The single-page list of possible terms circulated to contributors to the Frequencies project on a genealogy of spirituality has the clean feeling that comes courtesy of the alphanumeric. All those capital Hs in a row; all that happy cacophony, from Horatio Alger to LSD to the White Dog Café (Philadelphia, PA), contained by the stuttering letter. Jarena John John John Johnny Jonathan Joseph. One is enjoined widely—“what comes to mind when you think of spirituality”—while sensing that one’s flights of association will be easily contained. You left out (speaking of them) John-John.

One could say that this is what spirituality itself does. It is elastic, while expressing common rules of order. It contains everything, while conforming to strict limits. As the curators note in their invitation, with some understatement: “Few incidents or characters in the history of spirituality can be contained within national borders.” But do we—yet—know what contains spirituality? Do we yet know if anything does, and thus whether there can be history (or genealogy) here, rather than simply classification?

These questions are not intended to threaten the project. One would be hard pressed, I suspect, to advance a preemptive critique of a history of spirituality—of the very idea of such a thing—that was not already considered in the Frequencies conference room. Of course such a history is impossible. That is why it must now be attempted.

I would like to contribute to this attempt, if not a preemptive critique, then something like the question of whether or how one could be disobedient to its terms—the question of the project’s concept. Like the question to spirituality itself, one asks: is there really anything that could not go on the list? This might seem a playful or obnoxious intervention. It is playful in tracking the spirit of the call while taking its investigative thrust to potentially absurd lengths; it is obnoxious in pretending serious engagement while revealing the project itself to be absurd. I mean the question in neither sense.

In elucidating what I do mean, it is instructive to bring to mind the late metaphysical work of spirituality connoisseur William James. James spent the better part of his career as psychologist and philosopher attempting to debunk metaphysics of its spiritualist pretensions, while also, not incidentally, carrying on with theosophists and occultists. After achieving notice for his essays on religion, pluralism, and belief, and at the same time as he was honing his pragmatic theory of truth, James developed his own metaphysical theory, which he called radical empiricism. Fascinating as a historical document, radical empiricism is distinguished mainly by the claim that the world is composed—not of mind and body, or temporality and eternity, or indeed any of the other famous dualisms in the metaphysical water, then and now. Radical empiricism was to be a monism, whose basic unit is experience.

James’s theory has the advantage of cohering with his pragmatist commitment to make truth something we can see, feel, taste, practice, do. His rejection of standard (in his view, “Hegelian”) metaphysics was that it posited a world (“Spirit”) subject to none of these things, a world therefore useless in providing a framework for the investigation of what really does exist and matter, among which James’s empiricism stressed the relations between things as much as things themselves. It is also worth noting that the “incident or character” of James’s philosophy always toyed with, and was consistently received in the light of, a fairly explicit nationalism. America would be the land of a properly grounded, empirically contained, pragmatic philosophy, cutting itself loose from the decadence of an ethereal European spirit forever spilling out into tyrannical and sloppily conceived social and political projects. James’s solution, a radical empiricism, makes such a spirit subject to the containment of American knowhow: experiment, revisability, and an overall temper of constructive, this-worldly optimism. Dams and railroads would be built; souls and their sicknesses studied, diagnosed, and allayed, if not cured.

I call James to the task of considering the nature of a history of spirituality since he was himself so aggressively interested in the spiritual—in both fertilizing and disciplining it. But I also call on him for the scope of his philosophical ambition. James’s metaphysical system, unlike those of the Idealists he loved to lampoon, has as one of its features that, as with our list of terms concerning spirituality, everything, presumably, can be contained within it. It is a theory of everything.

