Episode 235 - Transcript

Hello everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This! Patreon.com/philosophizethis if you want to help keep the show a thing. Philosophical writing on substack at philosophize this on there. Thanks to everyone who has told a friend about the podcast. Really appreciate it. Hope you love the show today.

So by this point we’ve done three episodes on Byung Chul Han and it can start to seem like the guy might just be a negative person, like in general. Guy needs a, like an edible arrangement sent to him or something. Cheer him up a bit.

I mean, think of all the CRITICISM this guy brings into a room, my GOD. Always complaining about SOMETHING going on in modern society: apparently we all live in a digital panopticon if you’re him. Something that MOST of us I guess, don’t even know that we’re IN…let ALONE us being capable of finding a way OUT of it.

He says we have very little that BINDS and connects us together anymore as a species. That we have no shared understanding of truth anymore, or of community. We don’t even have shared STORIES that tie our LIVES together, that’s what we talked about a couple EPISODES ago.

In fact I saw an INTERVIEW with him one time… where he said it’s impossible to BE someone who’s thinking and paying ATTENTION to the world right now…and to NOT be pessimistic about it.

But IS this statement…telling the full STORY of the work of Byung Chul Han and all that he has to say?

Is it possible, that this statement IS true…he DOES, look out at the world and feel very pessimistic about where most things are headed…but that he ALSO thinks there are certain CHOICES people can MAKE in life, certain IDEAS someone can pay attention to…where there’s actually a lot of HOPE, for an individual that’s willing to put in the time and effort?

In 2002…LONG BEFORE Byung Chul Han EVER got famous for his criticism of the digital panopticon we live in…he wrote a book about Zen Buddhism. And BEING someone that is SO well versed in BOTH Mahayana Buddhism…as WELL as German Idealism and MOST of western philosophy…this book INSTANTLY became a respected, cross-cultural DIALOGUE…where he uses ideas from Zen Buddhism…to show the limitations of MANY of the core ideas that are the FOUNDATION of the modern western subject.

What I’m saying is that by the end of this episode…we’re gonna understand how The Burnout Society and being trapped in a digital panopticon…is something that’s UNIQUELY possible…when your view of the world is rooted in a traditional, western type of subjectivity.

We’re gonna look at the ways we often VIEW ourselves in the west that AMPLIFY the effects of the burnout society…and we’re gonna look at how he thinks Zen Buddhism, offers a great alternative to it, that might be able to give someone a less lonely/anxious or depressed way of relating to the world.

Now out of respect… to anybody out there that hasn’t listened to the other episodes we’ve done on Byung Chul Han, let me give you the one paragraph, correspondence course on what he’s talking about here. The travelers pamphlet version. The Burnout Society was a book he wrote in 2010…where he says that in the late 1980’s…something BIG changed about what it is to be a person living in the western world.

The shift, in economic policy, towards the direction of neoliberalism, turned everybody into essentially a little personal corporation, where now that we’ve deregulated things and the government is out of your way, the only person stopping you from being a billionaire, is YOU, it’s your ability to work hard and become more valuable in the marketplace.

In other words: instead of controlling people by telling them what they CAN’T do, like a King or Queen may have done in the past…now people are controlled by telling them they can BE whatever they WANT to be…they just have to constantly self-improve. Life, then, becomes an endless cycle of self-improvement, optimization, and personal branding. Even people’s LOVE life, gets reduced to just doing things that improve your market value, like you’re some kind of a product that’s being sold, ALL of this so that you can get better friends, a better job: your worth as a person is equal to the VALUE you provide in the marketplace.

We’ve all heard this message before. If you don’t LIKE something about your life. Well, learn a new SKILL, become more valuable. That’s how you can MANIPULATE the world around you and SHAPE it into the world you WANT it to be.

And if you happen to get sick, you know, if one day your BRAIN stops working well, and you CAN’T provide value…well, you’re mostly just forgotten about, and left to ROT inside of your double wide trailer while the REST of the world just moves on and tells you you shoulda prepped for things better.

Now because IMPROVING things about yourself is an endless cycle you can be in…what this leads to is a higher level of narcissism in people on average… and an INCREASE in behaviors people usually brand as mental illness. Whether it’s anxiety, depression, the point in the burnout society is that there’s something going wrong with your BRAIN when you feel these things…CERTAINLY nothing wrong with the world that your brain is trying to FUNCTION in.

