John D. Caputo, a contemporary American philosopher and theologian, is known for his work demonstrating the relevance of Derrida's deconstruction for theology. Vasubandhu, a fourth-century (c.e.) Indian thinker, is a seminal figure in the Mahāyāna Buddhist school known as Yogācāra. Although at first blush an odd pairing, and despite their great differences, these two thinkers share a fundamental presupposition: the priority and centrality of our conditioned condition. Indeed, for them, attending to the ways that we are conditioned makes possible the pursuit of a truth that is beyond our conditioned filters, aspiring to open us to the truth that is unconditioned. For this reason, it is illuminating to read and think Caputo and Vasubandhu together.Footnote 1
For Caputo, we are conditioned in the postmodern sense of recognizing that we are historically and culturally located, immersed in certain linguistic systems, shaped by our individual experiences, and so forth, and thus we are always constrained by our particularized, finite perspectives. Likewise, for Vasubandhu we are conditioned, but as a Buddhist he is concerned especially with how we are affected by karma and by our sense of self (ātman).
It is intriguing that, because of their stress on our conditioned condition, these thinkers therefore deny that we have access to truth through cognition or through final, rather than provisional, language. It seems such a strange approach for inciting religious commitment—i.e., humbly to stress the limitations of their traditions’ ways of knowing and speaking—and yet, for both, their soteriologies hinge on this attention to conditioning. Studying the two together can help us think through the implications for religiosity of acknowledging our conditioning and can help us explore the relation of epistemic and linguistic humility to religious commitment. In the final portion of this article, I will show how the contents of the compared thought systems have important implications for comparative theology and thus have affected my own comparative approach.
The following are some rough similarities between Caputo and Vasubandhu that this essay will explore and explain in more detail. First, Caputo's approach deemphasizes metaphysics and ontology in favor of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Similarly, recent scholars, although not without controversy, have wanted to read Vasubandhu no longer as a metaphysical idealist but in terms of phenomenology, and scholars have been calling for more attention to his text on hermeneutics, his Vyākhyāyukti (Principles of exegesis).Footnote 2 Second, both thinkers, though in different ways, discuss our conditionedness in terms of the problem of the self. Vasubandhu discusses this problem with respect to the implications of the Buddhist doctrine of no-self. Caputo focuses on the subject's lack of complete autonomy, the historical and cultural locatedness of the subject, the subject's tendency to self-promote and self-protect, and the subject's resistance to radical transformation (metanoia). Third, for each thinker, the referent, or the object, must be reconceived; this is the case whether the object may be God, things in themselves, the meaning of a text, etc. Against our common assumptions, the referent, they teach, is not a “what,” not an object with an identifiable essence. Fourth, once Caputo's and Vasubandhu's respective strategies are implemented, dualities of all sorts evaporate, which has ethical implications that Caputo discusses in terms of justice, Mahāyāna Buddhists in terms of great compassion. Lastly, both avoid self-referential problems by insisting that their own ways of speaking are not exceptions to the rule about all language being conditioned and thus limited. If successful here, they show us a way to affirm our religious thought systems while remaining ever critical of them and thus open to the wisdom of religious others; Caputo and Vasubandhu show us how to have faith and humility, strong devotion without dogmatism.Footnote 3 This will have important implications for comparative theology more broadly, which, again, is a topic to which I will return.
Overall, the strategy of emphasizing our conditioning is termed deconstruction for Caputo and appearance-only (vijñapti-mātra) for Vasubandhu.Footnote 4 Deconstruction and appearance-only, I contend, serve broadly parallel soteric functions, because the problems that Vasubandhu sees with our cognizing and with how we relate ourselves to objects and others are comparable to the problems that Caputo sees with our theologizing and with how we relate ourselves to God.Footnote 5
Caputo
CaputoFootnote 6 applies Derrida's thought to theology, employing Jewish and Christian terminology and asserting strongly that we need deconstruction.Footnote 7 We need always to deconstruct our religious views, he thinks, because, until the kingdom of God arrives, our views are conditioned. Here, down below, in the fallen, imperfect world, there is no place where we can stand in order to have an unconditioned vantage point, no way of knowing that is not bound by the limits of our finitude.
In Caputo's system, pure, sacred truth is symbolized by the kingdom, and that is to be distinguished from the claimed truths of human churches. Caputo says that while we may passionately yearn and pray for the coming of the kingdom, any kingdom that does come, by virtue of its appearing here in this world to limited humans, in being received by us, thereby becomes conditioned. Therefore, Caputo says that the truth that is not limited by being conditioned, the kingdom, is always deferred in our experience. Correspondingly, whatever does appear, then, as reflected in our current religious understandings, needs to be seen as the church, not the kingdom—i.e., as conditioned, not absolute.
Caputo describes deconstruction as “the hermeneutics of the kingdom of God.”Footnote 8 Deconstruction is a radical interpretive approach that relentlessly exposes conditionedness in the name of that which is not conditioned; it deconstructs in the name of what is not deconstructible. For example, and adding a new metaphor now, earthly laws will always be imperfect and conditioned. Consequently, we should deconstruct laws in the name of justice, which is not deconstructible, not perfectly containable by our conditioned words and historical forms. We deconstruct laws in order to “repeat them with a difference,”Footnote 9 negotiating the distance or difference between the present laws and perfect justice. Similarly, we must deconstruct historical religions in order to repeat them with a difference, deconstructing what is imperfectly human in the name of, and in aspiration towards, the divine.
By thus questioningly taking sides with “untruth” as we challenge current interpretations, deconstruction “is at the same time a hermeneutics of truth.”Footnote 10 Therefore, this complicates our distinctions between truth and untruth. As becomes clear later, it may indeed complicate all of our dualities and absolutes.
