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Comparative Theology as Repeating with a Difference: Deconstruction, Yogācāra Buddhism, and Our Conditioned Condition*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2015

Kristin Beise Kiblinger
Kristin Beise Kiblinger*
Affiliation:
Winthrop University
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Extract

John D. Caputo, a contemporary American philosopher and theologian, is known for his work demonstrating the relevance of Derrida's deconstruction for theology. Vasubandhu, a fourth-century (c.e.) Indian thinker, is a seminal figure in the Mahāyāna Buddhist school known as Yogācāra. Although at first blush an odd pairing, and despite their great differences, these two thinkers share a fundamental presupposition: the priority and centrality of our conditioned condition. Indeed, for them, attending to the ways that we are conditioned makes possible the pursuit of a truth that is beyond our conditioned filters, aspiring to open us to the truth that is unconditioned. For this reason, it is illuminating to read and think Caputo and Vasubandhu together.

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Articles
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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 108 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 1 - 29
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Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2015 

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was the Society for Comparative Theology's annual lecture in comparative theology, presented at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions on October 19, 2011. I am very grateful to Francis X. Clooney, S.J., for that opportunity and indebted to those who offered comments on that occasion. For their feedback, I wish to thank also Michael Lipscomb, Jennifer Disney, Steve Smith, Jeff Sinn, Greg Oakes, Cathy Stewart, Jonathan C. Gold, Rick Nance, Curt Thompson, Michelle Voss Roberts, Hugh Nicholson, Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier, James Clayton, Will Kiblinger, an anonymous reader for the Harvard Theological Review, and John D. Caputo.

References

1 For prior literature on Buddhism and deconstruction, see especially Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1984)Google Scholar and On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture (American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series 3; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). Magliola relates early Derrida to Nāgārjuna positively. See also Loy, David, “The Clôture of Deconstruction: A Mahāyāna Critique of Derrida,” International Philosophical Quarterly 27 (1987) 59–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Loy relates Derrida negatively to Buddhism by using a Zen-influenced Madhyamaka to criticize Derrida. For more on this debate, see Buddhisms and Deconstructions, which has a selected bibliography on Buddhism and deconstruction ([ed. Jin Y. Park; New Frameworks for Continental Philosophy Lanham, Md.: Lanham & Littlefield, 2006] 271–72). Caputo focuses on later Derrida. While earlier Derrida has been charged with uncontained “drift,” later Derrida is said to “retreat to Levinas” and is accused of unacknowledged essentialism. For late-phase Derrida in relation to Buddhism, see Park, Jin Y., Buddhism and Postmodernity: Zen, Huayan, and the Possibility of Buddhist Postmodern Ethics (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2008)Google Scholar as well as Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (ed. Youru Wang; Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy; New York: Routledge, 2007). Lastly, see Pensgard, David, “Yogacara Buddhism: A Sympathetic Description and Suggestion for Use in Western Theology and Philosophy of Religion,” Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies 5 (2006) 94–103Google Scholar. With regard to this last work, although we use many of the same exponents of Yogācāra to make our arguments, I am uncomfortable with Pensgard's sweeping claims for the “superiority of Yogācāra over the Continental Tradition,” with his equating of Eastern and Western notions without more attention to contexts, and with his failure in this article to deal with differences sufficiently.

2 Interpreters of Vasubandhu with phenomenological leanings include Thomas Kochumuttom, Stefan Anacker, Dan Lusthaus, William Waldron, and Richard King. Scholars promoting the study of Vasubandhu's hermeneutics text include José Ignacio Cabezón, Richard Nance, and Peter Skilling.

3 “Dogmatism” is used here in the sense of an absolutistic stance that has lost sight of its conditionedness.

4 Although “representation-only” is a common translation for vijñapti-mātra, Bruce Cameron Hall points out that “representation” is problematic, in that it suggests a representational theory of knowledge, while the purpose of Vasubandhu's argument is to question such a theory of knowledge; see Hall, Bruce Cameron, “The Meaning of Vijñapti in Vasubandhu's Concept of Mind,” The Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 9 (1986) 7–23Google Scholar, at 14. “Nothing-but-cognition” is yet another common rendering.