In fact, your whole LIFE becomes one giant ego-driven project in the burnout society…and most people around you become either THINGS, that are instrumental to your goals, or competition that just stands in the way of you having your dream LIFE and IDENTITY.

So to Byung Chul Han: no WONDER somebody would burnout in that sort of environment, and no WONDER somebody would feel alone…this is the BURNOUT society that he paints a picture of in the book.

But Han would say, there’s a GLIMMER of hope here…because to FIND yourself in this place, where all that stuff I just DESCRIBED resembles your life…that means that you’ve HAD to have accepted, certain premises about who you are and what the world is…that are not necessarily the way you need to be looking at it.

That being BORN into the western world…OFTEN means inheriting certain ways of SEEING things…that allow this view of the world to even make sense in the first place.

IN this book we’re talking about today…titled simply The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism…Byung Chul Han peels back the layers of six different ways we typically SEE things in the west…that STEER us in the direction of this lonely, burned out, anxious, depressed kind of existence.

And even on the table of contents page you can start to get a feel for where the conversations in this book are going to be going. Listen to the titles of the six chapters: Chapter one is called A Religion without God, then there’s emptiness, no one, dwelling nowhere, death and friendliness.

Each ONE of these chapters, makes a case for SOME area that the western subject…spends MOST of their life endlessly GRASPING for something, where they’re trying to make things IN this area more stable and permanent…than they actually are.

So just remember that as we go throughout these chapters…there’s ALWAYS gonna be some STABILITY, that we’re usually GRASPING for, and then through Zen there’s gonna be a totally different way to be seeing the thing.

Now, Han BEGINS the book with maybe the thing that is most OBVIOUS that people grasp for stability in…the existence of an ultimate creator, that is RESPONSIBLE for the maintenance of the universe. I only say this is the MOST obvious… because a LOT of these chapters are gonna be things that are NOT very obvious, not things that we typically THINK about too often in our day to day.

Anyway, Han is talking in chapter one about God though. He says a belief in a God… brings you a kind of ultimate guarantee…that CHANGES the way you see things… a lot.

I think that’s a pretty uncontroversial thing to say. I mean if you believe in a God…it CHANGES the way you see pretty much EVERYTHING in life. Right? It SHOULD at least.

ESPECIALLY, Han would say, if the PICTURE of the god you believe in…is the classic IMAGE that we typically HAVE of God in the western world…where God is the ultimate source of meaning… and every command about how we should be acting in our lives, morally…FLOWS FROM, this ultimate source of meaning.

In other words for Han: it’s not so much about the BELIEF in GOD… as much as the belief in some sort of transcendent ENTITY…that we’re all beholden to. One that we all OWE ourselves and our BEHAVIOR to, every SECOND, of every day.

Because consider the similarities… between THIS way of thinking about God…and the way MOST people approach their lives in relation to the burnout society.

Instead of every moment of their life being monitored by a GOD…now every moment is monitored by metrics and data that TRACK how efficient they’re being. Instead of feeling GUILTY that God is really disappointed that you didn’t follow his RULES today…they feel guilty if they’re not self-improving enough with every second they have. They always feel like they should be doing MORE.

Again, this is a classic, western way of relating to some ultimate moral authority… and it PRIMES people to fit right IN to this neoliberal economic setup that we have.

But Han’s gonna say that we don’t NEED… to necessarily be looking at religion this way…and he’s going to MAKE this point by REFUTING something that was said originally about religion by Hegel, all the way back in the 1800’s.

Remember…this book is a DIALOGUE between certain ideas from western philosophy, and Zen Buddhism. And he says that Hegel, when examining all of the world’s religions and trying to get to something SIMILAR among ALL of them…Hegel says that every religion out there, relates to some absolute… that functions like a God.

Now, sometimes he says, depending on the religion, the absolute, just IS a god, it’s a being that exists somewhere, that created everything and gives people moral direction. It’s pretty SIMPLE in those cases.

But sometimes, like in Buddhism Hegel says, Buddhism is ALSO a religion that has an absolute at the foundation of it; something they call nothingness…but then the GOAL of Buddhism he says…is for somebody practicing it, to recognize the limitations of the ego, and then to dissolve their individual existence, INTO that absolute of nothingness. Nothingness, then Hegel says, FUNCTIONS, more or less LIKE a God in Buddhism, even though there’s no belief in an actual BEING that’s maintaining the universe.

