I love my iPhone. I hate my iPhone. My iPhone has saved my life. My iPhone is stealing my soul.

The attractions are so clear. The loathing so ready.

It is stealing my soul: whole swaths of my life are in that cosmos of a machine. Names, addresses, phone numbers, messages of friends and frenemies and others are secreted away in it. It’s connected to a “cloud” and would make Jung blanch at any claims to synchronicity. After all, how could he have dreamt (yes, dream) of connections rendered with such ease, such style, such ceaseless seduction?

Ease, style, and seduction are surely part of the package. The sleek form lets us forget that with every tap someone is watching us, following us, tracking us. With each update, our frustrations with technology evaporate until the next glitch, until the next excruciatingly slow download. The delight at the sight of that silvery once-bitten apple makes the mind go blank to the very worldly reality of the hands that put the little machine together, and the corporate interests that want us wanting more. We get to leave our pathetic “dull” phone selves behind when we secure the services of the wondrous iPhone.

Sure my iPhone will give me the false confidence that I can do anything. It’s supposed to give me superpowers – or at least apps that make me feel like I have superpowers. Look: I can read your mind (or at least Google info about you)! Look: I can see the future (or at least tell you what the weather will be like for the next few days). Look: I hear voices! (sure, it’s the iPod or a voice memo, but still….). I am lost, and now I am found (well, I’m still waiting for Google Maps to load…). It’s not the stuff of gospel songs, but it is surely amazingly graceful.

My iPhone is magical, it connects me to a cosmos. And yet, of course, it constantly frustrates my desires to connect. For every wish I make to and through it, it reminds me of my all-too-human longings to be somewhere other than where I am at the present moment, to be with folks that are not the ones right by me, at my side. I am looking at a screen not quite 5 inches tall and less than 3 inches wide for hope, for possibility, for a little info on salvation. How can I not help but feel that it takes a little piece of me, of my soul, of my spirit with each gaze into its bright, shiny glare.

What to do with this magical device that makes me ask questions I didn’t know I had or needed to ask? Why keep touching that screen of desire, that pad of delights?

What will it give me? What will it keep taking from me? Too much, I’m afraid. I hate my iPhone. I love my iPhone. I kinda want my life back.

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We lost Steve Jobs last week. When I wrote these ruminations a few months back, I couldn’t have anticipated the passing of this master innovator. I suspect that Jobs was very much aware of the mixed emotions around the array of technologies of enchantment that he introduced to us over the last decades. In the wake of his death, many of us will ask how long Apple will be able to keep this stream of wonder going without the pitch of that Steve of the uncanny savoir faire. Where did he learn to enchant like that? As it turns out, we have now come to find out that Jobs was a seeker himself, looking for, and sometimes finding clues and paths in Buddhism and other traditions of enlightenment. Did Zen give Jobs the way to entice us to see the future in those marvelous designs, those portals of digitized wisdom? After all, we are now legion who find ourselves stuck in the cycle of birth, death, and renewal that the master marketer Jobs so convincingly led us to believe was not only necessary but actually unavoidable. We who call ourselves lovers of all-things Mac have found ourselves enduring through the obsolescence of what we have in hand (“yeah, it’s an iPhone 3…”), suffering the increasing futility that is the “OS X” or the “iOS” performing the charms we come to rely on, and waiting for the end of our yearning in the form of the little death that comes with “the next release”–the new version that will free us from the all-too-worldly and usher in a new material nirvana, priced just so, glistening just right. It’s hard to think of a wizard of capitalism that was more effective than Jobs in beguiling so many in thinking that consuming new products with such regularity meant that we were on the path to the good, and not just mere fools for the cunning of the market. And yet the market is cunning, and it has lost one of its masters, not quite Zen yet extraordinary nonetheless.

So, let us be decent, let us be good and give Steve Jobs his due, his praise, and our thanks.

D. K. K. (a rather ambivalent owner of an iPad 2…)

In a sparse, basement-level room of the Unitarian Church in a small Midwestern city—let’s call it Clifton—the fifteen or so members of the Clifton sangha gather on a Wednesday evening. There is no authorized teacher, though some members have studied with Zen or Tibetan teachers. Elaine, who convenes the weekly meditation session, pulls a ten-inch bronze Buddha statue out of a cabinet and places it on a small table. She leads a short Zen chant, and the group sits in meditation facing the wall for thirty minutes, followed by a reading, then ten minutes of walking meditation. After another brief chant, the group turns toward the Buddha image and bows deeply.

