How could I resist a title like this? Unfortunately, this collection of essays did not live up to the potential I imagined, and still imagine, in exploring how Deleuze's thought overlaps with Buddhism. They range across the non-sequitur (Higaki), the awful (See), the amateurish (Cook), and the word salad (Bradley), before culminating in the stream of consciousness (Ueno). That is, five of the six essays are philosophically useless. The best that can be said of them is that they made me aware of a few Japanese thinkers who sound interesting -- Kenji Miyazawa and Toshihiko Izutsu -- and drew my attention to a particular passage in A Thousand Plateaus (below).
The only essay I found particularly thought provoking was Simon Duffy's. He approaches the connection between Deleuze and Budddhism by what seems to me a very natural path -- through drawing on Deleuze's reading of Spinoza. Spinoza's system already bears comparison to Buddhism, and Deleuze's atheistic reading of it only accentuates this resemblance. Deleuze reworked Spinoza's puzzling and seemingly contradictory idea that knowledge of the third kind gives us a window onto eternity in terms of an intensive and an extensive part of the individual. Duffy, in turn, goes on to apply this concept to make sense of the Buddhist idea of reincarnation. Basically, the more my self-definition begins to revolve around the constructive connections I have with the world, the more "I" shift towards being a intensive virtual singularity and away from identifying with my current extensive actualization of this essence. In everyday terms, I get closer to being a pure possibility, a way of being that can be taken up by any being and hence re-actualized indefinitely. This is a very complex thought, and the essay manages to be both a bit pedantic and yet short on the details. Nevertheless, it poses the interesting question of "what happens when a Bodhisattva dies?" They become completely expressive, completely virtual, only an intense essence that can live on in any of us indefinitely. Duffy doesn't make it clear exactly how this differs from an eternal soul, or even from the way a lineage actively preserves the memory and spirit of a sage, so we're mostly just left with this suggestion that the path to immortality is in defining oneself as pure connection. It may not be the version of immortality you were looking for. But I found it food for thought.
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I imagine that the camouflage fish reference in this quote was inspired by its (dis)appearance in Neo-Finalism (probably not Ruyer's only use of this example). Regardless, it caught my attention as an apt metaphor for non-duality.
Becoming everybody/everything (tout le monde) is to world (faire monde), to make a world (faire un monde). By process of elimination, one is no longer anything more than an abstract line, or a piece in a puzzle that is itself abstract. It is by conjugating, by continuing with other lines, other pieces, that one makes a world that can overlay the first one, like a transparency. Animal elegance, the camouflage fish, the clandestine: this fish is crisscrossed by abstract lines that resemble nothing, that do not even follow its organic divisions; but thus disorganized, disarticulated, it worlds with the lines of a rock, sand, and plants, becoming imperceptible. The fish is like the Chinese poet: not imitative or structural, but cosmic. Francois Cheng shows that poets do not pursue resemblance, any more than they calculate "geometric proportions." They retain, extract only the essential lines and movements of nature; they proceed only by continued or superposed "traits," or strokes. (ATP, 280)
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