5 For purposes of this article, I am presupposing Caputo's Derrida-influenced theology and working from there in light of Vasubandhu, unpacking their implications for comparative theology. In other words, I presume an audience willing to entertain Caputo's theology or, at least, one interested in where Caputo may lead comparative theology. Of course, Derrida and Caputo have their critics, and while I agree with Caputo's defense of Derrida, I do not think that this article is the place to address all of Caputo's and Derrida's critics and defenders. For critique of Caputo's “religion without religion” and references to critics of Derrida's late-phase thought (said to “retreat to Levinas” and a closet essentialism), see respectively Hägglund, Martin, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar and Cohen, Tom, “Anecographics,” in Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change (ed. Sussman, Henry; Critical Climate Change; Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities, 2012) 32–57Google Scholar. For an early attack on reader-sided interpretation of textual meaning, see Hirsch, E. D., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967)Google Scholar, and for a defense of Derrida against the charge of relativism, see Norris, Christopher, Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997).Google Scholar

6 I draw especially on the following works by Caputo: The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997); The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006); and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Church and Postmodern Culture; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007); along with shorter pieces that he has published in two collections. A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus (ed. Mark Dooley; SUNY Series in Theology and Continental Thought; Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003) 1–19 contains his “God and Anonymity: Prolegomena to an Ankhoral Religion,” along with responses to other authors’ articles on himself. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism features his “Apostles of the Impossible: On God and the Gift in Derrida and Marion” (ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon; Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999) 185–222.

7 Caputo calls his a “Jewish-Augustinian” reading of Derrida (Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 58).

8 Ibid.

9 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 75.

10 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 30.

11 This parallels the Buddhist concern about views (dṛṣṭis) as forms of attachment (Hugh Nicholson, e-mail message to author, June 6, 2011).

12 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 19 [italics in original].

13 Ibid., 110.

14 Such words about being willing to put ourselves in question, for me, resonated all the more powerfully when juxtaposed with Buddhists’ no-self doctrine, with their analysis of the problem of the self that is more thoroughgoing than Caputo's.

15 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 345 n. 19.

16 Caputo, Weakness of God, 283.

17 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 17.

18 Ibid., 180.

19 Ibid., 138.

20 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 26–27.

21 In the Old Testament as well, Caputo says that “God is on the side of deconstruction, [as the God] who intervened at a crucial moment in the construction of a famous tower, calling construction to a halt, disseminating . . . tongues” (Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 54).

22 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 35.

23 Ibid., 43.

24 Caputo, John D., “‘O felix culpa,’ This Foxy Fellow Felix: A Response to Westphal,” in A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus (ed. Mark Dooley; Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003) 171–74, at 172Google Scholar.

25 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 46.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 46.

28 Then, the “Christian tradition . . . [over time] is the history of taking the story of Jesus differently, again and again” (ibid., 47–48).

29 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 120.

30 Ibid., 144.

31 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 96.

32 Importantly, however, Caputo is careful to distinguish his sort of phenomenology, which is a phenomenology of anonymity (i.e., what is given in experience is anonymous/undecidable, because our condition is to be severed from the truth), from that of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, who affirm that the infinite or God can make an appearance (of a sort) in phenomenology—e.g., via Marion's notion of a “saturated phenomenon.” Caputo remains skeptical of such claims of “infinite givenness” (Caputo, “God and Anonymity,” 3) or of a “phenomenology of infinity,” which sound to him “too much like the Secret” (ibid., 4). However, even this duality or distinction starts to blur, Caputo admits, because while we can distinguish God and anonymity conceptually, phenomenologically (i.e., experientially) the traits are the same: we reach limit states that are indefinite, formless, nameless, and so on. See Caputo, “God and Anonymity,” 6–7.

33 An opponent might ask, with this notion of the call, is Caputo not thereby introducing the problematic category of unmediated, universal experience? Quite the opposite: it seems to me that Caputo is trying to rule out any appeal to unmediated experience, but he is struggling to find a way to express what is going on when, in the midst of mediated experience, we yearn for the unmediated that we cannot have. Why a call rather than no call? Why affirm faith rather than disavow it? There is an undecidability in trying to define concepts such as faith, and that is why Caputo keeps deconstructing. These are passions, not knowledge (which is why they can go wrong). Caputo is sensitive to Kantian limits but thinks that we have to say “yes” along the model of Mary's response at the time of the Annunciation; hers is a commitment, a choice with a risk, a passion with a fallibility, not a knowledge or something groundable. One does not have to define faith this way, of course, but Caputo argues that there are advantages to doing so.