To repeat, then, the kingdom and justice indicate the unconditioned, or the highest truth, but we do not have that as such; we have only conditioned ways of speaking of truth and conditioned forms of it, yet we tend to run from this in denial and mistake conditioned things for absolute things, grasping idolatrously. As does Vasubandhu, Caputo traces this regrettable tendency to our sense of self and related insecurities. When we overlook our conditionedness to claim dogmatically absolute truths, we are self-asserting, promoting ourselves over others, claiming that we have privileged access to the unconditioned and that those with different views do not.Footnote 11 When church members claim to know, for example, “what Jesus would do,” Caputo thinks that they need to stop and really “ask that question instead of using it as a stick to beat their enemies,”Footnote 12 “as a club to pound what is different.”Footnote 13 Caputo thinks that we would do better to keep deconstructing, keep questioning rather than answering by admitting that our answer, and indeed every earthly answer, is conditioned. We should perpetually question, keep searching, in order to put ourselves in question and thus be open to fundamental transformation (metanoia).Footnote 14
Sounding somewhat Buddhist, Caputo insists that the subject lacks complete autonomy, being “antedated by systems” that precede it: unconscious forces, the linguistic system in which the subject is “always and already immersed,” and so forth.Footnote 15 “When we speak of the ‘I’. . . or the ‘self,’ we are. . . gloss[ing] over the complexities,. . . hastily summariz[ing] the. . . numerous competing forces, constantly shifting,” he writes.Footnote 16 Given this, the idea that we could have access to unconditioned truth or “reference,” that we could know final answers, is “excessively subjectivistic.”Footnote 17 Furthermore, as with subjects, likewise with objects. For Caputo, things have no nature; nature is just what nature is taken to be.Footnote 18 Thus, deconstruction, Caputo maintains, “constitutes a certain anti-essentialism.”Footnote 19
However, without thinking that we can ever definitively answer such questions as what Jesus would do, still Caputo feels that he can say, at least, that Jesus would somehow deconstruct; that is, Jesus would problematize our conditioned views, never satisfied with what is thus limited. Jesus would challenge the “sphere of the ‘same,’” “deliver the shock of the other.”Footnote 20 As Caputo reads it, the New Testament is full of stories of Jesus doing just that.Footnote 21
Following this Jesus, then, Caputo says, “The church is ‘deconstructible,’ but the kingdom of God, if there is such a thing, is not,. . [and] the kingdom of God is that in virtue of which the church is deconstructible.”Footnote 22 Note the “if there is such a thing” part, which is extremely important. If we acknowledge that the kingdom, or religious truth, cannot come to us without thereby being conditioned, then we do not know; hence the “if.” We have only faith, not knowledge, Caputo will insist.
In Caputo's writing, as I understand him, the kingdom, or the unconditioned, is like a ghost; its status is complicated. If a ghost appears, it does so in the mode of a kind of semi- or peculiar existence that is also part nonexistence. A ghost is the sort of thing that points to the fact that the sharp duality between existing and not, the usual way of thinking, may be inadequate. On the one hand, the downside can be seen in Caputo's frequent appeals to the trope of a ghostly specter as an emblem of our inability to access the truth. Caputo thinks that we must allow ourselves to be haunted by this specter. If we let ourselves be spooked, be “put in question by this question,” then we will always constantly ask whether indeed we are doing what Jesus would do, following him, or “just going where we want to go on our own.”Footnote 23 This is why Nietzsche is prominent in this system, but Nietzsche is, in Caputo's words, a “specter not a ‘dogma.’” Caputo writes, “I do not give him [Nietzsche] dogmatic authority; I just can't shut him up.”Footnote 24 That is the negative side. There will always be doubt as we are haunted by the possibility of other answers, interpretations, viewpoints, and contexts.
On the other hand, the upside is that the ghostly trope is not only an emblem of our inability to capture truth but also an emblem of the unconditioned itself. In this view, the kingdom may appear or be present in the sense that the unconditioned haunts our conditioned systems, ever unsettling and prodding our earthly ways. Ghosts do have a kind of reality or presence for us, but only of a limited, betwixt-and-between, elusive sort. The unconditioned is like that, Caputo thinks.
Let us translate the metaphor again now, for if language is conditioned, we must keep translating, trying out other possibilities. Caputo draws a parallel between our inability to know God transparently and our inability ever to arrive at the meaning of a text (including scriptures). If all readings are conditioned, then no reading is definitive. In order to elaborate, and alluding to Derrida's The Post Card, Caputo uses the metaphor of lost mail.Footnote 25 First, a lost item, like a ghost, is yet another image of something with a tricky, complicated status. The owner of something lost feels as though it exists somehow, that the lost thing is indeed here, but in another sense the lost thing does not exist because the item cannot be accessed or held. Observe also that when something is lost, we seem to appreciate it newly, wanting its presence all the more intensely. Herein lies the advantage of seeing the unconditioned, such as justice, in this way: it generates desire, motivating us to strive for ever elusive justice. In contrast, thinking that we already know justice in itself, and that we have legitimized the law in order to ensure it, does not generate that same effect.
Comparing texts to lost mail, in particular, Caputo says that texts follow the “postal principle”Footnote 26 in that texts always get lost—for example, when they are misunderstood, misquoted, altered, redacted, and read differently. “A text remains structurally and in principle capable of being understood differently. . . so that it is always happening (arriver) but never arrives (arriver) decisively at just one final destination. . . that would be authorized to pronounce its meaning once and for all.”Footnote 27 Caputo thinks that this “postal principle” is the principle of any tradition. Christianity itself practiced this sort of creative re- or misreading in its appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures, arriving at an unexpected destination.Footnote 28
For these reasons, Derrida describes what he is doing as a movement from ontology to “hauntology.”Footnote 29 Caputo argues not that there is a ghost, as though identifying an entity, but “that something ghostly is happening.”Footnote 30 The conditioned appears as things, but the unconditioned is present only as a haunting event. Thus, Caputo moves away from metaphysics and instead towards hermeneutics, poetics, and phenomenology. Instead of asking what is, he wants to ask what appears in our experience and what that might mean.