But Han is going to say this misses the ENTIRE POINT of most Buddhism, and that this is ESPECIALLY true when we’re talking about Zen, as a particular SUB-chapter of Buddhism.

First of all he would say: Zen doesn’t ask ANYBODY…to DISSOLVE their particular existence into nothingness. No, it just makes the claim… that your everyday experience…AS IT IS…is already complete, as it is. That you don’t NEED some transcendent thing, or a god…to GIVE you some ultimate meaning to your experience… or by the way to create a set of PROTOCOLS for you, about the way you should be acting.

See morality, TYPICALLY, in the western world he says…is an additive process. We START at a disinterested, morally neutral universe that doesn’t really care one way or another about us…and then MORALITY…is when we ADD ON, STUFF AFTER THE FACT…and then GIVE all sorts of good religious or philosophical reasons for why this morality is justified.

But as we’ll see throughout the rest of the book: Zen is not about adding anything ON to our experience. Zen is about NOTICING…the position you already occupy in the world. Which you come to realize is a meaningful position in its OWN right…one that doesn’t NEED morality tacked ONTO it.

We’ll talk more about it here in a minute but…one OTHER, helpful thing that Byung Chul Han does ALL throughout this book that will help you understand the flavor of what he’s trying to DO here…is that he works in, famous examples from the history of Zen practice, to illustrate whatever’s being discussed in the particular chapter.

This could be a poem, a parable, a haiku: the point is that in Zen Buddhism, our experience is something that is impossible to fully express through normal language. And that there are gonna be certain things about our lives…that can ONLY be understood through firsthand experience.

And if you WANTED, the CLOSEST thing you could get to expressing these kinds of things…you’re gonna have to use more poetic forms of communication, like these parables, haikus, koans: this is why he USES so MANY of these throughout the book.

And the one for THIS chapter, where we’re talking about Buddhism being a religion without god…is a story from when a monk asked a question to the head of his monastery… named Master Dongshan. It’s become a VERY popular example to reference in these kinds of discussions— The monk asks him a really simple question: he asks What is the Buddha? And Master Dongshan replies back to him: three pounds of flax.

Now again, keep in mind this is SUPPOSED to feel kind of paradoxical when we first hear it. I mean…normal person gives that answer to you…you’re probably strapping them to the hood of your car and taking them to the emergency room. Three pounds of flax? What?

But keep in mind this is an answer coming from the head of the monastery…and it’s supposed to CHALLENGE the typical ways we THINK about things in the west… in THIS case when it comes to our views of what COUNTS as a transcendent being, like God.

What Master Dongshan means when he says the Buddha is three pounds of flax…is that the Buddha isn’t some being… that’s HIDDEN BEHIND, everyday reality. Living up in the CLOUDS somewhere.

He’s saying that reality…in its very “suchness”, as it’s said, whatever’s right in FRONT of you, EVEN three pounds of a fiber called FLAX that’s sitting in a marketplace somewhere…EVEN in that mundane, every day experience…enlightenment is available to us.

Three pounds of flax as an answer is supposed to STOP us from always GRASPING… for some big metaphysical SOLUTION or some BEING… that’s going to COMPLETE our reality FOR us.

INSTEAD what this is supposed to do is to get us thinking about the true IMMANENCE of things. That again, our everyday experience, is already complete, as it IS, if you’re paying close attention to it.

This is WHY Hegel’s READING of Buddhism…is backwards, Han thinks. Zen isn’t trying to dissolve the ego…it DISSOLVES the entire NEED for a master/slave, God/human, dualistic type of THINKING…that so MUCH of our making SENSE of the world is rooted in in the west.

To put it another way: to see your experience MORE through the lens of Zen Buddhism…is to live FULLY in the immanence of reality, as it unfolds.

Again, there’s no NEED for a God to COMPLETE something about your experience. And again, this is a way of grasping for some kind of ultimate moral authority…that LEADS people to a kind of passive acceptance of their role…IN something like the burnout society.

Now chapter two, moves on from clarifying Zen as a religion without God…to the concept of emptiness, or Sunyata. We’ve talked about this idea recently in the series we just did on the Kyoto School. Episodes 216 and 217 for anyone that wants a more DETAILED description of what’s meant by emptiness.

But today I’m trying to focus mostly on the stuff from this book that’s new, things we HAVEN’T talked about recently.

