Appendix 2: What the Traditions Named
This appendix is about the traditions that named the thing; Appendix 3 is about the thinkers who saw the mechanism. Nothing in the book depends on it. I’m including it because some of my early readers practice in these traditions, because the names they chose turn out to carry the book’s central paradox, and because I want to be clear about which parts of this book are borrowed and which are mine.
Dzogchen and Mahamudra
If you practice in the Dzogchen or Mahamudra lines, the architecture will have looked familiar for several sections. I want to name the correspondences, since it costs nothing and since pretending to have invented them would be its own small act of hiding.
What I’ve been calling the turning-away sits one step after marigpa. Marigpa is non-recognition: not a thing and not an act, just the nature of mind failing to recognize itself. The turning is what a self does once it’s there, the grasping and defending that track and steer, which the tradition files under the afflictions and their habits. What I’ve called the parasite having no substance of its own is the standard position that the afflictions, anger, craving, and the rest, arise as the mind’s own display and have nothing of their own. What I’ve said about the darkness not being what you are is the teaching that the obscurations are adventitious: they cover the nature without ever touching it, the way clouds cover the sky. And what I’ve said about catching the turn faster is what the tradition calls non-fabrication and familiarization: the recognition can’t be manufactured by effort, and the path is recognizing again and again, not repairing anything.
Two of these are more than parallels.
The first is that this tradition already answers the question I’ve been circling: how does a turned mind turn itself? It doesn’t. Recognition isn’t produced by thinking; it’s introduced, by someone who is in it, in a way that isn’t an argument. That’s called pointing-out instruction. The second person who caught you did something like it in an ordinary moment: he pointed you back to your own nature simply by staying in his. That isn’t pointing-out, which introduces the nature whole, but it has the same shape. He didn’t put anything into you and didn’t win a debate. Someone already in it showed you, and the recognition happened by itself. If that move seemed too slight to be the whole answer, there’s a twelve-hundred-year-old body of technique built on it, and it lands on a student prepared for it by years of practice.
The second is the Aspiration Prayer of Samantabhadra. It doesn’t answer the question I said I couldn’t answer, why the first turning away happens at all; it describes the first not-recognizing. One ground; from it, appearances arise; Samantabhadra recognizes them as his own display and is free in that instant; beings don’t recognize, and wander. Same ground, same arising. And the not-recognizing is not a rebellion or a sin or a choice. It’s described as a momentary blankness, with no motive given—and the sense of self and other arises after it, not before. There was no one there yet to want anything. That dissolves the regress, the one where every explanation of the first turning away seems to need an evil chooser behind it: the first turning-away doesn’t need a cause, because it was never an act.
This sits differently from the fear account elsewhere in this book, where the turning begins with the fear of having left home. I hold both, in this order: the blank comes first, and the fear is what the blank feels like once there’s someone there to feel it. Projection—making the other one guilty—is the first thing that someone does. On that reading the fear isn’t the cause of the first not-seeing; it’s the first content of the self that not-seeing produced. If that’s wrong, the mistake is mine and not the traditions’.
The wider Mahayana, and the ego
First, the practices, because the tradition doesn’t only describe this; it treats it. Lojong is built for the person you can’t stand: drive all blames into one; be grateful to everyone, the enemy as the rarest condition for practice; and tonglen, taking in their darkness on the in-breath and sending them what you’d want for yourself on the out-breath, which works on the self-cherishing the verdict comes from. Shantideva’s patience chapter says the enemy is more precious than a friend for exactly this reason.
Three more are the ones Appendix 1 ends up beside. The first: an affliction, looked at directly, turns out to be made of the very nature it was hiding. Mahamudra says it as “the nature of thought is dharmakaya”; Dzogchen says delusion is the energy of awareness, not recognized as such, and that samsara and nirvana have one ground. Appendix 1 gets to the same place from the street: the message that denies our sameness is made of that sameness and can be read by nothing else. The second: the Uttaratantra’s teaching that buddha-nature (dharmakaya, suchness, the disposition to awaken) is present and untouched even in the most obscured being. It doesn’t call that nature care; that step is mine. But it’s the shape Appendix 1 needs when it says the care is still there, covered rather than gone, and able to turn back, and it’s what the hostage at the window needs to be true. The third is Shantideva’s, in his chapter on patience: being angry at the person is like being angry at the stick instead of the hand that swings it; the affliction is the enemy, not the being it’s using. That’s going after the absence and leaving the person standing, and it’s why the thing can’t be fought as a thing: contempt for the contemptuous is the same move, made by the one fighting. The Dhammapada says the whole of it in a line: hatred is never ended by hatred.
One more correspondence, and I haven’t finished working it out, so hold it loosely. What I’ve called the parasite is not “ego” in the everyday sense, a big personality or a bad attitude. It’s closer to what the Mahayana calls self-cherishing: the mind that counts itself as the one exception, which Shantideva names as the source of every harm and which the mind-training texts tell you to treat as the single enemy, while denying in the same breath that it is a thing. That is the book’s paradox, a nothing that has to be fought like a something. The exception is the ego. The parasite is the ego defending the exception, and self-righteous contempt is the defense at full volume. The traditions I know that looked at this noticed the same thing about where it hides: in the last place you’d ever look, behind your own eyes, convincing you it isn’t there. The Christians gave that trick to Satan. The Buddhists gave it to the self. I think they were describing one thing.
The phrasing that first made this click for me came from a contemporary teacher, Angelo DiLullo: the ego doesn’t tell you what it thinks; it does the thinking for you, in your voice. That is the parasite as this book met it. You never notice a second speaker because there was only ever one voice in the room.
