Michael Cherry

LITR 580
Paper numero dos

Questioning the Sky:

Tantric Buddhism and the Loosening of the Corset of Modernism

We are the savages of outer modernity.

Robert Thurman makes this statement in his book, Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty, and
the Pursuit of Real Happiness (217). He makes an important contrast between two different
cultures, European and Tibetan, noting the movement of the former toward outer, material
success and security as opposed to the movement of the latter towards inner realization. The
novels discussed in this paper The Fan-Makers Inquisition and Mason & Dixon are both
concerned with the new ideas about identity, the body, and the world, that formed as the socalled modern period began in the eighteenth-century. Though they refer to the period in
which this change was beginning, they are the harbingers of its imminent demise, using the
backdrop of early modernity to emerge from late modernisms still-smoldering ashes.
In this paper I will consider how these novels turn this modern form the novel,
after all, began around the same time during which the events of these novels occur against
itself, stumbling towards some (necessarily) uncertain liberation. Moreover, I will play these
novels against an alternate tradition, that of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism. Adherents of this

culture were, and remain, concerned with the same questions of identity, body, and reality.
Their conclusions are in many ways similar, but their psychological response to these
conclusions is very different.
Two Kinds of Enlightenment
It may be rather obvious to note the disparity between the use of the word
enlightenment in relation to East and West. But it is telling that one word can mean two
very different things. In this linguistic ambiguity, we can see an indication of the confusion
of the European mind. (The Eastern mind has its own confusions, but thats for another
paper.) Thurman describes the European enlightenment this way:
Europeans developed industry and intervened radically in the process of
nature; they challenged taboos, secularized everything, and gained enormous new
knowledge of the physical sciences; they set out to transform nature, and they
succeeded to a very great degree. When lack of wealth got in their way, they
invented better weapons and travel technology and proceeded to subjugate all
nations and races who did not share their science, power of travel, or warfare. They
conquered the world. (215)
This is not exactly news, but it bears repeating for its relevance to the novels I will discuss
later. It is also relevant for its contrast to what was going on at the time in Tibet. While
Europeans were busy shaking off the last bits of residual medieval Christian inwardness,
storming headlong into full immersion in matter and the so-called outer world, Tibetans
were experiencing an intensification of the Buddhist mystic worldview that had informed
them for centuries. It is a fascinating contrast, and hopefully relevant.

A renewal of sorts was touched off in Tibetan Buddhism in the eighteenth century
by the renowned mystic Jigme Lingpa (Gyatso 124-145). A member of the Nyingma-pa
lineage, the oldest but at this time least influential sect of Tibetan Buddhism, he achieved
renown for his work as Terton, or gatherer of treasure texts. It is believed by Tibetan
Buddhists, especially of the Nyingma-pas, that great masters of the past such as
Padmasambhava had placed instructional and inspirational texts in the mindstreams of their
best students, so that future incarnations of these students would later be able to pluck these
psychic texts from the collective unconscious and share them with the world when the time
was right. Padmasambhava was the Indian Tantric master who came to Tibet in the eighth
century to convert the pre-Buddhist demons into Dharma guardians, making Tibet safe for
Buddhist practice. Thus began a revolutionary overhaul of the whole society, based upon
Buddhist practices of psychic control and inwardness. Jigme Lingpa believed himself a
reincarnation of King Trisong Detsen, the king who invited Padmasambhava to Tibet and
who became one of his principal students. Lingpa discovered and promulgated a series of
texts that had a reinvigorating effect on Nyingma-pa practice. At this time, the newest and
most scholarly sect, the Gelug-pas, had attained ascendancy, and Tibetan Buddhism was
languishing a bit in an environment of intellectual dreariness and political wrangling.
Lingpas successors founded a movement that, though technically non-sectarian, was
informed mainly by Nyingma-pa mystic visionary tendencies. This movement enlivened
Tibetan religious life at the end of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth.
Thus, at the time of Europes commitment (in every sense of the word) to secular reason and
empiricism, Tibetans were enjoying an unprecedented closeness to a very different

enlightenment than that which the heroes in our novels would attempt to navigate. As I
hope to get around to showing, they did this by a fuller and much more joyful embrace of
the very uncertainty and openness that would later spell the death of Enlightenment
modernism, European-style. How did they sidestep our European materialism and paranoia?
What do they have in common with our intrepid postmodern purveyors of fiction? And
what the hell does Jigme Lingpa have to do with the Marquis de Sade and Thomas Pynchon?
The latter are hardly Buddhists, or even Tantrikas, but, I hope to show, they are signs of
impending convergence between East and West. It is my contention that the Buddhists
have already explored the areas dear to postmodernists in greater depth and greater beauty.
So, before getting to the novels (not that Im trying to avoid them or anything), lets see what
Jigme Lingpa and his compatriots actually have to say about identity and all that other stuff.