O  Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

Across the globe, there are countless images similar to the one to which these Midwesterners bow. This one was purchased in Lhasa, Tibet, at one of the dozens of open-air vendors on the circumambulation circuit around Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims come from all over Tibet to walk or prostrate around the circuit, spinning prayer wheels and chanting mantras. During a two-week trip to China, another member of the sangha, Carl, chose this statue from hundreds of others available. The vendor tried first to offer Carl a new factory-made buddha, but he asked for one that looked older, more antique, so the vendor dutifully mussed one up a bit and brought it back the next day. Finally they settled on an older figure that, the vendor claimed, was once used in a Tibetan monastery. After the monastery was dismantled by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, it stayed in a devotee’s house for a few decades and then found its way to the open market. Carl wanted an “authentic” image rather than one made in a factory, one that was made for a spiritual purpose rather than just to sell to tourists.

According to the vendor, the image was crafted by an artisan over sixty years ago. If this is accurate, it would have sat in limbo when completed alongside the other bronze buddhas in the studio with scarves wrapped around their eyes. When they were installed in a temple, a monk would have performed a consecration ceremony that has been going on since before the common era in which the Buddha is invited to take up residence in the image. In the final stage of the ritual, the scarf is removed and the eyes are painted in. Then the Buddha can look out at the devotees who come and prostrate themselves before it, praying for a better rebirth in the next lifetime, alleviation of sickness, or success on exams.

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Carl’s buddha now finds its home in the basement at the Unitarian Church, where it is kept most of the time in a dark cabinet. On Wednesday evenings, Elaine brings it out, sets it on a makeshift altar and lights a stick of incense before it.

A few in the sangha admit that they think there may be a special quality to items that have had intimate interaction with advanced practitioners—a kind of spiritual “energy.” But no one in the group thinks that bowing before it will give them karmic merit, success in business ventures, material prosperity, or a better rebirth. They are happy that it is old and consecrated, but they don’t believe that the Buddha dwells in the statue. Its eyes are as blind as metal deep in the cold earth.

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The image’s status in Clifton, therefore, is somewhat demoted from the one it enjoyed in Lhasa. Before we invite Max Weber in to declare it disenchanted, though, let us note the new kinds of enchantment it picks up in its new home at the far lower elevations of the Midwestern prairie. The biblical prohibition against idolatry, and its cousin, the scientific naturalist prohibition against naively attributing conscious life to an inanimate collection of atoms and molecules, demarcate certain limitations to this sangha’s reverence toward any statue. But there are deep currents of western culture that predispose these modern Buddhists toward disillusionment with the promises of modernity, its technology, its factories and corporations that promise to manufacture happiness for the masses. An old bronze statue from Tibet embodies the imagined antithesis of the failed promises of techno-rational-consumerist modernity. Tibet, in fact, has held such a place in the western imagination for well over a century—the last bastion of pre-modern wisdom, isolated beyond the Himalayas, its society devoted to spiritual wisdom that some even today hope will save modern humanity from itself. Coming from the land of the snows gives it the charisma of the mysterious, the lost, the authentic. And authenticity, as Walter Benjamin noted, is only possible after it has been replaced by the regime of mechanically produced commodities (after which, it is itself offered as a commodity).

The charisma of the lost Other of modernity only goes so far, though. The Clifton Sangha, after all, is an educated bunch. Of the fifteen, four are college professors (two in the sciences), three are engineers, and all but two have college degrees. Most are not content with dreamy, New Age longing. And some are a bit uncomfortable bowing to a statue. But they have agreed to continue the practice, insisting to anyone who asks that this is not idolatry and that the image is entirely symbolic. This object is ultimately a piece of metal, like any other. Nevertheless, for them it has its own kind of enchantment because it silently speaks of the possibility that beneath or within atoms and molecules—and especially within the mind itself—there is a cosmic spirit, a consciousness infusing the whole of things that connects everything with everything else, a vast interconnected network of life that weaves everything together into unity and harmony, over-riding the countless fragmentations and contradictions of the modern world. Buddha-nature, says 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji, is neither east nor west, north or south. It pervades everything—is everything.

One bit of matter is, therefore, as good as any other for representing this cosmic truth. Thus, Elaine says, we choose a bit that represents someone seeing into that truth—the Buddha sitting under the tree of enlightenment. Spirituality in this sense does not oppose materiality—it encompasses everything—but it disposes of local gods, gods of a particular culture, place, and time. The Buddha can be in everything but not one particular thing.

