Dukkha is lack
Tom McFarlane: Let’s move on now to this notion of lack that’s central to so much of your work. Perhaps you could start by giving us a definition of lack, and tell us how you came up with this concept.
Because it lacks any reality of its own, any stable ground, this sense of self is haunted by what I’ve called a sense of lack or, for short, lack.
David Loy: The easiest way to understand lack is to think of it as the “shadow” of the sense of self. The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or non-self, implies that our sense of self is a construct, an ever-changing process, which doesn’t have any reality of its own. Because it lacks any reality of its own, any stable ground, this sense of self is haunted by what I’ve called a sense of lack or, for short, lack. The origin of this sense of lack is our inability to open up to the emptiness, or ungroundedness, of the self. Insofar as we’re unable to cope with that emptiness, insofar as we deny it and shy away from it, we experience it as a sense of lack.
TM: What came to my mind when I first came across your term lack is the use of the word lack in the context of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that all things lack inherent existence. It made me wonder if perhaps we could say, more generally, that this lack of an inherent existence—or emptiness—is the shadow of the idea that there is an inherent existence of things.
DL: Everything is empty of own-being, or self-being. But the most problematical emptiness and lack for us has to do with our own sense of self.
This concept of lack is a helpful way for us to understand the Buddhist concept of dukkha. Although dukkha is often translated into English as suffering, when you look at the Buddhist texts, obviously dukkha is a much broader term that includes more general dissatisfaction, a basic frustration in our lives that we are never quite able to resolve. And this broader meaning of dukkha includes a basic dissatisfaction connected to the conditioned nature of the self. One of the distinctive things about Buddhism is that it brings out so clearly this connection between dukkha and anatta, between our basic dissatisfaction and our deluded sense of self. The concept of lack is an attempt to flesh out what I think is so distinctive and powerful about the Buddhist analysis.
The basic concept of lack came to me from reading Ernest Becker. He’s obviously a major influence in Lack and Transcendence (which remains my favorite book despite the ugly cover and tiny font). In his last two books, Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker focuses on how the inevitability of our death is denied and repressed, and it’s not such a big leap from Becker’s death-denial to a Buddhist lack of self. One significant difference is that focusing on death projects the source of our problem into our future, while in the case of Buddhism the source of the problem—the emptiness of the self—is right now.
TM: So, from the psychological or existential point of view, we’re worried about the future death of some self we think exists, but from the Buddhist point of view it’s actually deeper than that: we’re really worried about the fact that, right now, we don’t exist in the first place.
Buddhism is saying that our dukkha isn’t just due to impermanence and death, our dukkha is pointing at something fundamental about the groundlessness of the sense of self right now.
DL: That’s right. If the problem is death, we might think we’re really okay right now, and it’s only what’s going to happen in the future that’s so scary. Buddhism is saying that our dukkha isn’t just due to impermanence and death, our dukkha is pointing at something fundamental about the groundlessness of the sense of self right now. There’s a tendency in psychotherapy to say that our problem is due to childhood conditioning, so we just need to uncover and work through our memories of that. In Buddhism, on the other hand, the problem isn’t just with our particular conditioning, the problem is with all conditioning, with the nature of the sense of self. So, I think that Buddhism has a deeper understanding of the problem of dukkha and also a deeper understanding of tfhe alternatives. Freud thought that all we could ultimately hope for is to get rid of certain types of neurotic suffering. The message of Buddhism is that something more is possible. There are deeper, more transformative human possibilities. Yet the whole psychotherapeutic movement is changing so quickly, and today certain circles are moving strongly in a more spiritual direction.
TM: In Lack and Transcendence you discuss some ways our lack relates to psychological repression and compensation. How do these psychological concepts help us understand lack and the ways we try to avoid it?
If we repress awareness of our ungroundedness, then it will return as the various compulsive ways that we try to ground ourselves in the world, to make ourselves feel more real in the world. This is a general preoccupation for almost all of us.