34 This is why Caputo describes Derrida as remaining a phenomenologist but one whose phenomenology limits itself and cannot be phenomenology “in a rigorous sense.” Derrida wants “to ‘go beyond phenomenology’ but to do so phenomenologically” (Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible,” 206, 208, respectively). (With this qualification, we see yet again that no term or label in this system, not even “phenomenology,” should be absolute.) Caputo's phenomenology of anonymity is an unusual sort of phenomenology. Like Yogācāra's development, which the scholars say was prompted, in part, by the concern to avoid the nihilism that was sometimes attributed by opponents to Madhyamaka thought, likewise Derrida is also trying to avoid nihilism. Speaking of the gift, which I will introduce shortly and which is another metaphor for the unconditioned, Caputo says that “it is impossible for the gift to ‘exist’ as such, to be ‘present’ or make an ‘appearance,’” but he goes on to clarify importantly that Derrida does not conclude from this that “there is absolutely no gift” (ibid., 206 [italics in original]). Surprisingly (for the other always comes unexpectedly), the Yogācāra-Madhyamaka debate helped me understand the Caputo-Marion debate. Both Vasubandhu and Caputo want neither essentialism nor nihilism. Caputo is trying to steer a careful intermediate course—in Buddhist parlance, a “middle way.” Like the name of the text for which Vasubandhu wrote a commentary, Caputo's system is also Madhyāntavibhāga (Discriminating the middle from the extremes).

35 Ibid., 206–8, at 207 [italics in original].

36 Caputo, Weakness of God, 114.

37 Ibid.

38 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 196.

39 Ibid., 97 [italics in original].

40 Or was it Ishmael? Muslim traditions say it was Ishmael.

41 Caputo, “God and Anonymity,” 14.

42 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 49.

43 Ibid., 124. It is precisely because Caputo's approach is not to have untranslatable concepts that he keeps deliberately changing up his terms and shifting between religious and nonreligious language: democracy, Christianity, justice, kingdom, gift, hospitality, ghost, prayer, call, etc. By implication, he disagrees with the insularity of Wittgenstein's “language games” and with the so-called “cultural-linguistic” approach to theology.

44 Ibid., 58. Deconstruction is not only prayer, but confession as well—i.e., in the sense of confessing our conditionedness.

45 Ibid., 59 [italics in original].

46 This soteric urgency about, and drive towards, the future to come helps explain why it is a misreading of Caputo to see him as constituting a “sort of linguistic Berkeleyianism,” a charge against which Caputo defends himself in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (16). It is striking that, when read as a metaphysical idealist, Vasubandhu has also been compared to Berkeley, and studying the two thinkers together helped me to see this as a possible misreading in Vasubandhu's case as well. I do not see Caputo as denying any kind of reference whatsoever, leaving us trapped in our own language and minds, “signifiers . . . leading only to other signifiers.” This is because, “while there is nothing which . . . would escape the constraints of textuality, it is no less true that everything . . . written has been directed toward the other of language, toward the alterity” to come, he says. Quoting Derrida, Caputo writes, “Deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed. [Deconstruction] even asks whether our term ‘reference’ is entirely adequate for designating the ‘other.’ The other, which is beyond language and which summons language, is perhaps not a ‘referent’ in the normal sense” (Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 16). Vasubandhu also wants to reconceive the notion of reference, or referential objects.

47 “If the Messiah did show up he would ruin everything.” This is why in Christianity, “since it is believed that the Messiah has already come,” Christians now wait for him “to come again” (Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 60 [italics in original]).

48 Ibid.

49 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, xxiv. I see this as a strategy, to use a Buddhist term, to avoid attachment—i.e., to avoid elevating the finite to the infinite while still allowing the infinite to stir within the finite and urge us on. Also, this prophetic/messianic element is what takes Derrida beyond negative theology. Caputo describes Derrida's theology as more prophetic and eschatological than apophatic and mystical (ibid., xxiv). Deconstruction is not “merely negative” but “deeply and abidingly affirmative—of something new, of something coming” (ibid., 3). While negative theology seems to Caputo “a more refined way of affirming that God exists, or hyperexists” (ibid., 7), in contrast, “différance does not settle the God question one way or the other; in fact, the point is to un-settle it” (ibid., 13). On Caputo's account, deconstruction “saves apophatic theology from telling a bad story about itself, about how it speaks from the Heart of Truth” (ibid., 6). Caputo says that he “begs to differ” with negative theology “insofar as negative theology turns out, upon analysis, to be actually a . . . way to trump language and representation” (ibid., 10). “The God of negative theology is a transcendental signified, the dream of being without différance, of being outside the text” (ibid., 11). Negative theology claims “to touch bottom not by means of representational thinking, of concepts and discursive reasoning, but by . . . entering into a wordless, imageless . . . inner sanctum of the temple.” Therefore, “far from a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, negative theology . . . effects . . . the triumph of presence over representation. . . . To that extent, deconstruction is its nemesis. . . . The last thing that could be claimed in deconstruction is that one has reached the point of ineffability, of silent union, beyond words and concepts” (ibid., 11 [italics in original]). “Derrida wants to hold the hand of negative theology to the fire of its word . . . [namely,] that it does not know . . ., so that one is not sure whether this is God” (ibid., 12). While negative theology is described here as putting “presence over representation,” in contrast, Caputo says that his own view is that truth is doing the truth, which means putting passion over representation” (ibid., xix [italics in original]). I wonder, might Vasubandhu, in turn, want to say that we need to put compassion over representation (vijñapti)?

