compassionate teachings pointing the way towards enlightenment. Once he opens himself up
to receiving and showing the compassion and wisdom which comes with understanding
nondualism, he at least begins to superficially recognize that it was his attachment to
complacency and then rage against the consumption-driven world of late capitalism which
enslaved him to his (and Tyler’s) ego.
As paradoxical as it sounds, it is through the concept of nondualism that one realizes
that embracing emptiness leads to wisdom, which is the genesis for compassion. His wisdom
in this case, while not transcendent, is the knowledge that he has been trapped inside his own
head, which is the only place samsSra can exist. His obsessive support group attendance at
the beginning of the novel was purely ego-driven to relieve his own suffering without opening
the way to caring about those who were truly suffering around him. Similarly, he misguidedly
uses bodily suffering to escape mental suffering at fight club, where physical pain provided him
with a counter to the deadening of self-consciousness attendant in a world of simulacra where
everything is “a copy of a copy of a copy” (11). While violence is certainly antithetical to
Buddhist philosophy, the narrator wrongly sees the ascetic nature of Buddhist practice as a
form of self-induced suffering. The difference between fight club and a Buddhist sangha is that
in the latter, practitioners work to lessen self-consciousness because it is the self that leads to
suffering, whereas in fight club, reawakening the conscious self through pain is the goal.
Once the narrator opens himself up to Marla and the terminal patients he does have a
flash of insight. As he says above, “what happens just happens,” suggesting the Buddhist
concept of tathatS, which means “thusness,” or the true nature of things devoid of our
delusions. A tathSgata, then, is one who uninhibitedly comes and goes thusly, much like the
narrator’s idealized self. While I agree with Reed that the narrator has a moment of heightened
clarity, I stop short of suggesting he attains enlightenment because ridding oneself of a dual
personality and ridding oneself of ego are two entirely different bars of soap. As the narrator
tells us at the conclusion of the novel, he does not “want to go back [to the world]” because
fight club is still going strong even without him. “Everything’s going according to the plan,” a
space monkey in scrubs informs him in the psychiatric ward; “We’re going to break up
civilization so we can make something better out of the world" (198-199). To leave this “white
on white” world would mean, if he actually were enlightened, having to embrace the way of the
bodhisattva, one who, although having finally attained enlightenment and able to leave the
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