Christianity: privation, and the devil’s one trick
The Christian tradition names the same thing from the other side. Augustine’s evil is a privation, an absence with no substance of its own, and the Enchiridion is the earliest Christian statement I know of that same paradox (Plotinus had the privation first): nothing to point at, and everything to fight. Augustine is sharper in the City of God (Book XII): the evil will has no efficient cause, only a deficient one, and looking for its cause is like trying to see darkness or hear silence. Dionysius says flatly that evil has no being. And the same tradition holds, without contradiction, that the devil is a creature, good in nature and turned in will: the absence kept intact, and the question of a someone behind it left open. And the devil’s best-known trick, convincing you he doesn’t exist (Baudelaire’s line, not scripture’s; scripture’s accuser masquerades as an angel of light, which is the same move), is in this book the parasite’s whole method. The line I opened the book with, from the Gospel of Philip, says what to do about it and says it’s enough. The old Buddhist texts say the same of Mara: what defeats him is being recognized, “I know you, Mara,” and he vanishes. I should be honest about one difference. Augustine keeps the will and the guilt where I keep innocence and the catching of yourself. The privation is shared; the account of responsibility isn’t.
A Course in Miracles
A Course in Miracles, in Kenneth Wapnick’s reading, is the nearest thing to the fear account in this book: the ego is nothing but the belief in separation, and its one strategy is to keep the guilt out there. I got there by a different road. That’s where the roads meet.
What’s mine, and a caution
Where I go beyond what all of these say, and you should hold it as mine: none of them describe non-recognition passing between two people through a look, and recruiting itself in the second. The Pali suttas come closest. They trace ignorance back, through what feeds it, to keeping bad company (AN 10.61). They list contempt, concealing one’s faults and pretending to virtue side by side among the mind’s defilements (MN 7). They make praising oneself and disparaging others on account of one’s own virtue the mark of the untrue person (MN 113). And when a brahmin heaps abuse on the Buddha, the Buddha asks whose food it is when the guest won’t eat it: abuse refused stays with the giver (SN 7.2). The Mahayana has collective karma and interdependence, and Trungpa’s setting-sun world is a near neighbor, as is his “idiot compassion,” kindness that won’t risk anyone’s displeasure, which is this book’s kind-is-not-nice under another name. What none of them has is the mechanism: that the hiding shows, that its showing is how it passes, and that what licenses the second person is watching a sincerely good one cheat. The pair, and the look, aren’t in them. That part comes with a check. The picture of it at the scale of everyone comes with none, and I’ve marked it so.
One more thing is mine, though the conclusion isn’t. No single tradition here states the whole of it. Between them they hold the pieces: a nature that is there before anything is acquired; ignorance as not-recognizing rather than corruption; recognition as the way back; and, in Dzogchen, compassionate responsiveness as one of that nature’s three aspects. Each got to its piece by practice or revelation. This book gets there by a different road: taking a bad act apart. You can’t harm somebody while looking at them, so the harm needs a hiding, and nobody builds machinery that elaborate to keep something from a part of themselves that doesn’t care. The size of the hiding measures the care. The road starts from your worst moment rather than your best. The nearest roads I know start from a good impulse instead: Mencius’s child at the well, and the Uttaratantra’s argument that without buddha-nature no one could be weary of suffering or wish for nirvana (1.40). What I add is the psychology, two places to look that nobody had pointed at as places, limbo and contempt, and the fact that you can run it on yourself in an afternoon.
I should be careful about how much that convergence proves. The evidence is independent: the gaze exercise and the anatomy of contempt borrow nothing from any tradition, though the words I reach for at the end, care and recognition and turning toward, are theirs. The method isn’t independent: both rest on disciplined looking from the inside, so they could share a blind spot. And my road doesn’t reach all the way to the destination on its own. It shows that something is there that has to be hidden for harm to happen. It doesn’t, by itself, show that the something is care rather than, say, a fear of being caught, or a flinch we evolved. So here is what favors care, and what would count against it.
What favors it. First, conscience fires when nobody is harmed and nobody is watching. You cheated on a test and knew it was wrong with no victim in front of you; ask a soldier whether it’s wrong to desecrate an enemy’s corpse and I expect a yes at once, with no answer to who’s hurt. A flinch built to keep us from harming each other has no reason to fire there. Something that recognizes the other person’s standing does. Second, it crosses every difference I can find. You recognized the second stranger across every difference you could name, and what he was standing up for wasn’t his. Third, the traditions converge on the same shape from different roads, which is weak evidence by itself and stronger when the shape has this many parts. And fourth, the hardest case doesn’t point the other way. In psychopaths, where the care looks absent, what’s been found is that the response is weak when spontaneous and present when asked for. That shows they can take another’s perspective; it doesn’t show anything in them minds. So it can’t prove the care is there and merely covered. What it rules out is the crudest version of “missing entirely.”
What would count against it. Someone doing harm to a person while fully seeing them. That’s the sadist test, and it’s the same test as Appendix 1’s, because if care is part of what awareness is, it can’t coexist with full seeing, while if it’s one drive among others, it could be outweighed with nothing turned away. “Fully seeing” has to mean something you can check without knowing whether harm followed, or the test is empty, so here are three marks for it: their objection would land on you, and you’d have to answer it rather than manage it; their hurt would register as bad, the way yours does; and what’s in them could change what you do next. A person who passes all three and wants the suffering anyway is the case. It’s a test you run on what you’ve seen, not one a lab can run, and I’m calling it that. I’ve never met the case. If you have, it counts.
And one caution, mostly for me. The easiest way to misread non-fabrication is as nothing to do. That reading is available in every one of these correspondences, and it produces the other way of failing the book’s paradox, treating the thing as harmless because it’s an absence, which makes you complicit, in a form that feels like attainment. Whatever else this book is, it isn’t permission.