If Tyranny Falls and No One is There to Hear It...

Chan and the Pedagogical Differentiation of Anarchism and Anarchy

Micah Edwards-Acton
22 August 2019
Table of Contents 1

1 Introduction 2

2 Anarchism Primer 3

3 Chan and the Art of Freedom 5

3.1 Chan Critique 5

3.1.1 Suffering and Bondage 6

3.1.2 Discrimination and Thought 7

3.2 Chan Proposal 9

3.2.1 On Emptiness 11

3.2.2 On Enlightenment 13

4 Reading Chan Into Anarchism 16

4.1 Chan Critique of Anarchism 16

4.1.1 Anarchism With a Capital-A 16

4.1.2 Apathetic Anarchism 19

4.2 Chan Proposal for Anarchism 21

4.2.1 Emptiness of Authority 22

4.2.2 Action as Pedagogy; Pedagogy as Praxis 25

5 Conclusion 31

Works Cited 39

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1 Introduction

This paper will use ideas drawn from primary and secondary source texts of the Chan tradition, an early Chinese
contemplative school, to present a constructive critique of conventional conceptions of Anarchist pedagogy and praxis in
modernity. My main sources from Chan and Anarchism respectively will be ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind​ by D.T. Suzuki and
An Anarchist FAQ​ by The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective (Iain McKay et al.) so I will cite these texts liberally throughout
the paper. Some might feel that any connection between these thought schools and disciplines will be far-fetched, I contend that
their interaction can be an immensely productive one, especially for those who strive to dismantle hierarchically structured
institutions of authority as efficiently as possible. I can only hope that I have made apt use of the space my words occupy and that
these random sparks of representation will support others in relieving structural and systemic pressures from the shoulders of
others or themselves, even if in an infinitesimal role.
The subtitle of the paper is meant to give the first glimpse of a distinction I will elaborate later in the paper between
Anarchism and anarchy. I intentionally denote Anarchism with a capital-A here to identify its often institutional nature. Given the
stated goal of self-identified Anarchists around the world, this institutional nature seems problematic in and of itself. Pedagogical
development in the West has largely failed to produce conceptions of “teaching”, “learning”, “thinking”, “practicing”, “acting”,
and “embodying” that offer a vocabulary capable of facilitating Anarchists’ radical (and critical) reordering of their own project.
By ​reordering​ I mean the elevation of Anarchism’s own deconstructive critique to a sort of ‘higher order’, wherein it
must see itself not only as ​against​ the world, but also ​within​ the world. As such, the effort to deconstruct the hierarchical
structures of the world must also concern those monoliths of Anarchism, anarchy, polity, theory, critique, civilization, society,
chaos, order, sociality, solution, process, analysis, and system which are included among them. Raised to an even greater order, it
must deconstruct the Anarchist, identity, self, awareness, embodiment, practice, thought, freedom, and liberty altogether. This all
simply because each and every one of these things is both internally structured by and fundamentally premised upon hierarchy.
While this might sound like a ridiculous, unachievable project, the purpose of this paper is, in some sense, simply to indicate that
there is a canon of literature which may suggest otherwise: that of the Chan Masters.

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2 Anarchism Primer

“The problem that confronts us today… is how to be one’s self and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all
human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities.”
- “The Anarchist Question”, Emma Goldman

In the broadest sense, Anarchism self-identifies as a socio-economic political theory which seeks to critiques and
deconstruct modern civilization, proposing and constructing a free society in turn. Its critiques and proposals are primarily
motivated by a fundamental opposition of and to hierarchical authority, in its myriad manifestations and designs. Popular
narratives, even within professional and academic political science, often equate the concept of anarchy, after which Anarchism
takes its name, with “chaos” or otherwise a lack of order, but Anarchists fault distortions produced by the common-sense idea of
anarchy, political and social enemies, capitalist media, politicians, ideologues, and bosses for this misperception. In fact,
self-aware embodiment of Anarchism transforms anarchy into a powerful and constructive practice of anti-ideology and
self-critique.
As a body of flexible, evolving, fluid ideas which remains ever open to empirical and theoretical modification,
Anarchism changes and develops with society. Instead of promising “correct” answers or a new rule book, it attempts to provoke
thought and analysis. This process-based approach to answering Emma Goldman’s “Anarchist Question” has a constructive,
positive core lacking in other schools of political thought. As such, Anarchists believe it to be the one idea which can effectively
ensure liberty for all, entirely dismantling all systems based on oppression, authority, or the centralization of power.
The critical work of Anarchism primarily concerns hierarchy and institution. The main argument of the canon tends to
be that the dynamics of authoritarian structures like these always automatically enable and motivate the tyrannical wielding of
control on the part of parties occupying privileged positions. As the factors which primarily maintain these structures, ideology,
dogma, belief, opinion, and orthodoxy are all teased apart to reveal the deep ignorance and delusion left by lifetimes of
distortions produced by the bearers of authority. Without such a deep deconstruction of everything which facilitates the
inequitable distribution of power we see today, these cognitive biases will be left to perpetually manifest themselves in the social
realm as oppression and unnecessary suffering. Without challenging ​all​ opinions, orthodox and otherwise, we cannot be liberated
from ourselves––without challenging even the ​deepest​ assumptions, their large-scale structural creations will adapt and
regenerate more quickly than they can be overthrown. The common trope that “history repeats itself” is false––the stubbornness
of the human ego forces history to repeat itself, and until we successfully intervene upon ​this​ mechanism, we will forever live in
subordination.
Anarchism tends to be animated by the anticipation of crisis. In the context of political theory, this includes potentially
catastrophic events such as social breakdown (rising rates of poverty, homelessness, crime, violence, alienation, drug abuse,
social isolation, political apathy, dehumanisation, deterioration of community self-help and mutual aid structures, etc.),
destruction of the planet’s delicate ecosystems, or the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Whereas orthodox opinion
regards these threats to civilization as separable and independently caused, such that they can each be addressed in isolation,
Anarchism identifies hierarchical authority, which underlies most, if not all, modern societies and their institutions, as their
common source. This facilitates the formulation of a unified, coherent, and unique framework for crisis management which
appropriately respects both conventional division of these events as well as their ultimate indivisibility.

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 Anarchism’s fundamental descriptive premise is that authority is distributed hierarchically in all major institutions of
contemporary, “civilized” societies. Through the centralization of power, those in positions of authority are able to leverage these
structures to control the affairs of subordinates from the top down. Even on scales of the least or greatest locality, authoritarian
relations which negatively affect individuals, societies, and cultures are inherent to such hierarchies.
All forms of hierarchical control and relation are harmful to the individual and their individuality. Not only is the harm
they impact entirely unnecessary (in that the hierarchies themselves are unnecessary), it is also the cause of the natural repression
of persons that occurs in hierarchical institutions. As the natural object of any revolutionary political theory, government is
identified as a particularly unnecessary and extraordinarily harmful sort of hierarchical social relationship.
Most Anarchist thinkers regard ideology, fixed belief, dogma, willful ignorance, and delusion as the sources
contradiction, tyranny, and the destruction of real individual in the name of some doctrine which serves the interest of ruling
social class. Dogmas and ideologies are rigid and limiting for any person, but they are extremely seductive in their offers of
pre-packaged existential answers and solutions. These social constructions prevent the adoption of a communal flexibility which
would allow for all individuals to equitably reap and sow communal fruits, unencumbered by undue attachment to tradition or
heritage, and to speak and provide for themselves and others in the absence of enforced manipulation or control. Hierarchical
organization does not allow for a world in which the enrichment of one life is always already also the impoverishment of another.
The liberty of independent thought is seen as an index of freedom in many ways. Many Anarchists discursively reject
and offend reason as a superior mode of action or consideration, but this is not a statement of anti-intellectualism by any means.
To the contrary, the strategy here is to expose the ways in which no “reason” is untouched by influences of those systems and
states to which Anarchism stands in fundamental opposition. Every “fact”, “truth”, “logicality”, and “reason” finds its source in a
wealth of social constructions, events, and interactions. Is not everything you think and do conditioned by every experience and
thought you have had during your socialization in a hierarchical and authoritarian world? Who has the authority to tell you what
is “True”, and what is the elusive social structure which grants their power? If only there were an indoctrination vaccine.

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3 Chan and the Art of Freedom

Those Buddhist who discipline themselves in the doctrine of absolute Buddhahood should make their minds like a
piece of rock, be darkly ignorant, remain unaware of all things, have no discrimination, behave unconcernedly with all
things, resembling an idiot.
- Bodhidharma (Suzuki 113)

In his masterpiece ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind​, Zen Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki describes Chan as both “a series of
attempts to set us absolutely free from all forms of bondage” (27) and “a philosophy of absolute negations which are at the same
time absolute affirmations” (107). These descriptions are two sides of a no-sided coin, reducing something irreducible into a
dichotomous system of praxis, like the theorists and experimenters of physics. Unfortunately they insist on being useful
nonetheless––such is for the rest of this paper.
Perhaps the most famous of Chan’s genesis stories is that of the historical Buddha’s “Flower Sermon”, during which he
is said to have raised a flower while sitting in front of an audience of monks, one of whom simply smiled in response. Later, this
monk declared that the smile into which their mouth broke and the sight of the flower had enlightened them, and that they had
received the “Direct Mind Transmission” of the Buddha’s teachings (Harmless 192). From this point, Chan is said to have been
characterized primarily by a search for the cognitively penetrating realization that, as some people phrase it, there is nothing to
realize (Suzuki 37). The flower was the sermon.
Chan is interested in contemplative psychology (Suzuki 102), which seeks to realize and transcend the individual’s
experience of the world in a specific way. Unlike prescriptive religions, or even Western psychotherapy, there is no ethical
imposition for the Chan practitioner to be found (Suzuki 102). Chan is never concerned with what you do in the conventional
sense. Study it or don’t, get enlightened or don’t––the choice is yours. Although the agents of religions and other ideologies view
their beliefs as divine mandate or immovable fact, Chan acknowledges that its own accessibility and functionality are enormously
restricted by simple circumstance as soon as it assumes the form of a thought-school. Those who will find it, will––those who
won’t, won’t.
Recognizing the arbitrariness of its group of associates, Chan has used the necessary personalization of teachings
(Suzuki 14) as an exhibition for its own merits, and that of its Masters. Confronted with profoundly difficult questions from each
of their students, they are recorded as having had perfected the art of responding in a way that separates, conflates, and negates
the conventional and Absolute worlds at once––this is what Suzuki meant. For Chan, this is the outward manifestation of an
enlightened individual (Suzuki 33). Suzuki says, “One has no right to say a word about [Chan] unless they gain a certain insight
into this dialectic of negation-affirmation” (107). I like to think he would forgive me.

3.1 Chan Critique

The primary critiques of Chan literature are concerned first with suffering, and then with the conventional functions of
the human mind which are regarded as its source. Suffering is talked about far less frequently and explicitly in Chan discourses
when compared to those of other Buddha-descendent traditions. After all, it seems that we need not talk or be told about it to be
familiar with its place in our own lives. Rather, Chan wastes no time on pleasantries and courtesies, immediately starting at

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battering the practitioner into enlightenment (Suzuki 41). The compulsions of religious ceremony and ritual are abandoned as
quickly as their utility in service of this goal diminishes; anything one believes only “because they said so” is a delusion.
In keeping with the thread uniting all Buddha-descendent schools, Chan regards the establishment of ultimate freedom
[from suffering] for each individual as its goal (Suzuki 31). Its general proposal is that there is something about the structure of
human phenomenological experience which most people never see or understand. Those who do fully grasp it experience an
instantaneous alteration in the way they reactively perceive reality and experience life––a condition free from all suffering
(Suzuki 35). Along with this spiritual analgesia comes the ability to guide others toward this realization. Chan Masters are
imperfect humans, as the rest of us, but they seem to see something about the world which others do not. Their wit is nothing if
not transcendent.

3.1.1 Suffering and Bondage

When a sensory stimulus––a sight, scent, flavor, feeling, sound, etc.––enters a typical person’s attention, they instantly
and automatically evaluate it in a variety of dimensions. Before they even have the words to articulate their decisions to
themselves, the decisions have already been made: the object is absolutely good, bad, right, wrong, desirable, undesirable,
simple, complicated, exciting, disappointing, large, small, difficult, easy, real, unreal, etc. Because they are at first inarticulable,
these decisions can only be detected in their guidance of the person’s future actions, even for the person themself.
The claim of Chan is that it is possible to entirely transcend suffering by recalibrating this pre-conscious
decision-making mechanism, or intuition, such that it no longer conflates conventional truth with Absolute Truth (Suzuki 20).
Linguistically articulated or otherwise symbolically represented human narratives or reasons cannot be logically equivalent with
Absolute Truth (Suzuki 98), which is what Chan calls the content of pure phenomenological experience. Conventional objects
exist only as conceptual referents, but have no physical body or form, so they cannot actually exist within, directly impact, or
accurately represent the phenomenal world (Suzuki 112). Any story used to justify a pre-conscious decision falls short of
explanatory completeness and sufficiency in the Absolute sense, as a story can never be “right” or “wrong”; it can only be a
story. Stories are of a different dialectic than Absolute Truth. This is to say that, as language is structured around arbitrary
divisions​ of the real and mechanically breaks down in attempts to articulate its actual unity, we cannot justifiably make any
absolute claims about the world. And yet we attempt and believe ourselves to do so constantly. When we take these claims to be
Absolutely true as such, it shapes their experience of “the way the world is” at the most fundamental level. This is the
information that will be used to guide future pre-conscious decisions––our minds don’t ask us which prior experiences to take
into account when making these judgements, and thoughts are certainly included amongst experiences.
Each time I think to myself, “I really hate brussels sprouts,” I’m filing away information in the archival memory of my
intuition that will avert me to brussels sprouts the next time I encounter them. This aversion will grow stronger each time I see
them, feel pre-conscious aversion to them again, and repeatedly interpret this aversion as a hatred toward brussels sprouts. If the
aversion I felt was actually toward the narrative of hatred that overtakes my mind when I see brussels sprouts, would I be able to
tell the difference? In the absence of a familiar narrative, would I instead try a sprout upon each encounter and then promptly
rediscover (or not) my distaste anew?
When your preconceived notions restrict your ability to recognize and exercise your own individual freedom to the
greatest degree, you are restricted and bound (Suzuki 113). Being deprived of the opportunity to discover that brussels sprouts
have become one of my favorite foods is a violation of my freedom and a restriction of my will. Instead, I am relegated to a

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world in which a common vegetable maintains enormous circumstantial influence over my being––is not this bondage? We
anxiously fear God, yet neglect to notice that ​we​ damn ​ourselves​ to realms such as the one riddled with loathing and angst which
can only eat away at one’s wellness, but never the leafy vegetable it is directed toward. Beyond this realm, there is also another
full of really great feelings about and strong desires toward chocolate cake that won’t go away even once I’ve eaten enough to be
sick.
This condemnation to self-inflicted psychological diminishment is the bondage which Chan seeks to liberate people
from. Although my example with the brussels sprouts makes light of this phenomenon, it is not difficult to see how the
mechanism it exemplifies operates in enormously devastating ways for countless people everyday. From depression to anxiety,
drug addiction to incapacitating grief, these processes are at work in every moment of every day, no matter how mundane or
extraordinary. Without them, suffering would presumably cease to exist; while we would still feel pain, we would fail to evaluate
it either positively or negatively, and would therefore entirely avoid experiencing it as such. This is Chan’s plot to assassinate
suffering, along with everything else (Suzuki 26).