DL: Well, the basic concept of repression is an extremely important one that I think we’re still digesting. Anything that we repress is something that we’re unwilling or unable to cope with, so we turn our attention away from it. But if it’s something really pressing—like sexuality for Freud, or death for Becker, or non-self for Buddhism—then it’s not so easy for us to escape it. It’s going to find a way to return to awareness, which is what Freud called the return of the repressed. If we are not able to accept and acknowledge and live with the experience of our own emptiness, if we repress awareness of our ungroundedness, then it will return as the various compulsive ways that we try to ground ourselves in the world, to make ourselves feel more real in the world. This is a general preoccupation for almost all of us, but the particular form that it takes depends upon the kind of person you are and the kind of cultural context that you find yourself within. So, in the modern American context, accumulating money is probably our main, number one reality project. Collectively, we seem to believe that more money will make us more real. But there are also other basic reality projects, especially fame and sexual fulfillment. These are three of the common ways we try to overcome our sense of lack and ground ourselves in the world. Those are quite different than, say, how a medieval peasant in Europe would have understood and tried to overcome his or her sense of lack. If you look at the whole history of human civilization, lack has usually been understood in a religious way. Religion is the way that humans have tried to understand and resolve their sense of lack. A religion teaches us what our lack is—for example, Christian sin or Buddhist karma—and how to resolve it.
TM: I wonder if you have any thoughts on the origin of our sense of lack. You said it was the shadow of the self and that it’s related to this denial of our ungroundedness. But why do we have this problem with accepting our ungroundedness?
If we can open up to that ungroundedness at our core, if we can let go and yield to it, then we find that it’s the source of our creativity and our spirituality.
DL: Our sense of lack is a problem, but it’s also an opportunity. Lack is only the negative aspect of something that’s much greater—something that’s, in fact, salvific. It’s our ungroundedness—a kind of bottomless hole at the very core of our being—that we usually experience as lack. Because we’re so uncomfortable with or even terrified of this ungroundedness, we experience it as a sense of lack that we flee from. But if we can open up to that ungroundedness at our core, if we can let go and yield to it, then we find that it’s the source of our creativity and our spirituality, that at the very core of our being there’s something else there, something formless that can not be grasped, something that transcends the self and yet is the ground of the self. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart expressed it, “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” That’s a wonderful way to put it. So, the question is, what can we do to open up to our ungroundedness, in order for that to manifest in me and as me, and thus in the world.
TM: In A Buddhist History of the West you point out that lack is not just personal but is also collective, and you discuss how certain developments in the history of the West can be seen as shifts in how we understand and deal with our collective lack. How do you think this perspective on Western history may be helpful?
DL: It helps us to understand the particular kinds of ways that we are stuck today. There is a Zen phrase, “bound by ropes of our own making,” which means, trapped by our own ways of thinking. Our dukkha isn’t just something individual. Dukkha is also collective, culturally conditioned suffering, which has a lot to do with our cultural institutions. If there’s such a thing as collective dukkha, then there’s such a thing as collective lack, and collective understanding of that lack. Buddhism emphasizes delusion, and there’s also collective delusion—for example, myths about what America is and what it means to be American.
Our dukkha isn’t just something individual. Dukkha is also collective, culturally conditioned suffering.