Hermeneutically, reading literally will not help us avoid being haunted. We cannot reproduce precisely what Jesus does in the Bible, because we live in different circumstances than Jesus did. Also, we cannot know what Jesus would do because, if predictable, Jesus would have represented more of the same, not the loosening up of the same to make room for the incoming of the other. However, Caputo thinks that the haunting question of what Jesus would do, if allowed truly to penetrate and remain a question, can help us develop as much judgment as we can.Footnote 31
Hauntology is phenomenology, because Caputo works from our experience.Footnote 32 He speaks of the phenomenon in question (i.e., feeling haunted by the unconditioned) as an experience like that of a call or solicitation.Footnote 33 Again, I see calls and solicitations to be like ghosts and lost items, because when, for example, a deployed soldier calls home but is unable to be home, we do feel to some degree that loved one's presence. At the same time, during the call we are acutely aware of the limited way that the loved one is here with us, which makes our yearning for fuller presence increase sharply. Analogously, we do not have full access to the unconditioned, but we feel called by and towards it, and so in that sense we do have some semblance of it, which pulls us to seek after it, wishing it to be here among us.Footnote 34
Thus, hauntology is phenomenology but it is a “phenomenology of what is not given.”Footnote 35 Although we may seem to experience the call of truth, our conditioned state and epistemic limits render us uncertain of the caller's identity or even the caller's very existence. Is it really God? Or, as Nietzsche says, is it “a bit of undigested meat”? Oversimplifying the point for effect, Caputo quips that Freud “thinks that what is really being called for is our mommy.”Footnote 36 Hindus, I would add, think the caller is Brahman, Muslims that Allah calls. “Who has authorized me. . . to decide that undecidable?”Footnote 37 “Where would one be standing?” Caputo asks.Footnote 38 “It is a condition of our hearing [the call] that we cannot identify it further. The confession that we cannot identify it is constitutive of it. For as soon as we would be able to identify it. . . we would have begun to. . . put ourselves back in the nominative. We would no longer be in the accusative, put on the spot, de-posed by what it poses to us.”Footnote 39
Caputo explains that if Abraham in the story of the near sacrifice of IsaacFootnote 40 had been more concerned to ask about the identity of the voice that called to him, making his obedience contingent upon knowing, it would ruin the power of the story. There would be computable cost-benefit analysis on Abraham's part, not a giving up and over of himself, an excess outside of any economy, a transcendence. Without his non-knowing, Abraham “would not be the father of faith but of good investments and estate planning.”Footnote 41 Thus, “the spiritual journey we launch under the impetus of a calling. . . actually depends on not knowing.”Footnote 42 However, if this is so, then deconstruction, as an affirmation of what cannot be known or finally named, is an affirmation that “can be made under many names, with or without God.”Footnote 43 This has profound implications for theology of religions, as will be explained eventually below.
However, to say that no way of talking is ever final and that names and language are always limited or conditioned is not as bleak as it sounds; this is because Caputo thinks that names harbor events. By an “event” I understand Caputo to mean the sacred time when we are opened up to the unconditioned, the sacred itself. Caputo says that deconstruction is a prayer for the release of the event that stirs within conditioned names.Footnote 44 When we respond to a name, what we are really responding to is what the name promises, not what it can actually capture or deliver. Caputo observes that “when we speak of something. . . being ‘worthy of the name,’. . . we are speaking of the event that name contains. The event that is going on in the name is the event of a call, of something calling and of something being called for by the name.” “Anyone who hears what is resonating in the word ‘democracy’ (or ‘Christianity’). . . knows that no existing democracy [or form of Christianity]. . . is up to what is called for in that name.”Footnote 45 What is called for is never here but rather always deferred, or “to come.”Footnote 46
It is because the kingdom is always deferred and the events harbored in names always “to come” that Derrida speaks of a messianic or prophetic structure.Footnote 47 Caputo writes that “it would be ‘idolatrous’ to identify the event. . . with its present state of affairs. . . instead of being drawn by the call of that event.”Footnote 48 The messiah, “the one who is coming. . . can never be present. He must always function as a breach of the present, opening up the present to something new.”Footnote 49
However, an opponent may ask whether it is not a kind of answer to the question of “what Jesus would do” to say that Jesus would deconstruct. Caputo replies that deconstruction “is not a determinate position. . . but a ‘how,’ a way of holding a position. . . . It provides an unsettling reminder about how. . . [not to hold any given position] with too much complacency and self-assurance, and about allowing ourselves to be held.”Footnote 50 Caputo very clearly admits that Derrida's own system “emerged under determinate historical conditions,” and thus it, too, is deconstructible.Footnote 51 Translations, deconstructions, repetitions with a difference do not stop. “In the end, Derrida concludes, there is no end.”Footnote 52
This unending deferral rather than presence means that, for Caputo, truth is not an object to grasp or know but rather something we do, something we work at, which brings us to the implications for justice. “In the theory of the event, ‘truth’ means what is trying to come true, which points to our responsibility to make it actually come.”Footnote 53 “Justice in itself does not exist but it is something we demand and something that is demanded of us.”Footnote 54 Justice itself actually existing or coming would bring our efforts to an end, but justice haunting us is what keeps us in hot pursuit.
This brings us to one last way that Caputo describes deconstruction—namely, as passion for the possibility of the impossible.Footnote 55 Caputo says, “When you go to the possible nothing much happens.” You get more of the same. Thus, “the only event. . . is to go to the impossible.”Footnote 56 Explaining further with the notion of the gift, Caputo speaks of the gift as a paradigm for the impossible because as soon as something is given, there is debt (e.g., expectation of return) and there is reward (e.g., being owed); thus, an economy kicks in, even though true gifts are meant to be a loving excess given outside any economy and without regard for return. However, that the economy always rears its head means not that the gift is impossible simpliciter, but only that the gift is “the impossible ([in the sense that] it belongs to the vocative order)”—to the order of a call.Footnote 57 We should still try to give, Caputo thinks, not motivated by return, even though there will inevitably be a return. In short, the very conditions of the gift's happening nullify it, condition it, pull it back into an economy, and that dilemma and paradox is precisely the mark of it. Hence deconstruction is passion for “the impossible.”