And to describe this chapter in a way that’s on theme with the conversation we’re having today…western philosophy typically thinks of the concept of substance…in a way that has HUGE effects on the way we see things and people in the world around us.

That JUST LIKE a belief in GOD, has a huge effect on the way you see the world. Substance is another one of these BIG things that we are always GRASPING at, to Byung Chul Han, trying to TURN it into something that’s far more STABLE than what it actually is.

He points out how the word substance, which the word ORIGINALLY comes from the Latin translation of Aristotle by the way…the word substance if you break it down LITERALLY means “standing under”, sub STANCE.

And he says with this being the metaphor that we’ve had to WORK with for so long in western philosophy, OF COURSE we would see the things around us like they are separate, stand alone objects…and of COURSE we’d assume that reality is made up of material STUFF underneath, where one of our biggest tasks as THINKERS…is to study it and find the ESSENCE to what makes up all this STUFF.

Now this whole way of THINKING about the world as a bunch of separate, stand alone things…lends itself really WELL to the kind of thinking that’s common in the burnout society.

Think about it: how are we to VIEW ourselves in a world like that…well, we’re ALL…separate, stand alone people, that need to brand ourselves and produce value FOR ourselves.

It ALSO, for whatever it’s worth, is a way of thinking where THINGS, including the raw materials of the environment, are these self-contained BLOCKS, that can be manipulated and processed.

Everything can be OWNED. And everything can be SOLD in the burnout society. This is the technological enframing that Heidegger talks about in his work, right? Where everything and everyone becomes an object, that’s instrumental to some END, or to some ego-driven project that someone is working on out there.

Once again this is a kind of GRASPING that we do…where we want the THINGS that make up our reality…to be far more self-contained and DISTINCT… than they actually are.

But Sunyata… or emptiness… is going to CHALLENGE this way of seeing substance.

Because imagine seeing the world where there ARE no separate, self-contained things out there. That every THING, when we see it…is always sort of, BLEEDING into everything else around it. Always DEPENDENT, on the things that are around it FOR its existence…with THOSE things EQUALLY dependent upon IT for theirs. A kind of INTERDEPENDENCE, you could say.

You could JUST as easily chop up and make sense of the world THIS way TOO.

Byung Chul Han uses a famous line from the Zen master named Dogen from around the year 1200 AD. In something he wrote called the Sutra of Mountains and Water…Dogen says, “The Blue Mountains are walking; flowing mountains pass over the water.”

And what he’s REFERENCING here is this concept of emptiness we’re talking about.

See, it’s really tempting for us to think of something like a mountain…as just some giant, beautiful, rocky, stand alone THING, that’s off there in the distance.

But consider how much of what we mean when we say, there’s a mountain over there…is made UP by relational processes, that all converge together to make UP what we THINK of as being a mountain.

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Tectonic plates, for example, collide and send that mountain upward. And the ONgoing seismic activity there… makes the mountain something that’s ALWAYS swaying and moving to some extent, just very slowly.

More than that: snow and wind and rain are constantly changing what this mountain is, eroding it down, changing the setting of things— by the way with the size of the mountain itself…AFFECTING those weather patterns in its OWN right.

If it’s a mountain like around where I live…then the snow melts eventually, and it creates giant rivers that run for hundreds of miles in all directions, provide WATER to towns. Animals that live around there, then DRINK from those rivers, then spread the nutrients from the water to the surrounding plants. The examples here are endless and the POINT for Dogen is: mountains are not some static hunk of rock that just sits there all day like we might ASSUME with a classic, western view of substance.

Mountains WALK, for Dogen. Mountains FLOW and PASS over the water for him.

What LOOKS like a fixed material substance to us…is ACTUALLY, an interdependent FLOW that is going on. Where every THING…is bleeding into every THING else…in fact you could say it’s not even the THINGS that’s are the most REAL here in this picture: it’s the relational field that allows for any of these things to even appear AS things in the first place to us. Or Sunyata.

Which to be clear, this relational field ITSELF isn’t a substance. It’s pure emptiness, meaning none of these things, HAVE their own independent, isolated existence. They all co-constitute each other.

Now you can imagine how if you SAW things more in this way…how much harder it would be to operate under the logic of narcissism… that FUELS so many people’s lives in a world like the burnout society.

