Kanzeon and the samurai
I heard a story once, set in medieval Japan. It takes place in a small village not far from the mountains and renowned for the healing powers of its hot springs. One autumn night a man dreams of a stranger who tells him: âTomorrow, at two in the afternoon, Kanzeon Bodhisattva, the deity of compassion, âshe who hears the cries of the worldâ, will visit your village. She will appear in the guise of a man, a samurai in his forties, on horseback. Be prepared. And tell the villagers to be ready.â
The man wakes up in the dead of night, euphoric and also a bit worried. A thought reassures him: he will ask for instructions from the monk who is stopping by the village on his way to the mountain monastery. He can barely wait for daybreak. In the morning, the news spreads quickly. Instructed by the monk, the residents are soon busy scrubbing the village clean, adorning it with flowers, lighting incense and placing water offerings in small bowls. Then at the appointed hour they all gather silently around the hot spring to welcome the Bodhisattva. The village clock strikes two. Nothing happens; no one appears. Another long, silent hour goes by uneventfully, then two. A few minutes after four, with the sun already setting behind nearby Mount Hiei, a samurai on horseback appears. Everyone prostrates before him. He seems exhausted, maybe wounded â and visibly perplexed at the spectacle before him. âWhat is going on?â he asks. A monk tells him about the oracle. Baffled, the samurai explains that he is injured and that is why he has come to the spring. But the villagers keep praying and prostrating. At this point the samurai gives in. âOK â he says, in that case I must be Kanzeon.â The monk ordains him and the next day, having medicated his wounds, the samurai decides to travel with the monk to Mount Hiei, to become a disciple of the Zen master Kakucho.
Two things strike me about this story. First, the samuraiâs readiness, past his moment of perplexity, to respond to the situation and be what is required of him. This may be linked to a situational understanding of ethics: summoned by you, I respond. In attempting to respond to your request in the best way I can, I satisfy not only an ethical requirement, I also manifest myself more fully â true nature arises in endeavouring to meet your silent ethical request. This may also be linked to the hazy, dormant feeling that the heart of this ordinary and imperfect person contains the seed of Buddhahood.
Second, it seems to me that the samuraiâs decision to be ordained is truly remarkable. He wants to be instructed in the Buddha Way; his readiness to respond to the villagersâ need becomes grounded beyond his initial, spontaneous response. By deciding to undergo Zen training, the samurai is willing to turn a fleeting glimpse of his true nature into embodied reality. In this way, he will carry out more fully the villagersâ request. Without the latter part of the story, his response âI then must be Kanzeonâ could represent all sorts of things: a shrug of resignation, a form of wish-fulfilling, even plain opportunism. Instead, he is willing to train and rise to the occasion. He is not behaving like a politician but is ready to fulfil the pledge he made to others, i.e. to be Kanzeon.
There is a parallel here with the practice of therapy. I remember when a co-tutor and I were interviewing applicants to a counselling course in a university psychology department. We were on the top floor of a very tall building in a glass-panelled room that afforded dazzling views of the sprawling edge of London, which is maybe why I remember those endless, gruelling hours of work rather fondly, even wistfully. The interviews took place over several days, yet after a few hours we both figured out that although their circumstances and backgrounds were different, applicants could broadly be divided into two âtypesâ. There were those who, assuming they already knew a thing or two about counselling and psychology, were animated by a craving to help others; and there were those whose motivation to undergo the training was grounded in the desire to learn more about themselves. By and large, the former came to counselling stirred by a desire for a career change; the latter were motivated by a personal crisis, or because some recent shift in their life had made them question the world and their place in it. Needless to say, our preference almost invariably went to the latter group. We felt that their keen interest in what is commonly known as âself-developmentâ provided more fertile ground for the making of a good therapist.
As with the samurai story, the aspiration to play a different role has to be matched by a genuine desire to undergo a form of training, a rite of passage or a period of learning that allows one to rise to the occasion and respond more readily to the task.