3.1.2 Discrimination and Thought

Understanding the standard theoretical basis for Chan’s account of enlightenment is not a prerequisite for
enlightenment itself (Suzuki 43) (although it may be a prerequisite for knowing that enlightenment is an appropriate title for it). It
seems more likely that this sort of intellectualization should be taken to be just as useless as the rest. For our present purposes,
though, it will be useful for better understanding later sections’ coverage of Chan’s conception of enlightenment and its import
for the Anarchist.
The transcendent communication of the Chan Master involves the use of words to gesture toward something to which
no words are assigned because it cannot be understood through the cognitive capacities of language processing (Suzuki 29). It
must be experienced to be understood, as it does not exist in the conventional world of objects and concepts.
Chan describes the Absolute World (phenomenal experience) as infinitely pure, undefiled, simple, and illuminating
(Suzuki 23). It is immanent within all beings because it ​is​ being, but it transcends classification, so it stands above and cannot be
represented within space, time, consciousness, or duality. As it cannot be captured by the conventions of thing-classifying, it does
not meet the criteria to be regarded as a thing: it is ​no-thing​, or nothingness. This is not the material universe we talk about in the
physical sciences––rather, it is the negation of that world, its dialectical container (Suzuki 39) which necessarily contains all that
is and is not, and so nothing at all. It lacks substance, appearance, and utility by nature of ​constituting,​ ​subsuming,​ and
transcending​ substance, appearance, and utility themselves (Suzuki 41). In this way, it is indivisible and so devoid of
discrimination (Suzuki 115). This Absolute, this nothingness, which precedes conventional universe in terms of cognition, will
henceforth be denoted simply as Nature.
Nature is said to have some intrinsic attribute of Self-Consciousness (Suzuki 39). It does not have awareness or
intelligence and it cannot make moral, psychological, or epistemological distinctions (Suzuki 115). It does not know ​about
anything; rather, it is a serene Self-Knowing completely empty of actual content (Suzuki 48). It is unknown, but it itself is the act
and state of knowing. We only know Nature exists because we, living things, ​are​ its Self-Knowing. What we call life is Nature’s
encounter with itself, and every instantaneous frame of experience is a moment of this encounter. Far from spectators to this
phenomenon, we ​are​ the phenomenon.

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 In one sense, Nature’s Self-Consciousness may be thought of as being bi-directional, although this dualistic framing is
only​ dialectical and is an inaccurate representation of the Absolute. I mean to indicate that Nature always already seems to have
simultaneous phenomenological access to that ​from​ which is emerges, that ​toward​ which it is oriented, and the Absolute
relationship of identity between the two (Suzuki 120). In this way, there is a direct window into the Absolute Truth of Nature
immanent in phenomenal experience which most people neglect to seek, find, or shatter. However, whether it be by detriment of
linguistic communication or otherwise, the individual’s direct experience of being Nature itself can become distracted and
deluded by the side of its vision which is oriented outward (Suzuki 120). In this state, we have created symbolic representations
which we now take to be more authoritative accounts of reality than our personal experiences.
These representations (thoughts) are ultimately fabrications of the universe––the sensation that there is some unified
agent making free decisions at the core of consciousness is illusory. On this account, I do have free will, but “I” is actually
Nature, even if I am unaware of my identification with it (Suzuki 119). For incarnations of the universe’s self-reflection like us, a
superficial conceptual dichotomy between observer and observed can emerge, giving the impression that we are something other
than Self-Knowledge, but instead ultimately discrete entities engaged in knowing things which are external to us.
Any sense that one can make a decision to act and then does so is illusory when stated chronologically as such, which
threatens Western conceptions of free will. However, the will of the individual is actually always already the will of Nature, so
even if the will escapes reflection, meditation, or direct intervention, it is active nonetheless. More appropriately stated, the
universe and subjective experience both mutually condition​ and d​ irectly oppose one another. They negate each other, but the
negation is actually an affirmation. The human realizes the world. The nihilist realizes the negation of the world. The Chan
Master realizes the affirmation made by negating the world. If nothing is real, isn’t everything?
Many popular contemplative traditions seem to preach the active and intentional stilling of thoughts, or at least are
commonly interpreted as such. On the Chan account, though, this seems like a misguided approach (Suzuki 26, 36). Chan regards
all thoughts as transcendental knowledge (Suzuki 20), which is how they regard all contents of pure, pre-discriminate
phenomenology. This is the complete sphere of immediate experience which constitutes our consciousness at every given
moment, before our mind has had enough time to formulate thoughts regarding it. Predicting Western phenomenology, Chan
regards this as the absolute epistemological limit of any living being.
Here, thoughts themselves are just more phenomenal experiences, sharing some ineffable source-substance with all of
those things we see, hear, taste, smell, feel, sense, emote, say, do, or otherwise detect in the world. So to successfully still one’s
thoughts is hardly distinguishable from donning a blindfold, and to permanently annihilate thought is like gouging one’s own
eyes out. Neither of these things immediately strikes me as holding great spiritual utility, but what do I know?
Chan locates the problem not in the thought but in the ‘thinker’: the mental ego-concept invoked, assumed, and reified
by the utterance of “I” or “me”. The concern with thoughts is not that they exist, but that the way they appear in the
Self-Knowledge of Nature makes the content of their concepts difficult to parse from the content of instantaneous phenomenal
experience.
Thoughts add a superficial layer of meaning to a non-superficial phenomenal world, composed in a language
constructed around the part Nature’s bi-directional Self-Knowledge to which thoughts ​respond​, the part oriented ​toward​ itself,
not ​from​ itself (Suzuki 120). Language neglects the nature of the subject, even if it grammatically invokes them. This is why we
have the language of subject and object, noun and verb, even though such distinctions and the things they represent cannot
adequately hold or manifest any Absolute claim. From these subjects and objects emerges the narrative form of linguistic and
conceptual thought and communication: the realm of “things”. From these “things” emerge simultaneously the senses of “that

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world” and of “this self” as distinct, as well as the ideas about the world that we use to conceptually understand the relation
between the two. Such distinctions are not to be found beyond convention, though (Suzuki 25-26), and Chan Masters suggest that
there is some mechanism whereby the universe can transcend this delusion and remember its true nature, which is not as a
discrete self but as the entirety of reality (Suzuki 48-49).
To even ascribe the roles of observer and observed to the situation is misleading, as Nature transcends plurality and
does not interact with itself the way a human mind might with its body. Again, this is to invoke some separation between
observer and observed, whereas Nature is always already ​both​ observer and observed, taking on dynamics that cannot be
understood by conventional thought because it is unlike anything in the conventional world to which the ego reading this has
access. Nature can forget that it is the Absolute World, that all of the seer and the seen are entirely itself.
The inarticulable state of phenomenological affairs which this framework for Nature attempts to gesture toward is said
to be imminently accessible to Nature itself, and so to us. This means that there is some way for living beings to directly perceive
the functions of the universe that are described above, and that they are actually always already perceiving it regardless of their
ability to identify it as such. Such access is a product of specific mental conditions which are in conflict with the normative
mental functioning of modern humans in many ways (Suzuki 105). The project of Chan is to most effectively engineer these
conditions, all in the name of liberation (Suzuki 102). Once you’ve seen it, you just can’t look away. .

3.2 Chan Proposal

“Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the
word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody; natural order, unity of
human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.”
- Ericco Malatesta, “Anarchy”

Bodhidharma, a rowdy and disheveled Buddhist monk of either Persian or South Indian royalty, arrived in China in the
middle of the 5th century (Broughton 8, 54). Claiming he was the bearer of an apostolic succession descending directly from
Sidhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, he spent his life teaching in Chan, the Buddhist school of “Direct Pointing” or “Mind
Transmission”. Unlike many other lineage-based traditions, Chan’s primary use was as a vehicle for non-linguistic
communication. The lineage of Chan Masters existed not so certain scriptural texts could be passed down in preservation, but
rather so that individuals with some confirmed transcendent perception of the world were always available to identify others with
the same transcendent perception.
Note, however, that this system seems to be based on both trust and distrust, faith and skepticism, belief and disbelief,
at once. While a historical record of Chan Masters provides us with some guidance, it would never have been established without
concern that people might intentionally or unintentionally feign the specific attainments of their tradition and ‘misinform’ others.
Those wary of devotion to any teacher or teaching might find the unverifiability of the attainments of those ​within​ the lineage
suspect, reminiscent of every other claim of religious exclusivity. There is a line to be found in Chan that never misinforms
though, as it never informs either. The earliest holders of the Chinese lineage, often called the Six Patriarchs, fully condemned
devotion (Suzuki 101). In fact, they approved only of constant negation of everything, including and especially all things one is
devoted to or affiliated with. If somebody claims to represent Chan and suggests that you should believe in something new, rather
than pointing out and deconstructing the things you already believe in, their Chan is not the one I speak of here. Those I refer to

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care not for students’ learning, but rather their ​un​learning. To accommodate this, the act of teaching must be altogether revised in
Chan communities. To illustrate the difficulty of the Chan Master’s pedagogical task, I will provide an illustrative analogy to
their project here.
If two sighted, hearing, speaking people literate in the same dialect are standing next to one another in front of a police
station, it will probably take only seconds for one of them to understand exactly which physical object in their surroundings the
other is referring to when they say, “…the 20-foot Anarchist circle-A we just spray painted on the front of the building.”
Imagine that these two people go home to their respective Anarchist housing cooperatives and later talk on the phone,
when one (who is visually achromatic, completely blind to color) tells the other that they’ve just received their new EnChroma®
Color Blind Glasses in the mail. The calibration sheet that came with them, however, is misprinted and does not contain labels to
match the hue swatches. The natural trichromatic, the true comrade that they are, does their best to provide verbal guidance
without being able to see or point at the sheet and quickly finds it to be impossible. How could they possibly explain which
swatch is red to this person who has never seen red? At best, they can refer to common objects for approximations, but this too
falls short. If they say, “Get that “Tyrant’s Blood” color paint we used earlier––that’s red,” it does not seem that the achromatic
and the trichromatic will necessarily then share the same concept of ‘true red’, although the trichromatic’s should presumably be
taken as far ​more​ authoritative, if still subjective and computationally imperfect.
Those who ‘inform’ direct people toward resources in what I will call the ‘social-objective’ world, which we all share.
This world does not “exist” in the physical sense, as it is furnished by both physical and non-physical creations of human culture
and language. More of a metaphorical framework, it is the mental space we all operate within whenever we interact with
ourselves (thinking) or others, full of “meaning” and “value” and “universe” and “things” and “people” and “self” and “thoughts”
and “reality”. It is the cloud storage of culture, where every individual mind that comes into contact with it immediately becomes
a host server for an anarchically structured network that constitutes the collective mind, or the social-objective world. I mean to
distinguish this from the objective world in that a hallucination lies in the objective world but not the social-objective one, and an
ideology exist in the social-objective world but not the objective one.
Chan is disinterested in this sort of ‘informing’, as they see it as always already actually ‘misinforming’. When our
Anarchist proudly directs their comrade’s attention to the spray-painted product of their labor, they are engaged in this kind of
‘informing’. They are using a set of learned conventions to orient their partner toward an object in the social-objective world
which they share, even though they are both having entirely separate phenomenological experiences which are opaque to one
another. This is the work of the physics teacher who uses culturally familiar frameworks to conceptualize the behavior of an
atom, or the work of the priest who leverages popular hermeneutic lenses to interpret scripture. The work of the Chan Master, on
the other hand, is to assist the self-deconstruction of the individual by trying to force one into a mental position in which intellect
is absent, and then to realize this absence of intellect as exhaustively liberating.
To be clear, the duality set up by my account of the social-objective world is ultimately superficial and only
conventionally useful, as is any theoretical framework. Chan views duality of any sort as always already Absolutely superficial.
From the perspective of the ego though, it seems that the social-objective world can be seen in two ways, by looking either
inward or outward. The inward social-objective world moves with you and you move within it. You may be able to think of
several different individuals or groups around whom you conduct yourself quite disparately––this is the constant adjustment of
the inward social-objective world as it comes into contact with various minds. Every thought you have is within this world, but
only you have access to them––this is the experience of an individual within the social-objective world.

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 Looking outwardly, the social-objective world becomes more abstract and more robust. In this sense, social-objective
worlds are numerous. Here every individual exists within any number of social-objective worlds at any time––not just the one
that is of greatest appeal, import, or attention for oneself. This is to objectify the subject, to invoke them as a member of a set, to
see them in light of ​any​ permutation of the minds their mind is dependent upon and conditioned by at a given moment. Standing
in a room of friends, analysis of my social-objective world could theoretically take place at the level of the furnishings of my own
mind, of the shared minds of the people I’m interacting with in the conventional sense, the shared minds of the people in the
room, shared minds of the people in the building, minds of the people in the neighborhood, of the people in the city, the people in
the country, people on the planet, etc. As a theoretical framework, the only factor determining the ‘scale’ of analysis is
functionality––that is, why do you ask?
Those who ‘​uni​ nform’ (Chan Masters) demand the total annihilation of the social-objective world, restoring to factory
settings the nodes of its networks one person at a time. To ‘​uni​ nform’ is to point away from everything that can be pointed at, to
show you that this whole time you’ve been looking in the wrong place for the answer to your own question. It’s to convincingly
say, “No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” when you know how much people loathe and resist being wrong. It’s to ​force​ someone
to realize wisdom which transcends intellect and so can only be grasped in the suspension of intellectualization.

3.2.1 On Emptiness

“From the first, not a thing is.”