Cause if what you are… IS a set of relationships, where this personal brand you just built a website for, is ACTUALLY something co-constituted by everything and everyone around you…how much harder would it be to see yourself as something that’s alone? How much harder is it to see other people as just, you know, heads you can step on as you’re crowd surfing through life, where you say screw where everybody ELSE ends up…I just don’t wanna be seen as a LOSER by people? This becomes a bizarre way to be thinking, when seen from this other point of view.

Now…on a RELATED note…chapter three is called no one. And what it’s going to talk about is what we’re starting to talk about here: it offers an alternative to the classic western idea, of the reified self. Or the idea that who you ARE, your IDENTITY…is something that is created by you… and is something that’s STABLE to the point, that you SEE yourself as something that exists INDEPENDENT of everything else around you.

Zen Buddhism is not going to LOOK at the self like this.

Cause consider how much you need to be prioritizing your own EGO…to SEE yourself as a personal brand, that needs to constantly make improvements on YOURSELF, so that YOU can become more valuable.

Consider what it SOUNDS like… when someone LIVING in something like the burnout society…LOSES their sense of self. What kind of things do they SAY? They say I don’t even know who I AM anymore. I can’t find my purpose in life. I’ve LOST myself and need to find my identity again.

They SAY these things but ALL of this talking…is BUILT on the assumption that the SELF…is something that’s, not only SEPARATE from someone’s every day experience of the world…but it ALSO assumes that the self is something that’s STABLE enough… that all we gotta do is sit down and do some reflection…and then we can ARRIVE at our IDENTITY and who we actually ARE.

What Han might say is that the self isn’t something we can grasp at and get a HOLD of in a totally stable way like this…the self much more resembles the way we use a WORD, as a way to reference something in the world.

Meaning, to Han, we have to think of the self, as an abstraction. It is a USEFUL thing for us to use as a reference point, in SOME circumstances, no doubt about it.

But to CLING to a temporary sense of identity… because you think this identity just IS actually YOU…THAT’S when you cross over into territory where there’s gonna be consequences…where you see yourself as SEPARATE from everything AROUND you, more than you actually ARE.

And the POINT is: this separateness is NO DOUBT something that contributes…to the epidemic of narcissism, anxiety, depression and loneliness, that DEFINES many people in the burnout society.

Seen more through the insights found in Zen Buddhism, though…Han gives a famous Zen parable in the book about a farmer that is looking for an ox that has gone missing. This example is originally from a Chinese Zen master from around the year 1200…and in the original book there’s a picture that shows a farmer SEARCHING for an ox…and the text next to it reads: “Until now, the ox has never gone astray. Why then does he need to search for it?”

The FARMER in this picture represents US, us being people that often SEARCH and GRASP for a sense of self, or for enlightenment…but the POINT is whenever you think you’ve “lost” your sense of SELF…whatever it is you’re calling your “self”...has never really LEFT you in the FIRST place.

To say something like: I’ve LOST my identity, I need to go out there and FIND it again…well no, you always, already ARE you, IN your everyday experience of the world. Every SHRED of meaning and identity you could ever POSSIBLY ASK for… is ALREADY right in front of you…you just may be grasping and BLOCKING your ability to SEE it clearly.

In other words: JUST like MORALITY…the self is not an ADDITIVE process in Zen Buddhism. It is about noticing what is already there. And think of how IMPOSSIBLE it would be under this DIFFERENT kind of logic…to SEE yourself as some kind of neurotic, lifelong project, that ALWAYS needs to be improving, because you right now is never gonna be good enough.

Chapter four is gonna be called dwelling nowhere, and I think it’s best to begin to make the point he’s trying to make in THIS chapter by starting with a question.

WHY participate in the burnout society in the first place?

What’s the PROMISE…that’s offered to people if they spend their lives constantly optimizing themselves, and increasing their market value?

Well people are told…that if you BECOME VALUABLE enough…then you can manipulate the world into whatever kind of world you WANT it to be.

Increase your market value we’re told… so you can drive the ideal car you want to be driving, buy the perfect house in the perfect neighborhood, eat only hydroponically grown eggplants that were blessed by a shaman everyday from the time they were little saplings…in other words the PROMISE is: become valuable enough… and you will never have to be in a situation you don’t want to BE in. The world will start to conform to YOU, if you just become important enough to pay to make it happen.

But Zen on the other hand… just as an approach to human experience…it goes in the OPPOSITE direction. Remember under THIS way of seeing things, our experience of the world…is COMPLETE the way that it is, it doesn’t NEED anything…that’s the insight that leads to awakening, in Zen.

