Lack and Liberation in Self and Society - Interview with David Loy

Tom McFarlane at Holos Forum interviewed professor, author, and Buddhist scholar David Loy in 2005 - from their first online issue.

Lack and Liberation in Self and Society

An Interview with David Loy

Vol. 1, No. 1 (2005)
www.holosforum.org

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Professor David R. Loy is the author of Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (Yale University Press, 1988), Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (Humanities Press, 1996), A Buddhist History of the West: Studies in Lack (State University of New York Press, 2002), and The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (Wisdom Publications, 2003). He is also the editor of Healing Deconstruction: Postmodern Thought in Buddhism and Christianity (Scholars Press, 1996) and coauthor with his wife, Linda Goodhew, of The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy (Wisdom Publications, 2004). For many years, Prof. Loy taught philosophy and religion at Bunkyo University near Tokyo, Japan. In 2006 he took a position in the Theology Department at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition to his academic work, David Loy is an authorized teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage of Zen Buddhism where he completed formal koan training under Zen Master Yamada Koun Roshi. For more about David Loy and his work, see the links at the end of this document. The text below is an edited transcript of a telephone conversation between Tom McFarlane and Professor Loy in July of 2004. This document is copyright © 2005 by David R. Loy and is published here with his kind permission. Thanks to Sheila Craven for transcribing the audio of this interview.

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TOM McFARLANE: Could you start by telling us about your childhood and youth, about your religious background, and what led you to engage in a personal spiritual quest?

DAVID LOY: I was born in the Panama Canal Zone. My father was in the Navy so we lived in a lot of different places and I attended many different schools. Moving around so much made me quite bookish and self-contained.

I was raised as a Christian, but never really got very involved with it. However, I was always interested in philosophy, especially the more existential side of philosophy. While attending Carleton College in Minnesota I was fortunate to arrange a junior-year-abroad at King’s College, University of London, studying linguistic analytic philosophy, which taught me that I wasn’t interested in linguistic analytic philosophy. I developed in a more existential direction studying continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard. From there it’s not such a big leap to D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and other writers on Zen.

After graduating from Carleton at the height of the Viet Nam War, I became a draft resister and moved to San Francisco. Although I have never regretted that non-violent anti-war organizing, by the time the war wound down I realized that I needed to look more deeply into myself. Certainly there were many serious political and social issues that remained problematic, but it was not enough for me just to criticize the social system. I had to look into myself and find the more personal source of my own problems. So, typically, I departed on a round-the-world trip. But without any money I didn’t get any further than the first destination, which was Hawaii, and I ended up living there for five years. That’s when I got into Zen practice. There was a Zen center there at that time led by Robert Aitken, who wasn’t a Roshi yet. He was very kind to me, and after I attended a couple sesshins he invited me to live and practice at the Maui zendo. He later suggested that I go to graduate school, so I ended up getting an MA from the University of Hawaii in Asian Philosophy.

TOM: And was it there you began to develop the thesis that there is a core doctrine of nonduality shared by many schools of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, as well as by mystics of other traditions?

DAVID: Yes, the interest and focus started in Hawaii. But it was only later, when doing my doctoral studies in Singapore, that I started to develop that thesis and publish the first papers about different aspects of nonduality. And then I realized that they were really different ways of looking at the same thing, and saw how they all fit together. That’s when I put the book together. The first draft was my doctoral dissertation for the National University of Singapore.

From Singapore I came to Kamakura, Japan, where I’ve been now for about twenty years. I originally moved here in order to continue Zen practice with my teacher, Yamada Koun Roshi, a Zen Master who was then the Abbot of the Sanbo Kyodan, a lineage of Zen which combines elements of the Soto and Rinzai schools.

TOM: How did he become your teacher?

DAVID: I had originally met him in Hawaii. At that time he visited Hawaii every year or so to lead sesshins for Robert Aitken’s groups. I kept that connection up while in Singapore. We started a small Zen group there, and he came to lead sesshin for us a few times.

TOM: And are you a Zen teacher yourself now?

DAVID: After I completed the formal koan training under Yamada Roshi, he gave me a Zen name and authorized me to teach. But I’m not actually teaching Zen now, so I wouldn’t call myself a Zen teacher. You can’t be a Zen teacher if you don’t have Zen students! But maybe that will change sometime in the future.

TOM: So, now you’re mostly focused on teaching philosophy and writing?

DAVID: Yes. I’m a professor in the faculty of international studies at Bunkyo University, near Tokyo. Although we don’t have a separate philosophy department, I teach some introductory philosophy and religion courses, and in addition to that there is studying and writing.

TOM: Your first book, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy, develops the thesis that there is a core doctrine of nonduality shared by many schools of Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, as well as by mystics of other traditions. Beyond its academic significance, I’m curious what relevance you think this thesis of nonduality might have for society as a whole and also for individual spiritual practitioners.

DAVID: Western culture, and especially the United States, is quite dualistic in the sense that it is a civilization based on subject-object discrimination. If that’s a delusion—as many spiritual traditions claim it is—it’s very important for us to realize it, because it may have a lot to do with the kind of problems we’ve gotten ourselves into.

