Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought: Reflections on Buddhism in Lacan’s Seminar X and Beyond

112 Pages·2022·2.431 MB·English

by  Raul Moncayo, Yang Yu

Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought
Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought provides a close reading of how Lacan mobilizes
concepts from Chan Buddhist philosophy, culture, and practice in his later
teachings.
T he book emerged from the three co-authors’ engagement with L acan’s
1962–1963 Seminar on Anxiety, and the significance of Lacan’s original
interpretation of the Buddhist principle that desire is the cause of suffering. The
book reads key Lacanian concepts – such as the o bjet a, jouissance, the real,
Nirvana, and the mirror – through ancient Buddhist teachings and koans. With
this focused exploration of psychoanalysis and Chan Buddhism, the authors offer
a philosophically grounded cross-cultural approach to the theory and practice of
psychoanalysis in Asian countries.
L acan and Chan Buddhist Thought will be a rich resource for psychoanalysts,
academics, and students interested in Lacan and religion, the intellectual and
cultural relationship between Asian and Western thought, and Mahayana Buddhism
more generally.
R aul Moncayo , PhD, is a supervising analyst and past founding member and
former president of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, USA. He is the author
of seven books on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Together with Yang Yu and Hong
Zhou, he founded the Beijing Center for Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis
and Research to transmit a Lacanian psychoanalysis with an ongoing, active
engagement with Chinese culture. In 2019, he founded the Blue Mountain Zen
Center of El Cerrito, California.
Y ang Yu is Associate Professor of English Literature at Beijing Normal University,
candidate analyst of the Bay Area Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis, and founding
member of the Beijing Center for Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis and
Research. She has published several journal papers on Lacan and English literature.
“ This book is one of the clearest and most interesting introductions to Lacan.
Since Chinese people are familiar with Buddhist thought, interpreting Lacan from
this perspective makes the reader feel especially at home and helps to understand
some of Lacan’s extremely difficult concepts. This book is very suitable for
Chinese readers to study Lacan and the writers present Lacan with such depth
and lightness that the reader will find it a pleasure to read. The interpretation of
the name L ackhan is very helpful in understanding the two otherness inside and
outside the subject, and the explication of the concepts of jouissance, pleasure, and
the Real is very illuminative and greatly clarify their complexities. In the works
published in China on Lacan, there are only a few references to the relationship
between Lacan’s thought and Buddhism which are not so systematic. Therefore,
this book, and eventually a Chinese translation, will have a great academic impact
that will not only help to popularize Lacanian theory in China but will also orient
a new trend in studying Lacan.”
– Xiaoyi Zhou, Peking University,
Professor Zhou earned his doctorate at
Lancaster University in 1993 and has published widely
on comparative literature and literary theory
“ What a treat to read this profound, careful, and creative exploration of Lacan and
Chan Buddhism. East-West illuminate and add to each other, amplifying Lacan’s
vocabulary and concepts and Chan’s existential evocations. Although Bion was
not part of this work, his emphasis on the creative unknown vibrates with it.
Unconscious to unconscious, psyche to psyche, mind to mind – so much perme-
ates and enriches. This book opens many doors and passageways and gives us
much to think about, experience and digest.”
– Michael Eigen, PhD,
National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and
New York University Postdoctoral Program in
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
Lacan and Chan Buddhist
Thought
Reflections on Buddhism in
Lacan’s Seminar X and Beyond
Raul Moncayo and Yang Yu
Cover image: © Getty Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
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© 2023 Raul Moncayo and Yang Yu
The right of Raul Moncayo and Yang Yu to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-05696-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-05697-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-19876-5 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003198765
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Preface vii
Introduction ix
1 Lacan and Vasubhandu (世 亲菩萨) 1
2 The Second Turning of the Dharma Wheel:
Nagarjuna’s Teachings on Nirvana 6
3 Rereading Freud’s Nirvana 9
4 The Pleasure, Constancy, and Nirvana Principles 14
5 Wu and Mu in the Cáodòng zōng and Línjì Schools 28
6 “No Buddha-Nature” and Buddha’s Desire 34
7 The Vacuum in Western Science 37
8 Lacan and Wu 39
9 The Paradoxical Chan Koans, Self-Reference, and
Letter Jouissance 43
10 The True Body of Bodhi and Buddh(a ) 54
11 The Mirror in Lacan, Chan, and Dogen’s Zen 58
12 The One, the Many, and Kuan-yin 76
vi Contents
13 Clinical Dream Example 83
Appendix: The Practice of Thinking Non-thinking or
Thinking/Meditating with the Body of the Third Jouissance 86
Bibliography 89
Index 92
Preface
This book was inspired by Lacan’s comments on Chan Buddhism in his Semi-
nar X on Anxiety, as well as by our common interest in Chinese and Korean
