper  cannot  be here
    either....
        If we look into this sheet  of paper  even more deeply, we can
    see the sunshine  in it.  If the  sunshine  is not there, the tree
    cannot  grow.  In fact, nothing  can  grow.  Even  we cannot  grow
    without  sunshine.  And so, we know that  the sunshine  is also in
    this sheet of paper.  The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if
    we continue  to look, we can see the logger  who cut the tree  and
    brought  it to the mill to be transformed  into paper.  And we see
    the wheat.  We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily
    bread, and therefore  the wheat  that became  his bread is also in
    this sheet of paper.  And the logger's father and mother are in it
    too....You  cannot  point out one thing that is not here --  time,
    space,  the  earth,  the  rain, the  minerals  in  the  soil,  the
    sunshine, the cloud, the  river, the  heat.  Everything  co-exists
    with this sheet  of paper....
        As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains  everything  in
    the universe in it.(20)

Needless  to say, what is true for every  sheet of paper  is even more
true  for each of us.  So far from  being  an integral, self-contained
whole, both

                                21

the self and the culture which it both forms and forms part of are due
to the incorporation (and interaction) of innumerable elements usually
understood to be "outside".  Notice, however, a difference between the
two passages: Kroeber discusses cultural traits, while Thich Nhat Hanh
makes no distinction  between natural and cultural  aspects: the first
(clouds, the sun) elides "naturally"  into the other (sawmill, paper).
There will be more to say about this later.

2.Early  Pali  Buddhism  deconstructs  the sense-of-self  in two ways:
diachronically  into the five  skandhas  (form, sensation, perception,
volitional  tendencies, conditioned  consciousness)  whose interaction
maintains  the illusion of self, and synchronically  with the doctrine
of pratitya-samutpada  "dependent origination", which Sakyamuni Buddha
himself  called  the  most  important  of  his  teachings.   Dependent
origination  explains our experience not in terms of a self perceiving
an other, but by locating all phenomena within a set of twelve factors
(ignorance,  volitional  tendencies,  conditioned  consciousness,  the
fetus,  sense-organs, contact, sensation, craving, grasping, becoming,
rebirth, suffering  and death), each  conditioned  by and conditioning
all the others. There is no reference to something else outside (e.g.,
transcendent  to) this cycle, or to some originary  time  before  this
cycle began operating.  In response to the question of how rebirth can
occur  without  a permanent  soul or self that  is reborn, rebirth  is
explained  as part of this series of impersonal  processes which occur
without  any self  that  is doing  or experiencing  them.
    In Mahayana  Buddhism  the interdependence  of these  phenomena  is
carried one step further. If things (e.g., this piece of paper) are so
completely  dependent upon each other, how can the world be understood
as a collection of discrete things? Each is in effect deconstructed by
all the others;  none is self-present  because each is always infected
with the traces of the others.  This denial  of self-existence  is the
meaning of sunyata, a notoriously  problematic term usually translated
as "emptiness".  We are  left  with  a series  of interlinked  "empty"
phenomena  each of which does no more than signify  all the others and
be signified by them. This process never yields any self-presence, and
insofar  as Buddhist  nirvana  has been understood  to reveal  such  a
transcendental  signified  it has  been  misunderstood.
    This  may  be compared  with  the  theoretical  difficulties  that
Christopher   Herbert   identifies   in  the  cultural   analyses   of
anthropologists  such

                                22

as Benedict and Geertz.  The problem is with the symbolic character of
the supposed complex whole, which is believed to reside "in a ramified
chain of signifiers binding into a single scheme of expression all the
disparate  features  of the life of a society."  If we no longer  take
this  ramified   whole  for  granted,  however,  there   arises   "the
disconcerting  possibility  that all the interlinked  signifiers  of a
given culture signify nothing  but one another  in an eternal circular
labyrinthine  traffic  of "meaning"  which never attains  an authentic
signified."(21)
    Herbert gives as an example Malinowski's  attempt (in Argonauts of
the  Western  Pacific)  to grasp  the  cultural  significance  of  the
Trobriand kula exchange-system in which symbolically-charged  trinkets
migrate forever, "doomed to perpetual  displacement".  Anthropological
efforts  to extract the meaning  of such cultural  symbols  are always
inconclusive because open to the charge of subjectively imposing one's
own  preferences   or  presuppositions.   The  attempt   to  establish
hierarchies of significance  for such symbol systems is like asking to
whom belong, and for whom occur, the phenomena described  in pratitya-
samutpada.  Sakyamuni  rejected  that question as misguided: from each
factor  arises another;  that's all there is.  The karmic  results  of
action  are experienced  without  their being anyone  who created  the
karma  or  who  receives  its  fruit, although  there  is a connection
between the action and its result. Just as there is no master cultural
symbol which subordinates all the others, that we can therefore employ
to understand  all  the  others, so there  is no master  atman/psyche/
consciousness  "within"  the person, only a constant displacement  and
circulation of mental and physical factors which imply each other.

