In the 1920s, Elsie Lincoln Benedict, a then-popular self-help guru, devised a system called “the science of human analysis.” In her book How to Analyze People on Sight, she presented to her followers a toolbox to read people “as easily you read books.”1placeholder Her promises of clarity in a world of ambiguity led to a fortune made from her bestselling books and sold-out lecture halls. Benedict’s argument to our contemporary ears appears ambitious and reductive of the complexity of human expression, perhaps reminding us of the literary contributions of manosphere authors and get-rich-quick motivational speakers. But in her words lies a kernel of truth. For if there is one thing that modernist and postmodernist literary theory has emphasized, it is that reading a text is not, and should not be, “easy.” Russian aesthetic theorist Shklovsky writes, in his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” the aim of art is to make an object, “‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”2placeholder The 19th century Russian novels Shklovsky was raised on have been picked apart and reinterpreted for centuries. Benedict missed the mark by forgetting that personhood is as complicated as Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
In Buddhist communities, ethics are taught with this exact notion in mind. Buddhist moral anthropology, that is, the ways that Buddhists are socialized to live morally well and for others, is dictated through what Shklovsky here refers to as “difficult” texts—stories that confuse and disrupt our basic understandings of justice and morality. Much of the last century of Western aesthetic theory speaks of the nature of texts in such a way that circles around the Buddhist concept of the no-self. Before Derrida famously claimed, “there is nothing outside the text”3placeholder (that is, that there is no physical reality outside of interpretation), Buddhist communities shared the illusory nature of the Buddhist concept of no-self through complicated narratives with moral teachings that elucidate the self as an impermanent constructed entity, rather than a solid, unchanging essence. To put simply, the self is always in flux, continuously rewritten, in the same manner which a text exists in the world. It is through this internalization of the the self as a text that leads to an ethical system which is radically contingent on the immediate needs of the Other, rather than a system based on a rigid notion of good and evil. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s concepts of narrative identity and practical and tragic wisdom, the idea of a literary, textual self insists that ethical decision-making must take into account specific contexts at play, thus necessitating a more relational and dynamic approach to living ethically.
Buddhist Stories, The No-Self, and Relationality
While often disregarded as trivial folktales in the Western study of Buddhism, everyday Buddhist ethical philosophy is often taught to Buddhists in the form of stories. Of these, the jatakas—narratives on the self-sacrifices and deeds performed in the previous lives of the Buddha that ensured his final birth as an enlightened being—are the best known amongst laypersons.4placeholder In these stories, the Buddha is depicted in his past lives as animals, humans, and deities, a cross-textual device that showcases the impermanent and fluid identities held by the Buddha across time and place. Even within a single jataka tale the same character can undergo unexpected interruptions to their established identity. For example, in the Chaddanta Jataka5placeholder story, the Buddha is born as a noble six-tusked elephant named Chaddanta. A queen, who was once in a past life Chaddanta’s neglected wife, orders a group of hunters to retrieve the tusks of Chaddanta in the forest. When questioned why she desires these tusks, she admits her envy and affliction of suffering. When the hunter pierces Chaddanta with his arrow, Chaddanta does not fight back, but relinquishes his tusks to the hunter. The hunter returns to the queen, and the sight of the tusks triggers the queen’s memory of her past life as Chaddanta’s wife, who then weeps with remorse at her vengeful act.
In the case of the Chaddanta Jataka, the listener of the story sees the changes—physical and psychological—undergone by the Buddha and the queen, calling to question the listener’s own illusion of a permanent identity. Obeyesekere argues that in these stories, “the point of the tale is not only ethical… it permits the listener to identify with a being outside the human community. This fits with Buddhist cosmological conceptions that life and the world—samsara—embrace every creature, and all are ethically or karmically involved. The tales break the barrier between self and other.”6placeholder The basis of many Buddhist stories, particularly the jatakas, serve to educate Buddhists the fundamental relationality of all beings and things, that we are continuously acting upon another and hold aspects of each other within ourselves. The Chaddanta Jataka, any sense of independent recourse is simply an illusion—all the characters act upon each other in significant ways, including in ways that they are not consciously aware of due to actions in their past lives. Zadie Smith’s essay In Defense of Fiction illuminates fiction’s power to uncover the true nature of self:
“Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself, which so many other disciplines—most notably philosophy—have probed for millennia without reaching any definitive conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, those parts of our selves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction…was full of doubt, self-doubt above all.”7placeholder
In the Chaddanta Jataka, the story navigates these questions of the self through various means. It shows the impermanence of the self, as it is not only a reference to a previous incarnation of the Buddha, but the story is also embedded with the queen’s past identity as his wife. In a literal sense, there is a disruption in the continuity of the characters, who take on different bodily forms across stories. More subtly, too, the story exhibits the constant struggle of “self-doubt” Smith speaks of. Knowing the queen’s backstory as a neglected wife, her action of vengeance against Chaddanta may seem justified. However, she experiences a deep inner disturbance upon the realization of her actions against her past husband, doubting her own ethical decision-making. The essences of each character—the queen, the hunter, and Chaddanta—are contested at every point of the story, and our sympathies shifts between characters as the audience gather more information. We are left, then, not with archetypal characters that represent a singular virtue or vice, but characters that question our illusion of a stable, continuous self.
