Competing interpretations of the Perfection of Wisdom discourses (Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra), exemplified in the discourses of the Middle Way (Madhyamaka) and Yogic Practice Schools (Yogācāra) that stem from medieval Indian Buddhist thought, can be seen to prefigure two directions in “postmodern” thought: one toward deconstruction and one toward embodiment. By deconstruction, I mean to represent the culmination of modern rationality, in which a disembodied ego’s quest for a central core or true essence has finally come to an end; that is, an “end” in the sense of a hard-won recognition that the quest for essence is doomed from the start. By embodiment, I mean to suggest a turn to the body, and other (constructive) participatory encounters with meaning in response to this failed modern project. We could just as well call the project of deconstruction “most modern” as “postmodern,” since it is a continuation (and culmination) of a predominant feature of the same old modern paradigm—although with a different result. With deconstruction, the result is incompleteness—the ever unfinished truth that “there is no essence.”
The discourses of modernity flow from the Cartesian assumptions of certainty and that essence is foundational, and by the perpetuation of the fantasy that the future will inevitability discover the presumed essences that constitute the foundation or grounding of things. In the discourses of both deconstruction and modernity, however, we see the same paradigm play out. The same story unfolds, only with deconstruction it is retold, or unwound, such that the modern fantasy is uncovered and exposed for what it is—empty. Yet the modern ideal of an essence or foundation lies at the heart of both discourses. In other words, deconstruction thrives like a parasite on its host; its survival depends upon the presumptions of modernity.
Being without essence, however, brings the possibility of an alternative, something else that expresses the lived and living dimensions of meaning that are not simply truth claims tied to a predetermined and determinate, limited and limiting, schematic paradigm, as in the case of modern notions of meaning and their binary counterparts—their deconstructions.Within a recognition of the fully contingent, constructed nature of essence (the “result” of deconstruction), we have the opportunity to recognize meaning (and the role of our minds and bodies) in the constitution of our worlds in new ways—ways that do not simply follow the same old patterns of the modern, Cartesian, and Kantian legacies (Ferrer and Sherman 2008: 32– 36). It is in these lived, decentered spaces—with/in and between the body/ mind—where a truly “postmodern” turn can become meaningful (and not simply in “deconstruction,” which I argue here is simply the regurgitation of the modern, reacting against it while still buying into its fundamental framework). Hence, it is the turn to the lived and living body where the hallmark of what is truly postmodern, or nonmodern, can be discovered— the unthematized, lived spaces where the re-membered body can re-mind us about the (enminded) nature of being (empty).
I attempt here to chart a trajectory from deconstruction to embodiment in the intellectual history of Buddhist traditions in Tibet. I focus on embodiment as a participatory approach to radically deconstructed and unthematized meaning, in contrast to an interpretation of truth as purely an analytic category, or an approach to meaning that deals with values, such as emptiness, as simply truth claims or representations. I show how certain Buddhists in Tibet have represented the meaning of emptiness as a uniquely participatory encounter in such a way that its meaning is necessarily embodied. To speak of it otherwise is to misrepresent its meaning fundamentally...