3.Are the connections  among those factors causal? There seems to be a
contradiction  in the way that Madhyamika philosophy uses causality to
demonstrate  the self-existence  of things, yet also denies causation.
Despite denying that there is any specifiable  difference  between the
everyday world and nirvana, Nagarjuna  distinguishes  them: our usual,
ordinary  world of birth and death  is due to perceiving  the world in
terms   of  causal   relations;   nirvana   is  the  world   perceived
non-causally, without  interdependence.(22)  The  paradox  is that, if
there is no self-existing  thing to cause/be  effected, the world will
not be experienced  in terms  of cause  and effect  either.  If things
originate   (and  change,  cease   to  exist,  etc.),  there   are  no
self-existing  things;  but if there are no such things  then there


                        23

is nothing to originate and thus no origination.  Nagarjuna points out
the aporia within  cause-and-effect: the effect  cannot be the same as
the cause  (for then nothing  has been caused), but neither  can it be
different  from it (in which case any cause should  be able to produce
any  effect;  MMK  10: 19, 22).  Therefore  pratitya-samutpada  is not
really  a  doctrine  of  dependent  origination   but  an  account  of
non-dependent non-origination. Origination, duration and causation are
Òl ike an illusion, a dream, or an imaginary  city  in the sky Ó  (MMK
7: 34).  In short, if we do not  see "things", we will  not  observe
their causal relationships  either.
    Herbert identifies a remarkably similar problem infecting cultural
anthropology  insofar  as culture  is understood  as the composite  of
relationships  among various  social  phenomena.  Any theory  of their
systematic   interrelationship   creates

    a galling dilemma for a rigorously  empirical  science of the kind
    that classical anthropology and sociology aspired to be, a science
    of  "concrete,  observable  facts",  for  relationships   are  not
    observable phenomena. In some fashion they inhabit the empty space
    between observable  phenomena, or, putting the problem in temporal
    rather  than  spatial  terms, can be mentally  constructed  by the
    observer only after empirical observation  has been done.(23)

This  gives  culture   "a  distinctly   hypothetical   or  conjectural
character", something  which  "can never be demonstrated, only posited
ahead of time as a device for organizing one's data."(24)
    As one would expect, this problem becomes further complicated  for
structuralist  anthropology  (in the broad sense) preoccupied with the
doubly  abstract  notion  of the  relationships  among  relationships.
Insofar as it is concerned "to transcend empirical observation  and to
reach deeper realities(Levi-Strauss), it ends up positing metaphysical
substances which bypass empirical data and can be "perceived"  only by
a kind  of  extrasensory  perception.  Herbert  points  out  that  the
literature    describing    this   supposed   faculty   is   full   of
transcendentalist  overtones  and that  "the subject  matter  of these
inspired field researchers  is conceived  to be not ordinary empirical
fact but "deeper  realities,"...  something  essentially  occult"(25),
such  as  Spencer's   ghosts-who-demand-propitiation   and  Durkheim's
metaphysical  view  of  the  social  collectivity.
    And  such  as our commonsense  notion  of the  self, according  to
Bud-

                                24

hism.In  the same way, no one has ever seen an Indian atman or a Greek
psyche or our supposed Cartesian-like  consciousness.  We project such
occult entities  to explain the integrity  of a person Õs behavior  --
or, more  correctly  from  a Buddhist  point  of  view, we  posit  the
integrity  of that behavior (despite  much contrary evidence, which we
ignore or are surprised  by) in order to understand  people (including
ourselves) as simple self-consciousnesses  that generate such behavior
out of themselves.

