Violent Paradox of World-Renunciation

- A Girardian Reading
Ilkwaen Chung
Handong Global University Leopold-Franzens-Universitt Innsbruck (2009-10, post-doc)

For a detailed discussion, see my other publications Deconstructing the Buddhist Philosophy of Nothingness - Ren Girard and Violent Origins of Buddhist Culture (http://www.scribd.com/doc/88516537/DeconstructionBuddhism ) Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus- Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Rene Girards (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28), LIT Verlag 2010

Abstract The Tragic and the Dionysian surrounding the world-renouncing nothingness and emptiness of the tragic heroes of Buddhism will be elucidated from the standpoint of the theory of mechanism of reconciliatory victims scrutinized in the mimetic theory of Ren Girard. Based on the apprehension of world-renunciation as anti-structure, safety valve and reservoir of creativity (L. Dumont) and on the sacrificial interpretation of worldrenunciation (C. Malamoud ), this article illuminates the violent paradox of differentiating and world-constructing world-renunciation. Through radical anthropological re-reading of Buddhist nothingness and emptiness against the background of world-renouncers dharma, this paper examines the Dionysian transgression of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and saints in the eyes of the reconciliatory effect of the surrogate victim.

World- Renunciation as Sacred Anti-Structure In his seminal essay World Renunciation in Indian Religions that was given as the Frazer lecture at Oxford in 1958, Dumont has interpreted the unique character of worldrenunciation in India and the ambiguity of sacred world-renouncer as the extra-mundane individual in a complicated and also violent reciprocity with homo hierarchicus of the
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caste society from the sociological or anthropological viewpoint. 1 Following Dumont, Collins argued that the psychological and ontological dichotomy of sasra and nirva in Buddhism could only be comprehended by the sociological apperception of the fundamental social dichotomy between the man-in-the-world in his house, and world-renouncer oriented towards homelessness and nothingness. 2 In world-renouncer, as Dumont puts it, a special kind of sacredness is reserved. With his negation of the world and his asceticism, the sacred world-renouncer represents that very reversal of values which we expected to find in festivals. 3 The literature of early Indian Buddhism primarily reflects the values of world renouncers. 4 The world renouncing values of the Buddhist renouncer represents the undifferentiating reversal of values that are expected to be simulated in sacrificial festivals. The complete reversal of values during festivals is replaced by a division of labour that is characteristic of the Indian order. The violent undifferentiation during festivals seems to be specialized and represented in the sacred life of world-renouncer. 5 Much of the endeavour of the world-renouncer could be considered, according to Parry, as an attempt to recapture the original state of non-differentiation and to re-establish the unity of opposites which existed before the world began. The yogis immobilisation of mind, body, breath and semen represents an attempt to attain samdhi, a timeless state of non-duality in which there is neither birth nor death nor any experience of differentiation. 6 The non-differentiation represented by world-renouncer could be read as a specialized crisis of undifferentiation analyzed in the mimetic theory. Later we will make sense of transgressive undifferentiation of (radical) world-renouncer in terms of the undifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victims. Girard argued that the thematics of myths and of rituals reveal a transition from a structure of undifferentiation to a differentiation that is achieved by the radical elimination of the victim. Girard is in agreement with Lvi-Strauss who has recognized in the myth a movement from
1 Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 2 Steven Collins, Selfless Persons. Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 264. 3 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications, 279. 4 Rita M. Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy. A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 31. 5 See Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications, 278-9. 6 Jonathan Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, in Death and the Regeneration of Life, eds. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 86-7.

undifferentiaton to differentiation. 7 Lvi-Strauss believes, argues Girard, that the aim of ritual is to achieve undifferentiation for its own sake, but Girard considers the cultural undifferentiation and conflictual madness that constitutes the initial phase of many rituals as the preparation for sacrifice. The crisis is seen as a means to assure and to reproduce differentiation. 8 The application of Girard's theory helps to explain the civilizational paradox of world-constructing, namely differentiating role of world-renouncer. Paradoxically hierarchy in actual fact culminated, as Dumont maintains, in its contrary, the renouncer. 9 Girardian theory of mimetic desire and the resulting psychosocial process of sacrificial violence that Girard sees as the genetic mechanism underlying the foundation of human culture can clarify this violent paradox of civilizational creativity of world-renunciation. For Girard, the reconciliatory victim is considered as the matrix of difference and plays the structuring and generating role. World-renouncer is thought to be responsible for all the innovations in religion and in philosophy that India has created. Dumont maintained that the sacred institution of world-renunciation can be viewed not only as a kind of safety valve for the functional stability of caste-differentiation, but also as a reservoir of creativity. World-renouncer was not only the safety valve for the Brahmanic order, 10 but also creative agents in Hinduism and Buddhism. Girard's mimetic theory that is presented as elucidating the origins of culture illuminate this violent paradox of civilizations based on the world-renouncing orientations 11 in terms of the cultural paradox of transition from the chaotic undifferentiation to the differentiation that is generated through the genetic mechanism of reconciliatory victims. The culture produced by this differentiating mechanism will possess a structure based upon asymmetry and difference. And, this asymmetry, hierarchy and the differences

Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 108. 8 Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 28. 9 Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications, 194. 10 Ibid.,279. 11 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Die Paradoxie von Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus, In Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus. Interpretation und Kritik. ed. Wolfgang Schluchter, surkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft, 473 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 333-360; See also Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus. Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards, Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28 (Mnster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2010).