50 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 55 [italics in original]. “Différance is not God,” Caputo insists emphatically (Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 1–19). It is “neither a word nor a concept . . . because Derrida is . . . addressing the conditions under which words and concepts are formed in the first place, which means that différance, as the ‘word’ for that, is a kind of non-word” (ibid., 8). It is “not an entity” and “has no truth,” and, paraphrasing Derrida, it is, therefore, “irreducible to any ontotheological reappropriation” (ibid., 7). Consequently, this is why deconstruction “writes under erasure,” “saying something without saying it, even deforming and misspelling it”—différance “being the most famous misspelling” (ibid., 2). I am reminded here of Nāgārjuna in the Vigrahavyāvartanī (Refuting the objections), a text that, rather coincidentally, uses the metaphor of a phantom for the central Buddhist notion of emptiness (śūnyatā) and argues that emptiness is an antidote to all positions rather than itself one more position. Indeed, I think that Caputo has helped me to understand this sort of argument in Nāgārjuna in a way that I never did before.

51 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 142.

52 Ibid., 53. The “come” of which deconstruction dreams is a “completely open-ended, negative, undetermined structure. . . . For the future present, insofar as it is already pre-envisioned, belongs to the regime of the same, which is not the absolutely undetermined surprise that Derrida calls the ‘messianic hope.’ . . . Of this future to come, we can only say ‘come’” (ibid., 56). In other words, Caputo distinguishes between what he calls the present future and the absolute future. The present future is up ahead but what we can imagine and plan for. This is the realm of retirement savings and the like. The absolute future, on the other hand, is totally unforeseeable, and Caputo's way of speaking of that dimension in our lives is that our self-oriented limitations and conditioning get opened up somehow to the other.

53 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 61.

54 Ibid., 64.

55 He qualifies, though, that “‘the impossible’ refers [here] not to a logical [impossibility] but to a phenomenological impossibility” (Caputo, Weakness of God, 317 n. 1 [italics in original]). As I understand Caputo, this means that the idea that there could be an unconditioned “out there” is something of which we can conceive. Thus, logically speaking, the unconditioned is possible, not impossible. But the idea that I could somehow experience the unconditioned, know its nature or whether indeed it is even there, without conditioning, is a phenomenological impossibility.

56 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 50.

57 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 69–71 [italics in original].

58 Caputo, “Apostles of the Impossible,” 206–8.

59 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 71.

60 Ibid., 72.

61 Ibid., 133.

62 Ibid., 127. Likewise, “when I pray, am I not also praying that there is someone to hear my prayer? Praying is the sort of thing that requires that we are already praying in order to get started. When I pray, I am also praying to be able to pray, praying that my prayer ‘has a prayer,’ has a prayer of a chance, that it is not left without a prayer. I am praying that there is something to prayer . . . . The prayer on behalf of prayer itself, is structured into the prayer” (Caputo, John D., “A Game of Jacks: A Response to Derrida,” in A Passion for the Impossible, 34–49, at 40Google Scholar).

63 Faith and doubt are interrelated—dependently originated, to use a Buddhist term.

64 Ibid., 17.

65 Ibid., 17–18.

66 I focus on five works attributed to Vasubandhu: 1) the first chapter of Madhyāntavibhāga-bhāṣya (Commentary on the Discriminating the middle from the extremes; henceforward MVB), 2) Trisvabhāva-nirdeśa (Treatise on the three natures; henceforward TSN), 3) Viṃśatikā (Twenty verses; henceforward Viṃś) with its commentary (vṛtti), 4) Triṃśatikā (Thirty verses), and 5) Vyākhyāyukti (Principles of exegesis; henceforward VY). English translations of all of these texts except the last one are available in Kochumuttom, Thomas A., A Buddhist Doctrine of Experience: A New Translation and Interpretation of the Works of Vasubandhu, the Yogācārin (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982)Google Scholar and Anacker, Stefan, Seven Works of Vasubandhu, the Buddhist Psychological Doctor (rev. ed.; Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005)Google Scholar. Anacker provides as well the Sanskrit texts. I relied on secondary scholarship for my comments on the VY. Just as Derrida and Caputo have their critics, Yogācāra has been criticized by Madhyamaka for crypto-essentialism. For Candrakīrti's critique of Yogācāra, see Fenner, Peter G., “Candrakīrti's Refutation of Buddhist Idealism,” Philosophy East and West 33 (1983) 251–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Olson, Robert F., “Candrakīrti's Critique of Vijñānavāda,” Philosophy East and West 24 (1974) 405–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67 See Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine; Anacker, Seven Works; Lusthaus, Dan, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the “Ch’eng Wei-shih lun” (Curzon Critical Studies in Buddhism Series; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002)Google Scholar; Waldron, William S., The Buddhist Unconscious: The Ālaya-vijñāna in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought (RoutledgeCurzon Critical Studies in Buddhism; New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and King, Richard, “Vijnaptimatrata and the Abhidharma Context of Early Yogacara,” Asian Philosophy 8 (1998) 5–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 172, 485.