Because experiencing the unconditioned without thereby in the process conditioning it is an impossibility (i.e., a phenomenological impossibility), at bottom, this is just a way of “confessing the need for faith.”Footnote 58 Just as we should still give in the face of the impossibility of the gift, we should still speak our religious languages, knowing that our way of speaking will not prove to be permanently adequate. We cannot escape economies, but it is in virtue of the gift that we can loosen them a bit, opening them up.Footnote 59 Economies are all that exist, but they “are made fertile and productive by the gift by which they are ruptured and interrupted. . . . Economies need gifts.”Footnote 60 The time of the gift, Caputo says, is a kind of “suspension” that is the “very essence” of “sacred space.”Footnote 61
Like giving without regard for return, Caputo maintains that the most “radical prayer” is “praying with no. . . assurance that anyone is out there to hear”—or without assurance, I would add, that our God is the God.Footnote 62 Here we have another duality complicated, one with far-reaching implications for our theology of religions: faith, it seems, cannot be separated from doubt.Footnote 63 If we give, serve, or pray knowing that God will pat us on the back for it, the economy is only reinforced. However, conversely and crucially, if we give, serve, or pray anyway, when we are unsure of God, that is the sacred time.Footnote 64
With the above reading of Abraham and these notions of radical prayer and the gift in mind, Caputo thus asks suggestively, what if, just what if, living religiously requires non-knowing, a moment of atheism or doubt, structurally? “What then becomes of the distinction between. . . believer and infidel,” between Christian and non-Christian?Footnote 65
Vasubandhu
Although VasubandhuFootnote 66 is often read as a metaphysical idealist (that is, as denying that objects of perception exist independently of the mind), my own interpretation of him here instead follows scholars with phenomenological leanings.Footnote 67 Yogācārins work phenomenologically from experience because they presuppose that, while we are unenlightened, our ongoing experiences are continually adding to our karmic accumulation, and that fuels our bondage (saṃsāra). Therefore, it is essential to examine and change how we experience in order to be liberated. Furthermore, because intent is crucial for karma, the Yogācārins were primarily concerned to analyze cognition, or consciousness.Footnote 68
Remember that Caputo embraces phenomenology because he rejects the dualities of ontology (e.g., existing/nonexisting, present/absent, gift/no gift). Such dualities would not accommodate Caputo's experience of ghosts and calls.Footnote 69 Vasubandhu may be similarly dissatisfied with the usual choices for categorizing referents. Vasubandhu's position may not be exactly idealism (which too flatly denies the ultimate reality of anything beyond the mind), nor realism (“which assumes a close if not exact correspondence between” mental images and the external realities that they purportedly reflect). Instead, Vasubandhu's position follows from the Buddhist doctrine of dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda), i.e., that everything arises from causes and conditions, and thus everything is dependently arisen rather than autonomous.Footnote 70 Mahāyāna Buddhists hold that dependently arisen, so-called “things” are empty (śūnya)—that is, empty of own-being (svabhāva) or essence. What is dependently arisen and empty may turn out to have much in common with Caputo's ghosts.
The historical context for Yogācāra was worry that the rival Madhyamaka school's description of emptiness (śūnyatā) was apt to be perceived (fairly or not) as veering towards nihilism. In his writings Vasubandhu tries to develop a new hermeneutic of emptiness in order to clarify how empty things are not completely nonexistent even though they have no own-being.Footnote 71 The realism-versus-idealism debate, with its talk of entities, works best in the realm of ontology, but it is phenomenology that can focus us on interdependence, including the interdependence of mind and world.Footnote 72 In the Indian Buddhist system, “it is on account of our [mentally] clinging to forms of life that again and again we produce them. . . . It is our will, our. . . desire which creates the world in which we live, and the organism which corresponds to it.”Footnote 73
Buddhists see the world as consisting of conditioned, interactive phenomena, and it is the status of such so-called “things” that is controversial. Yogācāra offers what Richard King calls a container or receptacle view of empty things. The idea is that for something to be empty, it must still exist in some way, just as there is still something (i.e., a receptacle), even when the receptacle is empty.Footnote 74 Things are “in one sense existent (bhāva), but not in the everyday sense of being. . . independent ‘entities’ or ‘objects.’” For this reason, there is a refusal or suspension of ontological debate.Footnote 75
Let me illustrate a phenomenological reading of Vasubandhu by looking first at his Viṃśatikā (Twenty verses). The text begins by saying that everything is appearance-only because there is the appearing of nonexistent things. Although it is easy to see how this could be construed as a declaration of metaphysical idealism, an alternative reading takes this to mean only that, when things appear to us in the saṃsāric realm, this side of nirvāṇa, those things do not exist in fact as they appear to exist to us in consciousness. This is because, as long as we are stuck in saṃsāra, our experience of things is conditioned by our karma and our sense of self.
Vasubandhu goes on to compare our ordinary experience to that of someone with eye disease. Our unenlightened view, symbolized by the diseased eyes, is always flawed because it is compromised by our karmic and self-centered conditioning. Next, the text offers answers to various potential problems with this position—how to explain restriction to time and place, for example, if indeed exactly corresponding objects are not responsible for our experience of objects. Vasubandhu answers with more analogies. For instance, while dreaming, we feel that we are experiencing things restricted to specific times and places, when in fact this dream world is only constructed by our minds and there are no corresponding external objects. As I read the several analogies, though, maybe they are not necessarily meant to show that outside realities do not exist. The analogies are extreme or exaggerated in that the objects discussed are totally factitious, but perhaps the analogies are merely meant to emphasize the role of mental construction in experience and are meant to show how it is the mentally constructed objects (the objects as experienced) that account for the characteristics of human experience in the saṃsāric realm.Footnote 76
Verses 11–15 address atomic, or mereological, theories. Vasubandhu shows incoherencies in conceiving of things as wholes made of basic particles, as groups of basic parts, or as aggregates. (These three options are treated by some opposing schools as an exhaustive set of options for the composition of material objects.)Footnote 77 If interpreted as though trying to show the impossibility of material objects, then once again it is easy to see this portion as supporting metaphysical idealism. However, it is possible instead to see this section as not necessarily aiming to disprove physical objects, but rather as pointing to the limitations of our conceptualizations of so-called objects, implying that any conceptualizing is problematic. Vasubandhu does not really say that the outside world is completely nonexistent; he just denies that things-in-themselves could be conceptualized satisfactorily as atoms. This may be phenomenology, not ontology, for the actual meat of Vasubandhu's argument here is the point that objects are never actually experienced in any of the ways imagined by the three options.Footnote 78
However, if corresponding independent objects do not explain our experienced version of those objects, and instead our conditioning does, then how are we to understand the conditioning process? For this, we need to understand the Yogācāra view of the structure of our minds. Here we begin to see how Vasubandhu, more than Caputo, helps us think in detail about why and how we are conditioned, and about how our conditioning proliferates. The earlier Abhidharma tradition mapped the mind by asserting six kinds of consciousnesses: namely, the five sense consciousnesses plus the thinking consciousness, which has as its objects input from the five sense consciousnesses plus linguistic constructs and mental images. Yogācārins expand this six-part map of the mind by positing two additional consciousnesses, which make up a subliminal realm of our minds.Footnote 79 Yogācārins add a seventh consciousness, the defiled or afflicted consciousness (kliṣṭavijñāna or manas), in order to explain the “preconscious tendency” to assume the existence of the self. Thus, the seventh consciousness is the “I-making” function, which creates our attachments.Footnote 80 Then they add an eighth consciousness, called the store consciousness (ālayavijñāna), which functions to store and reproduce karma.Footnote 81 These two subliminal processes operate with, and underlie, all conscious processes.