- Hui-Neng (D.T. Suzuki, ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind,​ pg. 22)

Chan philosophy is only significant in light of the idea that all things are Empty of essence in the Absolute sense
(Suzuki 38), where Absolute Emptiness is something like that represented in a radical Cartesian doubt which shrouds certainty
even more than Descartes himself was able to (Davis 310). This is to say that, when we analyze our holistic, unified, and
undifferentiated phenomenological experience into component parts and categories, our methodology for doing so is ultimately
arbitrary, no matter how systematic. Any sense of meaning, context, or facticity about the world exists only in one’s individual
mind, even if they preconsciously project it onto their perceptions, making them believe that they are actually identifying them
somewhere in the objective world. Even for those who may be able to dialectically deconstruct this notion if prompted, this
mechanism of essence-imagining and meaning-creating is always active in one’s perceptual conception of the world (Davis 305).
Absolute Knowledge exists only in the form of experience––it ​is​ the collective content of pure phenomenological
presentation before you discriminate “things” and begin to synthesize a mental narrative analysis of them (Suzuki 105). These
thoughts themselves are part of this pure phenomenology at the very moment of their presentation, but as soon as they are
recognized and understood as thoughts, motivating the appearance of other related thoughts, their infinitesimal moment of purity
is gone (Suzuki 110). There is always a latency between thinker and thought because the thinker (ego, self) is a mental and
narrative product of the recognition and understanding. To actually see or realize this in personal experience using thought is a
chase where one begins each new moment already one step behind. The immediate, fleeting experience of a thought’s
appearance, as with the presentation of all other pure phenomena, is Absolute Knowledge, whereas the contents of the thoughts
themselves, filled with concepts and meanings, are only conventional knowledge (Suzuki 48). Absolute Knowledge is, therefore,
a kind of ‘knowing’ which is in many ways foreign to Western epistemology––it is both an experience and an action, but not an
articulable equation which lies in wait for analysis or recollection in one’s cognition or memory, respectively.

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 This might also be understood as the explicit dialectical separation between conventional truth and Absolute Truth, the
latter of which Chan regards as fundamentally unrepresentable via symbolic representation, including language. One of the most
prominent thematic lines in Chan literature seeks to clarify the functional distinction between the two, relegating all conventional
knowledge to solely conventional use. Information of this sort is fallible, subjective, and ​always​ vulnerable to delusion or
corruption. Interestingly, the only sort of knowledge which avoids these accusations on the Chan account is that of pure,
undifferentiated phenomenology––the Self-Knowing which ​is​ Nature which ​is​ the Mind of the Absolute World. On this account,
one’s immediate, conceptless, atemporal, aspacial, phenomenological sphere of experience, which Exists only as an
undifferentiated representation of itself to itself, is the only form of Absolute Knowledge.
Because Chan fundamentally views Nature as an active Self-Consciousness which can be sought and recognized by the
individual only within their own experience of the world, every moment of phenomenal awareness is seen as Absolute
Knowledge. This phenomenological experience is direct consciousness of Nature in itself, by itself, and for itself. It ​is​ Nature
itself, where Nature is the Self-Knowing of reality which is both the experiencer and the experienced, identifiable only by, in, and
for itself. This sort of transcendent, experiential Knowledge consists only in the unified, undifferentiated phenomenological field,
but the ​content​ of this field is never Absolutely True (Suzuki 39). Because this sphere of experience lacks any Absolute
discrimination, it cannot be said to have any content besides Knowledge of its own Existence, the consciousness of its own
presence in and as itself. Any “things” that one picks out from this unified field comprises their conventional knowledge. This is
what is meant by the quote which opened this section––no “thing” Exists in the Absolute sense. Some examples may be helpful
in clarifying this deeply unintuitive concept.
Recall our two guerilla Anarchists from earlier in the paper, now both functionally trichromatic in vision thanks to
incredible advancements in optical biotechnology. Suppose that after the one had pointed to their work on the front of the police
station, identifying it verbally as “…the 20-foot Anarchist circle-A we just spray painted on the front of the building,” the other
had replied with, “What building? I only see a huge, ugly canvas.” Now, it seems reasonable to assume that this person would be
able to identify the building as a building without hesitation if pressed, and that they understood what they were saying to be a
pseudo-humorous figure of speech even as they said it, but in some sense there was Truth in the statement. After all, it seems that
they did see an appropriate place to install a provocative and aesthetically forward-minded piece of political artwork––what do
we call such a thing if not a canvas?––where those who were asleep at their desks inside of the building presumably had not.
“The building” can never be Absolutely Known because it exists only as a concept, not a phenomenal experience. The
thinker can access the building only when circumstances prompt thoughts of the building as such, bringing the well-established
concept to mind and projecting it onto an objectified sensory (visual) stimulus, but the building cannot be brought into Absolute
Knowledge because such Knowledge lacks any conceptual content with which to represent or reference it. Concepts and
experiences are like different, incompatible file formats of the mind. Buildings and other products of thought––chairs, cars,
planets, atoms, space, time, sadness, happiness, pain, pleasure, right, wrong, good, bad, etc.––are all known only in convention.
They do not exist in the world external to all individuals, but instead ​only​ in the social-objective world. As such, we would err to
conflate them with matters of Absolute Knowledge or Truth. And yet, we do so constantly.
Deconstructively analyzing these post-phenomenological objects, feelings, and ideas seems to be a good way to begin
understanding where to look for the sort of emptiness Chan is referring to within personal experience, but an increasingly
nuanced vocabulary and approach are needed to investigate conceptual matters which underlie the day-to-day thoughts and
considerations in our lives. The hazard of this is, of course, that with more nuanced vocabulary and approach comes compounded
abstraction and conceptualization, moving Chan discourse away from its goal, per its own opposition to intellectualization

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(Suzuki 14). Having come this far, though, why let such things dissuade us? We’ve already committed the capital sin, so we
might as well see it through, ensuring that the ​attitude​ we maintain always accounts for the unbridgeable gap between conceptual
content and Absolute Truth. This theoretical humility is the most critical element of any serious, deconstructive discourse on
freedom.
After deconstructing concepts like those listed above until they are rendered transparent in light of Absolute Truth––in
that their Emptiness is so intuitively familiar to one that it is an immediately self-evident trait in encounters with and perceptions
of them––one may continue to pull at the foundational ideas of their conventional knowledge until they arrive at the functional
root of the human conflation of conventional and Absolute. Chan texts suggest that the phenomenological symptoms of the
construct which psychology might call the “self” or “ego” are primarily responsible for the way in which humans coordinate their
actions to the Absolute World as responses to a world which exists only in their own thoughts and theories (Suzuki 31). Like the
thinker who misguidedly seeks to cognize the thought before recognizing it as a thought, these theory-coordinated actions are
always automatically one step behind the Absolute World, and the tension which this separation produces fundamentally
constitutes suffering. Attaining a psychological state in which the ego presents itself as always already transparent to one, and so
to itself, is then the end of suffering––its preconditions are no longer met in the realm of pure experience.
This is the only prescription of Chan––that of non-prescription (Suzuki 20); of rejection of all prescription, including
and especially that of one’s self, which founds every thought, experience, and action of the unenlightened individual. Only then
can you so deeply Know pain and suffering as Empty that they can no longer captivate your phenomenal awareness beyond
Absolute warrant. This Knowledge informs the ​whole​ of experience; if the psychosoma reactively interacts with the world from a
pre-conscious insight into the Emptiness of pain, how can it ​feel​ “painful” in the conventional sense of undesirability,
unpleasance, and bad-ness (Suzuki 118)? What about pain would warrant a general sense of aversion which extends any further
than wise and skillful reflexes in situations involving pain for oneself or another? Who would determine such bad-ness in the
absence of an ego deceptively masquerading as the bearer of Absolute Knowledge?
This rendering transparent the ego is not nihilistic. Although emptying the world of any Absolute essence familiar to
the Western or Judeo-Christian mind might seem pessimistic, it cannot be, for even this distinction between glass-half-full and
-empty is sucked into the indiscriminate black hole of Emptiness. The only thing spared is life living life in, of, and for itself.
Looked at in this way, such a proposition might even be made palatable to the most conventional mindset––indeed, it seems as if
we can turn the despair of the old existentialist into the freedom of the child, as if by some alchemy! Perhaps Sisyphus can only
suffer if he thinks ​as Sisyphus​––what if his thoughts just thought themselves, instantaneously presenting then withdrawing within
pure experience, because the only phenomenal content they could be inspired by is already brimming with the impenetrable a
priori recognition of its own Emptiness. He can see where the conventional concepts of bad-ness and pain would appropriately
describe his experience, so he is still fully competent socially (I do wonder whether he talks to the boulder), but he does not
experience them ​via​ these concepts––it’s as if a distorted interpretive filter between him and his experience has disintegrated,
phenomenologically unifying the thinker with the thought. This is the Absolute freedom of Chan: to be ​unmoved​ by all “things”,
for “things” can only move an ego, for it too is a “thing” and so occupies the same abstract realm of activity.

3.2.2 On Enlightenment

“The [enlightened person] discriminates all things with non-discriminating [Self-Consciousness]. If he has any
discriminating mind, do you think he could discriminate all things?”

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 - Shen-Hui, ​Sayings​ (D.T. Suzuki, ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind,​ pg. 50)

As a tradition descendent from the teachings and students of the historical Buddha, even a secular Chan must reckon
with its obligation to freedom, to liberation, to enlightenment. Its liberative attainment is described as the cessation of erroneous
thoughts, dualistic perceptions, discrimination of forms, differentiation of logic and psychologic, the mind’s attachment to itself,
and the mind’s engagement in general (Suzuki 26, 50). In the positive dimension, it is regarded as the return to one’s “original
mind”, the recognition of Nature as pure and unified, and effortless submission to Nature as it moves us freely (Suzuki 47, 113).
The primary claim which founds most Chan discourse regarding enlightenment is that Nature is always already directly
Self-Conscious of its Absolute nature, which is fundamentally without essence (Suzuki 35). Indeed, to be Self-Conscious of its
Absolute nature ​is​ what it means ​to be i​ n the sense that Nature ​is–​ –there is no other Nature than Self-Consciousness of Nature’s
Absolute nature. The evident friction in this statement arises from 1) the dialectical splitting of the world into Nature and its
nature as well as 2) the non-dual unity that seems describable only by verb, not noun, because conventional psychology and
language take noun as primary and verb as secondary, and Absolute [psycho]logic reverses these roles. Generally speaking,
people have little to no practice of linguistically understanding or describing the world in a way that takes pure ​relationality​, not
physicality, as the fundamental denizen of Nature (for a masterful work that​ has​ explored this, see Foucault’s ​Archaeology of
Knowledge​). If Chan supplies something, the sheer unfamiliarity of this task is the source of its demand. We have been explicitly
and implicitly trained to reactively see the world in duality for the entirety of our lives––Chan only answers unanswerable
questions because we refuse to stop asking. It would make sense, given Chan’s attitude as we have seen to this point, that without
such questions there would be no Chan discourse at all.
To be enlightened is to be conscious without simultaneously ​feeling like​ the “self” which is conscious––to reactively,
phenomenological experience yourself ​as​ ​the act of being conscious.​ This is to ‘see’ in a way that is fully identified with itself,
such that there is no ‘seer’ apart from the ‘seeing’ itself. All at once verb becomes noun and noun becomes verb, immediately
collapsing them both into something totally devoid of anything which might feasibly support such distinctions as verb and noun
from being drawn in the first place. When Nature recognizes itself within its Self-Knowledge, the fundamentally unbridgeable
gaps between seer and seen, self and other, experiencer and experienced, and subject and object are all effortlessly bridged by
mere intuition. It seems that the individual who has mistaken their “self” as Absolutely real for their entire life, as most of us
have and will, can abruptly ​remember​ that this self is no more than ​its own dialectical vessel​ in the conventional world (as Nature
just ​is​ the objectless​ a​ ctivity of Self-Knowing), enabling a radically dynamic conception of Nature and more flexible,
spontaneous, and penetrating employments of both conventional wisdom and Absolute Knowledge. In Chan, the abruptness of
this enlightenment is critical––there is no gradual realization here (Suzuki 20).
Because the enlightened person reactively perceives the lack of essence in all things, they need not think at all to Know
the Absolute negation of all phenomenological sensations (Suzuki 47). The direct perception of essencelessness is something
precognitive for them, like information about physiological location is when one feels a bodily pain. One need not explicitly
think to themselves “left leg” to know that the sudden pain they are experiencing is emanating centrally from the left leg.
Precognitive information like this is impossible to aptly represent with language because the mere act of translation invokes
postcognitive capacities that cloud our ability to ‘occupy’ the precognitive mind––of course the data you gather from this limb
injury did not actually appear in the form of a subconscious, linguistic communique that read “left leg”. This precognitive
information cannot be known in the way that words or concepts can because it cannot exist temporally. By the time the ego has
an experience, the precognitive processes it is founded on have already finished their job and covered their tracks, rendering them

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invisible to the ego. In each moment, these precognitive capacities are ​just​ out of reach, perpetually on the tip of the introspective
tongue.
The enlightened mind always already perceives, on the most foundational level of consciousness, the lack of Absolute
essence in all things. While one can still navigate the conventional world in this condition (arguably much better than they could
otherwise), having a constant tangible awareness of the transience that exhaustively constitutes the world of form facilitates the
transcendence of suffering, in the Buddhist sense of the word. The enlightened being sees and understands that not a single
person or action is ever unenlightened. Rather, the inability of the person and action to recognize themselves, first in each other
and then in themselves, is what prevents them from constituting enlightened experience. As they are unable to recognize Nature,
they cannot understand the Absolute necessity (like perfection, but evaluatively neutral) of their every action as its conscious
embodiment.
According to Chan, if and when person and action ​do​ simultaneously recognize one another as themselves, the
penetrating understanding of their own passions as Empty of essence will give way to an effortless dissolution of the passions,
even as felt from this new perspective. Any phenomenology of passion is premised on a false precognitive distinction between
“self” and “other”, which no enlightened person would be inclined to hold. The Chan proposition here seems to be that all noble
aspirations are those premised on non-dual conceptions of reality.
Since suffering is generally considered vicious by convention, it no longer appears to the enlightened person as such
because they no longer distinguish vice from virtue in the Absolute, phenomenological sense. As Suzuki says in ​The Zen
Doctrine of No-Mind​, “He who has definitely attained [enlightenment] retains his [non-discrimination of reality] even when his
body is cut to pieces [...]. He is solid as a diamond, firm and immovable. [... N]ot the least feeling of joy [or pity] moves in him.
[...] He abides in the thought of emptiness and absolute sameness,” (Suzuki 118). This is how Chan intends to annihilate
suffering.