Is this a problem? First to the task of what it means. A thinker like Spinoza has often been called a monist. By this, readers mean that he sews up all of life’s particularities into one, single, existing substance. This reading can still afford to acknowledge that Spinoza understood substance to be infinitely modified. For the point, so it goes, is that its modifications are nevertheless, finally, of this one thing. James was against such pictures of the universe. His appeal to experience was precisely meant to give us the “blooming, buzzing” confusion of life—the smell of a dog’s nose, the angle of a roof as it is about to collapse, the agony of guilt over a failed connection with someone, the moments of longing for death. Finally, American readers have always felt, in turning to James after a spell in the archives of the Germans and the French: someone to give us the sense and taste of the damned gorgeous springtime in Cambridge MA, and not merely, as Schleiermacher vaguely promised, the sense and taste of the infinite.

And yet. Does James really get around the problem of how to have, while also theorizing what it is to have, experience? Does James really give us a theory of everything that marks what that everything shall smell and taste like? To do this question justice would take us deep into the bowels of modern philosophy—into, at the very least, the curious logic of an apriori worldview centered elsewhere than in the mind. Kant thinks, for example, that we meet up with the world of blooming experience with a mind that already orders it; James thinks we meet up with singular objects in the world with a self that is already experiencing, or better, a self that already is experience. There is a critical difference in the shape of the two positions. For Kant, we are limited to experience, and the work is to make this limitation and its structure as pellucid as possible. What it leaves out. What it leaves in. For James, we are limited by nothing, whose name (the thing, the nothing) is experience. It is noteworthy, then, that James’s theory of experience, in leaving nothing out, has a harder time than Kant’s at specifying what is left in—what it is, in short, that we are having an experience of.

It is enough in this context to suggest something like the following about James, concluding with some questions to a history of spirituality. What James was evidently after with his concept of a radical empiricism was a way to resolve the call of spirituality. As a sick-souled, genealogically-stressed denizen of the Cantabrigian beau monde at the turn of the twentieth century, James was fascinated by the more colorful of spirit’s possibilities. But in his philosophical commitments, he was a critic of spirit, Hegelian, Bradleyian, Blavatskian, and otherwise. James wanted to give us the real, and he felt sure that this real was both empirical and absolute—that the empirical was not simply the place of experiment and Baconian habit, but was also mind. This might seem a surprising claim in the light of James’s insistence that the turn to the empirical saves us from all forms of rationalism. But it is one that makes sense both of his various personal commitments and of his inheritance of a Kantian seriousness with respect to the integration of the person. James, like Kant, felt it important to admit that there were cracks in existence. He simply thought he knew how they could be philosophically, which for him meant empirically, resolved. That this resolution in a thinker like James comes couched in the language of open-endedness only serves to underscore the maddening sleight of the apparently decisive thing that nevertheless has no borders.

So again: is this a problem? The problem I want to draw attention to is that James comes up with a theory of the way things are that—by virtue of the decision to resolve dualisms before they arise—gives us no insight into its logic of inclusion. This would be as if a moral philosophy or psychology proposed a theory of what to do or how to live without reckoning with the obstacles (psychical, social, intellectual, animal) to doing so. James’s theory of radical empiricism cools our desperation over being split—mind from body, higher from lower, Jew from Greek or male from female, if you want to go that route. In doing so, however, it abandons us to a different problem. Put simply, everything can count as experience. But what is the concept of everything? The problem is not that everything can count. The problem is: what is an everything? What do I have when I have it? What are the grounds of distinction within it, or between it and itself, if not some other? How might everything (or anything) fail (to be everything)? What is or what could be failure? I scramble for the simplest of images here: a queue for a roller coaster, say, in which the gate keeper is checking that the prospects meet a list of qualifications, a list of qualifications that everyone happens to meet. Who is that gate keeper? And: must she keep checking?