Illusion Doesnt Mean Theres Nothing There

As noted above, it is a commonly held Tibetan Buddhist idea that it is possible to

discover in the mindstream a text that was written centuries earlier but never committed to
physical paper or read by anyone but the discoverers previous incarnation. This idea makes
sense in a belief-system such as their, a belief-system that is predicated from the start upon
the ultimate untenability of all beliefs.

Sure, we construct our reality, they would say.

Whats the big deal?

That identity, the body, and reality themselves are constructed is a basic assumption
of Buddhism, Tibetan and otherwise.

The key to their understanding of this

constructedness is the Buddhist idea of shunyata, or emptiness. Contrary to some Western

misinterpretations, this does not mean empty as in devoid of all content, a mere blankness
or nothingness. Rather, the essential point is that all things are empty of fixed and abiding
self. They are empty of certainty. In the words of a contemporary American teacher of
Tibetan Buddhism, Reginald Ray,
Tibetan Buddhism talks about twofold egolessness and the corresponding
two veils of our ignorance. First is the veil of conflicting emotions that needs to
be eliminated leading to the first kind of egolessness, the egolessness of self. Second
is the veil of knowables, the removal of which yields the egolessness of phenomena.
It is the recognition that the I or me that I have imagined throughout my life,
that I have tried to protect, augment, and aggrandize, does not exist. [Similarly,] we
see that external objects have no self or essence. (Ray 321-323)
Persons and things exist only in a composite, interconnected, impermanent way that forever
necessarily eludes all conceptual imputation upon them. The names and measurements we
apply to the world are mere attempts to stabilize a world that is not so much unstable but
beyond all questions of stability and instability. Again, this does not mean the world does
not exist. Tibetan lama Traleg Rinpoche explains,
Most of the time, when Buddhists use the notion of maya they really use it as
equivalent to illusion [rather than hallucination]. Illusion doesnt mean that theres
nothing there. [With] an illusion, there is something there, but its distorted.
(Traleg 43)

Thus it is said in Buddhism not that reality is mere dream, but that it is like a dream. The
question is simply how to engage this elusive world. According to contemporary Tantric
master Kalu Rinpoche, it involves compassion without reference point (Ray 325). When
one does not know where one stands, or upon what, there is nothing left but the great,
luminous unnamable.

This is clearly a far cry from the European Enlightenments

application of the mind as weapon, as instrument of dominance. But if these Tibetans were
not applying their considerable powers of intellect and imagination to the exploration and
subjugation of the external world, to what were they applying them?

Primordial Warmth and Selfless Love

Hidden in the last thousand years of Tibets civilization is a continuous process of

inner revolution and cool evolution. In spiritual history, Tibet has been the secret dynamo
that throughout this millenium has slowly turned the outer world toward enlightenment
(Thurman 225). As we have seen, during the period that Europe associates with early
modernism, this Tibetan dynamo was running at full intensity. Thurman continues, [The
Tibetan version of] modernist unity of the sacred/secular dichotomy was achieved at the
sacred, not the secular, pole; instead of disenchantment, the whole of reality became
reenchanted.

The magical/ordinary dichotomy was resolved by all becoming magical,

opposite from all becoming routine and mechanical (246).

This is no mere belief system, however. Rather, it is a veritable science of the mind,
a complex and esoteric system of practices and techniques designed to harness the energies

of the psyche and transform them. Since the world, in the Buddhist view, is all Mind
anyway, transformation of mind is transformation of the world. Since the mapping and
containment of space and the uses of the body and sexuality are themes which are taken up
in the novels Ill be getting to one of these days, it is useful here to focus on the two major
forms of Tantric practice, the so-called Father and Mother Tantras.
In the Mahayoga-yana, or Father Tantra, one practices the visualization of oneself as
deity, as a Buddha or related being. This being may be male or female, regardless of the
sex of the person doing the visualization. Sometimes one visualizes oneself as male and
female in sexual union. One further visualizes oneself as part of the larger Buddha realm
occupied by this specific being, symbolized by the now-familiar image of the mandala.
Realizing that all of our images and conceptions of reality are in fact complex visualizations,
we gain a unique entry into the underpinnings of the conventional world and gain a certain
kind of unparalleled leverage over it (Ray 124).

