Oedipus, Buddhas and Christ - The Last Symbolic Unity of Reconciliatory Victims Ilkwaen Chung Handong Global University

Leopold-Franzens-Universitt Innsbruck (2009-10, post-doc)

For a detailed discussion, see my other publications Deconstructing the Buddhist Philosophy of Nothingness - Ren Girard and Violent Origins of Buddhist Culture (http://www.scribd.com/doc/88516537/DeconstructionBuddhism ) Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus- Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Rene Girards (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28), LIT Verlag 2010

Christ, Bodhisattvas and Scapegoat

The similarity between Christ and Bodhisattva was commonly pointed out in the BuddhistChristian studies. The image of Jesus suggests that of a bodhisattva, the embodiment of selfless compassion for sentient beings. 1 Whereas bodhisattvas are free of the attachment to self owing to their insight into the Emptiness of persons and all things, Jesus was, according to Keel, free of preoccupation with himself owing to his complete trust in the God of unconditional love. 2 Some Buddhists believe Jesus Christ was a bodhisattva. The comparison between the Bodhisattva ideal and Christ in the phenomenological approach 3 can be radicalized in the sense of the symbolic unity of the reconciliatory victims that encompasses the entire religious history of humanity. 4 Paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation in Buddhism can be well explained by the mimetic theory of Ren Girard. Through the radical (social-) anthropological
1

Hee-Sung Keel, Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective, Buddhist-Christian Studies 16

(1996) : 169-185 ; and see Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Steven C. Rockefeller, eds., The Christ and the Bodhisattva (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987 ).
2 3

Keel, Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective, 175-76 Michael von Brck und Whalen Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog (Mnchen: Ren Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer. trans. Pascale Veldboer (Mnster: LIT,

C. H. Beck, 1997), 321.

4

1997), 161. See also Die paradoxale Einheit alles Religisen in the mimetic theory of Ren Girard (Wolfgang Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen. 3th edition (Mnster: LIT, 2008), 307-310.

rereading of Buddhist emptiness and nothingness as the sacrificial values and dharma of the world-renouncer, we can interpret the founding, differentiating and world-constructing role of Buddhist world-renouncer in terms of the reconciliatory victims. In the light of scapegoat mechanism, the tragic and the dionysian surrounding (radical) world-renouncer can be read and decoded. 5

Transgression of Bodhisattvas
The exceptional breaking and transgression of Bodhisattva in the path of initiation can be understood as the staged crimes and methodical transgression of taboos on the side of the reconciliatory victims. The initiatory vows of Bodhisattva involves exceptional breaking of basic moral or disciplinary precepts in order to accomplish a higher aim. Thus, a Bodhisattva vows to abandon not committing one of the seven physical and verbal sins. A Bodhisattva should kill a killer if that is the only way to prevent him from killing many other people; should rob a tyrant of his country if that is the only way to deliver the people from oppression; should commit sexual misconduct if that is the only way to save the life of a person so distraught by passion they will otherwise kill themselves or someone else. These examples of exceptional licence to break the basic rules of morality in special cases of alturistic motivation 6 is to be read from the perspective of genetic mechanism of surrogate victim. Oedipus the surrogate victim is unique in at least one respect: he alone is guilty of patricide and incest. He is presented as a monstrous exception to the general rule of mankind; he resembles nobody, and nobody resembles him.7 By giving
8

radically

sociological

reading

of

the

historical

forms

of

transcendence, mimetic theory of Ren Girard decodes the simulated transgression of sacred and world-renouncing Bodhisattva in his initiatory path. Faure has pointed out the ideology of transgression and the apparent transgression of the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and saints.

See Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus. Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der

mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards, Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28 (Mnster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2010). See 1.4.1. Transgression des Bodhisattva; 1.4.2. Bodhisattva, Christus und Feindesliebe.
6

Robert A. F. Thurman, The Buddhist Messiahs: The Magnificent Deeds of the Bodhisattvas, in The Christ and

the Bodhisattva, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 84-5.
7

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1977), Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M.

72.
8

Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 178.