4.The  failure  of the structuralist  project  to discover  a "unified
field theory" for the social sciences  has led to a new conception  of
what theory is and what it can do, well summarized  by David Scott:

    By "theory"  (at least  what I have  been  able to make  of it) is
    meant  that diverse  combination  of textual  or interpretive  (or
    "reading")  strategies  --  among  them, deconstruction, feminism,
    genealogy, psychoanalysis, post-marxism  --  that, from about  the
    early 1970s or so had initiated  a challenge to the protocols of a
    general hermeneutics..
        Theory, in this sense, offered  itself  as de-disciplinary, as
    in  fact  anti-disciplinary, the  virtual  undoer  of disciplinary
    self-identities.  It offered  itself as a mobile and nomadic field
    of  critical  operations  without  a  proper  name, and  therefore
    without a distinctive  domain of objects.  Indeed what theory went
    after was precisely the assumption (common to the disciplines  and
    their rage for "method") of the authentic self-authoring  presence
    of things, of histories, of cultures, of selves, the assumption of
    stable  essences, in short, that could be made to speak themselves
    once and for all through  the transparency  of an unequivocal  and
    analytical language.  On theory Õs account there could be no final
    description, no end  to  re-description, no  ultimate  perspective
    which could terminate once and for all the possibility  of another
    word on the matter.(26)

Since such critical  theory  cannot  pretend  to mirror  the objective
nature of society  in categories  that reveal without  distorting, its
own truth becomes  an inextricable  part of the phenomena  it seeks to
explain:

    A  full-scale   social  theory...   will  form  part  of  its  own
    object-domain.  That is, a social  theory is a theory about (among
    other things)  a-

                                25



    gents'  beliefs  about  their  society, but  it is itself  such  a
    belief. So if a theory of society is to give an exhaustive account
    of the beliefs agents in the society have, it will have to give an
    account of itself as one such belief.(27)

It  is  unnecessary  to  point  out  how  discomforting  this  nomadic
conception of theory continues to be for many social scientists.  Less
known is that a very similar  conception  of theory  as self-reflexive
and self-negating  has been essential to Buddhist philosophy  since at
least the time of Nagarjuna  (second century CE).  Since it emphasized
the  need  to empty  oneself  of concepts, Buddhism  could  not  avoid
self-consciousness about its own employment of theoretical constructs.
Sakyamuni  compared  his own teachings  to a raft  that may be used to
ferry  us across  the river of birth and death to the "oher shore"  of
nirvana, and then to be abandoned, not carried  about  on one's  back.
Nagarjuna  went further  by declining  to present any view of his own;
his chapter on the nature of nirvana concludes that "ultimate serenity
is the coming  to rest  of all ways  of taking  things, the repose  of
named  things;  no truth  has  been  taught  by a Buddha  for  anyone,
anywhere"  (MMK 25: 24).  This applies  also to the crucial concept of
sunyata, which  Nagarjuna  used to deconstruct  the self-existence  of
things: sunyata  too  is relative  to those  supposed  things;  it  is
nothing more than "the exhaustion of all theories and views" and those
who  make  sunyata  into  a theory  about  the  nature  of things  are
"incurable"(MMK  13:  8).
    Nagarjuna's  self-negating  conception  of conception reverberated
through  subsequent  Buddhism.  The sixth  Ch "an patriarch  Hui-neng,
revered  as the greatest  of all Ch'an (Zen) masters, also refused  to
make Buddhism into a transparent, mirror-like  teaching about reality:
"If I tell you that I have a system  of Dharma [teaching]  to transmit
to others, I am cheating you. What I do to my disciples is to liberate
them from their own bondage  with such devices  as the case may need."

    Only those who do not possess a single system of law can formulate
    all systems  of law...  It makes no difference  to those  who have
    realized the essence of mind whether they formulate all systems of
    law or dispense  with all of them.  They are at liberty to come or
    to go.  They are free from  obstacles  or impediments.  They  take
    appropriate actions as circumstances  require.  They give suitable
    answers accor-

                                26

    ding to the temperament  of the inquirer.(28)

Insofar  as  truth  is  a  matter  of  grasping  the  categories  that
accurately  reflect some objective  reality, all truth is error on the
Buddhist  path.