So when the title of the chapter is called dwelling nowhere…the POINT is: what’s the opposite, of never feeling comfortable unless you can CONTROL every aspect about every situation you’re in?

Well, it would be dwelling nowhere, to Han. Where home…isn’t some, specific place, and it isn’t a set of conditions that make you feel comfy all the time. Home, is in a sense, the SKILL… of being completely at ease…INSIDE the continual change that is always going on.

In other words: instead of always GRASPING, trying to MAKE the world into exactly the way we WANT it to be right this second. Why not learn to feel at HOME… no matter WHAT situation you’re in, ultimately dwelling nowhere?

Han in THIS chapter cites a famous letter, written by a Japanese poet named Matsuo Basho…where he writes to a friend, “I wish to live like drifting clouds with a heart that dwells nowhere; procure for me only things I need not cling to.”

This line beautifully captures the POINT that Han wants to get across here. Western philosophy, he says, usually says that if you want to find someone’s dwelling place or their home… look to what’s often called their oikos.

It’s a Greek word meaning their house, ot their origin place… you can find examples of this, he says, ALL THROUGHOUT the history of Western thought. Aristotle for example, had his prudent head of the household that he talks about in the Politics, where the ideal citizen… is someone who has proper management of their household as the basic unit of what makes politics even work.

Heidegger, in his early work, sees dwelling… as Dasein’s way of being-in-the-world, where you know in the sense that Dasein is always grounded in particular projects, relationships, it’s HOME, where it DWELLS… is a type of BEING, and the point is: this is a common way of viewing subjectivity in the west where there is an oikos… that defines our home.

But Bashō is going to say in this letter to a friend…that he doesn’t ask for ANYTHING in this world, when it comes to the conditions that make something “home”. All HE really asks for he says…is a hut made out of spider webs. It’s a crazy thing to say. And he says LET that hut be exposed to the wind, let it be destroyed… because ALL of the conditions we live under he says, no matter WHERE we are in life, all of them are provisional anyway. Every situation we find ourselves in is already half-gone, he says.

So on that note, and just to bring all that we’ve discussed here so far together a bit: imagine a way of going throughout life…where you’re not grasping for a creator or the perfect set of moral rules. Or grasping for the world being made of of THINGS that have fixed, stable identities. OR for a stable identity when it comes to who YOU are…and now imagine not grasping for a set of narrow conditions…that you NEED to make you feel at home all the time. Like you’ve arrived at the FINISH line in your LIFE or something.

The thinking for Han, is that if there’s NOWHERE that you’re dwelling, then EVERYWHERE becomes a place you can feel at home in. And what comes from THAT insight…is a TOTALLY different ATTITUDE towards the ever-changing world:

He says at THAT point it’s not about becoming more VALUABLE so you can manipulate the world into what you WANT it to be…now, you can welcome whatever, or WHOever, comes into your life…without having to do all the calculations we normally do, where we wonder IS this situation GOOD enough for me right now? Very COMMON for people in the burnout society.

Is it WARM enough in this movie theater right now, or should they have DEFINITELY made this place a few degrees warmer, what a bunch of idiots in the movie theater thermostat room? You could be hanging OUT with some people, you don’t necessarily wanna BE there…so you wonder are these people around me… useful enough for me to be spending this TIME with them? Am I GETTING enough out of DOING this thing I’m doing…for it to be worthwhile to me.

What comes from seeing this from more of a ZEN perspective is an attitude, where every experience that you’re having…IS something worth welcoming on the basis of what it is, and that alone.

Where even something like doing CHORES for example, famous example from zen buddhism is of shoveling someone else’s snow during the winter time…even in a moment like THIS, even if you were getting NOTHING from doing it other than helping somebody else out with a really difficult task…this TOO becomes a piece of your experience that’s worth welcoming.

Because when you’re not always GRASPING, COMPLAINING about how I shouldn’t be shoveling SNOW right now I should just be RELAXING…when you stop doing that you notice that shoveling snow, just IS, the way your existence is relationally unfolding in that moment. And that that IN ITSELF…is good enough. There’s actually nothing MISSING from that. And THAT’S what Han means by dwelling nowhere in this chapter. When you stop grasping, you realize you were already at home all along, no matter where you were.