Transgression constitutes a determining hagiographical motif in East Asian Buddhist chronicles. There are two basic types of antinomianism: a naturalist or spontaneist tendency, according to which the saints hubris places him above ordinary moral rules as in the case of Tantric or Chan madmen; and a systematic ritual inversion of the rule. 9A paradoxical justification for Buddhist transgression appears in some Buddhist texts: one may kill, steal, and have sex to the extent that one realizes that everything is empty. 10 The Chan school, Faure argues, was held captive in this double bind, in which monks had to adhere strictly to the rule while being confronted with the higher model of transgression. 11 A bodhisattva might act if necessary in ways contrary to the normal rules for virtuous action, while a fully Enlightened being is beyond the laws of karma. Tibetan myth and folklore are full of tricksterlike figures, whose apparently immoral acts obey a higher morality. 12 Undifferentiating transgression of Bodhisattvas is to be read in the light of differentiating mechanism of scapegoat that should remain invisible if these forces are to maintain themselves. Transgression of Bodhisattva is to be considered as an undifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victims: The transgressor restores and even establishes the order he has somewhat transgressed in anticipation. The greatest of all delinquents is, Girard maintains, transformed into a pillar of society. 13 Bodhisattvas willingness to be punished for the violent acts he would force himself to commit 14 can be well comprehended from the viewpoint of founding mechanism that produces religion the collective transference against a victim who is first reviled and then sacralized. 15 Oedipus the surrogate victim becomes the repository of all the communitys ills and receptacle for universal shame. 16 Bodhisattva is willing to transgress the norm and to be burdened with the bad karma of killing.17 Sophocles two Oedipus tragedies

Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 98, 100. Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 139. Geoffrey Samue, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute, Ren Girard, The Scapegoat ( Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 42. Gustavo Benavides, Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddholoy in the Age of Fascism, in Curators of the Buddha. The Study Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 77, 85. Lambert Schmithausen, Zum Problem der Gewalt im Buddhismus, in Krieg und Gewalt in den Weltreligionen.

98, 100.
10 11 12

1993), 214.
13

14

of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 176.
15

Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 177.

16 17

Fakten und Hintergrnde, eds.. A.T. Khoury, E. Grundmann and H.-P. Mller (Freiburg/Br.: Verlag Herder, 2003), 95.

also show a pattern of transgression and salvation long familiar to scholars. The beneficial Oedipus at Colonus supercedes the earlier, evil Oedipus, but he does not negate him. 18 Buddhas bad karma and his undifferentiating crime is also to be comprehended as a crime of reconciliatory victims: Buddha and the monks were forced to eat inferior food as the result of bad karma which the monks accumulated during one of the Buddhas previous lives. 19 The Buddha describes twelve previous lives in which he performed evil deeds, and states that these deeds resulted in great suffering. 20 It was karmically determined not only that Buddha would perform painful austerities but also that in a previous life he would slander a Buddha! Not only this Buddha, but also previous Buddhas too suffered bad karma. 21 Buddhas bad karma of his slandering an innocent Pratyekabuddha in a former life, of his slandering a bhiku of six psychic powers in a previous life out of jealousy, of murdering his brother for wealth in a former birth, of killing a visiting wrestler in a match, of knocking over the bowl of a Pratyekabuddha, and of his reviling the Buddha Kyap saying, Bald headed a, rma enlightenment is difficult to obtain,22 all these bad karma is to be interpreted as transgressive and undifferentiating crimes of reconciliatory victims. With regard to the hagiography of the saints in early Buddhism, there are some stereotyped themes that we may expect to recur in the hagiographies composed later and pertaining to later local saints, even in foreign lands. The saint is destined to a prolonged life of activitiy in this world, and this long presence is featured as a retribution for some evil karmic acts in the past. 23 As the gods age, their evil dimension becomes, according to Girard, blurred to the advantage of their beneficent side, but vestiges of the original demon always remain. If we are content to repeat the standard clichs about the Olympian gods, we will see only their majesty and their serenity. In classical art the positive elements are generally in the foreground, but behind them, even in the case of Zeus, there are the wild pranks of the god, as they are called with an indulgence. Everyone agrees to excuse these escapades with a knowingly complicit smile. In reality the wild pranks are the traces of crimes similar to those of Oedipus and other divinized scapegoats: parricide, incest, bestial fornication, the other horrible crimes. The wild pranks are, for Girard, essential to the primitive phenomenon of divinity.24 The indifferentiating crimes

18 19

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 86. Jonathan S. Walters, The Buddhas Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravda Buddhism, In Numen: Walters, The Buddhas Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravda Buddhism, 76. Walters, The Buddhas Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravda Buddhism, 87. Guang Xing, The Bad Karma of the Buddha, in Buddhist Studies Review 19, no. 1 (2002), 19-29. Stanley J. Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. A Study in Charisma, Hagiography, Ren Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 74.