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4 Reading Chan Into Anarchism

The experiential immanence of the enlightened mind for all beings has been emphasized in many contemplative
traditions, but Chan seems to be amongst the very few of them which take the notion to its logical conclusion. By noting that the
perception of every thought is transcendental knowledge of the Absolute (Suzuki 20), in some sense, it does away with the
necessity for the mental conditioning efforts believed to be necessary precursors to enlightenment in so many other schools.
Because the mind is able to coordinate the body according to present-moment circumstances and phenomenal information
without ever invoking a “thinker”, the thinker is tasked with their own deconstruction while they allow the body to perform its
housekeeping. In this way Chan is to be practiced in every moment of every day, not while seated in silent stillness on a
meditation cushion (Suzuki 109-110). The energy of daily life is the wellspring of the world, the very source of the total
experience of which Chan students seek to realize in its Absolute Nature (Suzuki 39)..

4.1 Chan Critique of Anarchism

In some of Chan’s most important texts, Masters are quoted as consistently condemning all forms of indulgent
intellectualization and quietistic escapism (Suzuki 35). Certainly Anarchism would benefit from embodying such an attitude.
Despite its rich history of social critique and utopian theorization, Anarchists seem to have largely failed to explore certain
radical approaches to the synthesis of anarchic states of relation in the world, and especially in day-to-day life under capitalism.
Using the outline of Chan doctrine which I have set forth in the previous section, I will attempt to articulate at least one sense in
which those constructions which Anarchism seeks to dismantle can be seen as always already absent, and how one’s
deeply-penetrating, reactive familiarity with this reality (as in Absolute knowing) can open previously inaccessible modes of
anarchic embodiment. This is to consider the Anarchist assault an attack on oneself, but to agree with and embody it nonetheless.
This is to stop being an Anarchist and to start ​being anarchy.​
Where the Chan adherent diminishes the ego in the name of personal enlightenment, the anarchic actor is motivated
instead by the desire for freedom and liberty for the countless beings around the world who are violently and fatally oppressed by
the tyrannical forces of hierarchical authority and institutionalized power at every moment of every day. They have cultivated the
attribute of reactively detecting the evidence of their Absolute freedom in their every perception and movement––whether they
are overtaking a federal facility or having dinner with their employer. This is a freedom which transcends any hierarchical
structure or authoritarian relation.

4.1.1 Anarchism With a Capital-A

“A hairsbreadth's difference is as the distance between heaven and earth."

- Wansong Xingxiu, ​Shōyōroku​, “Case 17: Fayan’s ‘Hairsbreadth’”

This quote from Chan Master Xingxiu’s seminal work, commonly translated as ​The Book of Serenity​, points in one
sense at Chan’s subitism––their understanding of enlightenment as attained suddenly and all at once, ​not​ gradually over time. The
gap between enlightenment and unenlightenment is always of the same magnitude, no matter how small it may seem in some,
because the two states of being are binary and mutually exclusive––you’re ​always​ doing either one or the other, but never neither,

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both, or somewhere between. This is the hairsbreadth’s difference which is as the distance between heaven and earth, where the
hairsbreadth difference represents somebody alleged to be ‘on the cusp’ of enlightenment–– “‘cusp’ is empty!” would say the
Chan Master. Even the smallest separation from enlightenment is still the greatest separation from it.
Alternatively, the sentence can be interpreted as a complete teaching, as a snapshot of the Master’s own enlightened
mind, because in their mind the hairsbreadth’s difference is, in one sense, ​actually​ undifferentiable from the distance between
heaven and earth, for they directly perceive the Emptiness of all measurements and the phenomenological substrate which unifies
them. Quantity, hair, breadth, difference, being, similarity, object, distance, preposition, heaven, summation, and earth, are all
Empty of essence, indistinguishable and inseparable from each other in the phenomenological realm, and the Chan Master
perceives this Absolute Emptiness as clearly as the conventional “things” themselves.
A third reading of the quote, which is appropriate with regard to the larger context of Xingxiu’s ​Shōyōroku​ and of
Chan, might interpret it as suggesting that even the smallest reservation, the most momentary hesitation, in one’s mental
deconstruction of world, self, and duality will prevent them from attaining enlightenment. If we spare even one single “thing” in
our rendering Absolutely transparent the conventional world, no matter how sentimentally valuable to our ego-narratives hold
them, we bind ourselves to a world of conflation and delusion, of seeing the conventional as Absolute, the dynamic as static.
In the Introduction section of this paper, I pointed out my use of the capital-A when writing the word Anarchism.
Through this section, and the end of the paper, I will present my argument against this capital-A Anarchism and the capital-A
Anarchists who maintain it, which I will specify the meanings of, and in favor of the active embodiment of a lowercase-a
‘anarchy’. I propose that even communities and organizations which explicitly promote anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian
values are ​entirely​ constituted by actors ​fully​ conditioned by the ​exhaustively​ hierarchical and authoritarian global/ized
social-objective world which most humans alive today occupy. Even further, it seems that such Anarchist congregations are ​more
susceptible to distortion, corruption, and abuse under the thumb of this unfathomably entrenched sociocultural and ideological
conditioning.
Those who feel called to participate in and identify with any sort of institutional Anarchism are like teenagers rebelling
against suffocating guardians, so focused on ​breaking​ the rules that they often neglect to consider a rule’s motivation or context.
Perhaps this behavior is so common because the parent-child power dynamic is so normatively imbalanced. It seems to be
conventionally acceptable, after all, for a parent to completely ignore criticism from their child simply because they are a child.
Many parents show no obligation to do anything ​but​ condemn and ignore those passions of youth which are misaligned with their
vision for their child’s life, and certainly most of them resist being reasoned with. How, then, can an adolescent bursting at the
seams with energy, curiosity, and excitement be expected to conduct themselves if ​not​ with reckless rebellion?
Such is the case with capital-A Anarchists. Where Anarchism is not a joyful communion of like-minded individuals,
but rather a response to systemic oppression that the oppressed have been forced to coordinate, its affiliates reactively organize
themselves around the existing societal infrastructure. Only oppressors have the luxury of premeditation, planning, and
organizational restructuring. Their victims are relegated to lifetimes of paranoid anticipation and existential sucker punches. The
most disadvantaged people are the least able to sacrifice what they do have in devotion to a revolutionary restructuring of their
society. They and their families may starve if this is where they direct their personal resources. Anarchism, as an affiliation,
ideology, or practice, is the historical gestalt of the collective words spoken, texts written, and action taken in its name, by
individuals of myriad walks. There are also people in the world who live the life of the Anarchist without knowledge of or
affiliation with Anarchism as such. For these anarchic agents, without the lexical vocabulary to explicitly identify Anarchism as
such, there is only ​anarchy-in-the-world​, unnoticed and unnamed but present, evident, and True always.

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 No being is excluded from anarchy, regardless of whether they have ever heard of or encountered it by name. This
anarchy is the natural state of the Absolute World, and so is immanent in every social experience we have. Pointing out the
universal immanence of anarchy is the positivistic mode of identifying the Absolute Emptiness of those things which Anarchism
has frequently condemned as preventing anarchy. This framing allows us to see that this prevention, however, is only operative in
the social-objective world. In the Absolute World, which Chan suggests that we must only look in the right place to experience
directly, anarchy always prevails because Nature transcends classifications implicit in hierarchical structures. The mind has no
master other than Nature, and Nature no master other than the mind, as they collectively comprise the self-mastery which is
Being.
Anarchism, in capital-A notation, all too easily fails to realize its own potential and to fully embody its own
formulation of the world. By promoting or embodying a practice which maintains ​any​ familiar trappings of the hierarchical or
authoritarian organizations that rule the modern world, one will fail to fully realize or “teach” anarchy. Conventions of political
and philosophical affiliation are certainly trappings of this sort, even when ideologies and their affiliates self-identify as
anti-ideological and anti-affiliatory. An anti-ideological ideology is still an ideology, and often one which is invisible to
itself––the most dangerous kind! To avoid fortifying social dogmas by the reification of an abstracted “other” which is doing the
oppressing, anarchic actors aim to ​inflame​ dogmatism by forcing​ its​ actors to reckon with its Emptiness, an encounter their
psychological egos must struggle to survive.
The differentiation between conventional and Absolute, drawn from Chan literature and outlined in previous sections,
is one of the most important conceptual tools that this interdisciplinary dialogue offers the anarchic actor. The theoretical and
functional distinction is a framework which even the unenlightened mind can understand, implement, and teach. To become more
effective champions of anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritian causes, I propose that those who presently self-identify with
capital-A Anarchism would benefit to realize the self-defeat implicit in their approach. With that one capital letter, they affirm
the “proper noun” which critically maintains ideologies and the structures of hierarchical authority that exploit them far beyond
the direct, organized reach of Anarchism itself.
Perhaps “anarchism”, denoted with a lowercase-a and classified in part of speech as a verb, can represent a new
employment of the term to describe the ​embodiment​ of the Absolute Anarchy of Nature. Here, anarchism is something to be
engaged in​, where there is a full recognition that ​engagement​ in life ​is​ ​being​ alive. Just as Nature ​is​ Self-Knowing, anarchism ​is
anarchy; and just as every experience (including thought) is transcendent knowledge of Absolute Truth, each action is always
already an embodiment of the Absolute Anarchy of Nature. To act is to be engaged in anarchy, and to do so while being as
penetratingly aware of Absolute Anarchy as a Chan Master is of the Absolute Emptiness of the conventional world is to be an
anarchist with a lowercase-a.
As Chan demands the abandonment of all conviction and selfhood, anarchism of this kind is the very act of suspending,
deconstructing, or dissolving ideology and dogma, identity and affiliation. Where textual records of Chan Masters are interpreted
as displaying their extraordinary spontaneity and pedagogical intuition as individuals in mental harmony with Nature (Suzuki
115-116), the skilled anarchist acts always from a fundamental ground which recognizes the furnishings of politics, economics,
and sociology as Absolutely Empty of essence, and as objects as deserving of critique as any other. This is to stop attempting to
interpret world events through a cordial Anarchist hermeneutics, as if to mistakenly contend that Anarchism can ever be of the
same class or order as other political ideologies and ethical systems, and to assign the new anarchist a task which is only defined
by negation: to constantly deconstruct the very psychosomatic basis from which action springs such that one is always in basic

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and self-aware opposition to superficial constructions like hierarchy and authority. One need not be enlightened to dialectically
employ the Absolute.
Although this may seem to be a call for the dismantling of an extant Anarchism, such an appearance is just that: an
appearance. The dynamics of the social-objective world persuade the Absolutely Empty subjects which simultaneously constitute
and experience––sow and reap––it to be falsely convinced of its Truth. This does not mean that Anarchism’s conventionally
factual existence should be willfully ignored, however:

“Shuzan held out his short staff and said, ‘If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short
staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?’”
- Mumon, ​The Zen Masterpiece: Mumonkan​ (“Case 43: Shuzan’s ‘Short Staff’”)

To call it Anarchism is to oppose its reality by reifying false impressions of its having an Absolute essence, using
simple capitalization to represent it as such. To hesitate even a moment in calling it Anarchism, though, is to intuitively ignore
the equally irrefutable fact that Anarchism does, in the conventional sense, exist. This conventionally real institution of
Anarchism, fully understood and treated as the chaotic, arbitrary, and Absolutely Empty product of human culture and conceptual
dissemination that it is, has been and will continue to be an invaluable resource for all anarchists. The crucial attribute of this new
anarchic mode of being––the full embodiment of anarchy––is that it denounces the life of an Anarchist, and so sees the projects
and archives of institutional Anarchism in light only of their liberatory utility. When you need a book, you go to the library; when
you need food, you go to the grocery store; when you need glasses to facilitate color vision, you go to EnChroma®; so where do
you go for discursive frameworks likely to be beneficial to the anarchist’s projects? This is to employ Anarchism as an
intellectual depot, but never an ideology or affiliation. With every action grounded fully in the immediate recognition of
anarchy’s Absolute manifestation in each moment, the true agent of Anarchism only interacts with the conventional world in a
dialectic of negation. In their discursive rampage, nothing is spared from their de[con]struction. The anarchist should be
Anarchism’s own greatest threat, for they alone realize that the ​only​ alternative to critique is monolith.

4.1.2 Apathetic Anarchism

“But serenely reflecting or contemplating on the purity of [Nature] has a suicidal effect on life [...]”
- D.T. Suzuki, ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind,​ pg. 25

Antithetical to the sort of idealized anarchic actor outlined in the previous section is an archetype I will call the
‘apathetic anarchist’. This is the individual who understands, if not in so many words, the Absolute Emptiness of ideological and
authoritarian structures but fails to integrate such insight into their intuition as a Being (present verb part). Some of the most
transparent incarnations of this personality can be consistently found amongst not only the most powerful, but even and
especially the ​most​ abusive of heinous power. This speaks to the seductiveness of the transient jewels which the conventional
social-objective world has to offer; the more privileged one’s status in the hierarchies of the social-objective world becomes, the
more ably they can choose and afford to fortify their defenses against attempts on their sense of self.
Perhaps the president’s morning briefing included a one-line item regarding the 20-foot Anarchist circle-A
spray-painted on the side of a Providence police station, but how much of their time and thought would they really judge such an

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event to deserve? They are entirely shielded from the impact of any single individual occupying a lower “class” in the
social-objective world, both by their heavily armed personal militias and their standing claim to occupation with ‘more
important’ matters. This shielding would not be required, however, if they did not already know of the threat such individuals
posed to them.
Although liberative apathy amongst the most powerful seems to be a mighty plague which warrants great effort to
eradicate, the ‘apathetic anarchist’ can ultimately be found in selves of myriad social stati. They are in each person who thinks
about the Absolute emptiness of hierarchical classifications and organizations, but fails to​ fully​ and ​unhesitatingly​ enact and
embody their deconstruction, persuaded by the threatened ego to attend to other, safer, deceptively ‘more important’ matters.
This, again, is the hairsbreadth difference which is as the distance between heaven and earth; to conventionally negate the
conventional is critique, to ​Absolutely​ negate the conventional is anarchism. This is another way of understanding the dialectic of
simultaneous negation and affirmation seen in pedagogical records of Chan Masters.
At several points in its seminal canon, Chan explicitly rejects the meditation methods (esp. silent, sitting) which were
prioritized in many other contemplative traditions of its time (Mazu 58-68, Foyan, Ch’eng-ku)––especially others descendent
from the historical Buddha’s followers. These techniques are still practiced by tens, if not hundreds of millions of people all over
the world, but Chan views any sort of quietism as completely disrespectful of the spirit of life (Suzuki 43). While proponents of
certain meditation schools suggest that specific practices can be a metaphysically-penetrating state of Absolute non-doing if
performed properly, Chan Masters are quoted as having essentially scoffed at this idea. Chan claims that it is impossible for a
person to be in a state of non-doing, for the closest they can get is to do nothing, but even doing nothing is doing something. In
fact, it may be the active not-doing of things which should certainly be done on any account. As such, devotion to any singular
practice is considered recourse to religious faith; it establishes a falsely immovable truth which is ideologically safeguarded from
deconstructive efforts. This is why Chan firmly holds that enlightenment is instantaneous and immanent in every single
phenomenal experience, no matter how mundane or extraordinary. It requires curious and critical wandering, not focused
attention on a determined object; it is as likely to occur during meditation as during the guerilla raid of a federal complex.
I suggest that this is equally true for the practice of the anarchic actor. To defend specific revolutionary or utopian
visions is to bind oneself to a conventional, social-objective reality which only gets a glimpse of the Absolute world every once
in a while. This, however, is only another manifestation of the same ideological mechanisms which the anarchist is always
single-mindedly assaulting. The anarchist promotes only non-promotion. They spend their time cultivating a deeply penetrating
awareness of the Anarchy manifest in each moment of each day, embodying, refining, and acting from this anarchic intuition at
all times. Attachment to any agenda, political or otherwise, delimits the possibilities of one’s own actions. It prevents the
attainment of a fully responsive, maximally adaptive mental temperament, which in turn prevents the anarchist from fulfilling
their potential as an agent and “teacher” of Absolute Anarchy.
Anarchy must be embodied in the passions of daily life, otherwise what good is it? Each moment of daily life should be
attended to and occupied with full respect to its infinite potential; it is, after all, as likely as any other to be the one which
suddenly enlightens us. Silent, sitting meditation is a withdrawal from the world in the same sense as idle utopianism and blind
radicalism: it doubts that the wealth of employable information contained in Absolute Knowledge is sufficient to aptly guide our
conduct. But this is ignorant of the intrinsic freedom and necessary perfection of life; anarchy fundamentally demands that we
relieve this ignorance. To see it and not act, or to act and not act ​from it​, is the momentary hesitation which instantly strips the
anarchist of their classification. Funnily, it seems that they can only get it back by losing it again.