An important point about lack is that it’s unavoidable. It’s the nature of lack that you’re going to have to deal with it one way or the other. Historically, people have usually dealt with lack in religious terms, referring to some other reality. But if you doubt any spiritual reality, if you are a secular person living in what you understand as a secular world, then you’re going to have to objectify and cope with your lack right here and now, which is why consumerism is so addictive. The promise of consumerism is that something you buy or consume is going to fill up your sense of lack. But it’s also the nature of consumerism that nothing ever can. Consumerism never makes you happy. Yet, it’s always promising to make you happy. It’s always the next thing that’s going to make you happy. That’s one example of a collective bind that we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Lack can also help us understand war and our response to terrorism since September 11th. Psychologically, war, despite all its horrors, is a comforting, familiar way for us to project our collective sense of lack onto somebody else. So, for example, we might come to believe al-Qaida is the cause of our lack, they are our problem, because, hey, they are trying to kill us! This involves a lot of anxiety, obviously, but we also feel a sense of relief that we can now understand what the problem with our lives is and how to deal with it. To keep lack from gnawing at our core, we objectify it: the problem is those terrorists over there, and if we eliminate them, we eliminate our sense of lack, and then we will be okay. Part of the tragedy with that projection, of course, is that it’s a false promise, just as with consumerism. If you kill those guys, you don’t solve the basic problem. There’s always going to be some other enemy, somebody else who starts to threaten us, because, insofar as we’re thinking in that way, we have to keep finding or creating new enemies, just like we have to keep finding new things to consume. Conveniently, one of the very dangerous things about the war on terror is that we don’t know if or when there will ever be an end to it. The evil guys can be anywhere and they’re a constant threat. That is very unsettling, and it encourages us to let go of some of our commitment to human rights and democracy because, after all, the terrorists might be within the United States as well. This distorted way of understanding our collective lack encourages us to acquiesce to the need for a national security state. But if terrorism can never be defeated, we’ll keep needing a stronger and stronger national security state.
People are becoming more aware that these accepted ways of overcoming our sense of lack are not really working. Quite a few people now are starting to see through this, so there’s a split. It’s a rather exciting time, as well as a very dangerous time, in American history. There’s something struggling to be born.
Many people are committed to these ways of overcoming our sense of lack. They identify with such distorted objectifications of our lack, with such familiar, even traditional understandings of what’s wrong and what we should do and how we should live to overcome lack. At the same time, many other people are becoming more aware that these accepted ways of overcoming our sense of lack—the emphasis on money, the emphasis on success, the emphasis on collective economic growth, the emphasis on violent solutions to conflicts and threats—are not really working. Quite a few people now are starting to see through this, so there’s a split. It’s a rather exciting time, as well as a very dangerous time, in American history. There’s something struggling to be born.
Liberation in Self and Society
http://www.centerforsacredsciences.org/holos/davidloy.html
Because it lacks any reality of its own, any stable ground, this sense of self is haunted by what I’ve called a sense of lack or, for short, lack.
David Loy: The easiest way to understand lack is to think of it as the “shadow” of the sense of self. The Buddhist teaching of anatta, or non-self, implies that our sense of self is a construct, an ever-changing process, which doesn’t have any reality of its own. Because it lacks any reality of its own, any stable ground, this sense of self is haunted by what I’ve called a sense of lack or, for short, lack. The origin of this sense of lack is our inability to open up to the emptiness, or ungroundedness, of the self. Insofar as we’re unable to cope with that emptiness, insofar as we deny it and shy away from it, we experience it as a sense of lack.
TM: What came to my mind when I first came across your term lack is the use of the word lack in the context of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that all things lack inherent existence. It made me wonder if perhaps we could say, more generally, that this lack of an inherent existence—or emptiness—is the shadow of the idea that there is an inherent existence of things.
DL: Everything is empty of own-being, or self-being. But the most problematical emptiness and lack for us has to do with our own sense of self.
This concept of lack is a helpful way for us to understand the Buddhist concept of dukkha. Although dukkha is often translated into English as suffering, when you look at the Buddhist texts, obviously dukkha is a much broader term that includes more general dissatisfaction, a basic frustration in our lives that we are never quite able to resolve. And this broader meaning of dukkha includes a basic dissatisfaction connected to the conditioned nature of the self. One of the distinctive things about Buddhism is that it brings out so clearly this connection between dukkha and anatta, between our basic dissatisfaction and our deluded sense of self. The concept of lack is an attempt to flesh out what I think is so distinctive and powerful about the Buddhist analysis.
The basic concept of lack came to me from reading Ernest Becker. He’s obviously a major influence in Lack and Transcendence (which remains my favorite book despite the ugly cover and tiny font). In his last two books, Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker focuses on how the inevitability of our death is denied and repressed, and it’s not such a big leap from Becker’s death-denial to a Buddhist lack of self. One significant difference is that focusing on death projects the source of our problem into our future, while in the case of Buddhism the source of the problem—the emptiness of the self—is right now.