Reincarnation and the Devil
âDonât look in the mirror at night, or youâll see the Devil.â My mother said this to me once when I was seven or eight. It was bedtime and she had probably noticed my fascination with a large mirror in the corridor, whose baroque-looking frame looked unusual to me in the dim light. I donât know for certain whether she was warning me against self-absorption or passing on a piece of superstition, but I took her counsel literally and for years didnât dare to look in the mirror. Then in my mid-twenties, after university, I travelled to India and lived there for a few years. There with many others I played around with what were deemed to be techniques of spiritual liberation. One of these consisted of staring into the mirror at night by the light of a candle. This was both unsettling and exhilarating as I could see my face changing and, bizarrely, other faces emerging who stared back at me. I hasten to say, I did not imbibe anything before or during these exercises. Rather than the devil, this time around I was told that appearing before me were semblances of who I had been in past lives. I am now sceptical about this sort of thing and a little more than resistant to metaphysical explanations: as with the notion of an afterlife in Christianity, I now find, rightly or wrongly, that belief in reincarnation is an imaginative attempt to dodge the finality and existential edge of death, although back then it spoke to my youthful mystical leanings. These were severely put to the test when, working once as a translator in a large group on âexperiencing past livesâ, I was surprised to notice that many of the participants had a proclivity for drama: most men found they had been pirates, glamorous conspirators or artists and most women witches, shamanic squaws or amazons. You could not find a single Victorian cleaner or run-of-the-mill medieval butcher.
Multiplicity
Despite everything mentioned above, there is one thing that the mirror-gazing exercise vividly evokes. Putting on one side religious accounts of various kinds, as well as, I imagine, all plausible scientific explanations of the phenomenon, what lingers with the experimenter is the sense of vertigo resulting from exposure to the multiplicity of the self, an experience in regard to which the psychotherapeutic tradition has shown ambivalence even when seemingly accepting it. In my own clinical experience, awareness of organismic multiplicity often dawns on clients as inconsistence, inner conflict, and dilemma (a âtwofold propositionâ) between, for instance, organism and self-concept, or instinct and civility. What I suggest here is that this either/or battle, so typical of the western mindset, is only the threshold of the larger province of multiplicity. Dormant and ignored in sections of psychotherapy that steer away from psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, this notion has now begun to resurface under many different guises, including that of âconfigurations of selfâ (Mearns & Thorne, 2007) as an attempt to understand the psycheâs multiplicity. The difficulty here consists in not being able to conceive multiplicity outside the confines of the self (configurations of self ), in harking back to a Freudian as well as Kleinian notion of parts and introjected objects, and in reducing âthe infinite multiplicity of unconscious affects to the logical unity of a signifierâ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 27). Despite these inevitable difficulties, to allow greater space for the exploration of multiplicity in therapeutic and meditative settings expands the horizon of our enquiry and is to be warmly welcome.
Ash and firewood
At times I wonder whether despite advances in psychology and the greater popularity of mindfulness and meditation, it is more troubling to our contemporary sensibilities than it was in other epochs to envisage the self as split, multiple or even insubstantial i.e. anything other than the solid unit conceived by the western philosophical, religious and scientific traditions. The unconscious and the double were common features of nineteenth-century/early twentieth-century literature and psychology, whereas contemporary science and psychology seemingly favours narratives dominated by notions of resilience and managerialism. Positive psychology (Seligman, 2006) increasingly portrays resilience as something divorced from a healthy notion of strength that embraces inescapable human fragility and associates it instead with the outdated injunction to âtoughen upâ heard from their fathers by sons of my generation â almost as if all the progress earned by 70 years of psychotherapy has been regressed to a single reductive formula (Bazzano, 2016a). As for managerialism, now ubiquitous in the humanities, this manifests as the consistent move away from freer explorations of human experience and psyche towards a âstultifying ⊠culture of surveillance, audit and bureaucratic controlâ (House, 2016, p. 151).