form what we call the cultural order. That is how order comes out of disorder. 12 The sacred institution world-renunciation and festive world-renouncer seems to represent mimetic crisis, a state of undifferentiation that requires the reassertion of differentiation by means of the scapegoat mechanism as the generative principle of all religion and human culture. Sacrificial Interpretation of World-Renunciation The festive anti-structure of world-renunciation in India was a sacred reality. 13 The sacred anti-structure of world renunciation belongs to forest (araya). In Vedic India, and more generally in brahmanic India, the dichotomy of village (grma) and forest (araya) is omnipresent. The forest is not defined in any positive way, but rather as something that is missing. It is the absence of a village, the empty space delineated by two divergent paths, an undifferentiated and unexplicated break in continuity. 14 Having renounced the world and entered the forest, kyamuni Buddha followed the negative way of the forest renunciation. He is a ramaa, wearing the garb of a mendicant, begging his food from the laity, and dwelling in the uninhabited forest (nirjanavana) in no fixed abode.15 Buddhas principal successor is also depicted as a paradigmatic forest saint, dwelling in solitude, wandering from place to place, and preaching a dharma of forest renunciation.16 Based on sacrificial interpretation of world-renunciation, we can seek further the cultural theoretical comprehension of paradox of differentiating world-renunciation in Buddhism with insights from mimetic theory. The initiation ceremony of world renunciation and even the lifestyle of world-renouncer are analyzed as a sort of transposition of sacrifice to the interior of the person. 17 The institution of renunciation is often thought to be emerged as a protest against brahminical orthodoxy. But world renunciation, as Heesterman maintains, seems rather to have fitted

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Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 312. 13 Patrick Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monarchism (Colombo: Gunasena, 1974), 4. 14 Charles Malamoud. Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, trans. David White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 75, 81. 15 Reginald A. Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 49. 16 Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 64. 17 Malamoud. Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 106.

themselves into the orthogenetic, internal development of Vedic thought. 18 Worldrenouncer has placed his sacrificial fires within himself, and so internalized his rites. 19 World-renunciation constitutes the ritual and therefore the civil death of the renouncer. 20 The world-renouncer dies to society. He has no longer a social status. His funeral rites are already performed. The renouncer, being outside caste rules, is an object of awe as holy, but is also impure, so far as normal social contact is concerned. The renouncer whose whole life is a sacrifice is permanently outside society, never returning to the human world from the sacred sphere of chaotic forest into which his renunciation has put him.21 Process Philosophy and Voidness of World- Renouncer Originally Buddhist nothingness, voidness and emptiness were the soteriological, namely world-renouncing project and values of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Nothingness has a soteriological significance. It is of world-renouncer from forest and is only seen from the point of view of yogic experience, not of normal persons in village. But the originally world-renouncing voidness of Buddhist renouncers has been decontextualized and then misunderstood, for example in the sense of modern physics, of deconstructionism la Derrida, of process philosophy and so on. As King pointed out, the tendency to make Buddha into a great scientist needs to be critically examined.22 His (world-renouncing) insight into the insubstantiality and impermanence of all nature processes was thought to indicate his complete mastery of the principles of modern physics. This is clearly a confusion of an intuitive, qualitative sense of the flux of nature, with the fully specific determination of physical dimensions and relationships within the nature, which is the material of science. King has rightly argued in my opinion that this is on a par with the attempt to equate Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity of Ecclesiastic with the Einsteinian formulae of relativity. 23

J. C. Heesterman, The Inncer Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 39-40. 19 Malamoud. Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 83, footnote 53. 20 Patrick Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 207. 21 Collins, Selfless Persons. Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism, 63. 22 Winston L. King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press. 1964), 145. 23 King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 145.

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Nothingness and voidness in Buddhism has no physical meaning in the sense of atomic voidness. It was soteriological concept.24 Conze has rightly emphasized yogic presupposition of Buddhist thought and philosophy. Buddhist philosophy is yogic philosophy. Many soteriological concepts are seen from the standpoint of yogi and come from yoga-experience.25 It was the world-renouncing concept of renouncers with his meditation on voidness and emptiness. This radical decontextualization of emptiness from the social anthropological context of world-renunciation can be read against the background of rapid modernization of Buddhism. In trying to distance themselves from popular superstitions and redefine Buddhism as a philosophical system, Buddhist scholars adopted the rationalization and demythologization. This ideological clean-up, according to Faure, led to a drastic reinterpretation of the Buddhist tradition. Buddhist notions of emptiness (nyat) and codependent origination (prattya-samutpda) suddenly took a scientific character. The Heart stra was even compared to Plancks constant. 26 With the help of radical anthropological re-reading of Buddhist nothingness and emptiness within the original context of world-renunciation, this conceptual confusion needs to be resolved. Religious experience and scientific experiment move on different levels and are only most superficially to be called equivalent. The attempt to equate the two leads only to confusion. This conceptual confusion is, as King persuasively argued, obvious in some of the contemporary attempts to make Buddhism scientific throughout.27 In spite of superficial congruences between the process philosophy of A. N. Whitehead and Buddhist thought, there are essential differences between two diametrically opposed programs of endeavor. Process philosophy is intellectual, but Buddhist philosophy is anti-intellectual. Conceptual thought of any kind is relegated by Buddhism to the level of "conventional truth", which is essentially delusive or false when seen from the standpoint of "ultimate truth", namely world-renouncing truth. But Whitehead's program is premised on the inherent validity of conceptual thought. 28 In spite of its affinity to Buddhism, Whitehead's view is profoundly Western. Unlike
24 Edward Conze, Buddhistisches Denken. Drei Phasen buddhistischer Philosophie in Indien (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1988), 82. 25 Ibid., 15, 18. 26 Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 99. 27 King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 144. 28 Robert F. Olson, Whitehead, Mdhyamika, and the Praj pramit, inPhilosophy East and West 25, no. 4 (1975), 449.