If we are to take Derrida’s words that “there is nothing outside the text” as a given, the Buddhist conception of the no-self— a constructed self that is always contested, reworked, and conditional on its environment—bears a strong resemblance to postmodernist theories of text hermeneutics. A text, as Roland Barthes stated in Death of the Author, “does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”8placeholder Similarly, the Buddha in the jataka stories does not exist in a vacuum within the text; each story is embedded with karmic continuity, pointing towards previous incarnations of the Buddha. The Buddha’s evolving virtues across lifetimes illustrate that what persists is not a “self” but a stream of actions and their results, conditioned by cause and effect. The Buddha’s compassion and wisdom grow across successive lives, reflecting the gradual cultivation of qualities leading to enlightenment, without any single, unchanging self tying these lives together. The Buddha can similarly be thought of as a “tissue of citations,” each life referencing a life of the past.
Buddhist philosophy, as unstable as it is, can only be best explained through legends, myths, and stories. Buddhist scholar Sarah Shaw argues, “it is in the narrative traditions where resourceful adjustment to the surprising, the unfamiliar and the difficult, essential elements of a potentially secular ethical code, are most clearly seen, in ways that the other Buddhist genres, simply because of their different parameters and constraints, cannot.”9placeholder A Buddhist ethical system is too complex to be put forth through a series of propositions. Shaw’s observation on Buddhist narratology reflects Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of the aesthetic experience and its purpose. For Gadamer, encountering art is not a passive process but an event—a dynamic and transformative experience. This event is marked by surprise because art confronts us with something unexpected, breaking us out of our routine ways of thinking and perceiving.10placeholder Buddhist stories have a way of surprising us in the moral decision-making of the characters. Chaddanta, for example, gives up his tusks to hunter, despite recognizing he has been victim to an unjust action.
The elusive nature of Jataka stories makes their meanings highly contested and open to many interpretations. Barthes continues in his essay, “Literature… by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.”11placeholder As a form of ethical instruction, these stories show the plurality of actions one may take in the face of a difficult situation, and the morals received by the audience may differ depending on one’s positionality. In another jataka story, the Vessantara Jataka,12placeholder In this story, the Bodhisatta is a prince named Vessantara, known for his extreme generosity. He gives away his kingdom’s resources, his children, and even his wife to demonstrate his boundless generosity. Eventually, he is exiled due to the perceived dangers of his selflessness. While the tale is a powerful example of generosity, the act of giving away his children and wife is shocking and unsettling. The story raises ethical questions about the limits of self-sacrifice and whether extreme generosity can lead to harm, such as abandoning one’s family. Depending on one’s positionality—for example, between a layperson and a monk—different conclusions about the meaning of the text can be reached.
Buddhist stories, in this way, warn against dogmatic rule of any kind, even moral imperatives. If we accept that any notion of a stable self is illusory, then a stable ethical code is illusory, as well. Therefore, the moral narrative content, as well as the intertextual structure of Buddhist stories take the shape of the basic Buddhist tenet of anatman. Each Buddhist story, even if read independently, is relational to all other stories that came before it and came after; just like the self, its meaning does not exist on its own. And if all texts are inherently amorphous, as postmodernist aesthetic theory suggests, then the Buddhist no-self can, too, be thought of as a text.