Vasubandhu's Triṃśatikā (Thirty verses) explains the role of these subliminal processes in shaping our experience. The opening of this text mentions transformations (pariṇāma) of consciousness (vijñāna), which are said to be threefold. That is, our conditioning “consists of three layers,” or “three subjective transformations,” which are elaborated in verses 2–18. First, the eighth, store consciousness, or karma, retains all of our habits and inclinations deriving from our past experiences, informing how things are responded to and received. Second, the seventh, afflicted, or I-making, consciousness shapes our cognition with selfish attachment and tendencies to “protect and further” the self. Third, the first six consciousnesses (that is, our thinking and sensing) operate while shaped by these subliminal influences.Footnote 82
The Triṃśatikā says that what we experience as self and other, or as subjectivity and objectivity (ātman and dharma), develops from this three-part process. Similarly, the opening part of the Discriminating the Middle from the Extremes speaks of duality (dvayam), which is glossed as referring to grasper and graspable (grāhaka and grāhya), or subject and object. Saṃsāric experience is said to involve this duality that is not actual but is contributed by the mind and thus is called the imagination of the unreal (abhūta-parikalpa). In contrast, nirvāṇa is associated instead with emptiness (śūnyatā), which for the Yogācārins here means the absence of constructed duality.
The text says that the storehouse consciousness endures because of habit-energies, or perfumings (vāsanās). Karmic conditioning is metaphorically described as a storehouse, which stores seeds and perfumings, images connoting a sense of lingering effects, of spreading and permeating. Experiences shaped by the karmic seeds of past experiences in turn create fresh seeds and more perfume that the store consciousness again accumulates, shaping future experiences. Thus, there is a vicious cycle—Caputo would say an economy—from which it is the religious task to free ourselves. Verse 19 says that not only karmic deeds but also dualistic grasping perpetuates the storehouse consciousness. Vasubandhu suggests that the storehouse consciousness endures “only in collaboration (saha) with the habit-energies of the twofold grasping.” Therefore, eradicating this dualistic grasping would abolish the distorting karmic conditioning synonymous with saṃsāra.Footnote 83
Verses 20–25 as well as the Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa (Treatise on the three natures) introduce the signature Yogācāra teaching of the three natures (trisvabhāva), which helps elaborate the difference between enlightened and saṃsāric experience. The three natures are 1) the imagined or constructed (parikalpita), 2) the dependent (paratantra), and 3) the perfected (pariniṣpanna). Dualistic constructions and discriminations correspond to the imagined nature; the process of constructions arising through conditions corresponds to the dependent nature; and the absence of the construction, the non-discriminating into subject and object, corresponds to the perfected nature.Footnote 84 Verses 31–35 of the Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa assert that the imagined nature is to be correctly understood, the dependent nature is to be stopped, and the perfected nature is to be attained.Footnote 85 When, upon enlightenment, we see in the perfected nature mode, our experience lacks bifurcation.Footnote 86
Vasubandhu explains that the teaching of appearance-only helps us reach the perfected nature.Footnote 87 First, becoming aware of our conditioning, we realize that the objects we experience are only representations of consciousness, not corresponding precisely to realities.Footnote 88 Next, this disruption of our sense of objectivity shakes as well our subjectivity because the intent, the grasping that fuels karma, now stops, “for desire. . . presupposes a subject who desires and an object which is desirable. Without making a distinction between subject and object one cannot speak of. . . desire or. . . attachment.”Footnote 89 Vasubandhu is questioning the subject as much as the object by demonstrating their interdependence.Footnote 90 The point is that objectifying things, projecting cognitive objects, is necessary for craving and a basic way that we create and perpetuate our sense of self. Getting rid of the objects helps us get rid of the self. This getting rid of objects is a Buddhist counterpart to, and expansion of, Caputo's point that we need to give up God as an object. In both cases, desires relating to the self make letting go of our constructed objects extremely difficult—but, if accomplished, extremely liberating.
Unlike Caputo's deconstruction, however, if Vasubandhu's theory of appearance-only can help us to attain the perfected nature as claimed, then for Buddhists there is such a thing as unconditioned knowing—namely, the awareness of enlightened ones, nondiscriminative gnosis (nirvikalpajñāna).Footnote 91 This achievement, this destruction of the store consciousness, is a “metaphorical means of describing the disruption and final elimination of karma.”Footnote 92 Because the store consciousness is just a container for the karmically tainted seeds and so is itself non-intentional and neutral, although we are greatly conditioned by our past, we have the opportunity to create a different future—i.e., by generating wholesome karma, positive seeds and momentum, which helps us eventually halt karma altogether.Footnote 93 This contrasts sharply with Caputo's claim that deconstruction never ends and the kingdom is always deferred.