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When the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of the sangha members insists, Buddhists weren’t bothered at all. “They’re just pieces of stone,” he says with a shrug.

A few weeks later in my Buddhism class, I discuss the image of the Buddha and its role in various Buddhist traditions. At one point I pull a small Buddha statue out of a bag and begin to place it on the table, but it slips a bit and almost falls over, clunking heavily onto the surface. The young Thai women in the front row gasps in distress.

…form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

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When Carl went to Tibet, he couldn’t help feel somewhat disappointed at the amount of ritual, liturgy, image-worship, and “superstitious” practices that he witnessed. He saw no one meditating. The reverence they seemed to show for the large buddha statues in the temples disconcerted him. Many Tibetans, he concluded, practice a kind of “cultural” Buddhism. It’s just a part of their culture, so they do it. Spirituality, as Elaine, Carl, and many other Western Buddhists understand it, transcends “culture.” It is the encounter with the universal. This puts them in an ambivalent relationship to even Buddhist culture.

Many western practitioners in the twentieth century have understood Buddhism as a matter of transcending cultural conditioning. Alan Watts insisted on a distinction between the “acquired self” and “your genuine, deepest self, not the self which depends on family and conditioning, on learning and experience, or any kind of artifice” but on Buddha-nature itself—the “original face” of the famous Zen koan. For Watts, Zen requires a person to realize that the “ego, the self which he has believed himself to be, is nothing but a pattern of habits or artificial reaction.” As Buddhism has been enfolded into western spirituality, it has often operated on some version of the idea, derived largely from Romanticism and modernism, that:

within each human being there is an individuality lying in potentiality, which seeks an occasion for realization but is held in the toils of the rules, beliefs, and roles which society imposes . . . that the real state of the self is very different from the acquired baggage which institutions like families, schools, and universities impose. To be “true to oneself” means . . . discovering what is contained in the uncontaminated self, the self which has been freed from the encumbrance of accumulated knowledge, norms, and ideals handed down by previous generations.

The East Asian conception of Buddha-nature—all-pervasive and embedded in each individual—is drawn magnetically to this indigenous western notion of transcendent selfhood, sometimes intertwining indistinguishably with it. Buddhist societies in East Asia, however, have generally been decidedly non-individualistic, seeing individual selfhood as deeply embedded in and dependent on social relations. Freedom from conditioning doesn’t mean freedom from society and its influences but from past karma. Universality doesn’t always override particularity.

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The Buddha statue of the Clifton sangha, therefore, displays the antinomies of its new function in its new home. It is an undeniably cultural product of another culture, deployed to symbolize the transcendence of one’s own culture toward a universal spirituality that overcomes, yet includes, all cultures.

The space for this particular articulation of Buddhism is created by specific cultural currents in the modern West: Romantics, Idealists, Transcendentalists, and their mid-twentieth-century counter-cultural successors, all of whom emphasize exploration of the deep interior of the mind, God as an all-encompassing spirit in nature, spontaneity, creativity, and suspicion of mechanized reproduction; Protestant Christianity, which eschews idolatry, privileges texts, looks askance at priesthoods and hierarchies; Enlightenment rationalism, which promises insight into the nature of things through careful observation and thought; psychology, which encourages introspection and exploration of the mind; and global capitalism, which allows for the flow of commodities newly valued in the West, like our Buddha image, by those who can afford them.

Thus Buddhism takes on yet another incarnation, blending with the indigenous cultures of the West, the United States, the Midwest, and Clifton. Even here, though, it turns out to be one incarnation among many. For our Buddha image unexpectedly finds its own kin scattered about—down the street in a temple where Vietnamese immigrants and their children bow and pray for good grades; in the backyard garden of a house in the suburbs; on a poster on the wall of a head shop downtown. The buddhas proliferate, mingle with the local gods, invite reverent or suspicious gazes, and take unexpected places on shelves, altars, and nooks throughout North America.

To insist on history is not an innocent move. Yet the facts of a truth’s history do not make it untrue or even less true. Foucaultian genealogies do not refute; their power lies elsewhere. Genealogies seek to shape the relation we have to a truth: the ways in which we take up a truth, hold and use it. There is not just one way of relating to a truth; there is not just one way of remaining true. Indeed, sometimes the way to stay true to something is to work against that which limited it. This is the work that critical thought performs on itself.