Narrative Identity and Ethical Responsibility
If there is nothing outside the text (and we have established that the text is elusive), then how can a person go about adopting a basic guideline to living a good life, well and for others? If a story leaves us with more moral questions than answers, how are we then transformed to act more ethically? To bridge meta-ethical philosophy and the philosophy of the text, it is helpful to draw on Ricoeur’s notion of “narrative identity.” Ricoeur argues that personal identity is made up of two dimensions: the idem self (the stable aspects of self that maintain a sense of continuity through time) and the ipse self (the dynamic, ever-reinterpreted self that understands itself through narrative).13placeholder Ricoeur’s concept of “narrative identity” bridges the idem and ipse selves into an understanding of identity which encourages a perspective of one’s life as a narrative– an interpretive act, where the “ethical aim” is living a good life, with and for others. As Peter Kemp points out, “there is no ethics without the idea of a happy life.”14placeholder
To connect this idea to aesthetic theory, the theory of self can be extended to the metaphor of a text. The physical medium of a codex, or the dried ink of a penned story, for example, would point to a book’s idem, giving us a sense of continuity and sameness in the book’s objecthood; its ipse would be the content of the book—a story in which its meaning and interpretation changes over time and in different contexts. Together, they make a text, an aesthetic object with dissolving boundaries that are penetrated by contextual interpretation.
What are the ethical implications, if we are to view life through the lens of narrative, or in other words, to view our own selves as literature? Ricoeur analogizes life’s laboratory to an aesthetic object: “Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity serves as a propaedeutic to ethics.”15placeholder Experimentation through imagining other realities and possibilities in the realm of aesthetics requires and trains oneself to have an openness to surprise. Good art, as Shklovsky claimed, defamiliarizes the audience. If habitualization is inherently conservative (conditioning us to remain comfortable with predictability), then defamiliarization opens us up to progressive possibilities and experimentation. In the realm of ethics, to live a good life, we must be open to surprising ourselves by our own actions. By immersing ourselves in narrative and noticing its effects on us, we practice moral reasoning—grappling with ethical questions about justice, responsibility, and human behavior.
Ricoeur essentially argues that in absorbing the stories around us (fictional or not), life imitates art– “the thought experiments we conduct in the great laboratory of the imaginary are also explorations in the realm of good and evil… Moral judgment has not been abolished; it is rather itself subjected to the imaginative variations proper to fiction.”16placeholder The moral imperative, then, unfolds before us like a story, rather than a formulaic abstract system of analytical philosophy that looms over us. Much like a fictional story, a good ethical system encourages unpredictability, in which moral action is based upon the immediate, unique situation at hand. As Ricoeur puts it plainly, “the autonomy of the self will appear then to be tightly bound up with solicitude for one’s neighbor and with justice for each individual.”17placeholder
Buddhist narratives prevent us from discovering the full karmic consequences of an individual act. Consequences, rather, can be entirely unpredictable and chaotic. Hallisey and Hansen argue in relation to Buddhist stories, “the opacity of karma displayed in the [Buddhist] narrative profoundly configures moral life by undermining any confidence we might have in our ability to identify the karmic results of any particular action that we plan to do.”18placeholder The listener of the story undergoes an ethical configuration that makes one more uncertain, rather than certain about what good and evil looks like and how they ought to be responded to. Buddhist stories help to sharpen our understanding of what is right and wrong, as well as how we might act in similar situations; at the same time, we are careful not to apply the same course of action to all situations, no matter how similar they may be. To use Ricoeur’s own terms, we pay attention to the individual, to our neighbor, over that which is the established “law.”
Ricoeur advocates for a worldview which deems the self, and therefore, right action, as context-specific. The ethical aim, which is living a good life, lived with and for others, is sought after through the everyday methodology of practical wisdom. In the realm of interpersonal relations, Ricoeur argues that practical wisdom takes the form of critical solicitude—a solicitude that passes the “double test of the moral conditions of respect and the conflicts generated by the latter.”19placeholder Practical wisdom, like Levinas’ ethics, requires sensitivity to the Other’s singularity and vulnerability, moving beyond abstract moral rules to respond to the Other’s lived situation. Ethical aim becomes, to use Gadamer’s term, a fusion of horizons. In reference to texts, “the interpreter’s own horizon is decisive, yet not as a personal standpoint that he maintains for enforces, but more as an opinion and a possibility that one brings into play and puts at risk.”20placeholder The interpretation of a text, according to Gadamer, is a bringing and blending together of truths, rather than the achievement of reaching a clear, defined moral. There is not “one truth” that reigns above all others. Rather, they are continuously negotiated over time and place. For Ricoeur, such a negotiation takes the form of practical wisdom. Practical wisdom helps make choices and take actions that align with this aim in the face of uncertainty, complexity, or conflicting values.
