Paper short abstract:

Essence and existence are two sides of the same coin, this paper argues. Drawing upon ethnography with Chinese practitioners of Zen, I argue that anthropology ought to ask what the real is ultimately made of. The answer may be contradictory, but should be embraced as such.

Paper long abstract:

Essence is still with us. Social Constructionism was supposed to have banished essentialism from social science forever. But it seems that essence refuses to go away. The ontological turn was testimony to this. It argued that the cultural relativism arising from the method of social constructionism hid a meta-ontology of mono-naturalism (Abramson & Holbraad 2016). Critics of the ontological turn called for a return, in contrast, ‘from essence back to existence’ (Vigh & Sausdal 2014). Recent calls to go beyond disciplinary ‘nominalism’, on the other hand, raise the possibility of ‘generative commonalities’ which theorists work hard to frame in non-essentialist terms (Bialecki 2012). This paper suggests embracing the contradictions between essence and appearance, essence and existence, rather than denying them by arguing for the legitimacy of one term over the other. Guided by an ethnography of Zen practitioners in Northeast China, I show what accepting the simultaneity of what they call essence (benti) and appearance or happenings (fasheng) can look like. They argue that the true substance (ti) of reality is ‘heart-mind’, the question is simply one of realising (juewu) this and then asking ourselves how we might shape the timeless substance of reality into temporary forms (yong). This is of course to reverse the Western philosophical equation of essence with form, and existence with substance. But it is also to embrace a logic of contradiction rather than its opposite. If essence is the substance of existence, this paper concludes by asking social construction yes, but social construction with what?