Thus, we can see that the need to gain

mastery over the external world is not unknown to Tibetan Buddhists; it is simply acted
upon from a very different angle. Questions of identity are clearly handled much more
boldly. Further, in addition to visualization, one uses the technique of mantra repetition.
Thus words as well as images are involved in this mental creation of the world --- as they
always are, for everyone. Mahayoga makes clear that these methods are only intensifications
of the ways in which we all create our worlds all the time.
In the Anuyoga-yana, or Mother Tantra,
the emphasis shifts away from external visualization toward the completion stage, in
which one meditates on the inner or subtle body with its primary energy centers

(chakras) and its prana (winds or subtle energies), nadis (the inner pathways along
which energy travels), and bindu (the consciousness).

[Further,} in anuyoga, all

appearances are seen as the three great mandalas, and reality is understood as the
deities and their pure lands. (125)
This all becomes very complex in its actual practice. It is strikingly reminiscent of the
intricacies of map-making and scientific measurements of bodies and landscapes that one
finds in our novels. However, once again, it is applied inward, for the transformation of
ones way of looking at the world, and this for its own sake. It is also in anuyoga that the
famous Tantric sexual practice is conducted. A keynote of anuyoga-yana is the perception
of the entire world as governed by passion, understood here not as sexual passion so much
as desire, thirst, and longing to unite with our experience (125). The important part is that
the adepts must have achieved a significant degree of the realization of selflessness, so as to
make the sexual union an experience of emptiness and freedom, not one of clutching and
greed. However, pleasure is of great value in Tantric practice. It is harnessed, not denied.
[Passion] is seen clearly as primordial warmth and selfless love, rather than an invitation for
possession and self-aggrandizement. In such as context, there are no objects to own and
personal territoriality has no meaning (125). This is an obvious contrast to the self-building
and extreme territoriality our novels are trying to unravel. We have seen a bit of what
Tibetan Buddhists have done in response to the burdens of delusional certainties. Let us
turn finally to the novels and see how twentieth-century Western minds are wrestling with
these problems.

Dwelling in the Belly of the Wind

One would think that a story about the Marquis de Sade would have little to do with
the ideals of Tibetan Buddhism. However, as Ducornet presents his story in The Fan-Makers
Inquisition, there are many points of intersection.
First is the important question of freedom. Ducornet implies a conclusion very
similar to that which we have seen from the Tibetans namely, that any true happiness
depends upon freedom of the mind. Certainly Ducornets Sade (because here he is her
creation) is much more attached to the physical world. And his freedom of mind seems to
depend in large part upon his freedom to express it --- though it is suggested he can write,
when deprived of pen and paper, in his mind. His freedom depends, one way or another,
upon the free play of imagination. Sade does not exactly harness his imaginative powers
here, but he at least focuses them enough to allow the energies of his psyche to reveal and
constellate themselves. It would be another century or so before Freud would make clear the
dangers of simply repressing such energies. Clearly, then, Sades use of imagination and
passion to escape the rigidities of the authorities is interestingly similar to the approach of
the Tantrikas.
Another important intersection is the question of identity and reality. While this
may seem a very simple little book, it is in fact very bold when it comes to strategies of
undermining narrative authority. As indicated above, this book is apparently Sades dream.
How else could we be reading this? It is the dream of Ducornets imaginary Sade, who
imagines this book about the fan-maker. He recounts the story of her inquisition; he

recounts the story of her telling of his stories and other stories. This is set against a very real
backdrop of bloody history, bloodied by ideas, by their murderous fantasies of truth.
Such emphasis on painful physical reality differs obviously from the Buddhist view;
consider the difference between entering a Catholic church with its image of a bloodied,
dying Christ, with that of entering a Buddhist temple and its image of a smiling, serene
Buddha. However, the novel itself contains this within a structure of unreality. The
immersion into refracted layers of mutual imagination in this book is dreamlike in a
voluptuous way. Imagination and ideas move from mind to mind, are told and re-told, until
the reader fully inhabits the ideal, a life of the mind. It is thus ironic that this life of the
mind involves such sensuous imaginings.

