Zen and psychoanalysis

An article by Guy Massat "Taiku Sogen"

Zen monk and psychoanalyst

Interested in zen? Why? To better understand the unconsciousness and free associations.
Zen is a used word, but it is still attractive as today western language uses it, often with luck, but it has lost the force of its original signification. D.T.Suzuki, the zen historian, explains that the principle of zen is "wu-nien", the no-mental, the no-mind, that is to say the unconsciousness. According to Bodhidharma, the founder of zen (6st century B.C.): "The unconsciousness is the vacuity, the peaceful, the abyssal, ·". For Freud, Nirvana, that is to say the extinction of the unconscious tensions, corresponds to the principle of pleasure. On the other hand, if the dimension of the unconsciousness were not introduced, the zen histories in Chinese and Japanese literature would be hardly acceptable. It is the same thing for what is called "The jokes", of Lacan (J.Allouch): "Allo Lacan? -Certainement pas" [cannot be translated]. »

But who is facing me? Asked the emperor Wu to Bodhidharma. I do not know! Answered Bodhidharma (Pi Yen Lou, famous zen text of the 11th century B.C.), as it is so true that if I stop travesty myself with words and images, I do not know who I am.

The principle of transmitting zen by denial, its abrupt method in the search of the meaning, its koans, its mockeries, its way of laughing, its management of effects where the inexact interpretation has therapeutic effects, lead Lacan to say (who was practising the ancient Chinese): "What is best in buddhism, is zen; it consists to that, my little friend, to answer you back with a bark (possible translation of katsu). It is what is the best for people when they want naturally to get out of this infernal affair, like Freud says" (Seminar XX "Encore").

J.Lacan starts the book I of his seminar ("The technical writings of Freud") by integrating psychoanalysis and zen, the zen Master and Freud. Then Lacan ends his life in holding sessions without words, the "non-sessions", "the pass to the degree zero of the analytic session" where the master merely "display braids and topological knots" as the psychoanalytic historian E Roudinesco recalls. It is because unconsciousness and zen languages hear also "the language of flowers and dumb things". The first zen transmission, the tradition recalls, took place on the "Peak of the vultures" when Buddha told his disciples that he was going to transmit to them the most profound essence of his teaching. The disciples gathered around him. But Buddha did not say any word and only showed a flower. Nobody understood. Alone, Mahakashyapa smiled. Buddha choose him as his successor. E Roudinesco gave recently a description of Lacan which could perfectly fit a zen Master: " · as a sphinx, he stayed in the mountains of the Borromea planet, going sometimes out of his silence to say the truth under the form of enigmas ·" "J.Lacan" (Fayard).

Zen, let us recall it, is a word of the 13th Japanese century which is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese ideogram "chana". The Japanese people can read the Chinese ideograms but they do not pronounce them in the same way. The writing of the ideogram "Chan" has to deal with Chinese prehistory, but it really took, phonetically, in the 6th century B.C. its real Buddhist function with Bodhidharma (founder of zen). Pali was Buddha's language and the ideogram was used from then on to transcribe in Chinese pronunciation the word in pali, Jhana. Jhana is pronunced Djhana and Chana is pronounced Tchana. There is almost no phonetic difference between the two terms. Tchana in Chinese was pronounced Tchan and Zen'na was pronounced zen in Japanese. Djhana and Tchana mean "absorption". Here it means the absorption of forms by vacuity and vacuity by forms. "Neither vacuity nor forms can be separated", this is the teaching of zen. It is the absorption of oppositions which makes go beyond. To bring the forms and the vacuity together is to push them to the extreme of themselves, like, in another domain of expression, the Cantor's fact with his topology of the straight line and his mathematical trans-finites. Lacan compared also his own teaching to the one of Cantor. The autonomy of the signifier, so important in zen teaching, is rediscovered written in the ideogram of zen.

Levis-Strauss and others did not miss to identify Lacan to a sort of zen lay master. In the "ethic desire", Patrick Guyomard quotes in conclusion Freud, Lacan and Keisan, famous Japanese master of the 13th century B.C.

The most ancient definition of zen is found in a Chinese text "The annals of the transmission of the Lamp" (10th century B.C.). It is "A specific transmission outside writings, no dependence with respect to words and letters ·"

Effectively, it is to the letter that the unconsciousness in language is anchored. The language is linked together by the push of vacuity.

o the ones who give up hope about the conflicts and ruptures among the psychoanalytical societies, zen could well show that any authentic transmission (psychoanalysis is a transmission) is only carried on by denial. For example, by treating one of his disciples of "blind monkey", the zen patriarch Lin-Tsi transmitted to him the continuity of his teaching, at the time of his death. "· Who would have believed that my teaching will disappear with this blind monkey! Having said that, he raised up quite straight and manifested the quietness (he died) ·". "The unanimous tradition understands this insult as the praise of the master sanctioning his disciple named San-Shang, as his own successor", explains Professor Demiville in his translation of the "teachings of Lin-Tsi" (Fayard, in French).

To the ones who regret that "the pass" has become as passive as a thing, that is to say a fictive pass for unachieved training, the pass of zen, "the pass through which the door is the nothingness", "the pass without door" could revive the profound source of the "experience of the limits", of the "subjective dismissal" and of the "dis-being", which has nothing to do with an "apology of despair" as Stuart Shneiderman has well underlined it in his book "Lacan, zen Master" (PUF).

The style itself of the zen stories can lead us to understand the one of Lacan. Fundamental concepts in Lacan's teaching can be lighten up by zen, as for example: the signifier, the big A, the object small a, the transfer, the impulse, the repetition, the real, the scope function, the castration, the phallus, the nothingness, the pleasure, etc. Even if psychoanalysis and zen have as function to unmask reality, the point is certainly not to reduce the psychoanalysis to zen or zen to psychoanalysis. Each of them has its own history. It is out of question to assimilate the one to the other, but rather to better penetrate the method of free associations, thanks to both of them. As it exists a "foul smell of zen", as the zen masters teach us (Nietzsche has predicted it "A weak buddhism will invade Europe"), it exists also in the word psychoanalysis itself, and some people have seen it correctly, "psycho-anal-lysis": the term "anal" which allows to read the word as psycho (the breath), anal (anal) and lysis (free), "the free anal breath", that is to say the fart. Emmanuel Kant notices also this point: "at the moment when the hypochondriac wind blows in my guts, it is very important to know in which direction it will go. Towards the bottom, a fart, but towards the top, an awakening". "Psychoanalysis can sometimes also, as everybody knows it from Freud, smell like the plague. But as the free association is its constitutive method, would it not be also allowed to see written in the centre itself of the word "psychoanalysis" - psy - ch(o)ana - lysis -, the signifier "chana" (zen), which points out to the absorption of oppositions, that is to say: the method of free associations, and the consciousness of the unconsciousness? J.Allouch presents "132 jokes (sic) of Lacan", in his book "Allo, Lacan? -Certainement pas". We will compare these jokes, they are not in fact, because they have to do with what is called in psychoanalysis "the interpretation", with the traditional answers, in situ, of the zen masters. The analytic interpretation, like in zen, is not designed to be understood, but like Lacan says: "it is designed to make waves." From this fact comes the importance of the topology of knots ·