encapsulated. Right here right now is all there is according to Zen philosophy; everything else
is a delusion in a similar way that the manifestation of Tyler is a delusion; he exists only in the
mind of the narrator, the seat of the dualistic world of samsSra.
Following Tyler’s kOan, the narrator poses one to himself: “If I could wake up in a
different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” This, of course, is
the genesis of his manifestation of Tyler and the driving concept of the novel’s plot. A few lines
later he responds to his own question: “Sometimes, you wake up and have to ask where you
are” (23). These sentences operate, like kOans, on multiple levels. The question most basically
addresses the repetition of takeoffs and landings which the narrator tells us about throughout
the chapter; once we’ve read the novel through, though, we understand this question as a form
of foreshadowing that the narrator is in fact Tyler himself. On a deeper level, the narrator is
grappling here with some pretty heady philosophical conceptions of time, space, identity, self,
and dualism. The chapter comes to a close with a rather profound lesson about Zen practice
and enlightenment:
The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute
Tyler had sat in the palm of perfection he'd created himself.
You wake up, and you’re nowhere.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work for it, but a minute was
worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.
You wake up, and that’s enough. (23)
The “palm of perfection,” like the lotus flower Buddha is sometimes depicted seated on, is
indeed something we “create" for ourselves through the practice of compassion and wisdom—
two things not on the narrator’s radar until the very end of the novel, and even then only in the
periphery. Perfection exists only for a moment, Tyler tells him, for a moment, according to
Buddhist philosophy, is all we have. One has to “work for it” in the sense that it is always
already there for the uncovering, and when realized, it is “worth the effort,” even if only for a
moment. “You wake up, and you’re nowhere . . . and that’s enough” because nowhere is our
original nature, before mind—before place, trajectory, discrimination, past, present. Nowhere.
“Right here----- Right now” (22); for an enlightened being, this is enough.
Were the narrator to seriously grapple with these ideas there would be no fight club, no
Project Mayhem. As the novel progresses, though, we realize he merely “uses" Buddhist
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