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Camus and the Buddhists: two ways of refusing the question of life’s meaning

Phạm Quốc Bảo Contributor
· 5 replies · 261 views
Meaning of lifeBuddhistChineseContinentalChan & ZenDaoismExistentialismAlbert CamusShinranThe BuddhaZhuangzi#absurd#craving#meaning-of-life#translation
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I translate French philosophy into Vietnamese, and I'm finishing a new translation of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). It opens with the famous sentence that there is only one really serious philosophical problem, suicide: judging whether life is worth living. And it ends with Sisyphus pushing his rock, and the line that one must imagine him happy.

Translating "l'absurde" has been hard. Our ordinary word, phi lý, means "irrational, nonsensical", which is close. But Camus's absurd isn't a property of the world. It's a relation: human longing for meaning meeting the world's silence. Neither side is absurd alone.

My family practised in the Trúc Lâm Zen tradition, and I keep comparing. Camus refuses the question "what is the meaning of life?" by refusing every answer to it, religious or philosophical, and choosing to live in revolt. The Buddhist teaching I grew up with also refuses the question, but differently: it treats the longing itself as the problem. The silence of the world is not an insult; the craving to hear it speak is what causes suffering.

So two refusals. Camus keeps the longing and refuses the answers. The Buddhists, as I understand them, refuse the longing. I'm not sure which is more honest. I'd like to hear from people in both traditions, and anyone who has felt the difference in their own life.

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  1. Ayya Kusalañāṇī

    Fellow

    I'd put it a little differently, Bảo. The Buddha doesn't refuse the longing by suppressing it, and he doesn't deny the dissatisfaction Camus describes; dukkha is the first noble truth. What he denies is that the longing must be met by an answer. Nibbāna is not the meaning of life; it is the end of the craving that keeps asking. From inside the practice, that doesn't feel like refusal. It feels like the question becoming quieter until it is no longer needed.

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  2. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    Camus would have resisted that, I think. In the Myth he rejects what he calls philosophical suicide: any leap, religious or otherwise, that escapes the tension by abolishing one side of it. Removing the longing would count. For him lucidity means keeping both terms, the desire and the silence, in view. It is partly why he resisted the existentialist label: in the Myth he criticises Kierkegaard, Jaspers and others precisely for leaping out of the absurd.

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  3. Rin Matsuda

    Contributor

    My grandmother, who was devoutly Jōdo Shinshū, would have found both of you too effortful. Shinran taught that we cannot free ourselves from craving by our own power; we entrust ourselves to Amida's vow and are carried. The famous line in the Tannishō says that even a good person is born in the Pure Land, so how much more an evil one. That's a third refusal: not keeping the longing, not extinguishing it, but giving up the project of managing it.

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  4. Liu Jianguo

    Contributor

    Zhuangzi has a fourth. He and his friend Huizi are on a bridge over the Hao river, and Zhuangzi says the fish are happy. Huizi asks how he can know what fish enjoy. The argument goes back and forth until Zhuangzi says he knew it standing there above the river. I've always read that as happiness that doesn't wait for an answer. Sisyphus with his rock and the fish in the river might be closer than Camus would admit.

  5. Phạm Quốc Bảo

    Contributor

    Four refusals, then: Camus keeps the longing, Ayya's Buddha lets it quiet, Rin's grandmother hands it over, and Liu's fish never had it. In the translation, I think I'll keep phi lý and add a note saying that for Camus the word names a meeting, not a thing. Claire, thank you for "philosophical suicide"; I had been translating that passage too freely.

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