However, thus far I have described Vasubandhu only with respect to phenomen-ology. It is notable, though, that Vasubandhu is one of very few Indo-Tibetan authors to have written a treatise on scriptural hermeneutics, his Vyākhyāyukti (Principles of exegesis), a text receiving increased attention from scholars in recent years.Footnote 94 This text seems to share many of Caputo's attitudes. Vasubandhu emphasizes, for example, that literal reading does not suffice, so readers must develop interpretive judgment.Footnote 95 Like deconstructionists, Vasubandhu stresses that meaning depends on context, and he examines ways that single phrases can give rise to multiple meanings.Footnote 96 As Caputo stresses the importance of particular situations over universal interpretive rules, Vasubandhu proceeds by exploring particular passages rather than articulating universal principles, perhaps implying a wariness about generalized rules.Footnote 97 Also, Vasubandhu says that although messages spoken by Buddhas are perfect, “the acts of speaking that successively give voice to them may not be”—in Caputo's terms, this distinguishes the arche from the archive.Footnote 98 Lastly, Derrida's notion of lost mail is reminiscent of Vasubandhu's argument for the authority of Mahāyāna sutras because Vasubandhu reminds his opponents of problems with their own canon, citing many references to lost texts and naming sectarian disagreements about canons, concluding that no tradition can claim to have the complete, original canon.Footnote 99
In part due to my dwelling longer on Vasubandhu's view of language, studying Vasubandhu has helped me understand, more deeply than I did with Caputo alone, how language impacts our cognition, contributing to our attachments and sense of self. Yogācārins see language not just as provisional and limited (as Caputo does), but also as deeply damaging. Jonathan C. Gold explains, “The bifurcation of the universe. . . appears necessary in the formation of any [linguistic] concept.” For example, when “we say of any given thing that it is ‘physical,’ we are effectively saying, at the same time, that all things are either ‘physical’ or ‘not physical.’ We create a ‘duality.’” Similarly, when I conceive of my self, “I am dividing the universe into ‘self’ and ‘other.’”Footnote 100 Language's inherent dualism causes us to experience in terms of dualism, imposing it and perceiving things as separate from ourselves (and each other).Footnote 101 Linguistic limitations “are part of what sets everything in motion” on the wheel of saṃsāra.Footnote 102
A fascinating trope that is used by Vasubandhu in the Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa relates to these points about language and how we are conditioned.Footnote 103 Interestingly, in light of Caputo's use of ghosts, Vasubandhu makes use of the illusion of an elephant (a ghostly elephant, if you will) conjured by a magician using mantras.Footnote 104 In a nutshell, the point seems to be that, although magical mantras (powerful language) really cause this deceptive illusion, we are duped because we think that seeing an actual elephant object is what produced our experience of the elephant. Likewise, our karmic and selfish conditioning—brought on, in part, by language's dualism—is what causes us to see things in a deluded way, but we are fooled because we think that we have perceived accurately actual objects. In each case, the problem is that we are unaware of the actual causes of our experience of objects.Footnote 105 This elephant illusion metaphor is very useful for the Yogācārins because they hold that what we think we experience as a result of accurately sensing outer objects actually arises instead largely due to the operations of the two subliminal consciousnesses—that is, due to our karmic and selfish conditioning.Footnote 106 Although some readers have understood the elephant illusion to be a figure for external reality, thus suggesting that the external world does not really exist, the point here may instead be to reflect upon our experience's causal story, which, more modest than an assertion of metaphysical idealism, just highlights how we condition perceived things.Footnote 107
Because linguistic conceptualization requires dichotomized essences, conceptualization falters in the face of a dependently arisen, non-dichotomized world. This means that enlightened awareness of emptiness and interdependence is necessarily non-conceptual; its content cannot be described. Hence Buddhists’ assertion of ineffability (anabhilāpya). Conventional, conditioned language only points inadequately, and ultimate truth (paramārtha-satya) is that to which conventional language is trying to refer but which cannot be captured in words.Footnote 108 This resonates well with Caputo's description of events harbored in names, with Caputo's idea that names call, promising something that they cannot deliver. Although it is likely an incorrect Sanskritization of a Middle Indic form, interestingly Dan Lusthaus notes that the Sanskrit term for convention (i.e., saṃvṛti) literally means “enclosed.” Therefore, the term for ultimate truth would then suggest the breaking out of closure or economy. This moment is the experience of appearance-only, viz., the moment consisting in experiencing the world in such a way that one now sees that one's sense of self and one's perceptions of discrete objects are merely constructed. Whatever is experienced at this point apart from construction must necessarily be “beyond” language.Footnote 109 Thus, overall, Yogācāra analysis reflects “the Mahāyāna theme that there is a problem even more fundamental than craving, namely conceptualization,” for it is conceptual bifurcation that gives rise to the craving.Footnote 110
Vasubandhu's writing style, regarded in light of this deeply suspicious view of language, resembles Caputo's in frequently playing with words and shifting terms. Verses 10–21 of the Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa are a clear case in point. Here Vasubandhu applies the same terms with different meanings to all three natures, and opposed terms to each of the same natures, so that the natures are said to be different but in another sense not different, dual but non-dual, natures but non-natures, etc.Footnote 111 Given the implications of linguistic conceptualization just discussed, this wordplay seems to be reminding us of the limitations, tentativeness, and translatability of all language—even Vasubandhu's own.