International Review for the History of Religions 37, no. 1 (1990), 83.
20 21 22 23

Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1984), 23.
24

of Bodhisattvas seems to be excused in the name of skillful means. The whole idea of bad karma is rejected and considered as a skillful means (upyakaualya) of the Buddha to save sentient beings. 25 The sacrificial process requires a certain degree of misunderstanding. The secret of the mechanism of sacralization lies in the sacred misunderstanding regarding reconciliatory victims.

The Tragic and the Dionysian in Bodhisattvas

Girard acknowledges the structural similarities between the gospel enactment and the basic workings of all other religions. These analogies are, for Girard, real ones. 26 Jesus, as Jean-Michel Oughourlian has formulated, provides the scapegoat par excellence. In Jesus the victim par excellence, the previous history of mankind is summed up, concluded and transcended. 27 The only true scapegoats are those we cannot recognize as such. By submitting to violence, Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.28 Christ and Bodhisattvas are also different. The Christ, because of the scandal of particularity, must be unique while Bodhisattvas are manifold. While Christians are traditionally exhorted to be like Christ, Buddhists are called to be Bodhisattvas.29 The essential difference between the uniqueness of Christ and the plurality of Bodhisattvas is not to be overlooked. Unlike Christianity and Islam, the historicity of a unique founding figure is not intrinsic in Buddhism: all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are the same and interchangeable. The idea of a plurality of Buddhas is common. 30 Heroic virtue separates the Bodhisattva from ordinary human beings. Too extreme selfimmolation of tragic heroes (Bodhisattvas) can be interpreted in terms of the sacrificial system of mythological representation based on the false transcendence of a victim who is made

25 26

Xing, The Bad Karma of the Buddha, 25. Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (ed), The Christ and the Bodhisattva (Albany: State University of Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge

Oughourlian and G. Lefort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 217.

27

Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 209.

28

Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 178-9.

29

New York Press, 1987), 39.

30

University Press, 1982), 274.

sacred. 31 The self-immolation of Bodhisattvas for the sake of all living beings sounds too extreme to our ears. 32 The language of Bodhisattvas vows is consistent with the hyperbolic images of the legends and proportionate to the heroic scale of the Bodhisattva ideal.33 The self-sacrifice performed by Bodhisattvas are jumping from a cliff, self-immolation, and cutting oneself into pieces. These practices of self-sacrifice are said to be for the purpose of enlightening sentient beings to realize Buddhahood. 34 The ritual confirmation of the Bodhisattva ideal is the reenactment of the Bodhisattva myth. Mythic or celestial Bodhisattvas act as models for human behavior. The heroic and tragic self-sacrifice of mythic Bodhisattvas acts as models for the self-sacrifice in Buddhist history. The vogue of self-immolations through fire has been well studied in the Indian and Chinese contexts. 35 With mixed feelings toward the work of Girard, Orzech has rightly analyzed an internalization of the process of victimage in many Buddhist self-immolation. While Buddhism rejected the practice of Vedic sacrifice employing animal substitutes, it nonetheless adopted the underlying logic of the sacrifice. The sacrificial and violent model of Buddhist behavior originates in the Vedic tradition of fire sacrifice. This sacrificial mythic and ritual structure have, according to Orzech, persisted for 3000 years. 36 Kleine also has interpreted many religious suicide and self-immolation in Buddhist history as a kind of hidden human sacrifice. 37 Unlike Christ, there are some the Dionysian in the mythic story of Bodhisattvas. Many Buddhist story seem to assert the superiority of transgression, its status as proof of awakening. 38 The concept of pivoting or inversion(paravtti) seems to underlie the notion according to which, instead of rejecting desire and sexuality, it is better to transmute them through meditation. According to Faure, the logic of transcendence that characterizes Buddhist concentration and wisdom implies, in its very principle, a transgression of all fixed
31 32

Girard, The Scapegoat, 166. Luis O. Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, in The Christ

and the Bodhisattva, eds. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 153.
33 34

Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, 169. Cheng-mei Ku, The Mahssaka View of Women, in Buddhist Thought and Ritual, ed. David J. Kalupahana Bernard Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism., trans. Phyllis Brooks (Princeton: Charles D. Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, in Curing Violence: Essays on Ren Girard, Christoph Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide Bernard Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),

(New York: Paragon House, 1991), 167.

35

Princeton University Press, 1996), 206.

36

ed. Mark I. Wallace und Theophus H. Smith (California: Polebridge Press, 1994), 144-5, 152, 156.
37

im ostasiatischen Buddhismus, in Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11. 2003. 34-39.

