Believing the unbelievable
"Credere di credere" is the title of a book by Gianni Vattimo. It came out spontaneously during a phone call with his old philosophy professor who asked him if he still believed in God: "I believe that I believe."
With this statement, he plays on the double meaning of “belief”. There is the hard meaning, where belief is a certainty, something that cannot be doubted, something for which people are sometimes willing to give their lives or destroy the lives of others. And then there is the softer meaning of "it might be."
Vattimo advocates for a "pensiero debole”, a soft thinking. He refers to Christianity in this context. A metaphysical interpretation of God as the ground of everything is violent for him, but the statement "God does not exist" is equally so.
This way of thinking is closely related to Buddha's view of the middle way. Liberation lies in a view that holds the middle ground between the extremes of existence and non-existence. Reality is anatta, without a fixed core, and anicca, impermanent.
This is a revolutionary and hard-to-swallow view. Not because it's hard to understand, but because letting go of certainty doesn't sit well. In Pali, this is called "duddaso”, literally "difficult to see." The "du" here is the same as in dukkha. We much prefer to cling to illusions than to face the uncertainty and fragility of life. Or as the French philosopher Charles Renouvier masterfully said, "à proprement parler, il n’y a pas de certitude; il y a seulement des hommes certains" ("properly speaking, there is no certainty; there are only people who are certain").
In that sense, I once wrote: "There are only two religions in the world: fundamentalism and openness”. Someone promptly replied that this statement itself was a form of fundamentalism. Nagarjuna already said it: "Openness (sunyata) is the letting go of all concepts, only for the concept of openness is there no cure anymore”. For those who think normatively, everything is normative. For those who cling to certainties, there is no pensiero debole. The conversation ends there. There's nothing more to argue about. “Everything of value is defenceless" the Dutch poet Lucebert said.
It's a question we cannot avoid. What choice do we make? I once read on a poster advertising a weekend on "belief": "He who only believes in what he can understand, believes in nothing”. I found that enlightening. It made it clear to me that I, quite happily, want to believe in nothing. Believing in something I cannot grasp is, in my view, a fake way of grasping the ungraspable. If the ultimate is ungraspable, then let's not pretend otherwise.
I don't want to cover up the uncertainty and fragility of existence with the "certainty" of belief. That's my choice. That choice doesn't deprive others of the right to believe, nor does it deprive me of the right to consider it an illusion.
This tension runs like a common thread through the book "After Buddhism" by Stephen Batchelor. He illustrates it using the story of Sunakkhatta.
Sunakkhatta accuses the Buddha of never having seen him perform a miracle and never having explained the origin of the world to him (MN 12). He explains to his clan members that the Buddha is not a real enlightened being and that he only teaches the cessation of suffering. When the Buddha hears of this, he responds that Sunakkhatta is only praising him. Sunakkhatta so desperately wanted to believe in the unbelievable while looking down on what the Buddha truly had to offer.
Not much has changed over the centuries. The origin of the world continues to fascinate us, even though we have outsourced this to science. Our superstition lies mainly in various fantasies about enlightenment. And, to my surprise, I discovered in recent years that even Westerners want to be reborn, preferably in some kind of paradise. Just like in the case of Sunakkhatta, discussions about this can become very heated and evoke strong reactions.
This is a movement that often appears in ancient texts. When Ananda begins to proclaim various miraculous stories about the Buddha, the Buddha adds that he has forgotten something very miraculous: whenever a thought or feeling arises in the Buddha, he notices it. It's the typical "yes, but" strategy of the Buddha. He doesn't confront it head-on but quietly brings the conversation back to reality.
Even when Rohatissa, through supernatural powers, wants to reach the end of the world to find liberation there, the Buddha confirms that it is important to reach the end of the world but adds immediately that you cannot achieve that by traveling, but only in this body with this mind and these perceptions (AN 4.45). The Buddha is secular avant la lettre.
You can find this movement in Zen texts as well. When Zhaozhou asks Nanquan what the Dao is, he replies, "your ordinary mind”. When a monk asks Zhaozhou if the dog has Buddha-nature, he coldly replies, "no" (wu). When another monk impatiently asks him for instructions, Zhaozhou asks if he has done the dishes yet. When a monk asks Yunmen what Buddha is, he replies, "the toilet brush”. Thich Nhat Hanh puts it a bit more poetically in our time: "The miracle is to walk on earth."
The remarkable thing is that all these stories can also be interpreted the other way around. The fact that the Buddha doesn't immediately reject Ananda's miraculous stories is seen as confirmation of them. In some koan traditions, Zhaozhou's "wu" points to the ultimate breakthrough of the enlightenment experience.
Take, for example, the fourth vow of the bodhisattva: "However endless the way of awakening may be, I vow to end it." Do we interpret this to mean that through total surrender, we will reach the unreachable, or that there is nothing to achieve and the path continues endlessly? It's a choice.
A Zen teacher once explained to me: "Enlightenment is not an experience, it is an evidence”. You can only understand it once you've achieved it. He seemed to know that at the end of the road, there is certainty. But, he added, you can only reach it through unconditional submission to a real teacher, like him. It was a matter of surrender, of trust. He expected his students to take a leap of faith.
The teacher's certainty legitimizes the power relationship with the student: there is something very special that only the teacher can know. But is believing in the unbelievable a leap of faith or a lapse of reason? "The dharma has only one taste, that of liberation”, the Buddha said. To paraphrase Nietzsche: "I would like to believe in liberation if the liberated looked a bit more liberated." It led to me to the question: "Do I want to be like that?" My answer was a resounding "No."
Where do we find liberation? When I look around me, not among people who submit themselves or want to submit others, not among people who are certain and go into a frenzy when someone dares to challenge their certainty. People I see going through life with a certain lightness, I see them confronting the uncertainty and fragility of life, I see them willing to think and doubt, I see them having the courage to speak and listen without wanting to convince.
This brings us to a much older meaning of “belief”, long before religion became a set of assumptions that you can either believe or reject, and that is trust. This trust is not based on a belief in the unbeålievable, it naturally arises from being familiar with the fragility and uncertainty of life, and with its beauty. There lies liberation.
July 2016
This is the last in a short series of Zen talks inspired by the book “After Buddhism” by Stephen Batchelor.