Now someone could ask back to this: well, does this mean…that people can treat you horribly, you know, ABUSE you in various ways…and you’re supposed to just accept that, hey, this is my place in the unfolding of reality right now guess I can’t really do much ABOUT it!

No. Han’s point here, much like Bashō’s point that he makes in the letter…it’s not about becoming passive, in your life.

The IMPORTANT part is the not GRASPING, for some fixed, idealized set of conditions, before you can EVER decide that you feel at home.

You still DO stuff, you still respond when people treat you poorly… but the point is NOW you’re doing it from a place, that isn’t always defending some EGO you have, or clinging to a sense of how the world “should” be for you.

And by the way this puts you in a place where you can take action on things…and NOT have it be out of a place of PANIC…where you think your HOME is being TAKEN from you in some way. In other words: this allows you to be more clearheaded while RESPONDING to things you want to adjust.

There’s another example Han gives in the book of a monk talking to his student…it’s right after dinnertime, and the monk asks the student have you eaten your gruel? (meaning have you finished your meal, right now) The student says back to him: yes. So the monk says: Then go wash your bowl.

The significance of this short little excerpt for Han is that: even in the mundane, in something totally ORDINARY like EATING a MEAL. We STILL sometimes IMAGINE that there is some FINISH line or HOME that we’ve arrived at. Even something as simple as I just finished eating my meal…can create this feeling where it’s like we’ve completed a task…and now we’ve arrived at the finish line.

The wisdom in what the monk is SAYING there…is that there IS no completed moment going on…ALL of these moments bleed together into a universe that is ALWAYS moving. There’s ALWAYS the next thing to do. And that even in these SMALL moments…we need to remember to never cling to them for a sense of false stability.

The bottom line for this chapter is that Han wants to question the western ideal of being settled, and secure all the time…and replace it with a more Zen practice of what he calls passing through, as though you’re traveling, and being at home no matter where you are or what’s going on.

And YES, if you ADOPTED this attitude…it would COME with certain TRADE offs…no DOUBT this could lead someone to feel kind of rootless if they were to DO it all the time, but what you get in return…is what Han calls a kind of hospitality, towards the moment. A FRIENDLINESS, TOWARDS the world you’re living in…that makes it MUCH harder to feel as isolated as we often do, in something like the burnout society.

If you remember from when I read the table of contents…the last chapter of the book is called friendliness. And since that seems to be where we’re at in the discussion of all this, I’m going to skip to the last chapter right now and come back to the way we see DEATH here in a minute.

So the point he makes in the chapter on friendliness is pretty straightforward: because we’ve already pulled back the layers on multiple ways we typically SEE things in the west….god, substance, the self and a rigid sense of home…a good question now is: what kind of a life…can you REALLY have in relation to OTHERS…if you were SUCCESSFUL, in REFRAMING all these things through more of a Zen experiential lens?

I mean apparently I’m no one, who’s dwelling NO where. Who in god’s name would ever wanna invite THAT guy to a party?

In fact, the way that western philosophers have often THOUGHT about this, Han says…that if you don’t start with a strong sense of SELF and who you ARE…then you LOSE the foundation that’s necessary to be able to RELATE to people… or to even worse: you LACK the foundation necessary to have ANY sort of meaningful conversation about morality.

But Han’s gonna say that when it comes to Zen Buddhism…almost the opposite becomes true.

WHEN you have a strong sense of SELF, that you’re CLINGING to…your life starts to mirror stuff like the classic “heroes journey”, that’s used so OFTEN in western STORY telling. Think about the implications of STARTING from this place: IF my life…is this heroic, existential BATTLE that I’m in everyday…who am I in a BATTLE against? Well, all the other people and THINGS that stand in my way, as an EGO.

But it’s precisely this “Becoming no one”, or dwelling NOwhere…that Han says this is ACTUALLY the thing that makes you an open enough space…to RELATE to the things around you closely.

Point is: when you stop trying to DOMINATE or REGULATE the situations you find yourself in all the time…you start to notice that you’re ALWAYS in what you could call a kind of co-presence, with other people and the world.

What you ALSO start to notice is that when you’re NOT trying to dominate things, you find that the thing you sort of DEFAULT to in your experience, is what Han calls a kind of original friendliness.

When two people come to a conversation and there’s NO desire on either end to OWN the other one, or to IMPROVE the other one, GET something VALUABLE from them that’ll benefit some PROJECT I have…friendliness is just what experience FEELS like when you’re in this mutual place.