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4.2 Chan Proposal for Anarchism

“Rejoice when others rejoice; Mourn when others mourn. That is the nature of Mind.”
- D.T. Suzuki, ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind

To fully embody the Absolute Truth of Anarchy-Nature is to found one’s every action in the realization that the
Anarchist’s ideal cannot be attained until the conventional world is no longer falsely recognized as the Absolute world by any
individual within a social-objective world. A social-objective world comprised totally of individual minds which fully realize
Anarchy-Nature is a sort of enlightened social unit; they manifest the pure, uninhibited anarchy of Nature not only as individuals,
but as a network of interactions. This sort of ‘communal enlightenment’ is the social-objective world’s realization of its Absolute
Nature, analogous and parallel to the individual’s realization of Nature: enlightenment.
Certain philosophical theories of panpsychism suggest that all physical particles may have a fundamental attribute
which causes them to give rise to complex consciousness when coordinated as a sufficiently robust, closed system of information
integration, like the human brain. The most basic “bit” or unit for this kind of information is binary; it corresponds to one of the
two states a particle can be in at any given time. When the dynamics of classical physics give rise to systems which contain a
networks of quantum particles exchanging, coordinating, and collectively integrating information, they seem to produce [at least
some unfathomably basic form of] consciousness as a by-product. (See Oizumi et al. for further elaboration.)
To offer a speculative metaphorical exemplification and not a serious or informed scientific proposition, perhaps a
far-future neurological account of Chan enlightenment would identify the appearance of a smooth, rhythmic, systematic unity in
the collective functioning of neural cells, and their quantum economy, producing consciousness. Perhaps these patterns would be
identifiably and consistently distinct from those observed in the brain instead conditioning an unenlightened mind, which may be
more erratic and irregular.
The ‘communal enlightenment’ of a social-objective world is aptly represented here. Individual enlightenment is
Nature’s reclamation of the mind, so the Natural flow of the mind is realized; ‘communal enlightenment’ is Nature’s reclamation
of the relationship, the assembly, and the community, so the Natural flow of the social-objective world is realized. This Natural
flow of the social-objective world ​is​ anarchy by my definition, as it is the full transcendence of hierarchy, authority, ideology,
and dogma, which only exist insofar as the social-objective world has not deconstructed itself. A group of individuals who all
maintain penetrating insight into the Absolute Emptiness of the conventional world have no use for the social-objective world;
such a construct becomes meaningless to and for them. Keeping even one eye on the conventional world is only useful for such
people when interacting with unenlightened minds. In these cases, conventional competence has clear social utility, but any social
network comprised of enlightened individuals never finds a need for such things––they act only out of anarchic spontaneity.
Saying that the social-objective world becomes enlightened at all, however, is as figurative as saying that the individual becomes
enlightened. As the enlightened eye can see clearly, neither the social-objective world nor the individual existed in the way they
once themselves supposed.
There is no “thing” to be enlightened; there is only the embodied experience of enlightenment. There is no “society” to
be enlightened; there is only the embodied experience of anarchy. “Embodied” is the key word here, as all people are always
experiencing anarchy, but to truly realize this is the full integration of this experience into one’s immediate psychosomatic
being-in-the-world, like wild animals on a prairie without the capacity to know hierarchy or authority. They know only Knowing,

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and so are spared from suffering because they cannot conceive of it. Their fortune seems to be that of safety from slipping into
the grasp of any social-objective world for as long as they live. Less luck had we.

4.2.1 Emptiness of Authority

“Anarchists want the living to bury the dead so that the living can get on with their lives. The living should rule the
dead, not vice versa.”
- The Anarchist FAQ Editorial Collective, ​An Anarchist FAQ

It must be clarified what I mean when I say that the structures which Anarchism broadly self-identifies itself as
opposing are Absolutely Empty of essence, and how this observation or perspective is useful to the anarchist in their embodiment
and cultivation of anarchy. I believe that a deep understanding of these ideas would serve well both the Anarchist and the
anarchist.
Through much of the writing of this paper, the BBC’s cinematographic masterpiece ​Planet Earth II​ idly played on my
television. With its foley sounds muted and replaced by some shuffling Spotify playlist, I would stare at the animals on the
screen, looking for an insight into the anarchy which manifests in the absence of a conventional world. My implicit claim that
animals do not experience a conventional world may seem suspect to some since many social life forms are observed
participating in elaborate systems of sociocultural etiquette. One might conflate this observed behavior with the lived experience
of a social-objective world, the dialectical realm of conventional knowledge, but this is a misperception.
In a 2014 paper, Johan J. Bolhuis et al. contend that human language, in its wide and well-studied differences from the
communication methods of all other known species, evolved as a product of a cognitive capacity for something called “merge”:
“a single [basic] operation that takes exactly two (syntactic) elements a and b and puts them together to form the set {a, b}”. They
contend that this framework suggests a minimalist theory of language syntax, which allows us to imagine how human language
may have emerged in the biome’s evolutionary history despite its appearance, to us, as being so unique amongst beings that it
warrants the human-animal dichotomy, a conventional idea constantly conflated with Absolute Truth.
Bolhuis et al. cite data from a collection of studies which collectively propose that there is a basis for this dichotomy, or
rather the human ​sense​ that there is one. They interpret the results of these imaging experiments as suggesting that human neural
function is clearly hierarchical in organization, and that this is untrue for nonhuman species. To explicate the complete mechanics
of their proposal would be extraneous here, as I don’t mean to endorse their theory scientifically but rather rhetorically. As a
skeletal framework, it may help us to understand how hierarchy is responsible for the human separation from anarchy in the
social sense as I have used it, but also from the anarchy of the psychosoma––the fundamentally unified and inseparable body and
mind. Certainly no part of our physical body is free from the conditioning of the social-objective world; after all, this
social-objective world is just as consequential for the body as for the mind.
When I attempt to filter my thoughts about the African wild dogs chasing their wildebeest-shaped dinner across the
endless savannah on my television screen through this framework, I find it difficult to conceive of any conventional world at play
in the scene. Without either the capacity or tendency to erect complex concepts from syntactic building blocks, other animals
don’t seem to be able to engage with the “things” which furnish the social-objective world. Indeed, that world consists entirely in
“things”, and “things” exist ​only​ in that world. The Absolute world––the phenomenal world, where the thought has not yet had

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enough time to recognize itself as a thought and create a self-explanatory narrative which implicitly assumes an ego as its
source––seem to be the ​only​ world occupied by conceptless minds.
One who eludes the social-objective world entirely is enlightened. While we can objectify and apply mental theories to
them, the thinking subject never actually appears. We can see them through the window, but never convince them to enter. With
absolutely no claim to scientific credibility, I can’t help but poetically wonder whether imaging the brain of Bodhidharma,
alleged founder and Master of the Chan school, would have revealed a pattern of anarchic coordination unlike the hierarchical
networks seen in most other human scans. This formulation is similar to the anarchical frameworks regarding figurative
enlightenment on quantum and communal scales which I set out in the previous section. More than mechanical theories, these
articulations are meant to provide ways of thinking about the world which in some way embody the Chan perspective. It will be
seen in the next section how this sort of exercise might be fruitful for the anarchist.
To say that the structural targets of anarchism are empty of Absolute essence is not, by any means, to say that they are
not real, or that they do not have actual, often catastrophically tragic impact on the lives of people in the world. That all
occupants of the social-objective world experience suffering is no less True than the Emptiness of the social-objective world.
Chan seeks not to elevate Absolute Truth above conventional truth, but to understand and employ them ​appropriately ​as
information about the world. Absolute Truth is unrepresentable by way of human language because what we call “representation”
here is not actually a true repetition of a previous presentation; it is the ​presentation​ of a ​re​configured object, where the object
that has been reconfigured is some original phenomenal experience. This mechanism is clearly observable when people recount
memories, explain actions, or even draw an apple.
This is the process, like a mathematical function, which transposes Absolute Knowledge into conventional knowledge,
awakening the concept, the ego, and the mind which sustains itself in thought, vitalized only by its own narratives. As soon as
this mind is synthesized, Nature becomes unenlightened; “humans” and their “conventional world” are born. This birth happens
in every single moment, giving each of them an equal chance to be the one in which the birth mechanically negates itself and the
self-sustaining network of mind, ego, and concept. Such a framework for Chan enlightenment would certainly explain the
tradition’s hard subitism; perhaps the ego is like a neural program that can spontaneously submit an executive command to shut
itself down, sweeping away its own hierarchical foundation in the process. Despite the efforts of the Chan Masters, though, the
command itself has never been, and will never be, articulated with words or symbols. Time to start guessing!
Any given social-objective world is a network of minds exchanging information in their interactions with one another,
whether directly or indirectly. Each unenlightened mind in a network is motivated by the False perception that its own contents or
objects of representation (identity, selfhood, thoughts, narratives, explanations, biases, ideologies, beliefs, dogmas, etc.) are
transcendently real. It struggles to see the ways in which they are fallible, arbitrary, constructed, subjective, reductive, ignorant,
etc. These are the minds which presumably constitute most, if not all of the global social-objective world. Hierarchy and
authority are Absolutely Empty, but the fact of their conventional existence is Absolutely True for as long as its conventionality
is conflated with Absolutivity in even one individual mind of a social-objective world. With a deep understanding of these truths,
one can fully embody anarchy in a way that skillfully leverages the intricacies of existing systems in their continuous enactment
of anarchism.
The anarchic actor can both simultaneously see and clearly differentiate between the hierarchies of the conventional
world and the Anarchy of the Absolute world––pure Anarchy-Nature in, of, and for itself. This means that they immediately see
both the truth and its negation in every social experience, the negation being the closest the ego can get to the Absolute, which
can only be linguistically indicated indirectly, by what it is ​not​. When they see a uniformed police officer, they do not objectify

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and project specific narratives onto them, narrowing their attention to fit only what fortifies their sense of self and identity.
Instead they instantly, and without thought, enact a response which is intuitively calculated by the body. As one’s body is
implicitly conditioned by the totality of one’s experiences, as well as those of every being in its genetic lineage from the first
amino chain, it is already equipped with the intuition for appropriate action in any situation. If the Truth of Absolute Emptiness
penetrates one’s mind, it becomes infused into one’s intuition, which then moves from a ground that fully respects both
conventional and Absolute in every action. Conventional knowledge is no less valuable to the anarchist or Chan Master than to
the banker or politician, the former two just grasp and use it ​in light​ of its Absolute Emptiness. They are no longer restricted by
identity or affiliation in deciding how to respond to the police officer. The attachments of the ego are one’s bondage, exemplified
previously by my aversion to brussels sprouts, and without them the psychosoma is free to self-organize at every level and
adaptively coordinate intuitive reactions based on truly critical considerations of all relevant information, not just privileged
narratives and perspectives.
The anarchist is motivated by their awareness of the suffering caused by the dynamics of the social-objective world, so
they tend toward its destruction. The next section will deal in greater detail with the ways in which Chan literature might inform
best practices here, but this general point must be emphasized. Exposing the delusion and emptiness underlying all hierarchy and
authority is the anarchist’s goal; none of the individual minds which comprise or invoke them are safe from the anarchist critique,
deconstruction, and negation. Without minds, the conventional and social-objective worlds disappear, and then even the arbitrary
chaos of human life is fully understood. Without “selves”, all concepts of morality, ethics, virtue, vice, justice, righteousness, and
merit become hollow, along with their negative counterparts. Without moral deliberation, which is founded on the false
conflation of intellect with Absolute Knowledge, Nature automatically prevails in every action (Suzuki 115).
The anarchist sees the ways in which the opinions and perspectives of the most deluded are conditioned, necessary, and
‘perfect’ in and of themselves. They see the way in which the most vicious of tyrants is conditioned, necessary, and ‘perfect’ in
every thought and action. They also, however, see the ways in which the opinions and perspectives of the deluded are binding
and hollow, and how the tyrant is seductive and evil. With one eye on conventional facticity and the other on Absolute
Emptiness, they see and empathetically ​experience​ the suffering of the oppressed more vividly than the most progressive
unenlightened mind, and they are able to act in promotion of universal liberation with greater skill, intelligence, and equanimity
than the Anarchist.
With no naïve conflation of conventional with Absolute, nothing can ever be an obstacle to the anarchist in their fight
for universal liberty. No event moves or holds them, no experience goes unobserved or unused by them, no ethic is accepted or
ignored by them. They are agents of the intrinsic empathy of Nature; in the absence of an ego, or of phenomenological
distinction, the pain and suffering of another becomes indistinguishable from one’s own. This actor lives a life without suffering
in a world of Absolute Anarchy, but every one of their actions springs directly from a fully subsuming motivation to eliminate
suffering from the social-objective world which they must navigate for pragmatic purposes. They themselves cannot suffer, but
until the suffering of every other being is fully relieved, it remains in their life, a matter of Absolute Truth. Individual
enlightenment is just a sample of the utopia which can only be actualized by the collective enlightenment of the social-objective
world.