TM: So, from the psychological or existential point of view, we’re worried about the future death of some self we think exists, but from the Buddhist point of view it’s actually deeper than that: we’re really worried about the fact that, right now, we don’t exist in the first place.
Buddhism is saying that our dukkha isn’t just due to impermanence and death, our dukkha is pointing at something fundamental about the groundlessness of the sense of self right now.
DL: That’s right. If the problem is death, we might think we’re really okay right now, and it’s only what’s going to happen in the future that’s so scary. Buddhism is saying that our dukkha isn’t just due to impermanence and death, our dukkha is pointing at something fundamental about the groundlessness of the sense of self right now. There’s a tendency in psychotherapy to say that our problem is due to childhood conditioning, so we just need to uncover and work through our memories of that. In Buddhism, on the other hand, the problem isn’t just with our particular conditioning, the problem is with all conditioning, with the nature of the sense of self. So, I think that Buddhism has a deeper understanding of the problem of dukkha and also a deeper understanding of tfhe alternatives. Freud thought that all we could ultimately hope for is to get rid of certain types of neurotic suffering. The message of Buddhism is that something more is possible. There are deeper, more transformative human possibilities. Yet the whole psychotherapeutic movement is changing so quickly, and today certain circles are moving strongly in a more spiritual direction.
TM: In Lack and Transcendence you discuss some ways our lack relates to psychological repression and compensation. How do these psychological concepts help us understand lack and the ways we try to avoid it?
If we repress awareness of our ungroundedness, then it will return as the various compulsive ways that we try to ground ourselves in the world, to make ourselves feel more real in the world. This is a general preoccupation for almost all of us.
DL: Well, the basic concept of repression is an extremely important one that I think we’re still digesting. Anything that we repress is something that we’re unwilling or unable to cope with, so we turn our attention away from it. But if it’s something really pressing—like sexuality for Freud, or death for Becker, or non-self for Buddhism—then it’s not so easy for us to escape it. It’s going to find a way to return to awareness, which is what Freud called the return of the repressed. If we are not able to accept and acknowledge and live with the experience of our own emptiness, if we repress awareness of our ungroundedness, then it will return as the various compulsive ways that we try to ground ourselves in the world, to make ourselves feel more real in the world. This is a general preoccupation for almost all of us, but the particular form that it takes depends upon the kind of person you are and the kind of cultural context that you find yourself within. So, in the modern American context, accumulating money is probably our main, number one reality project. Collectively, we seem to believe that more money will make us more real. But there are also other basic reality projects, especially fame and sexual fulfillment. These are three of the common ways we try to overcome our sense of lack and ground ourselves in the world. Those are quite different than, say, how a medieval peasant in Europe would have understood and tried to overcome his or her sense of lack. If you look at the whole history of human civilization, lack has usually been understood in a religious way. Religion is the way that humans have tried to understand and resolve their sense of lack. A religion teaches us what our lack is—for example, Christian sin or Buddhist karma—and how to resolve it.
TM: I wonder if you have any thoughts on the origin of our sense of lack. You said it was the shadow of the self and that it’s related to this denial of our ungroundedness. But why do we have this problem with accepting our ungroundedness?
If we can open up to that ungroundedness at our core, if we can let go and yield to it, then we find that it’s the source of our creativity and our spirituality.
DL: Our sense of lack is a problem, but it’s also an opportunity. Lack is only the negative aspect of something that’s much greater—something that’s, in fact, salvific. It’s our ungroundedness—a kind of bottomless hole at the very core of our being—that we usually experience as lack. Because we’re so uncomfortable with or even terrified of this ungroundedness, we experience it as a sense of lack that we flee from. But if we can open up to that ungroundedness at our core, if we can let go and yield to it, then we find that it’s the source of our creativity and our spirituality, that at the very core of our being there’s something else there, something formless that can not be grasped, something that transcends the self and yet is the ground of the self. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart expressed it, “God is closer to me than I am to myself.” That’s a wonderful way to put it. So, the question is, what can we do to open up to our ungroundedness, in order for that to manifest in me and as me, and thus in the world.