69 Ontology would not do justice, we might say. I mean this in two senses. First, ontology would not do justice to ghosts and calls (i.e., would not adequately accommodate our experience of ghosts and calls), and second, Caputo thinks that justice, like truth, is something you do (facere veritatem) and that phenomenology brings us to that “doing” better than ontology does.

70 Waldron, Buddhist Unconscious, 162.

71 King, Richard, “Early Yogācāra and Its Relationship with the Madhyamaka School,” Philosophy East and West 44 (1994) 659–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, “Meaning of Vijñapti,” 15–17; and Williams, Paul M., “Some Aspects of Language and Construction in the Madhyamaka,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 8 (1980) 1–45, at 10–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

72 Horner, Robyn, Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-logical Introduction (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005) 25Google Scholar.

73 Waldron, Buddhist Unconscious, 5. The second quotation is from Anagarika Govinda, as quoted by Waldron (Govinda, Anagarika, The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy, and Its Systematic Representation According to Abhidhamma Tradition [London: Rider, 1969] 54)Google Scholar.

74 Kochumuttom translates the MVB's commentary on 1.1 to say that “when something is absent in a receptacle, then one, seeing that receptacle as devoid of that thing, perceives that receptacle as it is, and recognizes that receptacle, which is left over, as it is, namely, as something truly existing here” (Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 236). In other words, the definition of emptiness found in early Yogācāra literature is the existence of nonexistence (King, “Early Yogācāra,” 666). See MVB 1.13 and 1.2.

75 King, “Early Yogācāra,” 667–68; Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 6.

76 Other potential problems treated include how to explain shared perceptions and produced effects, given the view that objects as perceived are only apparent. Vasubandhu's analogies in answer to those two problems are, respectively, the experience of hell (i.e., hell is collectively hallucinated due to shared karma) and wet dreams (i.e., effects are produced as a result of imagined constructions, not due to external realities).

77 In further detail, the argument is that if something has parts, then it is not irreducible and could be further divided into more parts, but if it has no parts, then it would be invisible; if it is invisible, then no matter how many are aggregated, the combination still would not be visible. Also, if something has no parts, then how would it have contact with other things or enter into relationships?

78 Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 180. As Hall observes, in the context of Buddhist debates, atoms are tools to demolish substantial “things,” but the danger may be that atoms themselves can, in turn, be reified (Hall, “Meaning of Vijñapti,” 18). Thus, perhaps atoms stand for any subtle, lingering “things” that may remain upon previous Buddhist analyses intending to deconstruct entities. Atoms stand for the notion of fundamental, irreducible elements, and Vasubandhu's point is just to insist that deconstruction must be radical and thoroughgoing until there are no such self-standing elements.

79 The six-part map of the mind was thought to be inadequate for explaining our experience and for supporting Buddhist doctrine. It left unanswered certain questions. For example, given Buddhist belief in transmigration (rebirth) and no-self, if upon death sensation and thinking cease, then how can existence carry over into another related lifetime where consciousness reemerges? Since scriptures define some meditative states as stilling all six consciousnesses, how does the meditator stay alive and consciousness reemerge from meditative states? How can we acquire cumulative knowledge and skills, such as when learning a sport? That is, where is that information stored when not actively conscious, and how is it retrieved? Why are the same things often perceived differently by different persons, or even by the same person at different times? What explains this coloring? Lastly, how does a past deed produce its karmic effect in the future? (Shun’ei, Tagawa, Living Yogācāra: An Introduction to Consciousness-Only Buddhism [trans. Muller, Charles; Boston: Wisdom, 2009] xvii, 15–16Google Scholar).

80 Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, xviii, 16; D’Amato, Mario, Maitreya's Distinguishing the Middle from the Extremes (“Madhyāntavibhāga”) Along with Vasubandhu's Commentary (“Madhyāntavibhāga-bhāṣya”): A Study and Annotated Translation (Treasury of the Buddhist Sciences Series; New York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies, 2012) 11Google Scholar.