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4.2.2 Action as Pedagogy; Pedagogy as Praxis

“A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts from his deepest convictions.
Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring
shame upon himself or his causes.”
- Mikhail Bakunin, ​God and the State

Chan​ is the Chinese transliteration of ​dhyāna​, a Sanskrit term (Dumoulin xvii) widely used in Buddha-descendent
traditions to refer to the intentional training of the mind (Kasulis 24). In the Mahayana tradition, the major Buddhist sect with
which Chan has historically had the most intimate and productive dialogue, contemplative practice is regarded as one of the three
critical elements of religious practice, along with behavioral refinement and philosophical education (Suzuki 32). In the practices
of many Buddhists, these three factors are taught and embodied individually. While they do inform and condition one another,
the use of this framework has facilitated the development of conventional prescriptions to train and practice these elements in
isolation. The literature of Chan suggests that this attitude is incompatible with the experience of enlightenment (Suzuki 33).
Common notions in Chinese philosophy at the time regarded every object as definable by three fundamental features:
its physical substance, its phenomenal appearance, and its functional purpose (Suzuki 41). Because the “self” exists only in the
social-objective world, which has no phenomenal appearance (it cannot be directly seen, heard, or otherwise Absolutely
known––it exists only in abstract terms incomprehensible in the dialectic of the Absolute), the unenlightened “person” cannot be
described in this aspect. Where many Mahayana traditions do regard this individual as analyzable into components of physical
substance and functional purpose, Chan demands that this duality ​must​ be as hollow as the rest. On the former account, the
physical substance of the subjectified psychosoma that one calls “I” is Nature itself, while its functional purpose is Nature’s
engagement in Self-Consciousness, the ​looking into and at itself​ that humans mistake for the experience of an individual self.
This is the basis for the aforementioned discrete division between contemplative practice and philosophical education in certain
sects.
In ​The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind​, Suzuki explains that Chan understands the person’s physical substance and functional
purpose as always identical (Suzuki 42), and that the enlightened one even has a phenomenal appearance, which is also
equivalent to the others. To say that the person has separable substance and function and no appearance is not only to speak
within​ the social-objective world by ​rep​ resenting the Absolute in the conventional dialectic of concepts, but also to speak ​of​ only
the unenlightened indivi​dual​ ​person w
​ ho ​occupies​ this world and not the ​indivisible being​ (singular present verb part) which is
Nature. What the person ​actually is​, for Chan, cannot be spoken of in terms which differentiate reality into “things” and conflate
“concepts” with Absolute Knowledge. What the person ​actually is,​ in the one moment before the birth of every convention,
ideology, and narrative, can only be experienced, for ​it is​ experience. We see the world as a platform filled with static and
dynamic furniture, defined by real divisions both physical and conceptual, but we can never be engaged with these objects in the
sense of pure experience, phenomenological awareness, Absolute Knowledge, or Cartesian certainty. Experience itself is
indivisible. Importantly, this framework suggests that one’s function (​action​) and substance (​psychosoma)​ are really only two
words for one thing, which I have called Nature. This renders pedagogical divisions like those of Mahayana traditions not only
false, but critically misleading. Action ​is​ the psychosoma and the psychosoma ​is​ action––the body does not move, it ​becomes
movement; the mind does not think, it ​becomes t​ hought. On this account, the third element of religious practice, behavioral
refinement, ​is​ to engage in mental training and philosophical education at the same time, as one who does this transcends

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morality. In the enlightened mind, this trinity of practice is holistically unified. To seek or preach a specific path toward
enlightenment is to misunderstand enlightenment, which demands to be sought only along infinite paths.
If I hit you in the head with a stick and then demanded that you sit on the floor and stare at a wall for the rest of your
day, what would you do? Depending on who you are, whether you know me personally, what you know about me, what existing
opinions you may have cultivated about me, what I’m wearing that day, whether I’ve shaved, whether you’ve read this paper,
whether you enjoyed reading this paper, etc, you might be furious, mildly angry and confused, scared, unconscious, etc.

Notice that “​do it​” does not seem at home amongst these realistic reactions.

And yet people dressed in religious garb and expensive business attire, disguised instruments of distraction and illusion,
command exactly this reaction from masses of people every day. This process has no beginning, in that each commander is
always of the commanded as well. Every boss has a boss––the officer who answers to the chief, the sergeant who answers to the
lieutenant, the manager who answers to the corporation, the CEO who answers to the stakeholders, the tyrant who answers to his
demons, the killer who answers to God. But the consequences of these subordinations are not equal, as they create astoundingly
debilitating conditions for minds which believe the conventional to be the Absolute, and are forced to spend their life Absolutely
experiencing agony without the psychosomatic capacity to handle anything like a search for food or water, much less for
enlightenment. Until they Know the Emptiness of suffering, suffering is most certainly Full.
That being said, the actual differences between the condition of the monarch and that of the slave are Absolutely
material and conventional. The unenlightened slave conflates conventional with Absolute as consistently as the monarch, for they
both have an ethic. The difference between them is that, even if both of them believe there to be a morally justifiable basis for the
forceful removal of agency and devastating infliction of pain on numbers of people which their brains are mechanically
unequipped to appropriately grasp, only the monarch can actually exercise this power. Indeed, the ability to exercise this power
seems intimately related with the will to do so.
The monarch is an arbitrary psychosoma, endowed with the ability to assert their own conceptions of right and wrong,
truth and untruth, above those of others solely by the vowed devotion of a sufficiently large civic sub-population. This
sub-population is the monarch’s militia, perfectly camouflaged until activated as defenders of their idol; while many use
weapons, some only use words. These militias are the agencies of volunteer enforcers which enforce the slave’s obedience by
threats only as severe as they can manage to design. Distributing their efforts along the entire spectra between visible and
invisible, overt and covert, macroaggressive and microaggressive, explicit and implicit, violent and nonviolent, active and
passive, direct and indirect, transparent and opaque, the members of these militias act from a ground fully conditioned by the
conflation of conventional with Absolute, unaware both of their indoctrination and its own transparency. The elaborate web of
narratives which occupies the social-objective world they share is used as a resource with which they can construct personalized
justifications for actions which their own empathetic intuitions unhesitatingly understand as heinous. This is how the monarch
empowers the average farmer to confidently and violently abuse persons who are Absolutely indistinguishable from themselves.
The accomplished anarchist is not bound by the obligation of the social-objective world: to regard it as Absolute and behave in
accordance with its dynamics, not Nature’s. They have no moral obligations to prohibit them from abusing power or exerting
authority, but their actions are guided by a recognition of the conventional world’s Absolute emptiness, so they inflict harm only
when their Absolute Knowledge indicates it as the best course of action. Conventional knowledge has no place in such a decision,

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and to understand this deeply enough to negate its conditioning of one’s own psychosoma is to be an enlightened embodiment of
anarchy.
The executive order of the monarch can symbolize any command as it descends a bureaucratic network; this is how
hierarchical authority facilitates oppression. Every position of authority is actively held in place by a militia like this, along with
every other concept, “thing”, and furnishing of the conventional world, and every person is a well-trained and highly active
member of many such militias. The project of the anarchist is to enact a mode of being which allows them to realize freedom
from their commitments to such causes, and to guide others in doing the same. The relinquishment of all commitment, obligation,
devotion, and subservience is the embodiment of anarchy. Ideology and dogma are false idols––Absolute Truth is the only
Master. The anarchist fights for no one and for everyone, but for no thing in between. Though authority is Absolutely Empty in
all cases, it bears Absolutely True consequences for the slave, the farmer, and the monarch. Any of them can embody anarchy
within their own, arbitrarily destined position. Regardless of their relative privilege or oppression, all three of them have militias
to withdraw from and new paths to consider. The effects of each action reverberate throughout the conventional and
social-objective worlds in an infinite causal web, certainly contributing to the conditioning of every living human institution and
system along the way.
As long as humans continue to be commodified, everything we do will automatically be in service to something (some
“thing”). One’s every action becomes an object of judgement for all others––we must be concerned with “what they will think.''
Who will your next movement satisfy and who will it upset? Who will benefit from its impact in the world, and who will suffer?
These moral deliberations, however, only hide and distract from the psychosomatic embodiment of anarchy, which is the primary
engagement of the anarchist. Chan regards “the right thing to do” as an Absolutely Empty distinction which distorts the ethic of
Nature, on which ​action​ is the right action––only hesitation is suspect. The anarchist recognizes that their intuition neglects no
consideration in its mysterious calculations, and that there is no way to intellectually predict which action will, in each moment,
produce the greatest net amount of anarchy ​out in the world​. They can only strive to realize and embody anarchy in the Absolute
World of their own experience. When one wholly ​embodies ​anarchy, they thereby smuggle it into the social-objective world like
a Trojan horse. Disguised as a human person, they are welcomed into the interpersonal realm under the reasonable expectation
that they will follow the rules. But alas, rules are empty! What reason to leave them unbroken?
The monarch exploits the slave via hierarchical systems of authority which are held in place by fear, devotion,
sentimentality, delusion, corruption, secrecy, violence, envy, and hatred. The fruits of the slave’s labor flow upward, depositing a
portion of itself at each link in the chain of command until it arrives at the monarch. Diminished by its economic journey, the
monarch’s portion of one slave’s labor needs not be substantial for their total share of ​all​ slaves’ labor to be immense. The
monarch is no less seduced by material wealth than other humans, but they have a body of people locked into submission to them
by a complex and arbitrary network of authoritarian relations––something the slave presumably lacks. You had no thought of
submitting to my demand that you sit and face the wall when I’ve just physically assaulted you, but that is, of course, only
because I have no robes! Were I to come back using a heavier stick and a louder voice, perhaps I would convince you to submit
to me for a while, but only out of fear––surely humans have often taken this approach at many points in history, though it is
unsustainable. If instead I returned with a group of people willing to testify to my ability to guide you towards your best possible
life, however, you may start to be persuaded. If some of these testimonials were from the mouths of people you already trust
greatly, this persuasion may take hold. You may actually begin to consider sitting down.
It is not difficult to see how social affiliation and doctrinal attachment can create situations like these, in which the
individual submits to the whole, often without alternative. Without the vocabulary, method, or reason for critique, critique never

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occurs––an atheist academic of religion would probably be able to resist the pull of robes and testimonials, to them familiar
markings of cults, cons, and exploitative manipulation. Short of a religious studies degree, most people are largely untrained in
defending themselves from subversive social objectification like this. It could not be reasonably expected that every person gain
an academically fluent critical perspective on every feature of the world. Such an idea hardly even seems desirable. The clear
path left for the anarchist, then, is to cultivate a practice which allows them to ​respond​ to the world from a ​psychosomatic ground
of anarchy​ even without the ability or desire to ​think​ about it in terms of intellectualized doctrinal Anarchism. This, I suggest, is
where Chan’s merging of contemplative practice and philosophical education becomes important for the anarchist.
If the goal of the unenlightened anarchist is to gain liberating insight into Anarchy, as the object of the Chan
practitioner is insight into Emptiness, then they should seek this insight in every action, grounding all they do in this search. This
practice is not an attempt to ​emulate​ Anarchy, but to look for its natural manifestations. The search for Anarchy though, like the
search for Chan enlightenment, is not and cannot be passive, superficial, or gentle. It is the act of actively, penetratingly, violently
encountering everything which is not Anarchy until you get to the bottom of the barrel, where every human will have realized
Absolute Anarchy.
Because it cannot be studied directly, Anarchy must be sought in its worldly traces by discovering as fraudulent the
systems which claim to contain it. When one sees that True Anarchy, the very manifestation of Nature in the moment before the
birth of the social-objective world, has never been and can never be contained by hierarchy or authority, they understand their
role as an anarchic actor. They comprehend no universal ethic, but they also lack any concern about material or selfish gain,
which is presumably required for any act of oppression. The anarchist has no moral responsibility, but if one does not fulfill their
moral responsibility they are no anarchist.
Contrary to popular understanding, Anarchism generally does not promote chaos, but rather endorses the ​study​ ​of order
and the idea that the world is always already self-organizing at its most basic and complex levels. While many associate
Anarchism with civil activists waving black flags, even they are ultimately representing an ideology of robust academic and
philosophical foundations. If Chan’s pedagogical unification of mental training, philosophical education, and behavioral
refinement is applied to the indiscriminate daily practice it demands, life becomes a single, unified, indivisible activity which is
simultaneously​ acting, observing, and adapting. It is the production of one action from a ground which is conditioned by
adaptations which are conditioned by observations which are conditioned by the previous action as well as those before it. This
process is familiar to us, as it is the general psychological model for skill acquisition and the well-understood path for any sort of
student or aspirant, but I specifically articulate it to point out that ​thought​ is not a necessary part of the activity. Thought and the
constructs which it produces are the very substance of bondage. The practice of the anarchist, which is simultaneously mental
training, behavioral refinement, and philosophical education, must then be to free themselves and others from these along with all
other forms of bondage.
Recorded conversations between Chan Masters and their students exemplify the Masters’ general pedagogical rejection
of intellectualism. They do not speak or act with the intention of giving you something to ponder; every move is a desperate
attempt to ​free​ you from pondering. The goal is not necessarily to relieve you of the capacity for thought forever, but simply to
remind you that there ​is​ a world which transcends and negates thought, and that this world is infinitely accessible and free from
delusion and suffering. This is their attempt to awaken the Self-Knowing in the student’s mind, which has been warped by
dualistic interpretations of life and the world. The anarchist holds the same goal at the social level, striving to incite the collective
introspection of the social-objective world to reveal the Absolute Emptiness of convention and the non-necessity of suffering
produced under hierarchy and authority. Mimicry of the Masters’ behavior is meaningless, but analysis of it does reveal patterns

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which may be illuminating for the anarchist. Here I will cite some examples, which I hope at least partially clarify the statements
I have made about these teachings up to this point:

A monk asked Yun Men, “What are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”
Yun Men said, “An appropriate statement.”
- Hsueh Tou, ​The Blue Cliff Record​ (“Case 14: Yun Men’s ‘Appropriate Case’”)

Whenever Hyakujo delivered a sermon, a certain old man was always there listening to it together with the
monks; when they left the Hall, he left also. One day, however, he remained behind, and Hyakujo said to him, “Who
may you be?” The old man replied, “Yes; I am not a human being. In the far distant past, in the time of Kasho Bud​dha,
I was the head monk here. On one occasion a certain monk asked me whether an enlightened man could fall again
under the chain of cause and effect, and I answered that he could not. Thus I have for five hundred lives been reborn a
fox. I now beg you to release me from this rebirth by causing a change of mind through your words” Then he asked
Hyakujo, “Can an enlightened man fall again under the chain of cause and effect or not?” Hyakujo answered, “No one
can set aside (the law of) cause and effect.” The old man immediately became enlightened, and making his bows, he
said, “I am now released from rebirth as a fox and my body will be found on the other side of this mountain. I wish to
make a request of you. Please bury me as a dead monk.” Hyakujo had the deacon beat the clapper and informed the
monks that after the midday meal there would be a funeral service for a dead monk. The monks thought this odd, as all
were in good health, nobody was in the hospital, and they wondered what the reason could be for this order. After they
had eaten, Hyakujo led them to the foot of a rock on the farther side of the mountain, and with his staff poked out the
dead body of a fox and had it cremated.
In the evening Hyakujo ascended the rostrum in the Hall and told the monks the whole story. Obaku
thereupon asked the following question: “This old man made a mistake in his answer, and suffered reincarnation as a
fox five hundred times, you say. But suppose every time he answered he had not made a mistake, what would have
happened then?” Hyakujo replied, “Just come here to me, and I’ll tell you the answer!” Obaku then went up to Hyakujo
and boxed his ears. Hyakujo, clapping his hands and laughing, ex​claimed, “I thought the barbarian had a red beard, but
here is another one with a red beard!”
- Mumon, ​The Zen Masterpiece: Mumonkan (​ “Case 2: Hyakujo’s ‘Fox’”)

Mi Hu had a monk ask Yangshan, “Do people these days need enlightenment or not? Have they ever been deluded?”
Yangshan said, “It’s not that there is no enlightenment, but what can be done about falling into the secondary? How can
you avoid it?”
The monk went back and reported this to Mi Hu. Mi Hu deeply agreed with this. “It’s not that there is no agreement,
but how can you escape the secondary?”
- Wansong Xingxiu, ​The Book of Serenity​ (“Case 62: ‘Enlightenment or No?’”)