TM: In A Buddhist History of the West you point out that lack is not just personal but is also collective, and you discuss how certain developments in the history of the West can be seen as shifts in how we understand and deal with our collective lack. How do you think this perspective on Western history may be helpful?
DL: It helps us to understand the particular kinds of ways that we are stuck today. There is a Zen phrase, “bound by ropes of our own making,” which means, trapped by our own ways of thinking. Our dukkha isn’t just something individual. Dukkha is also collective, culturally conditioned suffering, which has a lot to do with our cultural institutions. If there’s such a thing as collective dukkha, then there’s such a thing as collective lack, and collective understanding of that lack. Buddhism emphasizes delusion, and there’s also collective delusion—for example, myths about what America is and what it means to be American.
Our dukkha isn’t just something individual. Dukkha is also collective, culturally conditioned suffering.
An important point about lack is that it’s unavoidable. It’s the nature of lack that you’re going to have to deal with it one way or the other. Historically, people have usually dealt with lack in religious terms, referring to some other reality. But if you doubt any spiritual reality, if you are a secular person living in what you understand as a secular world, then you’re going to have to objectify and cope with your lack right here and now, which is why consumerism is so addictive. The promise of consumerism is that something you buy or consume is going to fill up your sense of lack. But it’s also the nature of consumerism that nothing ever can. Consumerism never makes you happy. Yet, it’s always promising to make you happy. It’s always the next thing that’s going to make you happy. That’s one example of a collective bind that we’ve gotten ourselves into.
Lack can also help us understand war and our response to terrorism since September 11th. Psychologically, war, despite all its horrors, is a comforting, familiar way for us to project our collective sense of lack onto somebody else. So, for example, we might come to believe al-Qaida is the cause of our lack, they are our problem, because, hey, they are trying to kill us! This involves a lot of anxiety, obviously, but we also feel a sense of relief that we can now understand what the problem with our lives is and how to deal with it. To keep lack from gnawing at our core, we objectify it: the problem is those terrorists over there, and if we eliminate them, we eliminate our sense of lack, and then we will be okay. Part of the tragedy with that projection, of course, is that it’s a false promise, just as with consumerism. If you kill those guys, you don’t solve the basic problem. There’s always going to be some other enemy, somebody else who starts to threaten us, because, insofar as we’re thinking in that way, we have to keep finding or creating new enemies, just like we have to keep finding new things to consume. Conveniently, one of the very dangerous things about the war on terror is that we don’t know if or when there will ever be an end to it. The evil guys can be anywhere and they’re a constant threat. That is very unsettling, and it encourages us to let go of some of our commitment to human rights and democracy because, after all, the terrorists might be within the United States as well. This distorted way of understanding our collective lack encourages us to acquiesce to the need for a national security state. But if terrorism can never be defeated, we’ll keep needing a stronger and stronger national security state.
People are becoming more aware that these accepted ways of overcoming our sense of lack are not really working. Quite a few people now are starting to see through this, so there’s a split. It’s a rather exciting time, as well as a very dangerous time, in American history. There’s something struggling to be born.
Many people are committed to these ways of overcoming our sense of lack. They identify with such distorted objectifications of our lack, with such familiar, even traditional understandings of what’s wrong and what we should do and how we should live to overcome lack. At the same time, many other people are becoming more aware that these accepted ways of overcoming our sense of lack—the emphasis on money, the emphasis on success, the emphasis on collective economic growth, the emphasis on violent solutions to conflicts and threats—are not really working. Quite a few people now are starting to see through this, so there’s a split. It’s a rather exciting time, as well as a very dangerous time, in American history. There’s something struggling to be born.
Liberation in Self and Society
http://www.centerforsacredsciences.org/holos/davidloy.html