world-renouncing and anti-intellectual Buddhism, Whitehead does not seem to deny the positive value of ordinary experience. 29

Derrida, Girard and Buddhism Some superficial parallels in the deconstructive philosophy of J. Derrida and the Buddhist philosophy were drawn. Derridean negation and the Mdhyamika prasaga (reductio ad absurdum) are understood to be comparable in the sense of the negativity at work in both traditions. Both are considered to proceed from linguistic deconstruction to critiques of ontotheologies. But behind these two kinds of deconstructive textual practices, there are different philosophical agendas. Mdhyamika deconstructions and self-deconstructions follow a clearly directional path, defined by step-by-step advancements and negations of lemmas. The Mdhyamika tetralemma effects a radical negation of all existing positions and, if seen from these positions, represents, as Zongqi maintains, a "non-sensical" position. A leading Chinese Mdhyamika thinker undertakes the self-deconstruction of this Mdhyamika tetralemma, he continues to follow the path of reductio ad absurdum and reaches a hexa-lemma: neither-affirmationnor-denial-of-both-being-and-nonbeing. His hexalemma itself seems to exemplify the most mind-taxing, the most non-sensical of the Mdhyamika non-sense. 30 All things are void, including the utterance of the teaching of voidness. The social anthropologically-based apprehension of self-deconstruction in Buddhist negative dialectic brings us to scrutinize much conceptual confusions found in overly hasty modernizations of Buddhist nothingness, emptiness and deconstructions more closely. Self-deconstruction in Buddhism are to be read anthropologically, namely as the world-renouncing logic of negativity which was originally the (sacrificial) logic of world-renouncers. Buddhist non-sense also has its deep roots in festive and dionysian non-sense represented by world-renouncer as the specialist of sacred that means a crisis and indifferentiation of sense and logic. Unlike Derrida, Mdhyamika Buddhists do not see their deconstructive non-sense as a consequence that needs justification. For
Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's Differences from Buddhism, in Philosophy East and West 25, no. 4 (1975), 409. Cai Zongqi, Derrida and Seng-Zhao: Linguistic and Philosophical Deconstructions, in Philosophy East and West 43, no. 3 (1993), 394, 400.
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them, such non

-sense helps lead to enlightenment beyond language and

conceptuality. Their deconstructive endeavors are geared to none other than dawning of Nirvana upon the transcendence of language and conceptual thinking.31 Therefore the similarity between linguistic deconstructionism of Derrida and sacrificial selfdeconstruction of Buddhism that was originally the specific dharma of world-renouncer seems to be only formalistic. Girard considers deconstruction as a formalism, an evacuation of content in favor of linguistic play. Girard reproves formalist exclusivity and tendency for its implicit nihilism, arguing for a return to content of historical, social, and psychical meaning. 32 Instead of formalistic and linguistic preoccupation with Buddhist voidness, the recontextualization of Buddhist emptiness and other world-negating values and concepts into the anthropological context of world-renunciation and rediscovery of anthropological content of Buddhist nothingness helps to grasp violent dynamics and complexities at the social anthropological level that are hidden in seemingly pure formal-logical concepts of Buddhist nothingness. In his work Theory and Its Terrors, Girard criticized the celebration of form and formalistic and idealistic bias in literary studies during the time of avant-garde. Formalistic studies were, according to Girard, becoming more and more unsubstantial. Girard maintains that this background is necessary to understand why the new European methodologies of structuralism and deconstruction as represented by such figures as Barthes, Lvi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida were so successful in USA. And Saussurian linguistics became a means to confirm and reinforce the expulsion of content. (198) Post -structuralism continued to rely on structural linguistics to discredit the referentiality of all texts. 33 Critically examining the expulsion of social anthropological content often found in many modern and postmodern Buddhist discourse, we must trace back to the violent and sacrificial origins of Buddhist philosophy and logic, instead of being preoccupied with the radical formalization and decontextualization of world-renouncing conceptuality and logic in Buddhism. Unlike the formalistic or linguistic expulsion of world-renouncing content, the conceptual roots of Buddhist nothingness can be traced
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Zongqi, Derrida and Seng-Zhao: Linguistic and Philosophical Deconstructions, 400. Robert Doran, Editors Introduction, in Ren Girard, Mimesis and Theory. Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005. ed. Robert Doran (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), xxiv. 33 Ren Girard, Mimesis and Theory. Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 199.

