Levinas and Asian Thought

7. Acting toward the Other with/out Violence

115 SEVEN Acting toward the Other with/out Violence DanLusthaus Certainly, my responsibility for everyone can also manifest itself by limiting itself: the ego may be called in the name of this unlimited responsibility to concern itself about itself as well. —Emmanuel Levinas, NineTalmudicReadings Hunger and thirst had exhausted the tigress, and her body was quite weak. On seeing her, Mahapranada called out: “The poor animal suffers from having given birth to the seven cubs only a week ago! If she finds nothing to eat, she will either eat her own young, or die from hunger!”...But Mahāsattva [Buddha in a former life] thought to himself: “Now the time has come for me to sacrifice myself!”...The friendly prince then threw himself down in front of the tigress. But she did nothing to him. The Bodhisattva noticed that she was too weak to move. As a merciful man he had taken no sword with him. He therefore cut his throat with a sharp piece of bamboo, and fell down near the tigress. She noticed the Bodhisattva’s body all covered with blood, and innotimeateupall thefleshand blood, leaving only the bones. —Suvarṇaprabhāsa, in BuddhistScriptures An alternate version of this gruesome yet compelling tale of one of Buddha’s former lives has the young prince lie down in front of the famished mother tigress, offering up his body to her so that she can live and feed her cubs. Seeing she is too weak to eat him, he proceeds to cut off pieces of his own flesh, placing them in her mouth 116 Dan Lusthaus until he has restored her energy to the point where she can devour the rest of him unaided. Such tales, exemplars of self-sacrifice down to one’s own “blood and sinews, flesh and bones,” as many Buddhist texts put it, form a significant genre of Buddhist literature, and are found especially plentiful in the Jātaka tales (stories of Buddha ’s former lives). As stories of educational morality, they encourage self-sacrifice, nonviolence to the point of allowing one’s life and limb to be taken, a surrender of what is one’s own—including one’s body—for the welfare and benefit of the other. Driven home with such graphic images, they pose, for Buddhists, ideal models against which one can measure the depth and sincerity of one’s own efforts at self-sacrifice. Levinas places human freedom precisely in a “difficult” place in which one is hostage to the other, in which one is absolutely and infinitely responsible toward the other without any demand of reciprocity , since reciprocity would undermine that infinite, asymmetrical responsibility. Is Buddhism the test case for such an ethic? Have Buddhists been practicing some form of Levinasian ethics for 2500 years (or longer, if one counts Buddha’s previous lives)? Is such selfabnegating nonviolence even feasible, or are there limits that sanity, necessity, or something else will insist must be respected? What are the limits—if any—that Levinas himself acknowledges and accepts? Does Buddhism also accept such limits, and if so, does it provide principled reasons for doing so, or are limits merely ad hoc admissions of practicality? To locate these limits and their justifications I will juxtapose some texts of Levinas and Buddhism. The texts themselves strongly advocate for their own positions. Having introduced them to each other, we can watch how and if they mirror each other, and how they play out in each other’s mirrors. Whether or not a full face-to-face encounter occurs or not, at least glimpses and sideways glances may be available to all, including us, the thirds in the room. I. IlleIty, Peace, and the Buddha First, to quickly dispose of an illusory stumbling block, Levinas does not seek to belittle or expunge the vocative any more than Acting toward the Other with/out Violence 117 Buddhists avoid first-person pronouns. It may surprise some students of Levinas to learn that far from diminishing the role of the vocative, Levinas in fact proposes an ethics arising from the vocative, the calling out to or addressing of an other.1 The pursuit of alterity, Levinas claims, is already initiated by saying, “Hello,” or even by a sigh or moan addressed to no one in particular, which precisely are expressions of one’s reaching out for and need of the other. To undermine the Cartesian self as...