In France, it is no revelation that Buddhism is on the rise. With the exception of the Muslim world, this philosophy (which for a philosophy is strangely religious) has become an integral part of the European mental universe, with varying degrees of adherence to wisdom and the Eightfold Path.
There is a misunderstanding. This westernized Buddhism, Tibetan or otherwise, is a “reconstructed” religion, painless and with a New Age flavor; it blithely deploys its rhetoric of individual well-being and the values associated with it—global peace, universal and inner harmony. This goes hand in hand with the very curious idea that maintaining both the philosophical and religious aspects is one of the conditions for Buddhism to cure the West of the logical principles inherited from Aristotle, and for us to learn from the wise Asian to think about contradictory realities together. The coincidencia opositorum was already the dream of the Surrealists. France has thus become, very discreetly, a land of entrenchment for the so-called Mahayana Buddhism, which holds the leadership of Western Buddhism, through the influence of the Dalai Lama.
In France, the mobilization for the Tibetan cause has provided the Dalai Lama with an exceptional platform. The Constitution of “Free Tibet” that he drew up deftly conveys the myth of a delocalized Tibet, a kind of (ecological) world territory whose abstract geography claims to extend to the whole of humanity, which of course is just waiting for it—all citizens of a world pacified by transcendental meditation. In reality, this Buddhism is neither that of the Small Vehicle nor that of the Great Vehicle (Hinayana and Mahayana), but it draws on these categories, which lend a patina of erudition and exoticism to the “catechism” relayed by a Parisian intelligentsia enamored of Eastern philosophy and universalism. Provided that it is held in the pure sky of abstraction.
Buddhism, which originated over two and a half thousand years ago, spread initially within the Indian subcontinent (6th–4th century BC), during which time it laid the foundations for several philosophical systems, presented as having already been stated by Shakyamuni Buddha, but to small circles of disciples, and passed on in confidence ever since. As one skeptical orientalist (of whom there were many) said: “It is hard to believe that a streak of dry humor and Socratic irony runs through the dry and monotonous repetition of the school formulas and mnemonic lists that form the whole fabric of the Buddha’s dialogues.”
From the first century AD, Buddhism entered China, and beyond, and continued its spread to Japan, Korea and South Asia. From these lands of implantation, other movements emerged, no longer originating solely from the Indian matrix. Thus, from China, via the Silk Road, the Indian religion spread throughout the string of oases of Central Asia, in a large region called “Serindia.”
From there (without much precision), in a very schematic way, we begin to distinguish two yanas or “vehicles”: the small vehicle (that of the Ancients), that is to say fundamental, primitive Buddhism (the real thing!), and Mahayana Buddhism, which has become, thanks to a complete mastery of the art of cross-fading, a veritable enterprise of baroque transformation of nirvana into multiple Sulpician paradises filled with imperturbable Buddhas and a new kind of great spiritual being: the Bodhisattva. All this in an inflation of perfumes, colors, apsaras and gandharvas (celestial dancers and musicians), sounds and meanings that spread and diffract to infinity, a bit like in Baudelaire’s poem about nature and its living pillars. The whole against a backdrop of doctrinal duplicity, which allows the passenger of the Great Vehicle to fully enjoy, without fear, reproach or let-up, what he claims to and fully intends to surpass, Maya, the great black goddess. And gradually enriched by the teeming world of tantric deities, wrathful or enraged; of various little demons and genies: yakshas of the trees, anthropophagous matrikas, etc. It all begins to smack of what Father Huc called “idolatry.” For those who may doubt it, his Memoirs of a Journey to Tartary and Tibet in the Years 1844, 1845 and 1846 are published by Omnibus. They contain descriptions of Buddhist black magic rituals.
Not so long ago, the Catholic Church conferred the status of “universal religion” on Buddhism, alongside Islam and Christianity. It must have been misinformed. But it helped to give zealots, followers and sympathizers a foothold that the great, skilled and cunning devotees did not need.
The genealogy of this Western Buddhism follows two lines. The first sees it as the generally unconscious son of Luther, and the men of this lineage believed themselves to be at the cutting edge of modernity because they eliminated religion, myth and superstition. In this rationalist Protestant line, Western logic is criticized for thinking, for thinking about itself and, more seriously, for thinking about reality in terms of a dilemma: it’s either A or B. This logic has nevertheless given us the 0 and 1 of computing. That’s not so bad. But the argument is valid—we have put truth in a funnel, the real must go through A or B or be crushed. This is true, but in Aristotelian logic, binary logic. It is also true in the Cartesian paradigm where truth must be certain, passed through the reductive sieve of the discourse of the method. It is not widely known, but the time will come when we discover that binary logic is not the only one. There is ternary logic and above all quaternary logic, the logic in which Revelation was expressed, a “recent” discovery (already half a century old) by a mathematician and a biblical physicist (Robert Lutz and Jean-François Froger). It is much more interesting than Buddhist speculations.