back to the social anthropological content and context of world-renunciation. Voidness war originally dharma of world-renouncer. Girardian radical anthropological deconstruction of Buddhist emptiness can be considered more radical than the linguistic deconstruction. The deconstructive critique of metaphysics, logocentrism, ontotheology, and the like, corresponds, according to McKenna, in its structure and dynamics to Girards critique of sacrificial practices. The occlusions and exclusions to which writing, the grapheme, are subjected, are comparable with the destiny of the sacrificial victim. It is as if Derrida describes as happening to the linguistic signifier something that Girard describes as happening at the foundation of cultural institutions. 34 The non-sensical and Dionysian analyzed in Buddhist logic and philosophy has the trace of its "violent" origins. The reconciliatory victim is the originary trace or the arche- trace of this violence. After deliberating on the pivotal terms in the analyses of Derrida, Girard see that beyond the deconstruction of philosophical concepts, it is always a question of the paradoxes of the sacred. This is also true for a reading of Heidegger. Everything that he says concerning being can also be said of the sacred, but philosophers will, as Girard argues, hardly admit this since they have no desire to go back beyond Plato and the preSocratics to consider Greek Religion. 35 Not only being of Heidegger, but also of nothingness of Buddhism is said of the sacred (le sacr) represented by the emptying world-renoucer as the specialists of sacred and festivals. Emptiness is to be explicated conceptually as world-renouncing values of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The Bodhisattva, when practicing the Perfection of Wisdom does not perceive the existence of a Bodhisattva. Why is this? Bodhisattva is empty. 36 Therefore emptiness of renouncer is also sacrificial: the purpose of the emptiness meditations is said to be to abandon the ordinary idea of self and are sometimes linked to the death of the (worldrenouncing) meditator, as he dissolves his ordinary self into the dharmakya. 37 In spite of similarity between Derrida's deconstruction of logocentric texts and Girard's
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Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 12. 35 Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 64. 36 Luis O. Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, in The Christ and the Bodhisattva, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 156. 37 Elizabeth Enligh, Vajrayogin. Her Visualizations, Rituals, and Forms. A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001), 130.

deconstruction of human culture, a close social anthropological reading of Buddhist nothingness using Girards mimetic theory in order to bring clarity to much paradoxical and non-logical language and logic in Buddhist texts means the more radical deconstruction that reaches the mechanisms of the sacred and no longer hesitates to come to terms with the surrogate victim. 38 The world-renouncing teaching on the emptiness of all phenomena is a core basis of Buddhist philosophy. But this teaching does not connote nihilism. Contrary to a common misconception equating world-renouncing emptiness on the part of selfemptying renouncer with nihilism, grasping and meditating on the doctrine of emptiness is a soteriological step towards Buddhist liberation that was originally dharma of worldrenouncer. Buddhist negativism is not to be understood as nihilism, but to be read anthropologically from the viewpoint of negating and emptying dharma of worldrenouncer. Renunciation, it is claimed, is a negative state- as its very name suggests a denial of all that makes society what it is. Renunciation is essentially a negative state constituting an anti-structure, a total rejection and the reversal of the value system of society. It is defined not by what it is, but by its rejection of the social structures. Worldrenunciation is not defined which is not defined by its own dharma, but by the negation of the dharma of life-in-the-world. Its dharma consists in the denial of the dharma of society. 39 And world-renouncer is the exception, who is defined by what he has given up rather than by what he does. His dharma consists of prohibitions rather than injunctions. 40 By providing an anthropologically radicalized interpretative framework, this new reading of Buddhist discourse about emptiness and nothingness from the viewpoint of world-renouncers self-negating dharma offers fresh and illuminating views. Tracing the violent origins of Buddhist nothingness and voidness, an attempt for conceptual explication of Buddhist nothingness against the background of self-renouncing and selfemptying dharma of world-renouncer has been made. Deconstruction of Buddhist nothingness and voidness needs an (social) anthropological and historical foundation that literally makes sense of its proliferation of paradoxical (anti-) concepts in Buddhist
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Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 64. 39 Patrick Olivelle, A Definition of World Renunciation, Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde Sdasiens 19 (1975), 75, 80, 83. 40 Patrick Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 67.

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philosophy and logic.

Paradoxical Unity of the Reconciliatory Victims The structural similarity between Christ and Bodhisattva was commonly pointed out in the Buddhist-Christian studies. The image of Jesus suggests that of a bodhisattva, the embodiment of selfless compassion for sentient beings. 41 Whereas Bodhisattvas are free of the attachment to self owing to their insight into the emptiness of persons and all things, Jesus was, according to Keel, free of preoccupation with himself owing to his complete trust in the God of unconditional love.42 Some Buddhists believe Jesus Christ was a bodhisattva. The comparison between the Bodhisattva ideal and Christ in the phenomenological approach 43 can be radicalized in the sense of the symbolic unity of the reconciliatory victims that encompasses the entire religious history of humanity.44 Mimetic theory claims that human communities unite around their own transfigured and sacralized victims because they first united against them as in the case of both Tarquin and Caesar. Thus the foundational victim becomes a transcendental being who sometimes rewards and sometimes punishes. Such is the mimetic genesis of divine ancestors, sacred legislators, full-fledged divinities.
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The role of victims is

foundational for culture. Mimetic theory of the surrogate victim as the foundation of culture seems relevant and illuminating for the comprehension of the violent paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation in Buddhism. For Girard, the working basis of human thought, the process of symbolization is rooted in the surrogate victim. Through the radical (social-) anthropological re-reading of Buddhist emptiness and nothingness as the sacrificial values and dharma of the world-renouncer, we can interpret the founding, differentiating and world-constructing role of Buddhist world-renouncer in
Hee-Sung Keel, Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective, Buddhist-Christian Studies 16 (1996) : 169-185 ; and see Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Steven C. Rockefeller, eds., The Christ and the Bodhisattva (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987 ). 42 Keel, Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective, 175-76 43 Michael von Brck und Whalen Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1997), 321. 44 Ren Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer. trans. Pascale Veldboer (Mnster: LIT, 1997), 161. See also Die paradoxale Einheit alles Religisen in the mimetic theory of Ren Girard (Wolfgang Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen. 3th edition (Mnster: LIT, 2008), 307-310. 45 Ren Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, first published in 1991 by Oxford University Press, New York. This edition published in 2000, p. 204.
41