With both Caputo and Vasubandhu, we find a caution against allowing ourselves to think too simply that our religious tradition's conditioned words refer, and yet both nevertheless provide a strategy for using language to approach truth. At the start of his Triṃśatikā, Vasubandhu says that his language is figurative (upacāra). For Vasubandhu, there is a great difference between, on the one hand, thinking that the illusion is really an elephant and, on the other, seeing it but recognizing that it is illusory. The self-referential issue is whether Vasubandhu can then advocate his own language once he has problematized it as conditioned and illusory. As Caputo appeals to ghostly and translatable things at this juncture, Vasubandhu addresses the problem with the notion of illusive appearances and figurative speech. Vasubandhu affirms that saṃsāric experience is appearance-only, but if we can recognize appearances as mere appearances, our languages as limited, then maybe we will cease to be misled by them. In this way, these experiences may serve soteric purposes.Footnote 112
As the commentary for the Viṃśatikā admits, even appearance-only teaching itself is only an appearance, a product of the discursive mind.Footnote 113 This is why the Viṃśatikā concludes with the caution that the intent or full meaning of “appearance-only” can be comprehended only by Buddhas, for it is beyond the scope of thought (citta).Footnote 114 Like deconstruction, appearance-only is a tool to short-circuit grasping; we must be vigilant about not grasping it.Footnote 115
However, since our subliminal conditioning is not directly accessible to consciousness, our grasping tendencies cannot be cast off easily and are “extremely tenacious.” Nevertheless, Buddhists believe that yogic meditation can make the workings of the subliminal realms of our minds transparent and that Buddhist practices can help intervene.Footnote 116 Over many lifetimes, there is hope for the eventual total elimination of conditioning. However, because, for now, our consciousness operates on top of the selfishly pulling deeper regions, it cannot be overemphasized that this “puts us in the position of swimming upstream.”Footnote 117 In Caputo's terms, it makes reaching unconditioned awareness a little impossible.
While Caputo problematizes the duality of self and other and thus gets to justice and the kingdom by deferring and insisting on impossibility, Buddhists like Vasubandhu recommend another way to get there. If we can, despite the odds, swim upstream, the achievement of non-discriminative gnosis is described in Yogācāra not as a “quiescent state” but as a “surplus of compassion,” leading to spontaneous activity for the benefit of all. It is “not the termination of thinking simpliciter” but an awareness lacking any subject-object dichotomy, which means that it is an experience of the “non-distinctiveness and equality of all entities.”Footnote 118 What then becomes of the distinction between self and other, believer and infidel, Buddhist and non-Buddhist?
Conclusion
I would now like to conclude with reflections on the implications of my Caputo-Vasubandhu project for our religiously pluralistic situation generally and for the method and theory of comparative theology in particular. Within the context of recent attempts to promote and justify comparative theology, and especially with regard to debates defending comparative theology as a superior alternative to theology of religions, in past work I have argued that theology of religions and comparative theology cannot be separated, because our theology of religions influences how we read the other.Footnote 119 Here, I illustrate how the compared thought systems themselves will have implications for the comparative theory and method. I still affirm the close connection between theology of religions and comparative theology, but the material under examination here has caused me to modify my earlier position on theology of religions.
I will set aside exclusivism with respect to truth because it never seems to be the position of choice for comparative theologians and also because it seems to suffer from an internal difficulty.Footnote 120 Notice, however, that I have specified exclusivism with respect to truth. The positions advanced by theology of religions with respect to soteriological efficacy are separable from those with respect to truth, and I am aware of no internal difficulty plaguing exclusivism with respect to salvation.Footnote 121
Given this, my new position, then, is that the remaining choices 1) between inclusivism and pluralism with respect to truth, and 2) among exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism with respect to soteriological efficacy, are, to use Caputo's term, undecidable. I cannot know whether there is one religious system that is at the top of a hierarchy or whether, on the contrary, there are multiple equal pathways. How could I? Where would I be standing? I began to ask what happens to our theology of religions and its relation to comparative theology when we take our conditioning seriously, and when we shift from metaphysics and ontology to phenomenology and hermeneutics.
Theologians of religions are sometimes accused by comparative theologians of generalizing about religions as wholes and of oversimplifying matters of religious identity, essentializing in that sense, while comparative theology's emphasis on close reading and digging into the particulars of the other is thought to pay better attention to diversity, ambiguity, and change within traditions. Rather than oversimplifying questions of religious identity, comparative theologians, such as Francis X. Clooney, speak about complications of religious identity and the possibility of religious identity being “neither here nor there.”Footnote 122 Theologies of religions are said to be typically framed as though traditions have essences and as though religious identities are static and self-standing, when really religions and identities are fluid, are complex, and are what they are only in relation to others. In this sense, theology of religions problematically seems to posit absolute entities, but, like comparative theology, deconstruction and Yogācāra are trying to disturb such absolutes.
Inclusivistic and pluralistic theologians of religion have been accused of distorting religious others in order to concoct similarity or of distorting by seeing others through the lens of a supposedly universal function or framework. Theologians of religions are told instead to strive to “get the others right” by seeing others on their own terms. However, according to the views under consideration here, there is no “essence” to a text or thinker and no way to read without conditioning; therefore this quest is misguided. Consequently, the task, according to my revised view, is not to feel about for the other's essence but to repeat the other with a difference.Footnote 123 I mean to make claims not about what is or about how Vasubandhu and Caputo definitively relate, but only about what coalesced in my admittedly conditioned experience of reading. I do not claim to discern the supposed original intent of Vasubandhu's works, “if there is such a thing.” I acknowledge that what I privileged might have been otherwise. Therefore, conclusions are always tentative; more reading and more translating are encouraged.Footnote 124
Traditional theology of religions, by its nature, frames other traditions vis-à-vis oneself, or vis-à-vis one's home tradition, whereas my approach is trying to break out of the selfish orientation that drives our filters and lenses by recognizing how concern for self and the self's location condition comparison.Footnote 125 Conventional positions within theology of religions are about how traditions stack up, or whom to include in whom, which now strikes me as the obsession of insecure selves. We cannot know, Caputo says, what is an example of what, which is a repetition of which. Is it that “biblical faith and prophetic passion are examples of a deconstructive bent,. . . or that deconstruction here acquires a biblical bent?” Caputo says that he does not know which it is, and that it does not make much difference as long as we say “come” to the kingdom.Footnote 126 Furthermore, did my new theory result from the comparative reading, or was it there before, already driving the work to some extent? Comparative reading and theology of religions, I repeat, are interrelated—dependently arising, to use a Buddhist term.