Again, it’s important to emphasize that for Han: this is not ADDING ON friendliness, like we might do in the west if we came up with some moral system where we say friendliness is GOOD…no, it’s NOTICING what’s ALREADY THERE, when you REMOVE the ways the self is often GRASPING for only relationships, that are USEFUL to some PROJECT we’re working on.

How COMMON is that in the burnout society by the way? For the people that we talk to, to be a VERY limited group, a group that we’ve hand selected for what they DO for us and our projects, a group we maintain and prune like a gardener prunes some hedges when they get outta control.

Remember, one of the big POINTS that Han makes about what’s happened since MOST of us live in this burnout society of his…is the steady removal of the OTHER. We LIVE in these little algorithmic pockets…where we never have to actually ever CONFRONT the other anymore. We just turn our political enemies into a cartoon so that we don’t have to actually validate their existence.

But again: what about this Zen idea of making yourself a hospitable environment to relate to things honestly? Well it’s IN this original friendliness Han is talking about…that hospitality towards the word becomes possible.

Now the LAST chapter we’re gonna talk about today is about the WAYS we often grasp for control over DEATH, as an event in our lives.

You know maybe the first thing to say is that if you’re living in something like the burnout society, where the ego is dominating pretty much everything that you do…then the idea of your individual life ending…is INCREDIBLY scary. It’s essentially you losing EVERYTHING that you think you ARE, everything you’ve WORKED for.

If your WHOLE LIFE is some neoliberal project where you’re building a LEGACY…then to accept the reality that ALL of this could end at any moment…it becomes TOO PAINFUL to consider on a regular basis…might as well AVOID it as a topic.

And we DO typically avoid it in the west. We don’t like to TALK about death. Heidegger’s criticism rings true here that we RELEGATE death to these distant plots of land we call graveyards. Or to these cordoned off buildings we call hospitals with no parking and limited visiting hours to them.

But there’s a FEW different ways that Zen approaches death in a totally different way than.

Han says there’s TWO things we typically do with death in something like the burnout society: we either try to turn it into some transcendent moment, where there’s some higher PURPOSE for why we lived…or we turn death into a kind of DISASTER, that’s impossible for us to face, so we avoid it.

But NEITHER of these really CAPTURE what’s going on…when you SEE yourself more as something that is relationally unfolding with the world around you. A metaphor, that Han uses in the book that’s pretty powerful for getting us thinking more in this way…is a plum tree. It’s a famous Haiku that’s written by a poet named Buson. It goes, “ The petals flutter, down with each, the branch of the, plum tree grows older.”

Keep in mind this is a Haiku translated from Japanese, so in English it sounds a bit choppy, but the POINT it’s making is just as strong. DEATH…is just another part of the process you’re engaged in here.

The SAME WAY we see the life cycle of the plum tree…where every year, it gets a little bit older, it blossoms, the leaves fall, and we don’t find ourselves GRASPING for this plum tree to be the greatest plum tree ever, it should be the PLUM TREE that’s remembered for the REST of TIME, and should the plum tree get sick and die we WOULDN’T think, that this is some DISASTER that is ROBBING us of something crucial…in the SAME way we can see the life cycle of the plum tree…it’s possible to VIEW our own lives in a similar sort of way.

Death isn’t some CLIMAX…or some heroic moment everything culminates in. It’s just another part of the flow that we’ve ALWAYS been a part of.

And what HAPPENS when you start seeing DEATH more in this way…is it gives you permission to stop seeing your life like it’s a resume that you have to build. Life is NOT about building up enough accomplishments to make your death not feel like you wasted your time here.

No, once again, life is something you can be living FULLY…right now. In this moment. This experience. Seen more in this way there’s nothing to prove, to yourself or to anyone. Nothing is MISSING from this moment. Imagine truly feeling that this moment is complete, exactly the way that it is.

Now it should be said: Han never intended for this book to be a FULL education on these concepts from Zen Buddhism. You can spend your LIFE studying this way of framing experience…which I know several people listening to this have, I know this because of the emails I get.

Truly grateful to have so many smart people in the comment section on Patreon, adding to the discussion each episode. Personally, selfishly…I’m really looking to the conversation after this episode. Can’t wait to learn more from some of you.

To anyone who contributes in any way thank you for making a podcast like this freely available to everyone. Hope you have a good rest of your week.

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.