The list supplied for the genealogy of spirituality has this quality of an itemization that requires continued checking even as everything could be included in it. This is not to say its curators imagine themselves gate keepers. Just the opposite. The call makes clear that the charge is to roam as far and wide as possible. Still, those possibles would—I suggest—be exceedingly unlikely to fail inclusion on the list. Let me amend. They could not do so. Like James’s reading of the metaphysical tradition, the list excludes only what it does not desire (what does not exist); of things desirable, all are present. Everything is—however implicitly—present. And yet there is no account of what this everything tears itself loose from. Experience—or spirituality—as opposed to what? In this silence, James ironically mirrors the logic of his own bête noir, an otherworldly spirit struggling to make the world fit reason (the monistic Spinoza, the benighted Bradley), while evading the logic of his ostensible quarry, an immanence of spirit, which is present, pace James, in the dialectical Spinoza, who locates spirit in creaturely life, in the pragmatic Hegel, who culls reality redolent with smells, in the mechanic Kant, who knows the difference between an engine we make and our fantasy of one. James confuses the universal (all) with finite inclusion (everything), failing both spirit and its histories, both what spirit is and what it isn’t. With a universal, one could say, the gate keeper is the position that founds the all on a primary exclusion (choice); with an everything, the gate keeper is simply the delirious confusion of not having to choose—the confusion of redundancy. Although James’s radical empiricism promises to subordinate spirit to experience, it yields what looks like nothing so much as spirit augmenting itself infinitely through the undifferentiated logic of its suppression.

Is the Frequencies list a sign that its call is caught in this same confusion?

I pose the following final questions:

What is the relationship between the call to consider spirit and the provision of a list of spirit’s projects, the implication being that this list, like the alphabet, could come to an end while being, in its inner nature, expansive to infinity (JJJJJJ…)?

What has this gambit already decided about spirit in imagining its projects alphanumerically, and not in substance and subject?

What is a history of the alphanumeric if history is already (is it not?) the alphabet’s undoing—the decision (expository, creative, poetic) to count Jarena and not John-John? What is the nature of such a decision in this project? Would it, like the list itself, get its own line on the list?

The project of Frequencies hints—against conventional wisdom—that spirituality can be contained by its manifold histories; by a history of the manifold. Might there also be a value in ascertaining whether spirituality is not already contained, a list of lists, a theory of when and where its own decisions make distinctions, apriori, as it were—before we assimilate it to the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, PA? Might there not be something in spirit itself—and not simply in our alphabets—that finds it(self) everywhere? Might this not be spirit’s own creative history of us?

Max Weber, the man who christened the spirit of capitalism, is buried in the Heidelberg Friedhof (literally, peace-field). Plots of land zoned, packaged, and sold for the dead and their material commemoration, cemeteries are repositories of spirituality as well as sites of remembrance and recreation. Cemeteries are also spaces of remarkable aesthetic diversity, as ornate and simple grave markers display epochal style, personal taste, and religious affiliation. A tall stone stele, Max Weber’s grave stands in a wooded enclave in the middle of the Heidelberg cemetery. It is situated not far from the Jewish section of the Friedhof, which predominantly houses the graves of Heidelberg’s Jews who died before the rise of the Nazis. Several of those resting there possess the surname of Marx.

The front of Weber’s gravestone bears the names of both Max and his wife Marianne. On either side of the stone are two brief epitaphs. The left side reads Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, meaning everything temporal is only a likeness, or all that is transitory is only a metaphor. The right side declares Wir finden nimmer seinesgleichen which means we will never find another like him.

These two epitaphs nicely complicate Weber’s life. On the one side there is the great theoretician whose equal will never be found, and on the other there is the undercutting declaration that all reality is, well, theoretical.

We can be reasonably sure that the right side was chosen by Marianne to describe Max, since she believed firmly in her late husband’s greatness and worked tirelessly in the last thirty-four years of her life to ensure the posthumous publication of his life’s work. The inscription on the left side is more interesting, however, since it expresses a view rooted in German metaphysical speculation unlike the more conventional gravestone inscribed with biblical citations. Since Marianne was the one who got to choose the inscription, we can’t know whether it was Max’s choice too, but it would certainly have been a line familiar to him. In German, the phrase Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis conveys rich cultural references. It originates in Goethe’s Faust and has been incorporated in such musical compositions as Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8.