    The crucial issue is whether or not our search for truth --  be it
the personal truth about my own "nature" or the scientific truth about
social systems --  is an attempt  to ground ourselves  by fixating  on
certain  concepts.  When there  is this compulsion, certain  ideas can
become seductive: i.e., ideologies. The difference between samsara and
nirvana  is that samsara is this world experienced  as a sticky web of
attachments  which attract us because they seem to offer something  we
feel  the  lack  of: a grounding  for  our  groundless  sense-of-self.
Intellectually, that seductive quality manifests as a battleground  of
conflicting  ideologies (including  social theories) competing for our
allegiance.  Ideologies  purport to provide the mind with a sure grasp
on the world: now we know  how the world  is meaningful  and (usually)
what  our role in that meaning  is.
    In other words, ideology is the attempt to objectify  ourselves by
understanding  ourselves  objectively.  On this  account, the need for
theory, and the problem  many  have  with unanchored  critique, is the
intellectual's  version  of  the  dialectic  noticed  earlier  between
security  and freedom.  The  Buddhist  alternative, as Hui-neng  makes
clear, is not to rid oneself  of all thought  but to be able  to think
without   needing  to  ground  oneself   thereby.   The  result  is  a
"non-abiding"  wisdom  that can wander  freely  among  truths  without
needing to fixate on any of them, which could also be called a mobile,
nomadic play that works to undo the supposed self- identities of those
who are anxious  because  they feel a need to ground their constructed
(and  therefore  groundless)  selves.
    Such a teaching is reflexively aware that it always "forms part of
its own object-  domain", yet this does not become  a problem  because
such teachings are designed to self-negate.  Since Buddhist conceptual
systems form only part of a religious path that emphasizes  meditation
--  during which one lets-go of all conceptualizing --  Buddhism works
to free one from all ideology including itself.
    Derrida   speaks  of  the  necessity   to  lodge  oneself   within
traditional  conceptuality  in order  to destroy  it, which  expresses
nicely why Nagarjuna  insists that the everyday world must be accepted
in order to point to the higher truth that negates  it (MMK 24: 8-10).
According to Madhyamika, sunyata is like a poison-antidote that expels
the poison


                                27

from  our bodies  and then  expels  itself, for if the antidote  stays
inside  to poison  us we are no better  off than before.
    This applies most of all to the version of dualistic thinking that
motivates  the Buddhist  path: the  distinction  between  nirvana  and
samsara, enlightenment  and delusion:"Those who delight in maintaining
"without  the grasping  I will realize nirvana;  nirvana is in me" are
the ones with the greatest grasping.  When nirvana is not [subject to]
establishment  and samsara  not [subject  to]  disengagement, how will
there be any concept  of nirvana  and samsara? " (MMK 16: 9-10) Rather
than  refuting  the  whole  enterprise, however, this  realization  is
essential to the enterprise.

5.Denying the duality between delusion and enlightenment  is not meant
to make us complacent in our delusions.  A particular kind of personal
transformation is nonetheless necessary, which dissolves the dualistic
sense  of a stable, self-existent  "I" inside  observing  an objective
world outside. The importance of this for Buddhism is so familiar that
it  does  not  need  to  be  elaborated;   more  interesting  is  that
anthropology  has  arrived  at  a  similar  conclusion.  According  to
Herbert, the  earliest  ethnographers  of  the  South  Pacific  Òw ere
engaged collectively  in a project amounting to the invention of a new
subjectivity,  the  basis  of  which  appears  to  be  an  impulse  to
experience  a state  of radical  instability  of value  --or even  the
instability  of selfhood itself."(29)  They and their successors could
not help but become more self-conscious  about the constructed  nature
of their own culture --  and therefore about the constructed nature of
their own selves.  A hundred years later, Leach would begin Rethinking
Anthropology   by  emphasizing   the  necessity   for   the   cultural
anthropologist  to undergo "an extremely  personal  traumatic  kind of
experience" in order to escape the prejudices of one's own culture and
be able  to enter  into  another.(30)  Roy  Wagner's  version  of this
reproduces  what countless Buddhist teachers have said about realizing
Buddhism: "The anthropologist cannot simply learn the new culture, but
must rather  'take it on'so as to experience  a transformation  of his
own  world."(31)
    Herbert sees this as reproducing  the Wesleyan salvation narrative
"in  which  an  influx  of awareness  of sin  is imagined  to  be  the
prerequisite  of the  shedding  of egoistic  selfhood  and  of the new
spiritual  birth which follows. "(32) In addition to the many Buddhist
references  one  could  point  to in reply, there  are numerous  other
instances  of such  transformations, described  in virtually  the same
words, in the earlier  mystic  and  pietistic


                                28

traditions   of  European   Christianity.   His  narrow  reading  here
exemplifies  the restricted  domain of his study, which seldom reaches
back before the nineteenth  century and therefore is oblivious  of the
larger context within which his culture problematic is situated.  This
misses  the opportunity  to ask what  is perhaps  the  most  important
question  of all, about the larger  meaning  of what anthropology  has
discovered about the constructed nature of all cultures and selves.