Foucault used to say that he had far too much respect for the truth to think that there could be only one. Inspired by the ancient Greco-Roman practice of philosophy as a spiritual exercise or way of life, Foucault cast his intellectual work as an attempt “to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks and so enable it to think differently … After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in [the accumulation of] a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not in the knower’s straying afield of himself?” In what became the final years of Foucault’s life, his search for non-moralizing approaches to sexuality led him to stray into the twentieth century Chicago school of economics, into the “philosophical spirituality” of ancient forms of practices of the self, as well as into the “political spirituality” of the Iranian Revolution. While many of Foucault’s readers have responded with incredulity at Foucault’s uptake of the “s” word, studying and immersing myself in Foucault has never felt qualitatively different from studying and immersing myself in Zen: both demand equal parts surrender and critique. After all, the hermeneutics of suspicion that is so often claimed as a crucial component of modernity (think Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) questioned not only religion but also reason.

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Zen was brought to the West by “an elite circle of internationally minded Japanese intellectuals and globe-trotting Zen priests,” writes Buddhist scholar Robert Sharf, “whose missionary zeal was often second only to their vexed fascination with Western culture.” Consider Sharf’s portrait of D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), whose popular writings contributed in no small measure to many of the productive mis-recognitions that bedevil American Zen. Sharf writes:

Having lived through the military humiliation of Japan at the hands of the ‘culturally inferior’ Occidental powers, Suzuki would devote a considerable portion of his prodigious energies tantalizing a legion of disenchanted Western intellectuals with the dream of an Oriental enlightenment. Yet all the while Suzuki held that the cultural and spiritual weaknesses of the Occident virtually precluded the possibility of Westerners ever coming to truly comprehend Zen. One is led to suspect that Suzuki’s lifelong effort to bring Buddhist enlightenment to the Occident had become inextricably bound to a studied contempt for the West, a West whose own cultural arrogance and imperialist inclinations Suzuki had come to know all too well.

Suzuki was not alone in living at this flash-point: this is colonialism, and the Zen that men like Suzuki and his teacher Soen Shaku (1859–1919) brought to the States was inextricable from the agon that is (post-) colonialism, how its conflicting vectors catch, enable, and vex.

The Zen they introduced had emerged in response to profound social and economic changes in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Meiji government officials had derided Buddhism as a “corrupt, decadent, antisocial, parasitic, and superstitious creed, inimical to Japan’s need for scientific and technological advancement … a foreign ‘other.’” Government officials appropriated temple estates and dissolved the danka system (which required people to register with a local temple). One Buddhist response to these encroachments was to concede the corruption, but to locate the problem in the institutional trappings that had accumulated around Buddhism and not in Buddhism itself. Buddhism, they argued, was modern, cosmopolitan, humanistic, and socially responsible—when appropriately reformed. Given the university education of its promoters, this project of purification was deeply informed by Western thought, including the anti-clerical critiques of the enlightenment, the romantic celebration of religion as feeling by Schleiermacher, as well as the immanent spirituality of Nietzsche. Sowing one seed of the late twentieth century discourse of being “spiritual, not religious,” this “new Buddhism” of the Meiji period claimed to comprise an unflinching spiritual empiricism—an empiricism not of the material world (that was the West’s province), but of the mind. Its intrepid investigators had gone bravely forth into spiritual realities where Western scientists had not yet tread, in the process anticipating (or so the claim went) key scientific discoveries in physics, astronomy, and psychology.

While the new Buddhism began as a defense against Meiji critique, as Japan defeated China in 1895, Russia in 1905, and pushed further into Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan, Zen elites willingly took up the banner of Japanese imperial ideology and ambitions. Celebrating “the way of the samurai” as the very heart of Asian spirituality, reformers proffered Japanese Zen as the most advanced form of the Buddha’s teaching. Japan would restore Buddhism from its degenerated state, thus linking Japan to the rest of East Asia through a missionary project that justified imperialism.

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As a professor of religious studies, I have been insisting to students for well over a decade that not only is it unethical to sequester critical thought from religion and spirituality—there is just no need. That these are false alternatives I still do not doubt. Yet becoming part of the zendo has given me a different sense of the commitment it takes to resist this opposition—whose falseness does not make it disappear. I have found this work difficult as a student in the zendo in ways that I do not find it to be difficult as a teacher in class. In the classroom I have ways of helping students avoid ventriloquating a religious text or practice by creating a middle zone wherein their lives can be engaged and addressed without their having to pretend that the text or practice in question came from no place and no one. When reading Job, for instance, students can draw on what they have learned about suffering in their own life without ignoring the specific nature of ancient Israel’s suffering. Openness to “spiritual” questions does not require them to suspend academic exploration as well as critique. For despite modernity’s claims about itself, critique is not limited to the secular.