Anarchy is seen in tenions of human life and exposed in tensions of social life. The anarchist goal is to expose these
tensions so violently that the energy of the action is enough to instantly, if only momentarily, render the social-objective world
Absolutely transparent to its subjects. On a personal level, this is the role of the ideal teacher or mentor: to dialectically force you

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into a moment of thought-calculation which computationally requires a certain sort of introspection, the intuitive output to which
is so different from the expectation of well-reinforced narratives that constitute the Self-Conscious ego that you feel a visceral
shock. This sort of linguistic action is not performed on the basis of thought-related computations because such power is only
generated in a pedagogical moment which takes into account too many factors in too high a degree of complexity for our
narrative minds to identify and use, especially if immediacy of response is ever an important component of an enacted teaching.
This sort of exposure can only be enacted based on refined intuition.
For we who fall short of this seemingly enlightened pedagogical ideal, the temptation to fall into passive emulation will
always be great when confronted by people like this. But we must treat their behavior as an object of curiosity, not disguise.
Investigating what they investigate, we will look up one day to find that we have accidentally become a successful embodiment
of anarchy simply by orienting our thoughts and actions toward constant ​consideration​ of anarchy that has developed into a
reflex. In our rejection of “right answers”, we can cultivate an entirely new mode of productive critical engagement with the
world. We can avoid nihilism entirely by accepting the process as the destination, and the destination as Empty. Intuitive action
and its refinement, which actually always occur simultaneously and inseparably, are the medium of the anarchist.
This​ sort of anarchist might be seen in your local marketplace, indiscriminately instigating disputes with passerby about
the discrepancy between actual and recognized social roles, like the neuroscientist who is also a therapist to her friends, a mother
to her sister, an employer to her plumber, a prisoner to the police, etc. What makes her less qualified than another in any of these
roles? Without accreditation, are my truths invalid? What are the concepts, behaviors, and norms of first- and second-person
self-referentiality evident in my thoughts and communications about such ideas? How can these concepts be deconstructed,
rendered transparent? Indeed, the roles are seemingly self-assigned––the clearest manifestations of anarchy in the world. Does
this neuroscientist not tell us something about our attachment to oversight and governance? Our anarchist sees every action,
reaction, and interaction as a boundless opportunity to defend anarchy, which can only be achieved indirectly by ​offending
hierarchy. This is an apparently negative mission with an apparently positive goal, but it enthusiastically negates negativity,
positivity, missions, and goals along the way.
The anarchist refuses Chan’s social indifference and, in response to suggestions that ‘who will find it will; who won’t
find it won’t,’ instead says that we must, then, condition the world to be a place which allows universal access to these functional
liberatory frameworks. Only when the most ​and​ least oppressed, the most ​and​ least tyrannical understand their delusional
conflations of conventional with Absolute can all be free. As such, this anarchy holds explosive potential for not only liberation,
but redemption as well. For the most powerful, the arrival at moral irresponsibility is total absolution, but also necessarily a
derealization of self which exposes as ignorant, misguided, and inappropriate every self-oriented thought and action one has
taken. If you have a great capacity to work for the liberation of the poor and oppressed, work for the liberation of the poor and
oppressed. If you have a great capacity to work for the liberation of the rich and powerful, world for the liberation of the rich and
powerful. All such paths condition the social-objective world for enlightenment, so none is less moral than another, unless and
until the ego is that which chooses the path.
There is no need to seek anarchy or utopia because Anarchy and Utopia are already right here, right now. After all, why
should I seek utopia? When the social-objective world becomes enlightened, and utopia is realized, what ego will be there to
experience it? When tyranny falls, who will be there to hear it? Certainly not I.

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5 Conclusion

I recently came across a post on a Reddit forum with the title, “It’s Systems, Not People That Cause Problems - Show
Some Compassion Today.” I will not share the full body of the post here, as it was short and to the point, but said nothing the title
hadn’t already communicated. It struck me that this attitude––”The ​systems​ are oppressing ​us​ and there’s nothing we can do
about it except to try to be a little more gentle to those with us here at the bottom of the hierarchy”––is precisely the one I had
ultimately been trying to combat with this paper. I took it as an opportunity to attempt a summarization of the material which has
been expounded more fully here. With a conservative character limit and an audience whose familiarity with Chan and
Anarchism I could not measure, I hope I was able to reiterate the basic ideas of this essay in a way which will prove helpful for
those who have read it and still feel mostly lost. If you feel ​entirely​ lost, I have succeeded, but ​mostly​ lost is not nearly lost
enough. “A hairsbreadth difference is the distance between heaven and earth,” remember?

Systems are comprised entirely of people. One can argue that there’s a gestalt created in interpersonal interactions,
groups, communities, and societies—which is to say that there is something about each of these things that’s “more than the sum
of its parts”—but I think it’s shortsighted to respond to this by trying to “show some compassion today”.
If systems, or the gestalts of human social structures, are the problem, and not the humans themselves, then what
reason do we have to try and be more compassionate? I have nothing to change. I’m not the problem.
A more appropriate response for the person who seeks both personal liberation (of the sort talked about in this [forum
about “mindfulness”]) and social liberation (from hierarchy, authority, ideology, dogma, tyranny, and oppression in all forms)
might be something like:

“It’s Systems, Not People That Cause Problems - Stop Maintaining Systems Today."

But even "Stop" is too passive. Every single moment that we spend doing anything but actively deconstructing these
systems is a moment spent reifying and reinforcing them. Contrary to what Zen Buddhists of Dogen's tradition would have you
believe, the old Chan (pre-Zen Chinese tradition) Masters say that sitting zazen isn’t "non-doing", it’s just doing nothing. Doing
nothing is still doing something; it’s the doing of deciding not to do, and the embodiment of, among other things, complacency,
resignation, and submission.
I agree with the idea that human suffering and "systems" go hand in hand, but I don't think we can say that one causes
the other. They are co-conditioned phenomena that transcend daily action, but also absolutely require it. The critical challenge
here, for somebody seeking to alleviate human suffering and the systems of hierarchical authority which are its co-constituted
cause and effect, is to always act from an embodiment of Anarchy.
When I say Anarchy, I'm not talking about the state of chaos that springs to mind for some, nor about Anarchism in any
institutional form. I'm talking about a particular way of looking at the Absolute World (distinct from the conventional world of
thoughts, selves, concepts, "things", and ethics; the Absolute World is their conceptual container, so it transcends all of them,
along with space, time, and "universe"; it’s the Ultimate Everything at the highest ontological level). This is like how Chan
philosophy talks about the World in terms of its fundamental attribute of Self-Knowing (prajna); the World doesn't know itself
per se, because this implies a knower and a known, whereas Chan views non-dual Self-Knowing as the fundamental substance of

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the World and the appearances of knower, known, and the conventional world as things which arise within and are comprised of
that substance.

Note: As seen in that last paragraph, I’ll use upper-case letters to denote attributes and functions of the Absolute World and
lower-case for those of the conventional world.

So when I say Anarchy, I'm talking about a word which can be used to describe the fundamental nature of the World,
the way Chan uses Self-Knowing. It's an observation of the fact that the World is most basically self-organizing at and across
every scale; it is intrinsically without hierarchy, authority, or morality because it subsumes and transcends them. Chan sees one's
self as the root of their suffering, but people who feel passionately about the liberation of those who are oppressed, marginalized,
assaulted, tortured, and killed for no other reason than affiliation with some arbitrary and socially constructed group, heritage,
physiology, state, thought, or behavior often feel great urgency around liberation, so they cannot wait for every person to realize
the Absolute Emptiness of their own sense of self and become enlightened. Those who suffer most greatly under systems of
hierarchical authority presumably have the most restricted access to information, motivation, or resources for such an
endeavor––even if they did, how many of them would be literate in the right languages? The matter is far too pressing.
My proposal is that we should take a cue from Chan and understand every single moment as an indivisible and
infinitely bountiful opportunity to engage in contemplative practice, philosophical education, and ethical development all at
once. Many other Mahayana schools regard these as the trinity of religious practice, prescribing specific and dedicated
engagement to each in turn. Chan rejects this tripartite formulation in favor of the view that everything one does is already all
three. Our actions, experiences, and evolutions are not separate ("evolutions" here is psychosomatic––the body and
sub/conscious minds learn together, any distinction between them is conventional and superficial). We act, experience, and
evolve simultaneously, and before we start to think about these actions, experiences, and evolutions we Know them only as one
unified thing.
When I say Know here, I mean it in the phenomenological sense, like the Self-Knowing of the universe. Knowing is
instantaneous, unified experience; it includes the appearance of thoughts, but does not recognize "meaning" in their contents.
The generation of meaning is a function of cognition, which necessarily requires time; Knowing is singularly in the present
instant and so is atemporal. By the time your brain would be able to recursively register and recognize its own state, the state is
gone; it’s now in state of recognizing a synthetic copy of its own thought, which it cannot recognize without indeed another
thought. I’m not suggesting that we try to unify our actions, experiences, and evolutions, just that we notice that they are and
have always been unified.

When acting, we are experiencing.

When evolving, we are acting.
When experiencing, we are evolving.
When evolving, we are experiencing.
When acting, we are evolving.
When experiencing, we are acting.

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 My suggestion is that the most effective way to do something about the systems which are, on your account, causing
problems, is the completely embody Anarchy is everything you do. Anarchy is already the nature of the Absolute World; you can't
do anything to improve, increase, augment, or otherwise change that. Embodying Anarchy is acting, experiencing, and evolving
in the world while always seeking the Anarchy which is already there. Every action, experience, and evolution has to be
motivated by this universal goal.
You might wonder how to do that, but it may already be happening as you read this comment. The things I'm saying
may be evoking responsive thoughts in your mind. Because we don't actually choose what to think (as that would require another
thought before it, which would then require another decisive thought before it, and so on ad infinitum), it must be that thoughts
autonomously present themselves in our minds, no different from the rest of the phenomenological world. If each thought is an
experience, then it is also an action and an evolution––it motivates the body, and the psychosoma adapts accordingly.
Every thought and activity which you orient toward this goal shapes you as an agent of Anarchy, like the musician who
practices for 8 hours each day until their instrument is a mere limb, the performance a mere test of reflexes. In every moment, ask
yourself, "how is the Anarchy-Nature of the Absolute World manifesting in this present experience of this hierarchical world?"
The goal is not to be personally without or beyond hierarchical authority, but to realize the ways in which you already transcend
them.
The more you look, the more you see it; the more you see it, the more you look. And all the while, you are both
embodying and becoming anarchy (lower-case 'a' to represent the realization of self-organizational anarchy in the conventional
world) in the very process of becoming an agent of Anarchy.
The end-point or ultimate goal of this process of becoming is not for the agent to embody anarchy (lower-case 'A',
conventional) so thoroughly that they realize the full embodiment of Anarchy (upper-case 'A', Absolute), as this would just be
enlightenment on the Chan account, which we don’t want to wait for. The end-point or ultimate goal for the agent of Anarchy is
to Absolutely dissolve the distinction between anarchy and Anarchy, clarifying their actual unity in the most imminent and
accessible part of life. When this distinction is dissolved, people can see life as a manifestation of Anarchy, which is only a
synonym for Absolute. They can feel the true extent of their freedom, which has been hidden from them by the trappings of
hierarchical authority, and the sheer complacency of this oppressive world.
To be Absolutely dissolved, the distinction between anarchy and Anarchy can’t be made by even one person. If a single
human mind makes the distinction, then it appears in the conventional world and becomes real (conventionally, but the
conventional world Absolutely Exists––its contents are just empty of Absolute meaning). Counterintuitively, parallels with Chan
pedagogy suggest that the way to understand the unity of anarchy and Anarchy is to conceptually reinforce a different
distinction, between conventional and Absolute, hierarchy and Anarchy, so that conventional hierarchy is never conflated with
some false "Absolute Hierarchy" which does not and cannot exist. The Absolute is not dialectically interpretable and cannot be
objectified by you any more than you can objectify your own body––how did you discover its ethic? “Divine Mandate”,
“law-abiding citizen”, and “good person” are political propaganda tools. “Common sense”, “manners”, and “the status quo”
are instruments of social manipulation.
Clearly this is the transcendence of morality, by any of Western philosophy’s many definitions. That may scare some,
but ask yourself what immoral action is motivated by a clear view of reality (specifically with regard to the Chan account of
'what reality is'). What reason is there to, for example, rape or murder if not out of self-concern and attachment to psychosomatic
states? If Anarchy is the Absolute World, then embodying Anarchy is always already embodying the Absolute, which is the
specifically stated aspiration of the Chan practitioner. By way of different paths, legacies, passions, and resources, these two