But thats the world of opposites (dear to

Tantrikas as well as postmodernists): Sade longs to savor the world he wishes would
disappear into nothingness.
As it must, this also demands that the reader consider questions of identity. Beyond
the fact that all of these characters are fabricated by Ducornet, the structure of the narrative
makes it difficult to know what to believe about any of them. The novel opens with the fanmakers evocative words. They are sensual enough to give the reader a sense of intimacy
with her: A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with
the flick of a wrist. It produces its own weather a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair
(8). When the reader eventually finds that this character dies midway into the book, it
becomes clear that she cant be narrating this episode. Again, this is all Sades voice, his
mind. We have been intimate with him in her guise -- and intimate with Ducornet through
his. And if Ducornet is herself a construct

Later in the first section, the fan-maker reads from the manuscript she has been
working on with Sade. Thus the readers enters into another world, that of Landa and his
map-maker, Melchor. Leaving aside the observation that Landa represses his sexuality so
that it becomes mere brutality and that Melchor applies his imagination to a hostile
distortion of the New World for his own self-aggrandizement obvious contrasts to the
Tantric way it is important that we have entered into a further dimension of illusory
persons and events. We have seemingly entered into the hearts of Landa and Melchor who
have been imagined by Sades imagination of the fan-maker and his imagination of himself, s
imagined by Ducornet. Yet this never becomes a mere game. The book itself is enjoyable.
The images give pleasure; this Sade is a compelling personality. This play of identities and
imagination continues throughout the rest of the book, and it ends with Sades recollection
of the fan-makers last letter to him: --- my reverie deepens. Boat, sky, and water dissolve and give
way to distant times, and places I have never seen but where I would travel gladly, if sometimes with
sadness (212). We end with the expression of an imaginary woman of her need to enter her
own imagination. Thus, Ducornet reclaims the soul extinguished by the petty rationality
and empiricism of early modernism.

Measuring Venus

In Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon employs a similar strategy, among others,
though with rather a different tone, and for much longer. His primary linguistic strategy
seems to be a recreation of the sheer density and weight of matter (as conceived by the

modern, European mind) by means of the density of his awkwardly capitalized and
punctuated verbiage. This is echoed by the obvious weight of the tome itself. Thus,
something of the rigors of Mason and Dixons work can be experienced directly by the
reader simply by his or her trying to read this bloody book. This simulation of the contents
of the narrative by means of the physical structure of the book can be considered similar to
the Tantric use of certain physical gestures, hand positions and the like, called mudras to
simulate the imaginal reality of the Buddhas.
However, the narrative strategy is similar to Ducornets, though much less lyrically
and dreamily.

Once again, we do not get the story straight from the author, or his

omniscient linguistic doppelganger, but rather from another character, whose telling of the
story becomes a story in itself as he interacts with his family. The novel opens, in fact, in
this narrative framing space, in Cherrycokes reality, not Mason and Dixons immediate one.
We are thus situated in the act of imagining and telling, of visualization and mantra. And
the relationship of Mason and Dixon to Cherrycoke to his family, and beyond this of them
to Pynchon to the reader, manifests the very interconnectedness celebrated by the Buddhists.
Soon enough we meet the Learned English Dog (who, I cant help it, I can only
visualize as Mr. Peabody from Bullwinkle. Hope this doesnt ruin it for you.) and are thus
indisputably within another, older realm. This is admittedly an ingenious way for Pynchon
to show the two worlds that are here colliding: the old world of belief in fantastic, magical
things, and the mechanistic, mathematical world heralded by Mason and Dixon. It is
noteworthy that Pynchon shows Mason and Dixon to be fully involved in this fantastic

