How Zen Can Teach Scholars to Think Beyond Their Specialities

Deep and specialized learning should not be an obstacle to new ideas and discoveries

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“A Literary Garden” by Zhou Wenju, Song Dynasty, 12th Century. Collection of the National Palace Museum, Beijing, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

For some years now, despite my being a former Roman Catholic and a sort of Burkean conservative, I have maintained a strong interest in Zen Buddhism and Taoist philosophy—much stronger than would perhaps be expected of a middle-aged guy from the Midwest.

It’s one of the things that people tend to find most surprising about me, in a head-cocking and eyebrow-furrowing and really?-ing kind of way. (They have the same reaction when they learn of my deep and wholly unironic passion for reggae.) In the U.S. we tend to have very little knowledge of what Zen truly is; for most of us, it simply conjures images of a peaceful monk, some bamboo, flowing water, or maybe an athlete or performer in a flow state. This is of a piece with our cultural ignorance of what used to be called “Oriental” studies, an impolitic term that is lamentable as a kind of pejorative, indicating an exotic “Other” we lack the depth to comprehend.

There is one element of Zen philosophy that aligns quite nicely with this issue’s theme of “camp,” and it has to do—unsurprisingly—with the principle of nonattachment. Much of Zen thinking relates to nonattachment: the transience of physical things and the embrace of simplicity, yes, but also the even more important principle of nonattachment to ideas or positions.

There is one Zen phrase I internalized during my own Ph.D. work, as I found myself being routinely convinced by the most recent social theory I came across in my years of seminars. It’s a phrase that, like so much in Zen, is possibly apocryphal and that has been variously attributed to many different figures, but for aesthetic reasons I prefer to attribute it to the classical Chinese thinker Linji Yixuan, who wrote: The man of the Way fundamentally dwells nowhere.

We should acknowledge up front that this phrase could very well be interpreted literally: The sages and poets of classical China were not exactly known for putting down roots, and a philosophy that emphasizes nonattachment doesn’t quite draw the 30-year fixed mortgage crowd. But as with most things in Zen, there is depth to the simplicity and the sentiment of the phrase that can and should be deeply relevant to the work of scholars and academics.

First, let me suggest that we perhaps overemphasize the importance of fixed positions. Both Western tradition and evolutionary psychology suggest that the Archimedean stance—“give me a place to stand and I shall move the world”—holds an innate appeal for us. We have a strong and not totally unjustified preference for the martyr, the sunk cost fallacy, the Patrick Henry, the one who digs in the heels and says this is what I believe and ne’er shall I abandon belief.

That’s all well and good when it comes to moral stances (excepting cases such as Robespierre’s, of course, when moral stance becomes mortal threat). I certainly hope that I shall remain firmly committed to, for example, “Thou shalt not kill.” But to see fixed beliefs as an innate virtue, as a sign of moral worth rather than what may be a certain intractability, is rather a hindrance to good scholarship and research. To stay resolutely fixed in one’s beliefs is not just to flirt with the boundaries of orthodoxy, which can all too easily color both one’s questions and one’s interpretations, but it also reveals a stance that belief can, and perhaps even should, trump discovery.

How can this be avoided, particularly in the age of the so-called scholar activist, when competition for social media “likes” can be just as fierce—and, alas, just as personally meaningful—as competition for top-notch journal publications? We are both blessed and cursed to live in an era of instant information and instant pontification, an era when the hunkered-down pose on social media is praised as principled rather than dismissed as stubborn.

Zen can offer some lessons here. The 11th-century teacher Yuanwu instructs: “You should work to melt away the obstructions caused by conditional knowledge and views and interpretive understanding.” The scholar might bristle at this: “After all this learning, all this acquisition of knowledge, all this specialization and training and ever-narrowing research profile, should I treat my achievements as obstructions to be melted away?”

Well, yes, in the sense that all of your learning should serve as scaffolding, a means of climbing to an intellectual height at which point you can transcend your learning and scholarship and focus on what is found there. You kick away the ladder, to use Wittgenstein’s metaphor, and you find yourself in a realm of openness to new ideas and discoveries that are explicitly not colored by the information you brought there.

Above all else this means an openness to changing one’s mind if new information comes to light. We should always be seeking the way that works best, not the way that things have been done before. This gives Zen some overlap with the very American philosophy of pragmatism as devised by Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, William James, and others—ideas and knowledge are useful inasmuch as they lay the groundwork for action in the world. If an idea no longer works, or is contravened by something new that has come to light, then rather than laying the groundwork for meaningful action, it chains us to an approach that renders action largely moot.

In this sense we should regularly set up “camps” of intellectual work. Rather than perpetually siloing ourselves in a narrow specialty, we should take on a specific project with some muddy questions surrounding it. We investigate, we research, we ask good questions and we get solid answers. We make those answers public in a forum of our interested peers, and then we walk away. We have dwelt in that knowledge for a time, and it prepared us to act in the world. Now let it melt, lest it become an obstruction.

Most scholars do not take this approach. The usual method is rather more like digging the same tunnel ever deeper, trying to chip away and expose anything you missed in material you’ve already covered. Thus, we get a Shakespeare scholar writing five books about different dimensions of Richard III or an anthropologist spending each summer with Amish communities in order to keep the papers coming and become the dominant scholar in that sub-sub-field.

But what if that Shakespearean turned her attention to, say, John Donne or Andrew Marvell? Or to contemporary spy thrillers? Surely the methodologies that served her well for Richard III could have some bearing on other texts. What if the anthropologist spent a research semester studying teenage behavior in high school cafeterias? The default approach of coming back to the same material, coming back to the same approaches, makes it harder and harder for us to see beyond those things—and this creates the conditions for orthodoxy.

“Shifting and changing and successfully adapting,” wrote Yuanwu, “you attain Great Freedom.” The opposite of this approach is the hidebound scholar, doomed to a Sisyphean scholarship of sameness, perpetually returning to the views that first shaped them. If we are to restore universities to their rightful place as centers of open inquiry, then we need more Great Freedom.

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