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terms of the reconciliatory victims generating and differentiating role. Thus violent paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation and of civilizational contribution of world-renouncer could be explained in the sense of the founding role of victimage mechanism for the whole of human culture. Sacrificial victim becomes the foundation of the new order and the origin of all structure. The generative and founding mechanism of culture, religion and all mythology described by Girard casts an anthropological light on the tragic and the Dionysian and the sacralizing misinterpretation of world-renouncer considered as gods on earth.46 Discussion of the function of the Dionysian in literary texts has been aided by Girards interpretive work, who has noted the special relationship Euripidean and Sophoclean tragedy share with specific concepts of violence and the sacred. We can also observe the Dionysiac elimination of distinctions and violent indifferentiation in Buddhist texts, especially in the ambivalent, liminal and tragic life of world-renouncer as the specialists of violent sacred. Girards views on staged crimes and methodical transgression of taboos on the side of the reconciliatory victims helps to throw fresh light on the exceptional breaking and transgression of Bodhisattva in the path of initiation. The initiatory vows of Bodhisattva involves exceptional breaking of basic moral or disciplinary precepts in order to accomplish a higher aim. Thus, a Bodhisattva vows to abandon not committing one of the seven physical and verbal sins. A Bodhisattva should kill a killer if that is the only way to prevent him from killing many other people; should rob a tyrant of his country if that is the only way to deliver the people from oppression; should commit sexual misconduct if that is the only way to save the life of a person so distraught by passion they will otherwise kill themselves or someone else. These examples of exceptional licence to break the basic rules of morality in special cases of altruistic motivation 47 is to be read from the perspective of founding mechanism of surrogate victim. The transgressions reflect the crimes attributed to the reconciliatory victims to justify expulsion or murder. Oedipus the surrogate victim is unique in at least one respect: he alone is guilty of patricide and incest. He is presented as a monstrous
46 See Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus. Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards, 1.4.1. Transgression des Bodhisattva; 1.4.2. Bodhisattva, Christus und Feindesliebe. 47 Robert A. F. Thurman, The Buddhist Messiahs: The Magnificent Deeds of the Bodhisattvas, in The Christ and the Bodhisattva, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 84-5.

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exception to the general rule of mankind; he resembles nobody, and nobody resembles him.48. By giving a radically sociological reading of the historical forms of transcendence, 49mimetic theory of Ren Girard decodes the simulated transgression of sacred and world-renouncing Bodhisattva in his initiatory path. Faure has pointed out the ideology of transgression and the apparent transgression of the Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and saints. Transgression constitutes a determining hagiographical motif in East Asian Buddhist chronicles. There are two basic types of antinomianism: a naturalist or spontaneist tendency, according to which the saints hubris places him above ordinary moral rules as in the case of Tantric or Chan madmen; and a systematic ritual inversion of the rule. 50 A paradoxical justification for Buddhist transgression appears in some Buddhist texts: one may kill, steal, and have sex to the extent that one realizes that everything is empty. 51 The Chan school, Faure argues, was held captive in this double bind, in which monks had to adhere strictly to the rule while being confronted with the higher model of transgression. 52 A bodhisattva might act if necessary in ways contrary to the normal rules for virtuous action, while a fully enlightened being is beyond the laws of karma. Tibetan myth and folklore are full of tricksterlike figures, whose apparently immoral acts obey a higher morality. 53 Undifferentiating transgression of Bodhisattvas needs to be considered as imaginary crimes of the reconciliatory victims that should remain invisible if these forces are to maintain themselves. Girards thesis on the undifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victims provides a interpretative framework for understanding Dionysian transgression of tragic hero Bodhisattva: The transgressor restores and even establishes the order he has somewhat transgressed in anticipation. The greatest of all delinquents is, Girard maintains, transformed into a pillar of society.54 Bodhisattvas willingness to be punished for the
48

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1977), 72. 49 Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 178. 50 Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 98, 100. 51 Ibid., 98, 100. 52 Ibid., 139. 53 Geoffrey Samue, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, 1993), 214. 54 Ren Girard, The Scapegoat ( Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 42.