81 Technically, first, there was an additional root or adhering consciousness (mūlavijñāna, ādānavijñāna) put forth, but this was then further dissected into the kliṣṭavijñāna and the ālayavijñāna (Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, xviii). Paramārtha, reflecting the Chinese leaning towards the theory of Buddha nature, would posit, in addition, a ninth consciousness (amalavijñāna), the undefiled or pure consciousness, a term not used by Vasubandhu.

82 Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 17.

83 Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 150–151.

84 Ibid., 91–92.

85 Ibid., 20.

86 This is why the imagined and dependent natures, in TSN.17, are characterized as defilement (saṅkleśalakṣaṇam), whereas the perfected nature is characterized as purity (vyavaddana-lakṣaṇam).

87 See, e.g., commentary on I.7–8 in the MVB and the end section of the TSN, especially verses 36–37.

88 Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 61–62. Of course, the contention that karma and self-attachment distort our mental images is not unique to Yogācāra. What is “distinctive . . . is the refusal to extend the discussion beyond a purely phenomenal account.” Other Buddhists, such as Sautrāntikas, say that we can infer objects from our experience—i.e., from our mental images of them. Yogācārins, however, argue that it is “logically unestablished (asiddha), a source of suffering . . . and philosophically superfluous” to extend claims beyond that which is experientially given (King, “Vijnaptimatrata”). Procedurally, this is much like Caputo insisting that we must start from where we are and thus proceed phenomenologically—in his case, from the fact that only anonymity is given in experience.

89 Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 12. As Hall concludes, “The intention . . . is not to reduce the material to the mental [i.e., idealism], but to deny the dichotomy while affirming that the basic reality is more usefully discussed in terms belonging to a correct understanding of the mental”—more useful, that is, for soteriology, for eliminating craving (Hall, “Meaning of Vijñapti,” 15; D’Amato, Distinguishing the Middle, 23). It is ignorance and attachment that cause the division into internal and external in the first place, and the most stubborn duality “to which we are habituated is this distinction between self and other” (Waldron, Buddhist Unconscious, 159).

90 Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 61–62.

91 The Yogācāra term for this awakening is āśraya-parāvṛtti (revolution or conversion of the basis).

92 Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 346. Vasubandhu tends to portray the storehouse consciousness as destroyed at awakening. Later Yogācārins (e.g., Paramārtha) instead envisage it as purified, leaving a pure consciousness (amala-vijñāna) (King, “Vijnaptimatrata”).

93 Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 37.

94 Jonathan C. Gold, “Vasubandhu,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (summer 2011 ed.), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2011/entries/vasubandhu.

95 Richard Nance, “Models of Teaching and the Teaching of Models” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2004) 215. An example of applying judgment rather than reading literally can be found in the Viṃś commentary (vṛtti) when Vasubandhu deconstructs the literal meaning of the Buddha's statements about the twelve sense bases (āyatanas) (Gold, “Vasubandhu”).

96 Nance, “Models,” 231, 261–63. This accords with the Buddhist doctrine of skillful means (upāyakauśalya), the doctrine that enlightened teachers adapt their teachings according to the context and in accord with audiences’ needs, so that teachings should not be held rigidly as dogmatic truths but instead should be recognized as context-dependent means that must be skillfully employed.

97 Ibid., 248.

98 Ibid., 269–70.

99 Cabezón, José Ignacio, “Vasubandhu's Vyākhyāyukti on the Authenticity of the Mahāyāna Sūtras,” in Texts in Context: Traditional Hermeneutics in South Asia (ed. Timm, Jeffrey R.; Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992) 221–43Google Scholar, at 226–28; Gold, “Vasubandhu.”

100 Gold, “Vasubandhu.”

101 Vasubandhu, in his commentary to the Mahāyāna-saṃgraha, indicates that the impressions of speech serve as the manifesting cause for objects to arise. The uttering of the name “eye,” for instance, contributes to the arising of an eye as an object of awareness (Waldron, Buddhist Unconscious, 159).

102 Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 427. This explanation of language's problems helps make clear the notion of prapañca in Yogācāra. Prapañca means linguistic concoction, linguistic proliferation, and cognitive projections onto experience, suggesting that “words and concepts become ‘realities’ overshadowing the actual conditions” (ibid., 204). Also, Tagawa clarifies that the “frame of perception is none other than language itself,” which is “carried out at the level of the sixth consciousness”—i.e., at the level of the thinking consciousness that is part of the mind's third subjective transformation (Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 22). Tracing this back further to the first transformation, Waldron explains that all of our awareness is preconditioned by language because in the Yogācāra model, our experiences arise based on the store consciousness, which is already structured by the categories of language use. Waldron writes that the “entire process is conceived in terms of the imperceptible impressions . . . of linguistic and conceptual categories and their subconscious influences upon every moment of waking awareness.” Furthermore, because language is social, languages give rise to the worlds that we inhabit not only as individuals but also as social beings (Waldron, Buddhist Unconscious, 166–69).