When I first read Weber’s grave, what came to my mind was not Faust but the American version of such neo-Platonist expressions, namely Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science. Eddy’s view that matter was error worked along a similar vein, encouraging mortal humans to recognize the spiritual truths behind transitory existence in which the body was only an illusion. This conjunction of high culture and popular nineteenth-century spiritual imaginations is not entirely accidental, of course, since the spiritual was kept in play by an active circulation of theories, speculation, and doctrine that incorporated German professors, writers, and cultural theorists, as well as North American professors, innovators, and impresarios. Encompassing psychologists such as Gustav Fechner and William James, as well as Protestant-bred leaders and clergy such as Mary Baker Eddy, Elwood Worcester of Boston’s Emmanuel Movement, and the lesser-known Canadian Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet, early-twentieth-century speculation about spiritual realities was fed by intersecting streams of religious experience, philosophy, biblical study, and pioneering theorists of religion. Like Max Weber.

These thinkers continue today in their books, and as monuments to certain amalgamations of thought, culture, and biography. As material bodies, they came to a perishable end marked by the solidity of their memorials in stone, granite, or metal. A haunting reminder of religious pasts and mortal futures, cemeteries persist as zones of spiritual mixing of the dead and the living, of the Christian and the Jew, of the scholar and the saint, capable of spooking even the most disenchanted of minds.

Why did five thousand redwing blackbirds fall out of the sky on New Year’s Eve over the small town of Beebe, Arkansas, turning the ground black and provoking widespread panic? And why, the next day, did one-hundred thousand drum fish die in the Arkansas River?

“The End Times,” my partner Tamara quips.

And sure enough, the news report we’ve been listening to quickly turns to the subject of Biblical prophecy.

“Five thousand birds, one-hundred thousand fish,” the announcer says. “What’s next?”

“Four horsemen riding down the street in Arkansas,” Tamara replies, facing down the television. “It looks like Arkansas is ground zero of the Apocalypse.”

I wasn’t raised with the Book of Revelation the way Tamara was. Her seriously religious Jamaican grandmother used to wash her in the blood of the lamb every time she crossed the threshold of the front door. And her even more seriously religious mother still occasionally sends her pamphlets about the End Times, urging her to give up her sinful ways: her woman-loving (yes, that’s me) lifestyle. It’s never too late to be saved.

These words and images – dead birds and fish, the horsemen of the Apocalypse, the blast of a trumpet in a fiery sky – still make Tamara’s blood run cold, even though she long ago rejected the theology behind them. As for me, my own agnostic-leaning-toward-atheist belief in “whatever it is that makes the grass grow” is fueled more by a Spinozist God-as-Nature than any redemptive flesh on the cross. During childhood, my typically WASP dalliance with the Episcopalian church was all about gaining the approval of Sunday School teachers by memorizing Bible verses. (And yet, despite all those gold stars for my flawless performances, today I’ve somehow managed to forget them all.) My commitment to God was more about an abstract sense of academic achievement – and an obviously fleeting achievement at that – than it was about the salvation of my soul.

The birds falling from the sky over Arkansas like the hail, blood, and fire of the Book of Revelation has no theological resonance for me. But I do know this. If Tamara is right – if the Rapture is coming, if we look back on Arkansas as the beginning of the End – I’d rather be left behind. Left behind to struggle for this spring ephemera: fiddleheads, trillium, dogwood, violet, the impossibly orange flicker of a wild flame azalea William Bartram called “the most gay and brilliant flowering shrub yet known.” In my quiet fidelity to Beebe’s redwing blackbirds and the drum fish of the Arkansas River, I’ll stick with Spinoza who, for all his rationalism, held fast to his own rapturous belief in this thing he called conatus: Life’s stubborn, mysterious, erotic persistence.

The earth may be fragile, but it’s also gay and brilliant. It won’t give that up without a fight. Sinner that I am, I’ll stay for the struggle.

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?