IV

What  is the  significance, if  any,of these  parallels  between  what
Buddhism   has  discovered   about  the  problem   of  self  and  what
anthropology  has discovered about the nature of culture?
    According to my explication of Buddhism, the basic problem for the
self  derives   from  its  quite  valid  suspicion   that  it  is  not
self-existing  but  a  mental  construction: a  fragile  sense-of-self
dreading   its  own  no-thing-ness,  its  groundlessness.   This   no-
thing-ness is experienced as a sense-of-lack  that motivates me to try
to ground  myself, to try to make myself  real.  This leads to various
attempts  to objectify  myself...  Does modern  culture  experience  a
similar collective problem?

    Technology is not applied science.  It is the expression of a deep
    longing, an original  longing  that is present  in modern  science
    from its beginning. This is the desire of the self to seek its own
    truth through the mastery of the object.... The power of technique
    is not to connect thought effectively to nature;  it alters nature
    to its own purpose.  Its aim is to master  its being;  to own  it.
    (Verene)(33)

Like the profit motive  that generates  our economic  system, today we
tend to think  of scientific  and technological  progress  as natural,
which  in  this  case  means: something  that  does  not  need  to  be
explained.  But in what sense  is it natural  to "progress"  from  the
first biplane  of the Wright  brothers  to a moon-landing  during  one
lifetime?  34  For  Heidegger,  the  self-assertion  of  technological
objectification is the main way Being discloses itself to contemporary
man;  the  essence  of  modernity  is the  technological  tendency  to
reorganize  everything  into  Bestand,  a  "standing-reserve."(35)  In
contrast,  Buddhism,  which   does   not   refer   or  defer   to  any
transcenden-

                                29

tal   Being, can  understand   the  self-assertion   of  technological
objectification  as our  constant  attempt  to negate  our  collective
no-thing-ness.  On this  account, technology  is our group  effort  to
create the ultimate  security for our self-constructed  (and therefore
ungrounded) civilization by transforming the entire world into our own
self-ground. In response to our anxious alienation from nature, we try
to make ourselves  real by reorganizing  the whole  environment  (into
"resources")  until  we can see our own image reflected  in everything
"natural". This is why people today can dispense with the consolations
of religion (or how we cope with the fact that those consolations have
been wrested  from us): now we have other ways to control our fate, or
to try to.  If the world  isn't  yet "developed"  enough  to quell our
anxiety  (and  it never  will be), then  it will  have to be developed
more...
    Another way to put it is that technology has become our attempt to
own the universe, an attempt  that is always  frustrated  because, for
reasons  we do not quite understand, we never possess  it fully enough
to feel  secure  in our ownership.  Is that  because  the only genuine
salvation  is in being  owned by it? "We now use the word Nature  very
much as our fathers used the word God," John Burroughs  noticed at the
turn of the century, "and, I suppose, back of it all we mean the power
that is everywhere  present  and active, and in whose  lap the visible
universe is held and nourished."(36)  Nature can take the place of God
because both fulfill our need to be grounded in something greater than
we are;  technology  cannot  because  it is motivated  by the opposite
response, attempting  to banish that mystery by extending our control,
as if the security  we crave  can be attained  by transforming  nature
into something like us.  Bill McKibben sums up his sombre elegy on The
End of Nature: "We can no longer imagine that we are part of something
larger than ourselves -- that is what all this boils down to.  We used
to be." Our success in "improving"  nature means we can no longer rest
peacefully  in its bosom.  We cannot manipulate the natural world in a
collective  attempt to self-ground  ourselves and also hope to find in
it a ground greater than ourselves. That, in a nutshell, is the source
of the conflict  between nomos and phusis for us.  The eschatology  of
technological  progress  is based on the promise of the former;  those
who want a "return to nature" yearn for the latter. One cannot opt for
both,  since  the  two  proposed  solutions  to  our  (individual  and
collective) anxiety are incompatible.
    On the technological  side, it is no exaggeration  to say that the
extent