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violent acts he would force himself to commit55 can be well comprehended from the viewpoint of founding mechanism that produces religion the collective transference against a victim who is first reviled and then sacralized. 56 Oedipus the surrogate victim becomes the repository of all the communitys ills and receptacle for universal shame. 57 Bodhisattva is willing to transgress the norm and to be burdened with the bad karma of killing. 58 Sophocles two Oedipus tragedies also show a pattern of transgression and salvation long familiar to scholars. The beneficial Oedipus at Colonus supercedes the earlier, evil Oedipus, but he does not negate him. 59 Buddhas bad karma and his undifferentiating crime could be understood within the conceptual framework of reconciliatory victims crime: Buddha and the monks were forced to eat inferior food as the result of bad karma which the monks accumulated during one of the Buddhas previous lives.60 The Buddha describes twelve previous lives in which he performed evil deeds, and states that these deeds resulted in great suffering. 61 It was karmically determined not only that Buddha would perform painful austerities but also that in a previous life he would slander a Buddha! Not only this Buddha, but also previous Buddhas too suffered bad karma. 62 Buddhas bad karma of his slandering an innocent Pratyekabuddha in a former life, of his slandering a bhiku of six psychic powers in a previous life out of jealousy, of murdering his brother for wealth in a former birth, of killing a visiting wrestler in a match, of knocking over the bowl of a Pratyekabuddha, and of his reviling the Buddha Kyap saying, Bald headed rmaa, enlightenment is difficult to obtain, 63 all these bad karma is to be interpreted as transgressive and undifferentiating crimes of reconciliatory victims. With regard to the hagiography of the saints in early Buddhism, there are some stereotyped themes that we may expect to recur in the hagiographies composed later and pertaining to later local saints, even in foreign lands. The saint is destined to a prolonged life of activity in
Gustavo Benavides, Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddholoy in the Age of Fascism, in Curators of the Buddha. The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 176. 56 Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 177. 57 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 77, 85. 58 Lambert Schmithausen, Zum Problem der Gewalt im Buddhismus, in Krieg und Gewalt in den Weltreligionen. Fakten und Hintergrnde, eds.. A.T. Khoury, E. Grundmann and H.-P. Mller (Freiburg/Br.: Verlag Herder, 2003), 95. 59 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 86. 60 Jonathan S. Walters, The Buddhas Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravda Buddhism, In Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 37, no. 1 (1990), 83. 61 Walters, The Buddhas Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravda Buddhism, 76. 62 Walters, The Buddhas Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravda Buddhism, 87. 63 Guang Xing, The Bad Karma of the Buddha, in Buddhist Studies Review 19, no. 1 (2002), 19-29.
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this world, and this long presence is featured as a retribution for some evil karmic acts in the past. 64 As the gods age, their evil dimension becomes, according to Girard, blurred to the advantage of their beneficent side, but vestiges of the original demon always remain. If we are content to repeat the standard clichs about the Olympian gods, we will see only their majesty and their serenity. In classical art the positive elements are generally in the foreground, but behind them, even in the case of Zeus, there are the wild pranks of the god, as they are called with an indulgence. Everyone agrees to excuse these escapades with a knowingly complicit smile. In reality the wild pranks are the traces of crimes similar to those of Oedipus and other divinized scapegoats: parricide, incest, bestial fornication, the other horrible crimes. The wild pranks are, for Girard, essential to the primitive phenomenon of divinity.65 The indifferentiating crimes of Bodhisattvas seem to be excused in the name of skillful means. The whole idea of bad karma is rejected and considered as a skillful means (upyakaualya) of the Buddha to save sentient beings.
66

The sacrificial process requires a certain degree of sacralizing

misunderstanding. The secret of the mechanism of sacralization lies in the sacred misunderstanding regarding reconciliatory victims.

The Tragic and the Dionysian Girard acknowledges the structural similarities between the gospel enactment and the basic workings of all other religions. These analogies are, for Girard, real ones. 67 Jesus, as Jean-Michel Oughourlian has formulated, provides the scapegoat par excellence. In Jesus the victim par excellence, the previous history of mankind is summed up, concluded and transcended. 68 The only true scapegoats are those we cannot recognize as such. By submitting to violence, Christ reveals and uproots the

64

Stanley J. Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984), 23. 65 Ren Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 74. 66 Xing, The Bad Karma of the Buddha, 25. 67 Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 217. 68 Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 209.

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structural matrix of all religion. 69 The Christ, because of the scandal of particularity, must be unique while Bodhisattvas are manifold. While Christians are traditionally exhorted to be like Christ, Buddhists are called to be Bodhisattvas. 70 The essential difference between the uniqueness of Christ and the plurality of Bodhisattvas is not to be overlooked. Unlike Christianity and Islam, the historicity of a unique founding figure is not intrinsic in Buddhism: all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are the same and interchangeable. The idea of a plurality of Buddhas is therefore common.71 Heroic virtue separates the Bodhisattva from ordinary human beings. Viewed from a Girardian perspective, extreme self-immolation of tragic heroes (Bodhisattvas) could be considered as belonging to the same idea of the sacrificial system of mythological representation based on the false transcendence of a victim who is made sacred. 72 The self-immolation of Bodhisattvas for the sake of all living beings sounds too extreme to our ears.
73