On the personal level, the claim of subject-object nonduality helps to give some validity to the spiritual experience and the spiritual path. Confronted by such a variety of systems and truth claims and practices, it can be hard to make any sense of them. In academia now it’s rather fashionable to doubt whether these systems can really be talking about the same thing. If we can understand the relationship among them in a nondual way—to see, for example, that Buddhist categories are one way of trying to articulate something, and that Advaita categories might be another way of trying to articulate what seems to be the same kind of experience—that can be helpful in understanding and validating the experience, thereby helping us to pursue such a spiritual path. It also encourages us to pursue it in a non-dogmatic way, so that we don’t get hung up in, say, identifying only with Buddhist categories and thinking that other versions of the spiritual path must therefore be deluded or incorrect.

TOM: I’ve heard some academics present the view that, because all experience is conceptually mediated, all religious experience is fundamentally different, so one can not say that there is some single unified religious experience. I was wondering how you would respond to this claim.

DAVID: I think there’s some validity to that point, but it depends on how we understand the claim. There are two points to make. First, it’s true that, insofar as we interpret our experience or even become aware of it as a particular kind of experience, then it’s already mediated. It is only afterwards, when we try to relate our own experience to the various articulations of spiritual experience that have been offered historically and culturally, that we can see the similarities among them and talk about a common experience. So, in that sense, I’m agreeing with the criticism. All our experiences are unique. But I don’t think that prevents us from looking for similarities afterwards.

The second point is that, with regard to spiritual insight in Zen, there’s no “pure experience” to be found apart from the nondual sensory experience. There’s no universal consciousness that is exactly the same across culture and time. With a kensho—a first opening, as it were—you let go of yourself and you experience something in a nondual way and an empty way. The important point is that there is no awareness of a distinction between subject and object. The fact that the experience is nondual makes it similar to other nondual experiences, but there’s an enormous variety of particular experiences that can trigger this: a sound, something visual, a physical sensation. So, we’re not talking about transcending the sensory world to experience some higher reality, some unchanging transcendence. In Zen, it’s experiencing one’s particular situation in a nondual way—maybe only for a split second, or maybe longer.

TOM: Let’s move on now to this notion of lack that’s central to so much of your work. Perhaps you could start by giving us a definition of lack, and tell us how you came up with this concept.

DAVID: The easiest way to understand lack is to think of it as the “shadow” of the sense of self. The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or non-self, implies that our sense of self is a construct, an ever-changing process, which doesn’t have any reality of its own. Because it lacks any reality of its own, any stable ground, this sense of self is haunted by what I’ve called a sense of lack or, for short, lack. The origin of this sense of lack is our inability to open up to the emptiness, or ungroundedness, of the self. Insofar as we’re unable to cope with that emptiness, insofar as we deny it and shy away from it, we experience it as a sense of lack.

TOM: What came to my mind when I first came across your term lack is the use of the word lack in the context of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that all things lack inherent existence. It made me wonder if perhaps we could say, more generally, that this lack of an inherent existence—or emptiness—is the shadow of the idea that there is an inherent existence of things.

DAVID: Everything is empty of own-being, or self-being. But the most problematical emptiness and lack for us has to do with our own sense of self.

This concept of lack is a helpful way for us to understand the Buddhist concept of dukkha. Although dukkha is often translated into English as suffering, when you look at the Buddhist texts, obviously dukkha is a much broader term that includes more general dissatisfaction, a basic frustration in our lives that we are never quite able to resolve. And this broader meaning of dukkha includes a basic dissatisfaction connected to the conditioned nature of the self. One of the distinctive things about Buddhism is that it brings out so clearly this connection between dukkha and anatta, between our basic dissatisfaction and our deluded sense of self. The concept of lack is an attempt to flesh out what I think is so distinctive and powerful about the Buddhist analysis.

The basic concept of lack came to me from reading Ernest Becker. He’s obviously a major influence in Lack and Transcendence (which remains my favorite book despite the ugly cover and tiny font). In his last two books, Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker focuses on how the inevitability of our death is denied and repressed, and it’s not such a big leap from Becker’s death-denial to a Buddhist lack of self. One significant difference is that focusing on death projects the source of our problem into our future, while in the case of Buddhism the source of the problem—the emptiness of the self—is right now.

TOM: So, from the psychological or existential point of view, we’re worried about the future death of some self we think exists, but from the Buddhist point of view it’s actually deeper than that: we’re really worried about the fact that, right now, we don’t exist in the first place.

DAVID: That’s right. If the problem is death, we might think we’re really okay right now, and it’s only what’s going to happen in the future that’s so scary. Buddhism is saying that our dukkha isn’t just due to impermanence and death, our dukkha is pointing at something fundamental about the groundlessness of the sense of self right now. There’s a tendency in psychotherapy to say that our problem is due to childhood conditioning, so we just need to uncover and work through our memories of that. In Buddhism, on the other hand, the problem isn’t just with our particular conditioning, the problem is with all conditioning, with the nature of the sense of self. So, I think that Buddhism has a deeper understanding of the problem of dukkha and also a deeper understanding of tfhe alternatives. Freud thought that all we could ultimately hope for is to get rid of certain types of neurotic suffering. The message of Buddhism is that something more is possible. There are deeper, more transformative human possibilities. Yet the whole psychotherapeutic movement is changing so quickly, and today certain circles are moving strongly in a more spiritual direction.

Read the whole interview.

Tags: Buddhism, nonduality, Psychology, Spirituality, awakening, Lack and Liberation in Self and Society, Interview, David Loy, Holos Forum, Tom McFarlane