                                30

of the environmental  crisis signifies  the end to any such dream of a
collective  self-grounding, although  it remains to be seen whether we
will realize that in time. The supreme irony of our situation today is
that our project to secure ourselves  is what threatens to destroy us.
    Does that imply a return  to nature? But what can that mean for us
today? There is no escape from the Cynic Õs paradox: having  alienated
ourselves  from  it  so completely, nature  is no  longer  natural.  I
believe it was Petrarch who first climbed a mountain for the enjoyment
of it;  up to that time the Alps were perceived mainly as troublesome,
often dangerous obstacles to travel in mid-Europe. Simmel noticed that
one who lives in more direct contact  with nature may enjoy its charms
yet "lacks that distance  from nature  that is the basis for aesthetic
contemplation  and the root  of that  quiet  sorrow, that  feeling  of
yearning  estrangement  and of a lost paradise that characterizes  the
romantic  response  to nature."(37)  The only society that can gratify
such an indulgence  is one that has little to fear from nature because
its technology has largely tamed it.  To paraphrase  Stanley Diamond's
comment about relativism, such a romantic  response  is "the bad faith
of  the  conqueror,  who  has  become   secure  enough   to  become  a
tourist."(38)  Whether or not our technological genie should have been
released  from his bottle, he cannot be put back inside.  Nor would we
want to return  (even if we could)  to a "natural"  premodern  society
such as Tokugawa Japan, where hierarchical and exploitative "political
arrangements  were presented as perfect in that they conformed to 'the
order  found  in  the  manifold   natural  phenomena   of  heaven  and
earth.'"(39)
    To summarize: the freedom  that technology  seems  to offer us, to
dominate  the natural  world, has become our compulsive  attempt  at a
collective  self-grounding  that cannot  succeed.  Yet neither  can we
self-conscious  citizens of the twenty-first  century find security by
returning  to nature  in the usual sense of the term.  Apparently  our
duality  between  nature and culture  is not to be resolved  by either
term subsuming  the other.  Is there any other alternative? I conclude
with some reflections on that issue.
    Buddhism  has  much  to say  about  the  problem  with  conceptual
bifurcations  such as that between nature and culture.  The paradox of
such dualisms is that each term can be understood  only in relation to
the other, as its negation.  We usually make such distinctions because
we want  one side  rather  than  the other, yet their  interdependence
means we cannot

                                31

avoid getting  both.  If it is important  for me to live a pure life,I
must be preoccupied  with avoiding  impurity;  my hope for success  is
equalled by my fear of failure; my desire to live is also my terror of
death. And insofar as the nature/culture dualism reflects our need for
a ground, we have learned that to love one of them is to confront  the
other.  In so doing, however, have  we also  learned  to overlook  the
continuity between them?
    Whitehead  somewhere  calls the duality  between  man and nature a
false dichotomy: mankind  is that factor  in nature which exhibits  in
its most intense  form the plasticity  in nature.  This plasticity  --
lack of fixed  form --  is another  way to understand  the sunyata  of
phenomena, for their  lack  of self-essence  is what enables  constant
transformation  of one thing into another.  Whitehead's  point is that
this is most true of homo sapiens, which of all species is capable  of
the widest diversity  of experiences.  He refers to our "most intense"
plasticity  --  a difference  in  degree, not  in  kind.  But  if  the
ego-sense is constructed  --  if its need for security is what resists
this  extraordinary  plasticity, by identifying  with  a more  limited
range of possibilities -- then precisely what is it that exhibits this
plasticity? In other words, who or what is having  all these different
experiences? If dogs and trees are also "empty" of a fixed essence, on
what basis  do we bifurcate  between  humans  and nonhuman  creatures?
Perhaps  what  is unique  about  humans, from  such  a perspective, is
simply  that we are the species  which  constructs  such a difference;
that  conceptual  construction  is one  of  the  ways  we express  our
plasticity.  If that is the case, however, the distinction is not only
dangerous but delusive.  To see the "natural world" thus is to project
our way of thinking  in a way that alienates  ourselves  from it, with
all the anxiety  that entails.
    This issue may be raised another  way.  Does phusis have more of a
self-organizing, self-developing  aspect than we have acknowledged? In
contrast  to the  strong  form/matter  and mind/body  dualisms  of the
Western  tradition, for example, the Chinese  concept of ch'i does not
distinguish  physical  matter  from awareness  or from energy.  Recent
attempts  to wed Buddhism  with general systems  theory(40)  raise the
possibility of joining natural selection and cultural development into
a more unified "grand theory" of evolution.
    Can such abstract theories contribute to solving our very real and
intimate  problem, the  anxiety  generated  by  our  awareness  of the
construc-