103 On this trope, see Gold, Jonathan C., “No Outside, No Inside: Duality, Reality and Vasubandhu's Illusory Elephant,” Asian Philosophy 16 (2006) 1–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Yogācāra Strategies against Realism: Appearances (ākṛtī) and Metaphors (upacāra),” Religion Compass 1 (2007) 131–47.

104 The context is explanation of the three natures. The perceived illusory elephant superimposed on a piece of wood, Vasubandhu says, symbolizes the imagined nature; the conjuring of the elephant appearance dependent on the condition of magical mantras matches up with the dependent nature; and the truth of the wood without the imposed illusion is the perfected nature (Gold, “No Outside” and “Yogācāra Strategies”).

105 Gold, “No Outside,” 13–14.

106 According to early Yogācāra, appearances (vijñapti) are not the mental representation of sense objects as much as they are “a representation of the agent's own subliminal karmic predispositions.” Appearances are more a reflection of our state of mind than they are reflections of the actual world (King, “Vijnaptimatrata”).

107 According to Gold, Asaṅga (Vasubandhu's brother, another Yogācāra thinker) uses the elephant to show that one could have experience of an object (due to mental construction) in the absence of a corresponding external object. However, Vasubandhu uses the comparison to a dream to make that point, whereas he uses the illusory elephant to make a different point, as explained (Gold, “No Outside,” 7).

108 Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 222.

109 Ibid., 346.

110 D’Amato, Distinguishing the Middle, 25.

111 For example, TSN.12 reads, “The other-dependent nature is said / To be defined both as existent and as non-existent, / For, it exists as an illusion, / It does not exist, though, in the form in which it appears.” Similarly, with the perfected nature, TSN.13 says that “it exists as a state of non-duality, / It is also the non-existence of duality” (Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 97–106).

112 Gold, “Yogācāra Strategies,” 145; Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 223.

113 Anacker, Seven Works, 167.

114 Ibid., 175; Kochumuttom, Buddhist Doctrine, 195.

115 This means, then, that as Lusthaus writes, “We are . . . not cured by the Truth, but by efficacious deceptions (upāya [skillful means])” (Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 475).

116 Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 64. Tagawa highlights the importance of the practice of giving, or generosity, in particular, which tops the list of the bodhisattva practices known as the six pāramitās (perfections, practices for transcendence). Giving/generosity calls to mind again Caputo's notion of the gift. If the motivation for practicing giving is for reward, then this amounts to “karmic ensnarement” insofar as one pursues better karma rather than seeking to eliminate karma (Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 209). (Caputo would say in this case that the economy is not disrupted, that one is really selfishly estate planning, not acting under the call.) On the other hand, as Tagawa says, “The action of giving . . . when there is no expectation of recompense, is intimately connected to the removal of attachment to self” (Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 64–65).

117 Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 86.

118 D’Amato, quoting Gadjin Nagao, Distinguishing the Middle, 27.

119 Kiblinger, Kristin Beise, “Relating Theology of Religions and Comparative Theology,” in The New Comparative Theology: Interreligious Insights from the Next Generation (ed. Francis X. Clooney, S.J.; New York: T&T Clark, 2010) 21–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

120 Namely, if one believes that one's home tradition is in sole possession of all truth so that there are no truths elsewhere, this would commit one to the claim that no other tradition claims anything that is also claimed at home, which seems patently false, as examples of some shared claims are typically easy to cite.

121 On this, see Griffiths, Paul J., Problems of Religious Diversity (Exploring the Philosophy of Religion 1; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001)Google Scholar.

122 Francis X. Clooney, S.J., “Neither Here nor There: Crossing Boundaries, Becoming Insiders, Remaining Catholic,” in Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion (ed. Cabezón, José Ignacio and Davaney, Sheila Greeve; New York: Routledge, 2004) 99–111Google Scholar, at 102–3 and 109–10. Similarly hard to pin down, Caputo describes Derrida as atheist and not, as Jewish and something of an Arab, as someone who writes between Hebrew, Christian, Latin, French, and Arabic with no clear native language or soil.

