This kind of approach is rare: emphatically to eschew the either/or according to which critique is necessarily secular, and spiritual practice is nothing but blind (not just blind in the idealizing way that love is blind, but totally and inescapably and uninterruptably blind). Instead, the thought re-animating the opposition between critical and religious thought seems to be that one is either in or out: that being inside a religion or spiritual practice entails immersion and surrender, whereas critique entails standing back and outside, establishing distance. This view sees the outsider’s distance of critique as incompatible with the practitioner’s embrace. But in most of the things that I care about, I find myself both within and without in one and same breath.
Much as Suzuki’s life flashed up at the meeting point of conflicting forces of resistance and embrace, the American reception and appropriation of Zen flashed up in a particular parallelogram of forces, in which Zen becomes a way to embrace and resist in one and the same breath. This is Zen as counterculture (or counter-conduct), but also Zen as primary icon through which we solicit power and govern ourselves.
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So many of our images of Zen are historically inaccurate. To know their falsity is to face the tangle through which Zen came to us. The freedom of this inauthenticity is also a politics of truth. Call it a koan if you want (I’m not wild about koans, myself): sitting with a Zen marked by the vicissitudes and vexations of its transmission and of our reception. In a world where nothing stays self-identical for long, religion provides a frame, one frame, wherein living bodies incorporate forces (natural and social) to fabricate truth. Into the rhythm of refrain, the parallelogram of forces—Suzuki’s and our own—is drawn and incorporated, elaborated and intensified. To my mind, the source of any value that religion might have arises here: in diverse, repeated and failing, attempts to imagine counter-the-fact … with all the courage and blindness such imagining demands. This is religion as a history that we make, compose, invent—but (with a nod to Marx) not as we choose. Why claim more?
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