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engagements seek the same goal: self-transcendence. Embodying Anarchy is a project which can only culminate in the
attainment of effortless embodiment, of having practiced with conscious intention and thought for so long that they simply aren’t
required anymore, like when you’ve been driving the same car for years. Any path of self-transcendence is the moral path––evil
finds its root in the self, and in fact reaches no further.
None of this is to say that suffering is not real. Suffering is real. The conventional world within which it’s constructed is
Absolutely real in its phenomenal appearance, even if its perceived conceptual content has no meaning beyond the hermeneutics
of illusory egos. What it means to be unenlightened is to intuitively, responsively, and consistently conflate this conventional
content with its Absolute Appearance. To be enlightened isn't to see only the Absolute World, but to see the conventional world
only in its relation to the Absolute World at all times. So even for the enlightened individual, suffering is still something real,
albeit empty of essence. If they are empathetically inclined, they may decide to do what they can to relieve the anger and sadness
which they experience on behalf of others. While they cannot truly suffer––they cling to no identity, outcome, idea, or
phenomenal experience––they do feel empathetic pain, as they recognize no boundary between themselves and others. What
healthy intuition would not guide them generally away from pain?
Presumably, those who are systemically identified with conventionally recognized "classes" of "low" "status" would be
the most receptive––if the least equipped in terms of accessibility, education, and other resources––to a formulation of the world
like this one. The conventional context which they and others tend to assign to their private and public self-narratives begs for a
worldview which annihilates hierarchy and authority at the highest ontological level––they're the ones who started all this talk
about "anarchy" in the first place!
The white, old, rich, straight, cisgender, men who play golf with my taxes might be a bit more resistant, on the other
hand. For them, the pervasive conflation of conventional and Absolute is like a virtual reality headset that's always playing a
first-player, God-mode, open world, sandbox game. Who knows if you’ll be able to figure out how to get their headset off, even if
you've figured out how to get yourself out of the game, but trying to kick somebody them out of the game and back into the real
world, while you’re still within the game yourself and they're willing to give their real lives to stay in the game, seems impossible.
Can the enlightened individual force an enlightenment out of somebody who wasn't looking for or didn't want one? Seminal Chan
Master Hui-Neng was allegedly enlightened when he happened to overhear somebody recite a phrase of Buddhist scripture while
he was doing chores, but who knows?
Unable to see that which transcends the conventional, they believe they have nothing to lose but the conventional. Little
do they know that the suffering which they haphazardly medicate with conventional "things" can be completely and eternally
annihilated if they entirely detached from these "things" for just one infinitesimal moment. Perhaps they know this, but also that
these "things" will never reappear after that moment, and so avoid and resist this loss. They must not understand that, were they
to see the conventional in light of the Absolute, the headset would be removed to reveal that their real life, which they had long
ago forgotten, is one of freedom, control, and contentment which transcend those of their virtual avatars in ways which they’d
never fathomed. It's as if the pathetic liberties of the game had become so normal that they forgot it wasn't, so the attainment and
maintenance of the game's greatest freedoms became their primary goal. This is not to say that the pursuit of freedom is by any
means bad––on the contrary, what is it that the agent of Anarchy or the Chan student seeks?––but that if they actually want
maximum freedom, they've really got the wrong idea.
Chan says that the enlightened person always intuitively understands, experiences, and responds to the "things" of the
conventional world––everything that constitutes human affairs––from a ground which always simultaneously intuitively
understands, experiences, and responds to the Absolute World as well. This way of talking about it sounds dualistic, but there is

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no division in their experience; where you only see the world after your mind has infused it with meaning and “things”, they
simultaneously see the world with and without these features. They see the conventional world as real, but aren't attached to any
outcome because their perception just transcends such attachments, so they are impervious to suffering altogether.
And yet, I can't help but think of the Black mothers––constantly coerced, seduced, and conned into strengthening their
own material attachments by the immense forces and ornaments of American capitalism––who haven't gotten the memo that their
son, grandson, husband, or father, who will be killed by a Domestic Population Control Soldier (DPCS, often apologetically
referred to as a "police officer") is actually just an Absolutely Empty social construction, so they don't have to worry about it.
I don’t offer "get enlightened" in response to others’ welfare-threatening suffering. I don’t offer "embody Absolute
Anarchy" in response to others’ welfare-threatening suffering. Instead, I demand the embodiment of Absolute Anarchy always
from myself, and from others when the World demands it of me. This demand of the World is my very action itself, which is also
my experience and my evolution. The demand cannot be seen by the action because the action is it. By the time I look at my
action, I’m already disengaged from it––”looking” is now my action, but the one I’m looking for is long gone. Actions cannot be
observed, but only performed, experienced, and reaped, and these all occur simultaneously and are, in combination, action itself.
Observation is always already its own new action, not a part of some greater one.
Instead, when responding to others’ welfare-threatening suffering, I trust only my spontaneous response as an agent of
Anarchy. In my own studies as a self-motivated agent of Anarchy, I've undoubtedly “retained” only a tiny fraction of the
information I've "consumed". But that probably just means I could recall that much of it for you consciously, cognitively, and
articulately. The view of the psychosoma and its actions that I've given here suggests that my mind and body are both fully
conditioned, through-and-through, by every word and "thing" I've ever encountered. My conscious recollection and calculation
will always pale in comparison to what my psychosoma actually remembers, knows, uses, and is capable of.
Every action, experience, and personal evolution shapes the body, the mind, and their relationship (or lack thereof). I
trust my reflexive response in every situation to do its job, and as long as I maintain that trust it always will. If my intuition is to
smash my face into a wall, then I'll trust my intuition to decide whether clean myself up or just do it again once I've regained
consciousness. My intuition just takes it as it comes, rolling with every single punch and never slowing down. What's there to
calculate? What's there to mourn?
Until death at the very least, it has me covered. This is why Chan sometimes refers to this intuition as the Vital Force of
the World. As a well-conditioned Western ego, I find it easier to think of this Vitality as more of a natural law than a force, per
se. It’s not a soul or spirit which moves through the world and its beings, but rather a descriptive name given to an arbitrarily
observed and articulated feature of the Absolute World: It never stops. It just… goes. Why shouldn’t the world just be a still
frame?
Enlightened individuals experience no distinction between themselves and others, so their intuitive reactions to the
world are free of any conditioning influences which might cause them to privilege one person, including themselves, over
another. It seems clear why we don't have to worry about them wreaking havoc or anything. It seems that we, the unenlightened,
are the problematic party yet again.
When the unenlightened person thinks about the world in light of their conceptual understanding of the actually
inarticulable Absolute World, the conceptual foundation of their distinction between "human" and "nature" is disrupted or
collapsed. Unfortunately for us, we don't intuitively experience ourselves as being both unified and identical with the entire
universe like those enlightened folks do, so this picture may seem scary if for one great reason: it seems to put us in a world

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where all other people seem to become objects, no different from rocks or puddles. Why would I promote other people seeing me
as an object, not an experiencing subject just like them?
Social subjects understand themselves and others to be governed by morality, which is something like an ability to
distinguish desirable and undesirable behavior in social interactions, as well as an understanding that one will be held
accountable to this distinction at all costs as a fundamental part of the "social agreement". These subjects are forced to occupy a
world crowded and cramped by other subjects––we can't get peace and quiet anywhere! But I don't believe in the sociological
idea of the "social agreement". We didn't agree to do what we're doing, we've just always been doing it. One day, somebody
noticed. So what?
The idea of the "social agreement" finds every party guilty before proof of innocence. It holds every individual as
suspect and every institution as secure, as it presumes that this sort of agreement, which always distributes freedoms
approximately and inequitably on the basis of arbitrary material factors, was once supplied by our Great Omniscient
Forefathers™ to meet a demand created by “bad” people. But who are these “bad” people? This is the logic of capitalism and
human commodification, which condemns every person to paranoia by labeling every person a threat to one’s wealth, the total
measure of their personal status, wellness, access, resource, and ability. But do you believe you should be held as suspect, or as
innocent until guilt has been proven beyond reasonable doubt? And even then, is no legal crime justified? Is no case of guilt
actually a case of Innocence? I propose they all are.
Objectify people, but objectify them fully. For the DPCS ("police officer"), please look at the young boy standing on the
opposite side of your gun and ask yourself whether the boy you're looking at is actually the boy you're about to shoot. Does that
phenomenal appearance, that visual object, pose a threat to you any greater than the hoodie you perceive them as wearing? Is
the tiny, motionless mammalian body you're about to launch a chunk of solid metal through the abdomen of actually the subject
you're looking for? Do you usually use your government-assigned weapon when you go hunting?
Your theory of mind, that incredible capacity to intuit the mental behaviors of others without access to their
phenomenal experience, is a hoax. It's stories are woven into a television drama which you design around and project onto the
world as you move through it. You have only as much access to the mind of your lover as to the experiences of a given lizard. We
may, for our existential comfort, deny that this is so, but it is impossible to prove such by any empirical standard. If only by way
of Occam’s Razor, it seems that the burden of proof is in my favor.
But really, what difference does it make? They have been objects to you this whole time, even if we have all come to
call ourselves and each other "subjects" as if to make sure that we aren't forgotten. "Hey, I'm special too! Don't forget about me
when I die! I'm a subject! When I die, I bet I’ll feel just like you bet you’ll feel when you die––I bet we’re right! So let’s agree to
preserve each others’ legacies so we'll be immortal! Woohoo!"
Have I loved any less for lack of access to another's mind? Have I hated any less for lack of access to another's
experiences? Of course not; nothing has changed. The brown recluse commands enormous respect from me, at least until I find a
heavy shoe. This is the manifestation of Anarchy in the world. The spider is no subject to me, but if it knew English would I not
converse with it all the same?
Without an Absolute Ethic to adhere to, how will we know what is ever to be done? We can only ever know this in the
sense of Knowing with an upper-case 'K', of simultaneous action, experience, and evolution. The psychosoma always knows what
to do––how would it exist otherwise? An active "Knowing what to do" is and always has been its sole function and definition.
Because the ego does not executively control reflexes, it cannot be held morally responsible for reflexive actions. The
only responsibility of the empathetically inclined or the enlightened is to reorient so as to be constantly refining their

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embodiment of Anarchy in the world. Expose to every person in the world their own conflation of conventional with Absolute.
Expose morality a conventional construction which inherently fails to account for the Absolute Truth which is requires to
function. Expose the "police officer" as a white man standing the street with a pistol trained on a black child's chest, though he is
also a loving father, an emotionally abusive husband, a physically abused son, a white supremacist, a rape victim, an adulterer,
etc.
He understands these intricacies of his own narrative self, but stands before a boy who he perceives as none other than
an invasive mammalian pest. This is not a reduction from person/subject to thing/object, but rather a direct experience of the
subject and his intuited mental behavior. Being who he his, of course, the Soldier's intuition is probably going to be that the
contents of this kid's mind are dangerous, or perhaps simply dispensable. What if, instead, he saw that the kid's personal truths
were as numerous as his own, and that no ideological conviction, social affiliation, authoritarian position, or melanin density
would change that? Perhaps then he would see that there was no way to interpret his situation and arrive at any justifiable
reason to shoot this child. Every action is always already a product of every experience that has conditioned you––there are no
bad people until we decide who they are.
Force the world to be unable to decide between right and wrong, true and false, good and bad. Force it to engage in an
activity of non-decision, which is actually the decision to not decide. Force it to reckon with the World which exists before
decision, where Anarchy is realized as irrepressible, uncontrollable, and exhaustively manifest.
The thinking attempt to see the Absolute clarifies the conventional, supplanting moral doctrine by helping us see that
agency is just out of reach of the ego. The closest we can get to exercising free will, on this picture, is to use the thinker's
thoughts to guide our psychosoma's future self-conditioning. That is, by using the dynamics of your attachment to your thoughts
to parse what I'm writing, you are conditioning your mind and body to have general reflexes which will take this information into
account now, and so forever, in whatever way is fit.
If you deeply and intuitively understand that your participation in the conventional world of hierarchical authority is
the only thing which maintains it, and that this world is one in which all––including the most privileged, least privileged, and
you––are deprived of fundamental freedoms, why would you participate at all? Why would you do anything other than seek to
realize your purpose as a force to liberate yourself and all others from this captivity? This deep and intuitive understanding
comes like any other: practice, practice, practice. In a way, looking for it is finding it; as you learn, think, and talk about it more,
the process of development becomes self-perpetuating. On the other hand, once you actually find what you’re looking for, it’s
instantly lost forever. When your ego is displaced and you are enlightened, all you see is the Anarchy that’d been there the whole
time.
So if you care about more than your personal enlightenment, then I would again suggest alternate titles of, perhaps,:

"It's Systems, Not People That Cause Problems - Embody Anarchy Today."

Just decide to tirelessly identify, deconstruct, and negate every single way in which you embody hierarchy in each
moment of each day.. This process cannot end but with the total intellectual dismantling of the "self", which automatically
dismantles the "world". If you think you've run out of questions or critiques of your own role in the world, you're wrong. Try
harder. Keep going.

"It's Systems, Not People That Cause Problems - Teach a Tyrant Today."

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 What if one of the “police officer’s” children had come to visit from college one day, and talked about the Absolute
transience of hierarchical and authoritarian institutions, sometime before his encounter with the boy? Perhaps his enthusiasm
for the life and words of his own child would have been enough to grant these thoughts a precious cognitive foothold. Maybe they
would even have been sufficient to strike a new thought in him, which could have been enough to lead to another. How many of
his loved ones, mentors, and idols would have had to force him into the deconstruction of his own ideologies, dogmas, identities,
affiliations, dominations, submissions, participations, and meanings for one fewer young Black boy to have been murdered in the
street? This task seems insurmountable, but each of these people from whom he sought guidance had highly manageable tasks,
but remained effective as parts of a larger process. Like every other being, you are always already a part of many such
processes––so use it.

"It's Systems, Not People That Cause Problems - Discourage Affiliation Today".

Sure we all have that one (or many) racist uncle(s), but what about the people you're closest with and have culturally
relevant views that closely align with yours? Do you deconstruct their ideas as readily as those of the former? Anything other
than active destruction is aiding and abetting. There is no "non-doing", no Absolute Doing Nothing. There is no "right
affiliation", no Absolute Truth Party. Every single limb and appendage of hierarchical systems of authority must be severed,
starting with yourself. What affiliations do you use to support your ego? To whom do you submit, and from whom do you
command submission? On whose behalf do you readily surrender personal will, and for what superficial gain? What of those
who are forced to submit for no gain––do you care that you too are their captor? To embody Anarchy is to remind the 'social
realm' that it, or “we”, does not exist, by exposing the Absolute Anarchy which is the very substance of the conventional world
and all beyond it, just as the job of the Chan practitioner is to negate themselves into enlightenment.

TL;DR: Compassion is good when it's spontaneous, but moral declarations like this are reductive and build complacency, as
all ideologies, dogmas, conventional attachments, and ideas of "self" do. To dismantle systems, become an agent of their
deconstruction in everything you do.

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