Ricoeur draws on Levinas’ Ethics as First Philosophy in establishing the primacy of ethics and responsibility to the Other in his ethical methodology. As such, it is important to look to Levinas for guidance on shaping one’s own practical wisdom. Levinas argues, “The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility —and this, moreover, whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing how to assume it, whether able or unable to do something concrete for the Other. To say: here am I. To do something for the Other. To give.”21placeholder Ethical action, therefore, is contingent upon the call of the Other, and we are bound to the needs in front of us that are asking to be addressed in the present moment. What has occurred in the past in subordinate to what is being demanded by the Other in the present. We must respond to this call because we are guilty and responsible simply based off another’s existence.
In a Levinasian fashion, balanced scales of justice are not a priority in Buddhist stories; Obeyesekere argues that ethical action in Buddhist stories is contingent on ever-shifting personalities of characters, rather than static archetypes of good and evil so often found in Judeo-Christian stories. In Buddhist stories, “there is not only a critique of the futility of vengeance and retaliation, but there is no conception of intrinsic evil. In fact, many of these texts, like the story of the demoness related earlier, blur the distinction between good and evil. Demons and ogresses are eventually brought to the ethical viewpoint of Buddhism. Parallel with this is that the hero of the myths–the Buddha–never advocates any form of violence. It is impossible for the Buddha to say ‘vengeance is mine.’”22placeholder In Buddhist stories, the moral priority is not to exact karmic revenge by one’s own volition to counter harm inflicted by another. The priority is upon the immediate needs, responding to the Other’s “Where are you?” with “Here I am.” And through this healing cycle, the demon in the story is no longer the antagonist.
For Levinas, the prioritization of the Other’s immediate needs is literal. Levinas does not state, exactly, what the needs of the Other are. Rather, it is found by confronting the gaze of the Other; you will know when you look at the Other’s eyes and hold proximity to her. Levinas continues, “The witness testifies to what was said by himself. For he has said “Here am I!” before the Other; and from the fact that before the Other he recognizes the responsibility which is incumbent on himself, he has manifested what the face of the Other signified for him. The glory of the Infinite reveals itself through what it is capable of doing in the witness.”23placeholder The witness becomes a conduit for the Infinite, a transcendent awareness that goes beyond human understanding, as the witness’s ethical action reflects the boundless nature of responsibility and care that the Other demands.
Ricoeur complicates the reliability of practical wisdom by introducing the element of tragedy. Drawing on Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, tragic wisdom, on the other hand, acknowledges the limits of human agency and the inevitability of suffering, even when one intervenes. Ricoeur explains this perceived gap between tragic wisdom and practical wisdom—“By refusing to contribute a ‘solution’ to the conflicts made insoluble by fiction, tragedy, after having disoriented the gaze, condemns the person of praxis to reorient action… in the sense of a practical wisdom in situation that best responds to tragic wisdom.”24placeholder When tragedy is inevitable, simple solutions are fallible and illusory; the pain, too, is infinite. Instead, tragedy prompts a “disoriented gaze,” which must be reoriented toward some solution to provide the best possible response—even if tragedy is fated. Though suffering is guaranteed, the answer is not fatalism—ethical intervention—critical solicitude—is necessary.
Through the tragedy inflicted upon Chaddanta was karmic, like the queen, we, too, are infinitely and asymmetrically implicated in our own guilt every time we face the gaze of the Other. In a sort of “prelude”25placeholder to the Chaddanta Jataka, the same queen from the Chaddanta Jataka is reborn as a female disciple of the Buddha. While he was preaching, she remembered her past life as his wife, which caused her to laugh in joy. Then, upon remembering the violence she inflicted onto him, she burst into tears. This reaction made the Buddha smile, who then told the Chaddanta Jataka story to his disciples. In the direct presence of the Buddha, the former queen realized the responsibility she failed to uphold to her former husband. In her moment of realization, she experienced the infinite; even in the next life, the wound of her own action was there, and the Buddha’s alterity became known to her. Though now reborn as one who revered the Buddha, her sense of responsibility for the Buddha’s pain did not cease.