                                32

ted nature of our own self / our own society? For Buddhism, as we have
seen, theory is useful only insofar as it is based upon transformative
experience  and helps us to transform our own experience.  That brings
us back to what Thich  Nhat Hanh said about this sheet  of paper.  His
analysis  does not distinguish  between  cultural  (paper) and natural
(clouds) phenomena. The practical question is how it might possible to
experience  that  interdependence.
    One  term  used  to  describe  the  transformative  experience  in
Buddhism  is the  Sanskrit  pravrtti, which  may  be understood  as  a
"turning around" from the alienated sense-of-self  as something inside
the body, to realizing  that the mind which  experiences  is not other
than the experienced  world.  As the thirteenth-century  Japanese  Zen
master Dogen put it: "I came to realize clearly  that mind is no other
than mountains  and rivers  and the great  wide earth, the sun and the
moon and the stars."(41)  In terms of the culture/nature  dualism, the
importance  of such an immediate experience  of our plasticity is that
it  would  not  only  free  us (from  the  delusive  alienation  of an
ego-self) but also ground us: not by identifying  with some particular
thing in the world, nor with something transcendent  to the world, but
with the whole world  itself, its boxy-or-attractive  skyscrapers  and
convenient-but-polluting  automobiles  as well  as its  mountains  and
rivers.  If this could occur, then, it should help to obviate both our
yearning  to return to nature (for regrounding)  and our technological
need to dominate  nature (for self-grounding).
    Whether  or  not  such  a transformative  experience  is  actually
possible, however, is beyond the scope of this already too-long paper.

                                              Bunkyo University, Japan

David Loy
Faculty of International Studies
Bunkyo University
Chigasaki 253 Japan
(September 1995)



NOTES

1.Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed.  G.H.  Von Wright, tran.
  Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), 50e;  his emphasis.
2.Almost,  because  there  is  an  important  exception:  the  Chinese
  dialectic  between  Confucian  emphasis  on social  norms and Taoist
  emphasis  on the Tao.  If the parallel  is significant, however, why
  did it lead to such different  historical  consequences? I think the
  answer  is related  to Confucius  "conservatism.  He understood  his
  teachings  not as a means to restructure  society  but as the way to
  restore  the old social order, which allowed them to be

                                33

  appropriated  as the official  ideology of later rulers.  Instead of
  helping to demystify  the social order, therefore, Confucianism  was
  used to maintain it.  For discussions  of the Chinese conception  of
  nature, see J.  Baird Callicot  and Roger T.  Ames, eds., Nature  in
  Asian Traditions  of Thought (Albany: State University  of New York,
  1989).
3.S.C.Humphreys, "'Transcendence'  and Intellectual Roles: The Ancient
  Greek Case" in Daedalus Spring 1975: "Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt:
  Perspectives  on the  First  Millennium  B.C.", 92, 112.
4."Louis  Dumont, "On  the  Comparative  Understanding  of  Non-Modern
  Civilizations" in Daedalus Spring 1975, 162,163.
5. "'Transcendence'  and Intellectual Roles", 111.
6.  Otto  Rank, "Life  Fear and Death  Fear", quoted  in Irvin  Yalom,
  Existential Psychotherapy  (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 141-2.
7.  History  of  the  Peloponnesian  War  I.10.
8.  Bruno  Snell,The Discovery  of the Mind  in Greek  Philosophy  and
  Literature, trans. T.  G.  Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover Publications,
  1982), 130
9. E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of
  California  Press, 1951), 254.
10.  See Eli Sagan, The Honey and the Hemlock: Democracy  and Paranoia
  in Ancient  Athens and Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1991),
  ch. 11 and passim.
11.  Politics  1310a,  in  Aristotle, Politics, trans.  Ernest  Barker
  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958).
12. The Republic 431.
13.Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imgination in
  the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
14. Culture and Anomie, 35.
15.  Culture and Anomie, 52-53;  Herbert's italics here and elsewhere.
16. For more on this, see David Loy, Lack and Transcendence: death and
   life  in  psychotherapy,  existentialism   and  buddhism  (Atlantic
   Highlands,  New  Jersey: Humanities  Press, 1995).
17.  Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Society (New York: Boni and Liveright,
   1920), 441.
18. A. L. Kroeber, Anthropology ( 1948), 258.
19.  Milton Singer, "On understanding  Other Cultures  and One's Own",
   The Journal of General Education, 8.
20.  Thich  Nhat  Hanh, The  Heart  of  Understanding  (Berkeley,  CA:
   Parallax Press, 1988), 3-5.
21.   Culture   and  Anomie,  p.   19.   I  think  that  part  of  the
   anthropological difficulty in defining culture is due the fact that
   what is at issue here is really a dualism: another  permutation  of
   phusis versus nomos.  The cultural is distin-