123 See Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 142.

124 While Caputo employs Jewish and Christian terminology in his theology, he also insists—indeed the logic of his system requires—that all names are provisional and translatable, and so Caputo himself invites analogous versions of his theology from other traditions’ ways of speaking. Indeed, translation is a demand of hospitality, Caputo thinks (Caputo, Weakness of God, 259–78). Caputo invites versions from other traditions, and this is an invitation that I am trying to take up here, although about those other traditions, such as Buddhism, Caputo himself says that he feels “less competent to comment” (ibid., 303 n. 22). However, his early book The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (rev. ed.; Bronx, N.Y.: Fordham University Press, 1986) contains a chapter on Heidegger, Eckhart, and Buddhism. (I wish to thank Curt Thompson for reminding me of the point about hospitality requiring translation [Curt Thompson, e-mail message to author, June 27, 2011].)

125 As Tagawa says, comparing oneself to others is problematic when one is attached to oneself. “One cannot but end up praising ourselves, and either slandering others or envying them” (Tagawa, Living Yogācāra, 113).

126 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 114–16. Everyone privileges a name. “The danger is only to think that your name cannot be translated, that if someone does not use it, they are against you.” Instead of asking which is an example of which, Caputo asks, “Is it a matter of choosing between the two? Do they not pass back and forth in a kind of holy dissemination?” (ibid., 68).

127 Heim, S. Mark has written about “singular end” approaches in his Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Faith Meets Faith Series; Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1995)Google Scholar.

128 Caputo, Prayers and Tears 138, 155 (quoting Derrida). (See ibid., 35, 138, 154–55.)

129 Caputo, Weakness of God, 140.

130 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 65.

131 Ibid., 66–68.

132 Caputo, Weakness of God, 140. Caputo writes, “The singular is not a fall . . . from universality . . . but an excess that cannot be contained.” “The singular is thought not as a particular under a universal but as an . . . irreplaceable individual. What better embodiment of such a ‘kingdom of singularities’ than the biblical kingdom itself, where God has counted every tear, and numbered every hair on our heads?” (ibid. [italics in original]).

133 For a discussion of Derrida's concept of singularity and the matter of the plurality of singularities, and the relation of Derrida's thought on this to Jean-Luc Nancy's, see Marie-Eve Morin, “Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities,” Culture Machine 8 (2006) n.p.

134 Horner, Jean-Luc Marion, 45. It must be possible for readings to go wrong, but when they do, the problem may stem from their motivation, from what is selfishly or insecurely driving them, and not from their seeing newly or differently per se. Like the Buddhist parable about the water snake (according to which if you do not hold your truths correctly, they can bite you), similarly Caputo and Vasubandhu show that how and why views are held is key.

135 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 338.

136 Ibid., 183.

137 Horner, Jean-Luc Marion, 44.

138 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, 100.

139 Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?, 50–51.

140 Caputo, Weakness of God, 118.

141 Caputo, “God and Anonymity,” 8.

142 As David Loy has remarked, “Derrida is concerned that we not replace the specific, detailed activity of deconstructive reading with some generalized idea about that activity” (Loy, David, “The Deconstruction of Buddhism,” in Derrida and Negative Theology [ed. Coward, Harold and Foshay, Toby; Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992] 227–53, at 234Google Scholar).

143 Derrida himself, I would add, seems to affirm such an approach. Speaking of Caputo's reading of his own work, Derrida says that Caputo writes “according to his own trajectory . . . without, at the same time, betraying” him (Derrida). Derrida does not consider Caputo a literal interpreter of himself (Derrida). “It is another kind of gesture,” Derrida says. “He [Caputo] is doing something new that, in turn, enriches my own text and gives it a wider scope.” “He illuminates my text with his own culture and insight” (Mark Dooley, “The Becoming Possible of the Impossible: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in A Passion for the Impossible, 21–33, at 21–22). Caputo, too, writes, “I cannot say whether it is . . . a gloss on Jacques or not, whether it has to do with his religion or mine. I do not know where to draw the line” (Caputo, Prayers and Tears, xxix). Also, he states that texts have a life of their own (i.e., beyond their author), and that the “worth . . . of any text lies in the ‘stimulus’ it provides” (ibid., 110).

144 I mean, of course, immodest in the sense of sexually immodest, but also immodest in the sense of its sounding too ambitious and grandiose for little old me to be able to set off an event. Any event that comparative theology can prompt, though, I think will always be modest (and in this sense very disanalogous to the event of the inbreaking of the kingdom). Worthwhile comparative theology I see along the lines of a good sermon. One rarely walks away from a sermon with a radically altered or previously completely unknown new truth. However, if the sermon can present an old idea or reading from a fresh angle, renew our attention to it, and suggest for it new possibilities and applications, deconstructing and reinterpreting it a bit, then the sermon can be powerful.

145 Caputo, e-mail message to author, August, 20, 2011.