The language of Bodhisattvas vows is consistent with the

hyperbolic images of the legends and proportionate to the heroic scale of the Bodhisattva ideal. 74 The self-sacrifice performed by Bodhisattvas are jumping from a cliff, self-immolation, and cutting oneself into pieces. These practices of self-sacrifice are said to be for the purpose of enlightening sentient beings to realize Buddhahood. 75 The ritual confirmation of the Bodhisattva ideal is the reenactment of the Bodhisattva myth. Mythic or celestial Bodhisattvas act as models for human behavior. The heroic and tragic self-sacrifice of mythic Bodhisattvas acts as models for the self-sacrifice in Buddhist history. The vogue of self-immolations through fire has been well studied in the Indian and Chinese contexts. 76 With mixed feelings toward the work of Girard, Orzech has rightly pointed to an internalization of the process of victimage in many Buddhist self-immolation. While
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 178-9. 70 Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (ed), The Christ and the Bodhisattva (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 39. 71 Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 274. 72 Girard, The Scapegoat, 166. 73 Luis O. Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, in The Christ and the Bodhisattva, eds. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 153. 74 Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, 169. 75 Cheng-mei Ku, The Mahssaka View of Women, in Buddhist Thought and Ritual, ed. David J. Kalupahana (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 167. 76 Bernard Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism., trans. Phyllis Brooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 206.
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Buddhism rejected the practice of Vedic sacrifice employing animal substitutes, it nonetheless adopted the underlying logic of the sacrifice. The sacrificial and violent model of Buddhist behavior originates in the Vedic tradition of fire sacrifice. This sacrificial mythic and ritual structure has, according to Orzech, persisted for 3000 years. 77 Kleine also has interpreted many religious suicide and self-immolation in Buddhist history as a kind of hidden human sacrifice. 78 Budha is burning because he practices asceticism (tapas). 79 The cranial protuberance on the Buddha's skull (ushnisha) becomes symbolic of the enlightenment realised by a yogi and proceeds flames. Ushnisha is derived from ush to be flaming, to be fiery. This might be considered in terms of internalization of sacrifice and of sacrificial fires. Through the ceremony of renunciation, sacrificial fires are not abolished, but rather internalized, inhaled. Sacrificial fires are made to mount back into oneself (samropaa), such that the renouncers own person thenceforth becomes at once the seat of, and the raw material for, a burning up, a permanent oblation, offered upon that internal flame. World-renouncer is often designated as a tapasvin, as one who heats himself up. Constantly performing the essential sacrifice, the cooking of the self, he renders useless and impossible the cooking of any substitute.80 Unlike Christ, there are some the Dionysian in the mythic story of Bodhisattvas. Many Buddhist story seem to assert the superiority of transgression, its status as proof of awakening. 81 The concept of pivoting or inversion(paravtti) seems to underlie the notion according to which, instead of rejecting desire and sexuality, it is better to transmute them through meditation. According to Faure, the logic of transcendence that characterizes Buddhist concentration and wisdom implies, in its very principle, a transgression of all fixed rules. Such an inversion is precisely what allows the boddhisattva to consumate the sexual act without being defiled by it. We are told, for instance, that the Korean priest Wnhyo (617-686) did not hesitate to transgress Buddhist precepts by frequently visiting brothels. Buddhism remained, as Faure argues,

77 Charles D. Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, in Curing Violence: Essays on Ren Girard, ed. Mark I. Wallace und Theophus H. Smith (California: Polebridge Press, 1994), 144-5, 152, 156. 78 Christoph Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im ostasiatischen Buddhismus, in Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11. 2003. 34-39. 79 M. Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 332. 80 Malamoud. Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 47. 81 Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4.

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ambivalent concerning its condemnation of transgression. 82 In the transgressive combination between the Buddhist saints and the sacred, but defiled courtesan, we can find the Dionysiac elimination of distinctions. As Marra argues, the Buddhist institution attempts to rationalize a disruptive dionysian cult of fertility that they condemn as sinful practice but uphold as an accomplishment leading to spiritual enlightenment. 83 Girards theory about la non-diffrence dionysiaque could shed light on the transgressive union between Buddhist holy man and a impure courtesan who guides the process of enlightenment through the complicated philosophy of nondifferentiation Much of the literature on the Buddhist saints focuses on the fundamental role played by courtesans in the process of enlightenment. The chief courtesan of Kanzaki, who appears to him as bodhisattva Fugen, is certainly the best, but not the only example. 84 The theory of Girard on the expulsion, violent reconciliation and resulting sacralization of the victim could make sense of the sacralization of courtesans as Bodhisattva. Whenever the Buddhist saint reopens his eyes, the courtesan appears, again singing her luring song, until she suddenly dies and a fragrance spreads through the sky to indicate her arrival to the Pure Land. The death of the defiled scapegoat assures Shk of a perfect Buddhist realizations as well as protecting him and the common people from the threat of defilement.85 The ghost of the unknown courtesan is pacified and cleansed of impurities by the sacred waters of the Buddhist ocean of nondifferentiation.86 Buddhist mythographers, as Marra maintains, resorted to outcasts (hinin) as filters between the deity and the people, scapegoats of exclusion without whom monks could not engage in their discussion with the sacred. The paradigm of the shamaness/courtesan/bodhisattva became a common topic in one strain of anecdotal literature of the Japanese Middle Ages that asked the courtesan to play the role of spokeswoman for the Buddha.87 Following Girards insight into the violence of Nietzsches Dionysus, we can trace violent origins of the Dionysian surrounding the tragic and heroic specialists of the
82 83

Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 99. Michele Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, in The Journal of Asian Studies 52, no.1 (1993), 62. 84 Ibid., 59. 85 Ibid., 52, 56. 86 Ibid., 63. 87 Ibid., 55.