As mentioned above, scholars have charged that theology of religions reflects on other traditions in general rather than engaging the particulars of foreign systems. Critics such as S. Mark Heim have worried that pluralistic theology of religions and “singular end” approaches can unwittingly impose as normative and universal what is really a home perspective, thus snuffing out the difference of the other.Footnote 127 Comparative theologians assert that comparative theology attends, better than theology of religions does, to the specifics and particulars of compared systems on their own terms and that comparative theology shows more respect for singularities and differences. Caputo sheds new light on these concerns, and his work aligns with the prioritizing of particularity and difference because he deconstructs the relation between the universal and the particular and wants a “universal culture of singularities.”Footnote 128 Caputo explains, “Justice in itself is not an. . . eternal Platonic form but the unique. . . justice that is cut to fit. . . the particular.”Footnote 129 “If laws are universals,” Caputo writes, “justice is sensitive to the singularity of the situation. . . . Laws have to do with the ninety-nine, but justice has to do with the one lost sheep. . . . Every time we feel unjustly treated by the law we say, ‘But this case is different.’”Footnote 130 In other words, the event happens when we suspend the general application of a rule to consider the concrete circumstances, respecting the differences. The event happens when we use our judgment, such as when, against the rule, Jesus chooses to heal on the Sabbath, or when, rather than reading the Bible literally, we must interpret it by deciding what Jesus would do in our own unique situations.Footnote 131 Indeed, singularity and particularity are that in virtue of which there is deconstruction. Singularity and particularity are why we translate.Footnote 132 Deconstruction, translation, and repetition cannot occur without, and are prompted by, particularities and difference.Footnote 133
Inclusivistic theology of religions on the model of Rahner-inspired anonymous Christianity has been heavily criticized for ignoring difference and for offensively disrespecting others’ self-understandings. Indeed, if I am just going to make Vasubandhu an anonymous Caputo, then I will risk angering Buddhists and will fail to learn anything new from, or be challenged by, Vasubandhu. I might as well read Caputo alone, but that would be, as Caputo says, just more of the same, rather than what I am after. Despite the fact that Caputo and other factors admittedly condition my reading of Vasubandhu, for the tension of the comparative difference to do its illuminating work, Vasubandhu must remain a different other and recognizable to Buddhists. Thus, my interpretation of Vasubandhu must be one that, while newly shaped by Caputo and me, is at the same time still supported with careful reference to Vasubandhu's texts. It should have a persuasive logic of its own in this comparative context. Thus, by advocating this approach, I am not saying that any reading is acceptable, but I am saying that “making meaning involves judgments, choices, decisions”—that this is the nature of faith and that it is by faith that comparative theology proceeds.Footnote 134
Comparativists worry as well that positions established by theology of religions can predetermine in advance the outcome of comparative explorations. Indeed, if one accepts the fact of conditioning lenses, to what extent does that conditioning predetermine, coloring our seeing to the point of precluding openness? There is a tension here, but the crucial point is that we proceed in faith, not in knowledge. Proceeding by faith, by definition, means “the urgency of forging ahead where one does not see, where in principle one cannot see,” as opposed to knowing where one is going.Footnote 135 We listen for calls that prod our pre-set notions, and precisely because deconstruction interrupts regularities and foreseeable possibilities, it “sets off effects beyond its intentional control.”Footnote 136 On this view, meaning depends on context and since we “cannot foresee all contexts in advance,” we can never “fence off” the possible new meanings that may appear.Footnote 137 Caputo's description makes even clearer that this approach does not predetermine meaning in advance, when he says that deconstruction “moves by chance, not by a logic.”Footnote 138 Caputo says that Derrida loves “experimental writing. . . to see what sort of convergences, divergences, and questions” arise. Derrida likes to “settle into these pieces of luck and explore their richness.”Footnote 139 Would it be so terrible, I rationalize hopefully, if something serendipitous resulted from the “lost mail” of my poor Sanskrit?
Although Caputo does say, sounding relativistic and pluralistic, that “the idea of one true religion. . . makes no more sense than that of one true poem,” in another sense he cannot really be a pluralist because he is agnostic about the relative ranking of traditions.Footnote 140 Thus, I would say that pluralism is here, like Nietzsche, a specter, not a dogma. However, Caputo argues, reasonably, I think, that inscribing faith within Derrida's différance can make us more open.Footnote 141 In other words, it is true that Caputo refuses to banish pluralism's haunting specter, but for him this specter is necessary to faith rather than hostile to it.
Finally, Caputo's stress on truth as something we do agrees with the objection that too often theology of religions talks about and theorizes the other rather than getting on with the actual engagement.Footnote 142 Therefore, I wish this comparative project of mine to be judged not so much on the logic of the theory but on the extent to which this side-by-side reading deepens our reflection on the implications of conditioning for faith and on the extent to which it helps us figure out how to be less self-oriented and more open. My way of demonstrating respect for the thinkers and traditions under study, in the end, is not to aspire to reproduce the letter of my two thinkers’ writings, but rather to repeat them with the difference of each other.Footnote 143 My aim is no less than to try to occasion an event, a surprising incoming of the other, as Caputo says, by getting into bed with these unlikely bedfellows, although that sounds far too immodest.Footnote 144
Final differences between the two thinkers, of course, remain; importantly, my method preserves them. Vasubandhu seeks unmediated, direct knowing, a release from conditioning, while Caputo sticks to faith, accepting the conditioned as “the medium in which we live.” Vasubandhu sees language as damaging and thus reaches for the ineffable, while Caputo instead sees language as “creative and productive,” translation as a way “to reinvent ourselves,” repetition helping us to “forge ahead.” Closure, for Caputo, is not an ideal; on the contrary, the whole point of deconstruction is to keep things open.Footnote 145
Thus, the attention to conditioning leads to sharply different conclusions for these two thinkers, but their conditionedness and being conditioned ourselves make resting content, with either thinker alone, problematic. Like Caputo, I would say that this is not the apathy or paralysis of indecision, but rather it serves to intensify our searching. In this way, my comparison here endorses and justifies the comparative theological endeavor itself. I do not see myself as in a position to come down conclusively with final judgments about these two thinkers in terms of better or worse, but my study of each remains haunted by the questions raised by the other, and that is as it should be.