                                34


   guished from something else, and then anthropologists are surprised
   that they cannot understand  it adequately  by itself.  So Clifford
   Geertz distinguishes cultural symbols as "vehicles of thought" from
   the social structure  as "forms  of human association", and despite
   their  inevitable  interaction  he ends  up  describing  the  human
   situation  in terms of their dichotomy.  Jack Goody  questions  all
   such attempts  to differentiate  the cultural  (symbolic)  from the
   social  (other  forms  of human  interaction), concluding  that the
   cultural  is not something  distinct from the social but the social
   viewed  from another  perspective  ("Culture  and its Boundaries: A
   European View", Cultural Anthropology?(?), p.?. As Eric Wolf points
   out, describing  culture  as secondary  or derivative  "recreates,
   time  and  again,  the  seeming  contradiction  between  earthbound
   material  processes  and the  free-floating  zigzags  of the  mind"
   ("Perilous  Ideas.  Race, Culture, People",  Cultural  Anthropology
   35(1), pp. 13, 30).
22. Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamikakarikas [hereafter "MMK"] ch. 25: verses
   19, 20, 9.
23.  Culture and Anomie, p. 10.
24.  Culture and Anomie, p.  11.
25. Culture and Anomie, p. 14.
26.  David Scott, "Criticism and Culture", Critique of Anthropology 12
   (4), 374-375.
27. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, 1981, 56.
28.  Sutra  Spoken  by the Sixth  Patriarch  on the High Seat  of "The
   Treasure of the Law," trans.  Wong Mou-lam (Hong Kong Buddhist Book
   Distributor,  n.d.), 95, 96.
29.  Culture  and  Anomie, 156-157.
30. Quoted in Culture and Anomie, 174.
31.  Roy  Wagner, The  Invention  of  Culture  (Englewood  Cliffs, NJ:
   Prentice-Hall, 1975), 9.
32.  Culture  and  Anomie, 174.
33.  Donald Phillip  Verene, "Technological  Desire, " in Research  in
   Philosophy  and  Technology  7 (London: JAI Press, 1984), 107.
34.Bertrand  Russell (1872-1970)  was in his thirties  when the Wright
   brothers  flew the first time, and he lived to be able to watch man
   land  on the  moon.
35.  See, for  example, Martin  Heidegger, Poetry,  Language, Thought,
   trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 125.
36.Quoted in Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
   1990), 66 -  67.
37.Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed.David Frisby, trans.  Tom
   Bottomore  and David  Frisby  (London: Routledge  and  Kegan  Paul,
   1978),


                                35


   478.
38.  Stanley  Diamond, "Anthropology  in Question",in In Search of the
   Primitive (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1974), 110.
39.  Karel  van Wolferen, The  Enigma  of Japanese  Power: People  and
   Politics in a Stateless Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989), 337.
40.  See  especially  Joanna  Macy,Mutual  Causality  in Buddhism  and
   General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural  Systems (Albany, New
   York: State  University  of New York Press, 1991).
41. As quoted in Philip Kapleau, ed., The Three Pillars of Zen (Tokyo:
   Weatherhill,  1965),  205.  The  original  reference  is  from  the
   Sokushin-zebutsu fascicle of Dogen's Shobogenzo.  The same point is
   made   in  other   fascicles   such   as   Shinjin-gakudo,  Bussho,
   Sangai-yuishin, etc. For a comparative study of such subject-object
   nonduality, see David Loy, Nonduality (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale
   University Press, 1988).