culture and language. Lacan and Chan Buddhist Thought continues and devel-
ops what Roudinesco (1997 ) called Lacan’s fascination with the Far East.
We hope that psychoanalysts interested in Buddhism, as well as Chinese and
Korean psychoanalytic practitioners and researchers, will feel especially at home
when reading Lacan from a Chan perspective. We believe that this orientation
in studying Lacan represents a form of psychoanalysis with unique East Asian
characteristics. Lacanians or analysts not familiar with Lacan’s later work may
also find it helpful to understand the late Lacan with the help of Chan Buddhism.
In particular Chan Buddhism broaches Lacan’s classification of the Real, first as
representing the destruction and devastation of the symbolic world, and later, as
the link that fixes the three registers into a new knot of four.
Moncayo has reviewed the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis
and Buddhism in a prior more general book on Zen and psychoanalysis. For a
sample of the field of psychoanalysis and Buddhism, we refer readers to Safran’s
Psychoanalysis and Buddhism ( 2003 ), and, appearing nine years after, Moncayo’s
The Signifier Pointing at the Moon (2 012) . The current book is a sequel to this
latter book and examines the internal and historical relations between psychoanal-
ysis, a product of Western modernity, and Chan Buddhism as a fundamental phi-
losophy and religious tradition central to Chinese language, culture, and thought.
We link free association in psychoanalysis to what Heidegger (1966 ), follow-
ing Zen, called a quiet meditative form of thinking. But can Western thought
really raise the question of non-thinking as a form of thought without the experi-
ence of meditation and from a philosophical point of view? This is a challenge
Lacan poses to Western philosophy and science in a uniquely Chan moment in
which he argues that thought is a form of jouissance. Taking up this challenge,
we consider this book “a form of thinking at the end of Greek philosophy with an
Eastern and topological twist of the knot” (Moncayo, 2021, p. 276).
Yang Yu is the sole author of C hapter 9, “The Paradoxical Chan Koans, Self-
Reference, and Letter Jouissance.” It reflects her long-term interest in the logical,
mathematical, and philosophical roots of psychoanalysis. Professor Yu brings to
viii Preface
the work not only her interest in the work of Hofstadter, in its relations to the use
of paradox in Chan Buddhism and Lacanian theory, but also her studies on the
emergence of the “I” as a form of psychical genesis.
Raul Moncayo has spent 40 years studying and practicing psychoanalysis and
Chan Buddhism, experiencing their similarities and differences, and receiving
transmission from both traditions. He began his studies of psychoanalysis in Bue-
nos Aires and later was a founder of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in
San Francisco. He has studied psychoanalysis with people in the direct lineages of
both Freud and Lacan and is a Chan descendant of Shunryo Susuki Roshi through
his late teacher Sojun Roshi (Mel Weitsman) of Berkeley, California. In 2019, he
founded the Blue Mountain Zen Center of El Cerrito in California.
We note this lineage because, beyond institutions and organizations, Chan and
psychoanalysis rely on a personal, mind-to-mind transmission between analyst
and analysand, teacher and student. In addition, Raul Moncayo, Yang Yu, and
Hong Zhou together have founded the Beijing Center for Freudian and Laca-
nian Psychoanalysis and Research to transmit a Lacanian psychoanalysis with an
ongoing, active engagement with Chinese culture.
Introduction
The occasion for Lacan’s (1962–1963) reflections on Zen or Chan Buddhism in
Seminar X is his encounter with Buddhist statues during his visit to the women’s
monastery of Todai-Ji at Nara in Japan. This was not the first time a psychoanalyst
would discuss a work of art since Freud (1914) had famously discussed the Moses
of Michelangelo. Lacan observed that
It might strike you as surprising that I should qualify in this way statues that
have a religious function, statues that were not in principle made with an eye
to representing works of art. This, however, is incontestably what they are in
their intention and their origin.
( 1962–1963 , p. 222)
A s if directly engaging this distinction between a work of art and “a religious
function,” Lacan notes that these Buddhist statues in Nara also have a “function.”
I t is not therefore irrelevant for us to take this inroad to get something from
them that leads us, I won’t say to their message, but to what they can repre-
sent of a certain relationship between the human subject and desire. It can
be found in the women’s monastery, the C hugu-ji nunnery in Nara which
was the seat of imperial power for several centuries, until the tenth century
(p. 222). “It is one of these statues, one of the most beautiful, the one which
is found in the women’s monastery of T odai-Ji . I will tell you in a moment
what function is involved.
( Lacan, trans. by Gallagher, 8.5.63 XVII 154)1
I n Section XVI, it is in the context of Lacan’s reflections on Chan that we find
that the statues raise the questions of desire and represent the Buddhist truth that
desire is an illusion and the root cause of suffering. In the early form of the Bud-
dhist teaching, or the first turning of the Dharma Wheel, this principle is known
as the second noble truth. The first truth is that life is suffering since anxiety is
not only the sign of an illness, but also an existential condition. Everyone suffers
from anxiety, and, this way, anxiety approximates what early Buddhism refers to