38

4.

rules. Such an inversion is precisely what allows the boddhisattva to consumate the sexual act without being defiled by it. We are told, for instance, that the Korean priest Wnhyo (617686) did not hesitate to transgress Buddhist precepts by frequently visiting brothels. Buddhism remained, as Faure argues, ambivalent concerning its condemnation of transgression. 39 In the transgressive and indifferentiating combination between the Buddhist saints and the sacred, but defiled courtesan, we can find the Dionysian. As Marra argues, the Buddhist institution attempts to rationalize a disruptive dionysian cult of fertility that they condemn as sinful practice but uphold as an accomplishment leading to spiritual enlightenment.40 The transgressive union between Buddhist holy man and a impure courtesan who guides the process of enlightenment through the complicated philosophy of nondifferentiation can be read in the sense of la non-diffrence dionysiaque (Girard). Much of the literature on the Buddhist saints focuses on the fundamental role played by courtesans in the process of enlightenment. The chief courtesan of Kanzaki, who appears to him as bodhisattva Fugen, is certainly the best, but not the only example. 41 The Sacralization of Courtesans as Bodhisattva can be interpreted in terms of the sacralization of indifferentiating scapegoat. Whenever the Buddhist saint reopens his eyes, the courtesan appears, again singing her luring song, until she suddenly dies and a fragrance spreads through the sky to indicate her arrival to the Pure Land. The death of the defiled scapegoat assures Shk of a perfect Buddhist realizations as well as protecting him and the common people from the threat of defilement. 42 The ghost of the unknown courtesan is pacified and cleansed of impurities by the sacred waters of the Buddhist ocean of nondifferentiation. 43 Buddhist mythographers, as Marra maintains, resorted to outcasts (hinin) as filters between the deity and the people, scapegoats of exclusion without whom monks could not engage in their discussion with the sacred. The paradigm of the shamaness/courtesan/bodhisattva became a common topic in one strain of anecdotal literature of the Japanese Middle Ages that asked the courtesan to play the role of spokeswoman for the Buddha. 44

Violent Paradox of Bodhisattva Ethics

39 40

Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 99. Michele Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, in The Journal Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, 59. Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, 52, 56. Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, 63. Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, 55.

of Asian Studies 52, no.1 (1993), 62.

41 42 43 44

In terms of world-constructing world-renunciation, 45 we can affirm some positive potential of Bodhisattva ethics in a contemporary Western sense. Based on some stereotypes of western Buddhism, Leo D. Lefebure has pointed out, in his article Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, some meditative devotional wisdom and potentials. 46 A specific literary genre, the so-called meditative devotional literature is popularized and positioned in a field of interfaith relationships. 47 In spite of some devotional value from the radical altruism of heroic and mythic Bodhisattvas, 48 the hidden sacrificial is not to be neglected. Dumoulin has rightly highlighted the fundamental difference between Christian charity and the altruism of Bodhisattvas. 49 Through the radical anthropological rereading and hermeneutics of suspicion, I have deconstructed the mythological and the Dionysian surrounding the tragic heroes Bodhisattvas from Girards standpoint concerning genetic mechanism of culture. This structuring mechanism is not intrinsically obscure, but it is paradoxical from the standpoint of established perspectives, being essentially rooted in the delusions of unanimous victimage. 50

45

For detailed discussion about the violent paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation and Bodhisattva

(ethics), see Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus. Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards, 3.2. Transformationskraft des Opfers und der Bodhisattva-Ethik, 3.2.3. Friedenspotential des Buddhismus im Reich der Eifersucht.
46

Leo D. Lefebure, "Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue," Contagion: U. Berner, C. Bochinger and K. Hock, Das Christentum aus der Sicht der Anderen zur Einfhrung, in Das

Journal of Violence. Mimesis, and Culture 3 (Spring 1996), 121-140.

47

Christentum aus der Sicht der Anderen. Religionswissenschaftliche und missionswissenschaftliche Beitrge, ed. U. Berner, C. Bochinger and K. Hock (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2005), 13.
48

Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Den Lwen brllen hren. Zur Hermeneutik eines christlichen Verstndnisses der H. Dumoulin, Der Religise Heilsweg des Zen-Buddhismus und die christliche Spiritualitt, in Studia Ren Girard, To double business bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The

buddhistischen Heilsbotschaft. Beitrge zur kumenischen Theologie 23 (Paderborn: Schningh 1992), 563.
49

Missionalia XII. Buddhism. Edita a Facultate Missiologica in Pont. Universitate Gregoriana. Rom. 1962, 113.
50

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), xiv.