Roberto Calasso - Ka

It took an immense effort for the world to achieve the ingenuousness, the improvidence of Locke, who spoke of the human mind as a tabula rasa . But then the dizzying gadgetry of the modern needed a perfectly flat surface to stand on. And that was the tabula rasa . In India, at the time of the Buddha’s birth, people’s assumptions could not have been more different. Every being was born as a tally of debts — a quadruple debt, according to Vedic doctrine: to the gods, to the ṛṣis , to his ancestors, to other men. But — and this doctrine became increasingly obsessive as time went by — every being was also born weighed down by actions already performed and attracted to others yet to be performed. We are born old, of an age that dates back to the beginning of time. Every life is a segment in which certain actions fade and others blossom. More than anyone else, the Buddha appreciated the mass of pain stored up in time by the accumulation of one act after another. Perfection is achieved when someone is about to put an end to the long series of actions. Then that person is surrounded by a sudden lightness, an emptiness.

When the Buddha was born, he was close to that perfection. He just had to finish “doing what had to be done,” as one formula common among his disciples put it. Hence his whole life was a gesture of farewell. Hence it was overlaid with a patina of melancholy and absence. The loves of his youth — his father, his mother, his wife — these figures are barely sketched in. They have no features. They perform their functions and disappear. Perhaps this partly explains why the oldest depictions of the Buddha show him as an empty space in the middle of a scene, or at most represented by one of his attributes. As for the doctrine: it was a wheel between two antelopes.

From the first discourse in Vārāṇasī on, the Buddha’s words are analytic and repetive. Everything seems to dissolve, except numbers. There are four noble truths, the path is eightfold, the objects of grasping are five. Whatever the subject under discussion, the Buddha takes it apart and reduces it to the elements, whose number he later established as seventy-five. A single word, dharma , is now used to designate both the “Law” and the “elements.” It is as if a discriminating eye had penetrated every nook and cranny, leaving nothing out, dividing everything up. And the procedure begins over and over, the same formulations endlessly repeated. All the more impressive, then, is the one omission: sacrifice —the word that in the past had been repeated more than any other, the word that had always been there at the beginning and end of every discussion, indeed had sometimes seemed to be the only object of discussion and the only theater of action.

Omission and substitution were the weapons the Buddha used to oppose those who came before him. He did not say a word against sacrifice (nor for that matter against the castes that derived from it). But if we consider the space the word “sacrifice” takes up in his teachings, we find it is minimal. Before him, it was immense. It is as if the prolixity of the Buddhist texts sought to make that omission the more momentous, to occupy all available space in order to deny that unspoken word any place of refuge, however small.

The Buddha made himself understood first and foremost through contrast. His strongest form of denial is not to mention something. He did not deign to name what others evoked and reiterated with every new day in an intrusive, all-pervasive murmuring. For the Buddha, not mentioning sacrifice was like ignoring the air he breathed, the ground he trod. The Buddha never quoted, in a land where every leaf that crembled was a quotation.

There was an obsessive attention to action. It went back to the very first actions — which were not even human, but divine. Yajñéna yajñám ayajanta devā/s , “with the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to sacrifice.”: so said the texts — then, to make it clear that nothing had happened before that, they added: “Such were the first institutions.” The gods had appeared, surrounded on all sides by sacrifice. Sacrifice was the tool, the object, the recipient of action. And any action accomplished was sacrifice. Would there ever be anything that was not sacrifice? Hence it came as the result of immense effort when people began to speak of karman : a neutral, generic word to indicate all actions. At first it was a secret. Then, with the Buddha, it became a ceaselessly declared and repeated secret, while sacrifice was now implicit, silently understood as action par excellence. But the most daring and devastating rebellions come when someone decides to ignore something implicit.

The Buddha undid the knot that tied the victim to the sacrificial pole. But at the very moment he was undoing it, he explained that everything is a knot. From their vantage point in the heavens, the spies of Varuṇa, god of knots, were watching.

One of the many things the Buddha did not speak of was the cosmos. How the heavenly mechanics came into being, how it worked. Of what substances life was made and how composed. None of this seemed to interest him. With the exception of one invisible element: time. Of everything he said that it rose up and died away. That must suffice. He also said how something rose up and through what transitions it came to die away. But he was always referring to things of the mind. Outside the mind, he didn’t mention so much as a blade of grass. He rarely used similes, and when he did they were always the same, and almost always had to with poor materials. Sometimes he mentioned the lotus plant. Animals he mentioned were the elephant and the antelope. Yet the Buddha was fond of certain natural locations. What he loved best were the parks near towns. They were quiet, suitable for gathering one’s thoughts. And it was easy to leave them and find roads where one could beg. Around those parks and their silence, like a frame on every side, you could still sense the city’s roar and babble. The Buddha’s wanderings were punctuated by the rests he took in these parks. Some were donated to the communities of monks. Often they settled down there, stayed for some centuries. When the imperious believers of another faith sought to subdue India, such places proved easy to find and destroy. Behind them they left heaps of stone, smothered in vegetation.

What would one day be called “the modern” was, at least as far as its sharpest and most hidden point is concerned, a legacy of the Buddha. Seeing things as so many aggregates and dismantling them. Then dismantling the elements split off from the aggregates, insofar as they too are aggregates. And so on and on in dizzying succession. An arid, ferocious scholasticism. A taste for repetition, as agent provocateur of inanity. Vocation for monotony. Total lack of respect for any prohibition, any authority. Emptying of every substance from within. Only husks left intact. The quiet conviction that all play occurs where phantoms ceaselessly substitute one for another. Allowing the natural algebra of the mind to operate out in the open. Seeing the world as a landscape of interlocking cogs. Observing it from a certain and constant distance. But what distance exactly? No question could be more contentious. Adding this last doubt, then, to a trail of other gnawing uncertainties.

One becomes what one knows: that was the premise of the ṛṣis . “Men become like unto that by which they are intoxicated.” That was the premise of the Buddha. Why seek to know the world, if knowing it means being possessed by it? The thinking of the ṛṣis embraced the implicit risk that the-thing-one-becomes-like-through-thinking-it will take us over entirely, obscuring any further investigation, dominating the mind the way a Gandharva or an Apsaras will toy and sport with the person who hosts them, and whom they possess. This doesn’t just happen sometimes, but always and inevitably if one no longer accepts the immensity and continuity of the ātman , if consciousness is seen as the result of mere aggregation. The Buddha’s gesture was meant to counter a secret enemy: possession. That mental life is continually invaded — by what? powers? call them what you will, in any event elements that agitate — was revealed to the Buddha as the ultimate slavery, that bondage to which all others lead back. Mental life: objects looming before us, without respite, taking over, obsessing us. The gesture of grasping, of reaching out, like the monkey’s lean paw. This is the most precise image of mental life: restlessness, the pathetic tension of the monkey among the branches of a big tree. He who reaches out to grasp is himself grasped, possessed by the mental object that looms up and imposes itself. There is only one circumstance in which this doesn’t happen: if one is able to recognize a common trait in all those objects: emptiness.