Sitting in the zendo, however, I relearn how deep runs the habit of regarding religion as literal—even if, when confronted with the probable historical inaccuracies of Zen lineages (for instance), people can quickly acknowledge that, of course, such “truths” are not probably about something other than historical accuracy. When pushed, people can acknowledge the power of “metaphorical” or “mythical” forms of truth—but people read literally, until they are questioned. In this way, religion still speaks to us. For how we relate to a truth matters more than its propositional content.

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It’s an odd thing to sit in the zendo study group and watch the fabrication of a “timeless” tradition. I do not understand this desire to see religion as a “timeless” truth, which in American Zen takes the form of revering the interaction between teachers and students as moments of immediate contact with ‘reality.’ And the truth is, I fear this desire and the reverence to which it leads. In the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche identified the inculcation of a feeling of indebtedness for life itself, for its first causes and principles, as the very ‘origin’ of religion: how the power of our wishing and the sense of our fullness become a fetter. Nietzsche has Christianity in his sights, which he excoriated for making this sense of debt infinite: God sacrifices his only son for your sins. Yet not believing in the Christian God is not enough to escape the power relations that history has embedded in its forms of truth. “After the Buddha was dead,” Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, “they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadows.” For Nietzsche, these shadows included ostensibly secular games of truth (like science) insofar as the scientific will to know remains moralistic in its drive. In declaring God dead, Nietzsche affirmed a tension between truth and life: “To what extent can truth stand to be incorporated?—that is the question; that is the experiment.” That, I contend, is the real sticking point—not attachment to claims of immediacy: we do not want the agon(y) of a politics of truth.

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When American practitioners of Zen proclaim the immediate nature of truth (and thereby cut off uncomfortable questions of historicity), the apple is not falling far from its tree. Consider the reformist movement Sanbokyodan, which was established formally in 1954 by Yasutani Hakuun (1885-1973). Many of the key teachers in the West were certified by Yasutani: H.M. Enomiya-Lassalle (who was the first to hold Zen retreats in Germany), Philip Kapleau, Robert Aitken, Eido Tai Shimano, and Maezumi Taizan. Buddhist scholar Robert Sharf depicts Sanbokyodan as a typical Japanese ‘new religion,’ noting in particular its rejection of scriptural study and its controversial promise of rapid spiritual progress. Yasutani changed the nature of spiritual attainment: rather than being identified by (or with) doctrinal knowledge or ritual mastery, “spiritual success lies in the momentary experience of satori—a state that students in the Sanbokyodan have been known to experience in their very first seven-day intensive retreat (sesshin).” This version of Zen differs starkly from the more standard view of nirvana as an impossibly distant ideal, so that morality, study, and merit-making were the core of a traditional monk’s life in Japan. This stark difference was Yasutani’s point. By proclaiming this break, Yaustani portrayed himself as returning to Zen’s “true” nature with Dogen.

From an academic point of view, Yasutani speaks the standard “fundamentalist” narrative—with a colonial twist. Meiji reformers fashioned Zen as not really a “religion,” but rather as a spiritual technology through which practitioners are believed to observe the mind without mediation. In the Meiji reformers’ choice to make ineffable experience the core of this “new Buddhism,” Sharf sees an attempt to insulate Zen from critical analysis. This Romantic desire to cordon Zen off from the corrosive effects of critique and historicity persists in American Zen today. At best, the impulse to insulate Zen from critique is about siding against the cultural arrogance and imperial inclinations of America, which show no signs of abating, end of Empire notwithstanding. Yet when Zen truths are shorn from the politics of their history, this impulse seeds another fundamentalism, this time of the left rather than the right.

Zen in America unfolds within this problematic. One result was a series of scandals that posed sharp questions about enlightenment experiences–their-idealization, what we think enlightenment is ‘good for.’ What is the nature and value of life-changing experiences whose power does not totally transform all of the dimensions on which life is lived?

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One Saturday at the zendo the dharma talk given by my teacher, Barry Magid, could have been taken straight out of any Intro to Religion course. What a relief! He spoke of Zen as true “in the way that Anna Karenina is true.” We do not expect novels to be accurate descriptions of facts, and we commit a category mistake when we relate to religions as if they were factually rather than fictionally true. The fictioning and fabricating are the power of their truth.

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?