The other genealogical line is more recent. It is that of the various European theosophies which found in Buddhism something to feed their productive and invasive imagination. At the beginning of the 20th century, the “New Theosophical Society” claimed to be linked to the Little Ceylon Vehicle. It originated from the mysticism of a few fantasists, combined with American spiritualism. The inventors of the doctrine called it “esoteric Buddhism”: they thought of nirvana as “the exclusion of the three fires of passion” and “the complete empire of the spirit over matter,” somewhat forgetting that it requires the annihilation of what we call “personality.” These theosophers conceive of man as a threefold being: an animated physical body, an intellectual soul and a divine spirit. For Buddhism, the body and the spirit are illusions: errors of our deceived senses. In Mahayana, they both dissolve, at the end of a period of asceticism or a more or less long initiation which reveals their intrinsic emptiness. One is then ready for the welcoming emptiness of nirvana. For these Buddhist theosophists, the physical man is composed of the first three principles (out of a “septenary,” a set of seven): material body, vitality, astral body; the intellectual man includes the fourth and fifth principles, the animal soul and the human soul; the spiritual man brings together the last two principles, the spiritual soul and the spirit. These neo-Buddhists claimed to have discovered that there are seven states of matter: solid, liquid, gaseous, radiant and three other states unknown to Westerners. New alchemists, they claimed that, thanks to this knowledge, they could transmute bodies, decompose them, project them far away, precipitate them and recompose them almost instantaneously; they would receive letters from the other side of the world that had not been sullied by any administrative stamp or postage stamp in the space of a few minutes. They could, moreover, split themselves in two, their physical body remaining in Paris, for example, while the astral body, its ethereal double and its prototype, was instantly transported to San Francisco or Beijing.
Reduced to its simplest and most primitive expression, the basis of the Buddha’s teaching is reduced to the formula of the four truths. Stripped of its extravagant scholastic garb, it is reduced to two closely interdependent propositions: human existence is transitory and unstable, everything in it is pain, birth, old age, illness, death, union with loved ones as well as separation, and not having one’s desires fulfilled is pain. Only the Buddha’s teaching can put an end to this endless nightmare. How can pain be eliminated? The cause must be eliminated, and the ultimate cause is desire, that is to say the person, because desire is a force that transcends all dimensions of man.
Relayed and transmitted through various artistic forms, Buddhism has given the world an impassive figure, strangely reminiscent of the ideal of “apatheia” of our Coptic hermits or the Stoics. Its religious art ended up only producing in series these frozen statues that open neither the starry sky, nor the history of men, nor man and his inherent strangeness, nor the earth and its riches, but which come to replace our garden gnomes and even decorate the offices of physiotherapists and sophrologists nourished by the bland spirituality of this inculturated Buddhism.
In 615, when the Chinese pilgrim Hiouen-Thsang brought back Buddhist works from India, including Vasubandhu, Ki-Ki, his favorite disciple, spread his teachings, which passed from China to Japan.
…The Buddha’s doctrines, eighty thousand of them, not one less, ascribed to the Mahayana and Hinayana, are divided into three parts: Existence, Nothingness and the Middle Way.
One doctrine is already a lot, but “eighty thousand doctrines” is dizzying. Rest assured, the karmic doctrine allows for unlimited reincarnations, which leaves plenty of scope for the most zealous or the most enthusiastic, or in any case the most patient.
It was within the Mahayana that the Vajrayana or “diamond vehicle” developed, tantric Buddhism, generally associated with Tibetan Buddhism, even confused with it; in other words, the first cousin of Shivaism, with its secret initiations and cults of possession. Is it still Buddhism? Of course it is. Buddhism cannot be dissociated from its rituals and worship. For Buddhism has reintegrated the deities of Hinduism, as well as the teeming world of demons. Interest in this branch of Buddhism is recent. Eugène Burnouf, the founder of Buddhist studies, had dismissed all these extravagances which he found revolting. Scholarly research attributes to the people all these rituals that must be described as magical, and often black magic, and even very black. This is not untrue, of course. But in all Tibetan monasteries, until around 1950, various rituals were celebrated every morning to Mahakala, “the great Time,” the almost twin deity of the god Shiva.
Whatever religion you choose, it is good to know it and it is good to know the god or deity that you worship or under whose shadow you meditate or pray. Under the golden banner of Buddhism lies a reality very different from the fallacious (and childish) promises of psychological well-being and the illusory dissolution of the stress of modern life. The release from the anxieties inherent to the incarnate condition is a chimera. We will all die one day and we will all go through trials and experience joys.
There is a completely different Promise, that of a God who speaks the truth and who assumes from our existence all that has been given, received, loved and forgiven. True is the salvation, true is the promise of the resurrection of the body and the deification of the soul. Also true is the path of spiritual combat and the inevitable passage through the Cross. No slow anesthesia until the extinction of desire, but a just government of the passions and the righteousness of reason enlightened by faith, if we so choose. The truth of man’s desire is God. The senseless promise of Buddhism is the repression and extinction of this sovereign desire, the driving force of all true and truly lived human adventure.