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sacred. Creative Renunciaiton in Envy Society Seen from the viewpoint of the civilizational paradox of world-constructing worldrenunciation 88 that are explained in the light of Girards comprehensive explanation of violent origins of culture, we can acknowledge some positive potential from Bodhisattva ethics that are creation of western Buddhism and are often redefined in a contemporary Western sense. Based on some stereotypes of western Buddhism, Leo D. Lefebure has pointed out some meditative devotional wisdom and potentials. 89 A specific literary genre, the so-called meditative devotional literature is popularized and positioned in a field of interfaith relationships. 90 In spite of some devotional value derived from the radical altruism of heroic and mythic Bodhisattvas, 91 critical reflection of the founding mechanism and sacred misrepresentation surrounding the invisible victim found in the story of tragic hero Bodhisattva needs to be made. Dumoulin has rightly highlighted the fundamental difference between Christian charity and the altruism of Bodhisattvas. 92 Through the radical anthropological rereading and hermeneutics of suspicion, I have deconstructed the mythological and the Dionysian surrounding the tragic heroes Bodhisattvas from Girards standpoint concerning genetic mechanism of culture. This structuring mechanism is not intrinsically obscure, but it is paradoxical from the standpoint of established perspectives, being essentially rooted in the delusions of unanimous victimage. 93 Through the social anthropological re-reading of Buddhist emptiness against the background of renouncers dharma, the paradox of world civilizations based on the world-renouncing values and orientations was descriptively interpreted in the sense of
For detailed discussion about the violent paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation and Bodhisattva (ethics), see Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus. Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards, 3.2. Transformationskraft des Opfers und der Bodhisattva-Ethik, 3.2.3. Friedenspotential des Buddhismus im Reich der Eifersucht. 89 Leo D. Lefebure, "Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue," Contagion: Journal of Violence. Mimesis, and Culture 3 (Spring 1996), 121-140. 90 U. Berner, C. Bochinger and K. Hock, Das Christentum aus der Sicht der Anderen zur Einfhrung, in Das Christentum aus der Sicht der Anderen. Religionswissenschaftliche und missionswissenschaftliche Beitrge, ed. U. Berner, C. Bochinger and K. Hock (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2005), 13. 91 Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Den Lwen brllen hren. Zur Hermeneutik eines christlichen Verstndnisses der buddhistischen Heilsbotschaft. Beitrge zur kumenischen Theologie 23 (Paderborn: Schningh 1992), 563. 92 H. Dumoulin, Der Religise Heilsweg des Zen-Buddhismus und die christliche Spiritualitt, in Studia Missionalia XII. Buddhism. Edita a Facultate Missiologica in Pont. Universitate Gregoriana. Rom. 1962, 113. 93 Ren Girard, To double business bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), xiv.
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the violent paradox of differentiating and founding mechanism of reconciliatory victims. In spite of this sacrificial reading of Buddhist world-renunciation, the renunciatory wisdom of Buddhism, mainly its devotional potentials is to be acknowledged. We live now in the hot indifferentiation of envy society. The gradual erosion of every dharma, of every rigid social hierarchy and the increasing democratization of societies has plunged the modern individual into new mimetic crisis, deep into ever more extreme oscillations of desire and resentment. 94 Following Nietzsche and unlike iek, Sloterdijk has valued the hygienical of Buddhist ethic of detachment in modern society of envious resentment.95 But we have already analyzed the dionysian undifferentiation of festivals represented by the tragic heroes of world-renunciation in the light of differentiating mechanism of foundational scapegoat. The psychotherapeutic effects produced by meditation of wildness in this age of undifferentiating global village is to be affirmed, without downplaying the sacrificial dimension of healing Buddhas: Through self-immolation by fire, Bodhisattva Kemadatta literally became a living lamp. This tale of Kemadattas offering is identified as the recounting of a pivotal past life of kyamuni, the Supreme Physician. The flaming body of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is an outer indication of the achievement of deep meditative trance. 96 Nirvana is the extinction of (sacrficial) fire on the side of world-renouncer, namely the sacrificial death of tragic heroes. Nirvana means extinction of a lamp or fire. Just as the flame of a lamp struck by a gust of wind or lack of fuel disappears and cannot be traced, so also does a Buddhist saint freed from name and form disappear. We need non-sacrificial and creative renunciation. Girard is not unconscious of the sacrificial dimension that is hidden in the complete nirvanesque renunciation (ce renoncement nirvanesque total). 97 The psychotherapeutic effect is only by-product of originally (world-renouncing) meditation.98 In terms of civilizational paradox of the world-constructing world-renunciation and wisdom from forest, we can expect some
Pierpaolo Antonello and Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha, Introduction: One long argument from the beginning to the end, in Evolution and Conversion. Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, R. Girard with Pierpaolo Antonello and Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha (London: Continuum, 2008), 13. 95 Peter Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht: Notiz zu Rene Girards anthropologischer Sendung, epilogue to Rene Girard, Ich sah den Satan vom Himmel fallen wie einen Blitz: Eine kritische Apologie des Christentums (Mnchen: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002), 247-8. 96 Raoul Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979), 32. 97 See Leo D. Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue,. In Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 3 (1996), 122. 98 Heinrich Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik (Freiburg-Mnschen, Alber Verlag 1966), 217.
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positive, devotional and peace-making capability from modern meditation-Buddhism, without neglecting the violent paradoxes of the sacred represented by the worldrenouncing specialists of the undifferentiating festivals.

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