At heart, both notions are steeped in the bourgeois view of the human being that universalizes its imagined solidity, self-sameness and psychological consistency. As such, the person (and the world he/she lives in) has to be defended and managed. The first notion, resilience, was influential in bringing about the controversial application of psychological and psychotherapeutic expertise and knowledge (as well as mindfulness techniques) in the military. One example may suffice here to illustrate this point: a psychologist recently came up with the notion of âadaptive killingâ: a set of cognitive and behavioural techniques âfocus[ed] on eliminating irrational thoughts and beliefs ⊠on changing a soldierâs belief structure regarding killingâ. As he sees it, âthese interventions could be integrated into immersive simulations to promote the conviction that adaptive killing is permissibleâ (Matthews, 2014, p. 187).
In turn, managerialism (the second notion) seeks to administer and control human nature. This is because it sees human nature as essentially unruly and unpredictable. This view is problematic: not only is it devoid of âsoulâ, it is also divorced from an organismic view of the human dimension and as such is no longer interested in describing the fluctuations of an organism in search of actualization, meaning and freedom, but it focuses instead on the factual, relying on the quasi-scientific collection of quantifiable data. This is known as the McNamara fallacy. For Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, decisions must be based exclusively on quantitative observations: 1) measure what can be measured; 2) ignore what canât be measured; 3) assume that what canât be measured is not important; and 4) assume that what canât be measured doesnât exist. Social scientist Daniel Yankelovich famously commented that the first point is OK as far as it goes; the second is misleading; the third is pure blindness and the fourth suicidal (Friedman, 2013).
Both Zen and most of the therapeutic counter-traditions work outside the parameters discussed above, i.e. they are less interested in substantiating the self and more keen to explore and deconstruct it. It may be partly for this reason that their natural allies are to be found in the arts.
Broken statue and shadow
It is not surprising that we need to turn to art in order to find examples that fearlessly explore different possibilities, namely, that the self may be fluid, multiple and/or insubstantial. The work of Francis Bacon is one example, and what comes immediately to my mind is his triptych Three Studies for Self-Portrait. When gazing at it, âas the eye moves from left to rightâ, Colm TĂłibĂn, writes:
the face in the first section appears like a mask. It is fully visible in the center panel, gazing outward. In the right-hand section, the face is already in another realm, some of it having merged with the blackness. What little of it remains has an aura of enormous suffering. It is not nothing ⊠Instead of nothing, there is âallâ or the irony surrounding all.
TĂłibĂn, 2015, Internet file
An obvious response would be to suggest that Baconâs unsettling triptych, part of his late work, is foreshadowing death. But this feels like a clichĂ©: itâs what interpreters of writers or artistsâ late work tend to do. At close scrutiny, there is no autonomous âmeâ, a solid entity moving towards death in a straight line. Instead, living beings constantly expand beyond their edges. Life is neither reconcilable nor understandable: this is what is truly unsettling (more unsettling than death itself perhaps) â and exhilarating. The problem with saying that life itself (let alone late life) is âbeing for deathâ (Sein zum Tod) as Heidegger (1962) and scores of existential psychotherapists are fond of saying after him, turns death into something that can be reconciled and even apprehended by human subjectivity (Levinas, 2001).
It is thrilling to find artists and writers in their twilight years refusing to go gently, to meekly ponder their demise and instead striving to create a new form and a new language (Adorno, 1998; Said, 2008). What is expressed at times by these new forms and new languages disrupts our neatly teleological representations of life and death (including our understanding of life as moving towards death), which are all-too often the hallmark of the anti-aesthetic mind (Schwartz, 1997; Bazzano, 2012). Roused by their provocations, we suddenly notice that things are no longer what they seemed. Even philosophers, notorious for their meek obeisance to the status quo, are capable of doing this at times: in a passage in DĆgenâs GenjĆkĆan, written when he was 33, he confronts several metaphysical and existential assumptions at once. Firewood becomes ash, he says; it doesnât revert to firewood. Likewise, we shouldnât presume that ash is future and firewood past. Firewood does not become firewood again once it is ash, and in the same way we do not go back to birth after death. The challenge he poses in the next sentence is even more telling: birth does not turn into death but has to be understood as no-birth. Birth is a complete expression in itself â as it is death. They are akin to winter and spring; we do not speak of winter as the beginning of spring, nor do we call...