occurrence; they are still as much in the old world as the new. It is fascinating to watch as
they straddle the fence --- or the line, like the duck.
If the reader can recover from this, he is treated to more adventures in this liminal
space between old world and new, and Old World and New, as well as between the narrative
space inhabited by Mason and Dixon and that inhabited by their teller, Cherrycoke.
Pynchon insists on reminding us of Cherrycokes sub-authorial presence. Interestingly, in
one of these episodes, we see his familys children fascinated by a small, mechanical model of
the solar system. We then learn of their creator, a Dr. Nessel. By the time he got to
Philadelphia, he was applying to the miniature greenish-blue globes Mappemondes of some
intricacy, as if there were being reveald to him, one Orrery at a time, a World with a History
even longer than our own, a recognizable Creator, (95). Once again, worlds within
worlds.
That the first section is devoted not to the Mason/Dixon line but to the Transit of
Venus relates very clearly to the Buddhist insight of passions essential role in human
activity. But it was Europes destiny to direct that passion outward, into the subjugation and
control of the outer world. It is daring of Pynchon to devote so much of the book to this.
Mason makes it clear: But on the day of this Transit, all shall suddenly reverse, --- as she is
caught, dark, embodied, solid, against the face of the Sun, --- a Goddess descended from light
to Matter (92). This is the goal, for the intangible to become tangible, to grasp the
ungraspable feminine, to conquer love. It is this movement into material solidity that
characterizes the sordid affairs within the Vroom sequence.

Sexuality and childbirth

commodified, love reduced to economic strategies for mere physical survival.

I think

Pynchon means to indicate not that these actions are new, but that the attitude toward them
became (even) colder and more calculating as the culture moved into the age of
measurement and mechanical precision. The various erotic adventures of Mason and Dixon
mark them as earthly and worldly men. Mason in particular moves from his imaginal lost
beloved into real, physical relationships, sometimes rather sordid. Yet, insofar as Pynchon
seems to take pleasure in the telling of this story, he does not let us judge this descent into
matter too harshly or one-sidedly.
The rest of the book proceeds through their labors of tiresome measurement. They
age into a future that begins to resemble the world we know. The book ends with various
signs of the difference in Mason and Dixons world since the beginning of their work. They
meet a rather ordinary dog and decide to name it Fang or Learned, making light of the
extraordinary episode from earlier days that they can no longer quite seem to believe in.
When this latter dog finally speaks, it is apparently in dreams, for this is the only way
modern, mathematical men can hear dogs speaking to them. That it is a shared dream is
still a poor substitute for the days when such fantastic things could happen without anyone
questioning it at all. Later, Mason has a dream which I think would have made a good end
to the book; it is close enough.
He arises, glides to the Door, and emerges from an ordinary Modern House, in one
of the plainest cities on Earth, to find ascending before him one single dark
Petroglyph. There is some [ancient] writing on some of [its] Structures, but Mason
cannot read it. Does not yet know it is writing. Perhaps when Night has fallen, he
will be able to look up, to question the Sky. (771)

This is the modern predicament. Night falls soon enough on Dixon and then Mason; this is
the only way the modern mind can escape its own shackles. Likewise, the authors of these
two novels have tried to bury the forced coherence and narrative stability of the modern
novel by situating their narratives within shimmering displays of narrative worlds within
worlds, minds within minds. The postmodern novel is a complex beast, and while these two
are among the more playful of the bunch, they nevertheless move in a direction of increasing
complexity, so as to die to the heavy, artificial simplicities of the past and move toward some
more open space. But can complexity ever bring such relief, or does it simply result in
further burden?
Beyond the mahayoga and anuyoga Tantras, there is a final, highest level. This is
atiyoga. In Tibet it is called Dzogchen or Mahamudra; it is very similar to Zen. One makes
use of no visualizations or mantras or chakras or energy channels. There is only silence and
pure openness and letting go. It may be that Pynchon is pursuing a doomed and futile
strategy by trying to use the heavy, complicated form that he does. It may be that Ducornet,
in giving us a multiplicity of voices and selves, wraps the reader tighter in the binds of
intellect that Sades instinctual imagery is supposed to explode.

If the imagistic and

linguistic play that Ducornet and Pynchon engage in have some similarity to Buddhist
Tantra, it stands to reason there is a literature that corresponds to atiyoga, but I dont know
what it is. Like Mason, I cannot read the signs yet; I do not yet recognize such writing. It
would be something simple and unaffected, unconcerned with the literary or historical past,
free from anxiety and metatextuality. James Joyce purportedly meant to follow Finnegans
Wake --- which I know is supposed to be high modernism, but Ill be damned if it doesnt

seem postmodern to me --- with a short, simple book, something to do with the sea. Maybe
its his last book thats written on the petroglyph, a remembering of something so old it is
outside of time. If there is anything after post-modernism, I hope it is this. Something pure
and vast like the sea.

Michael Cherry 2003, 2014.

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