Derrida’s tribute essay to Gadamer illuminates another such instance of tragic wisdom, through the medium of a text. In this essay Derrida references Paul Celan’s poem “Vast, Glowing Vault,” which ends with “The world is gone, I must carry you.” In reference to these final words Derrida writes:
“Such a gaping… marks in the poem the hiatus of a wound whose lips will never close, will never draw together…Because these lips will never again join… It is perhaps there that, alone in the distancing of the world, the poem hails or blesses, bears the other, I mean ‘‘you’’—as one might bear the grief of mourning or else bear a child, from conception through gestation to its delivery into the world. In gestation. This poem is the ‘‘you’’ and the ‘‘I’’ that is addressed to ‘‘you,’’ but also to any other.”26placeholder
Derrida, through his careful deconstruction of the poem, uncovers the infinite in Celan’s written words and discovers the alterity and acknowledges the Other through the interpretation of the text. In the poem, he recognizes the responsibility that is there is to “carry” the Other, in their alterity, to infinity. The wound remains gaping, and so we must resume the practice of carrying the Other over, and over, and over again.
Postmodernist hermeneutical theories— those contributions by the likes of Barthes, Derrida, Gadamer, and others mentioned in this essay— ultimately return us to the integral Buddhist theory of the anatman. What aesthetic theory and ethical philosophy share is the fundamental drive to change the self. Art and ethical action are both rooted in alterity and relationality. “I” recognize “you” that which is another entity, with her own subjectivity and story. In this difference, this gap between “I” and “you” lies the wound, the relation between us that subjects myself to you. In this gap is the ineffable, the infinite—and so, the infinite suggests that this wound may never be healed, and therefore, my responsibility to the Other will never cease. Through the constant cycle of noticing the wound, reflecting upon it, and returning to it, there is an opportunity for refiguration, which refers to literature’s “positive function of revelation and transformation of life and customs.”27placeholder A tragic ending does not preclude the possibility for living a good life.
Ricoeur’s contributions to the nature of identity point toward a Buddhist moral anthropology, which dictates simply, that if you cannot inhabit a world built by stories, you become a danger to others. The case study of the Buddhist story is a valuable prototype to understand the relationality between the text and the self. Buddhist philosophy and postmodernist aesthetic theory complement our understandings of the Other, in a way that provides a direction to intellectual discourse, to move with purpose in our academic deliberations. For Rancière, this is the modern purpose of art– the aesthetic regime which “incessantly restages the past”28placeholder and “[plays] an essential role in the formation of the critical paradigm of the human and social sciences.”29placeholder It is through the lens of creative narrative and morality in which we may awaken to the nature of self and our responsibilities to the Other.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 142–148. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
“Chaddanta Jataka (514).” The Jataka Tales. Accessed December 18, 2024. https://thejatakatales.com/chaddanta-jataka-514/.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 227, accessed December 14, 2024, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.124704/page/n255/mode/2up?q=%22nothing+outside+the+text%22.
Derrida, Jacques. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
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Hallisey, Charles, and Anne Hansen. “Narrative, Sub-ethics, and the Moral Life: Some Evidence from Theravāda Buddhism.” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, no. 2 (Fall 1996): 141-161.
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Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
Shaw, Sarah. “Ethics and the Jātakas: Can Narrative Support a Secular Ethical Code?” In Buddhist Approach to Global Education in Ethics, edited by Thich Duc Thien and Thich Nhat Tu, 273–285. Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam Buddhist University, 2019.
Shklovsky, Viktor. “Art as Technique.” In Contemporary Literary Criticism. 3rd ed. Edited by Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, [page range]. London: Longman, 1994.
Smith, Zadie. “In Defense of Fiction.” The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/in-defense-of-fiction/.
Wickremesinghe, Martin. Rasavadaya Ha Bauddha Kavyaya (Aesthetics and Buddhist Poetry). Colombo: Author’s Publication, 1961.
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Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, 3rd ed., ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (London: Longman, 1994), [264]
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Gananath Obeyesekere, “Buddhism and Conscience: An Exploratory Essay,” Daedalus 120, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 219–239, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025395.
Sourced from Martin Wickremesinghe, Rasavadaya Ha Bauddha Kavyaya (Aesthetics and Buddhist Poetry) (Colombo: Author’s Publication, 1961).
Gananath Obeyesekere, “Buddhism and Conscience: An Exploratory Essay,” 235.
Zadie Smith, “In Defense of Fiction,” The New York Review of Books, October 8, 2015, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/in-defense-of-fiction/.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 145.
Sarah Shaw, “Ethics and the Jātakas: Can Narrative Support a Secular Ethical Code?,” in Buddhist Approach to Global Education in Ethics, ed. Thich Duc Thien and Thich Nhat Tu (Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam Buddhist University, 2019), 278.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed. (New York: Continuum, 2004), 490.
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 146.
The Vessantara Jataka. Translated by A. F. Cone and Richard Gombrich. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
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Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 24
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, 34