Cats don’t have names: Does Neil Gaiman’s black cat teach emptiness?
‘Please. What’s your name?’ Coraline asked the cat. ‘Look, I’m Coraline. OK?’
The cat yawned slowly, carefully, revealing a mouth and a tongue of astounding pinkness. ‘Cats don’t have names,’ it said.
‘No?’ said Coraline.
‘No,’ said the cat. ‘Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.’
Neil Gaiman, Coraline (2002), p. 42.
Neil Gaiman’s brilliant book entitled Coraline. The reader trying to make sense of this article may ask why the character Coraline is talking to a cat, they may be in awe trying to understand how a cat can engage in conversation, or perhaps they even think that this dialogue is nonsense. But what the reader might not be aware of, is that with this dialogue the author – Neil Gaiman – managed to deliver an important philosophical question related to an extremely difficult topic to grasp in Indian Buddhism, as well as Tibetan Buddhism (which will be the focus of this article, while acknowledging that such a discussion is present in other Buddhist traditions as well).
The cat in Gaiman’s Coraline is no ordinary cat; it possesses two qualities – haughtiness and the quality of being black. We could say that almost all cats possess a haughty attitude based on both their behaviour and on the safety they seem to feel when using higher ground as a point of advantage. But the quality of being black is reserved for the imagination of people that embark on the telling of magical myths and tales. The black cat was, after all, associated firstly with Satan, witchcraft, and all sorts of sorcery, due to a Middle Ages superstition elevated to an official statement in Pope Gregory IX’s Vox in Rama.[1] With time, the black cat stopped being perceived as a threat or as bad luck, but became something more – it was linked with the supernatural. In many stories, including Coraline, it is a black cat that can walk between two worlds – this one, meaning the realm of our everyday life and endless work; and the other, the realm of the beyond or the supernatural. It is true that other cats in some stories can also stroll between both worlds, but because of the strong association mentioned above, Gaiman’s choice to use a black cat suits this story – Coraline – perfectly.
The black cat in Coraline invites us to rethink the way we consider animals, and even nature. Why? Because as human beings, we learn to consider ourselves superior to the rest of the earthly creatures. This is present in literal interpretations of Genesis 1:26-28 that historically gave way to enormous cruelty to non-human animals through a theology of dominion. From a biological and evolutionary perspective, however, the superiority of humans cannot be proven to be true, as stated the monk Matthieu Ricard (2017):
Starting with the era of the ancestors we share with other animal species, little by little, by a long series of steps and minimal changes, we arrived at the stage of Homo sapiens. In the course of this slow evolution, there was no “magical moment” that would justify our conferring on ourselves a special nature that makes us fundamentally different from the many species of hominids that preceded us. Nothing occurred in the evolutionary process that would justify our claim to a right of total supremacy over the animals.
Ricard, “A Plea for Animals.”
Ricard’s Buddhist perspective adds to what Pope Francis states in his Laudato Si’ (§67-68), and also with the beautifully woven work of David Clough in his On Animals II: Theological Ethics.
By reasoning and believing that humans are superior, the desire to dominate and control nature and creatures was naturalised in such a way that we began to see ourselves as separated from nature. By being apart from nature, humanity lost its sense of coexisting with its surroundings and replaced this with an obsessive compulsion of controlling the world, sometimes with swords and guns, and in other moments through the power of philosophy and the pen. Through this logic, any given object could only be what it was destined to – its essence. Words lost the power of creating anew, and became a hermetic and rigid thing. Thus, words became labels and with these, wars were waged, and identity became such an issue to the point of crushing empathy, compassion, loving-kindness, and solidarity.
So how does this relate to Buddhism, the reader may inquire. It is precisely this naming process, of imposing a static and immutable characteristic to an object, held as an ultimate truth that creates all this havoc. Therefore, the focus of this article is to reflect on the issue of naming brought up by the sage black cat in Coraline.
It is not the objective of this article to fully address or explore the reasonings of śūnyatā (Tib. སྟོང་པ་ཉིད་),[2] or the subsequent part of the black cat’s answer to Coraline. Rather the article simply offers the reader more questions. The XIV Dalai Lama offers an accessible take on this discussion, in his How to See Yourself as You Really Are:
There is no person to be found either separate from mind and body or within mind and body. This is the reason why the “I” and all other phenomena are described in Buddhism as “name-only”. The meaning of this is not that the “I” and all other phenomena are just words, since the words for these phenomena do indeed refer to actual objects. Rather, these phenomena do not exist in and of themselves; the term name-only eliminates the possibility that they are established from the object’s own side.
The XIV Dalai Lama, How to See Yourself as You Really Are (2008), p. 127.
It is precisely because all things – all phenomena – are empty that change is possible. And even though this dimension can be easily missed in the cat’s response to Coraline, it is there. By not having a name the cat still exists, and can be referred to as an actual cat, and even though Coraline has a name, she does not exist in and of herself.
It is precisely because of that discussion that humanity still clings on feverously to labels having burnt “witches” throughout history. The us versus them wars are a byproduct of understanding reality in such a shameful manner, not acknowledging emptiness (of these names and essences) as the proof that all beings are equal and deserve happiness.
Cats don’t have names, indeed. It is humans that confer names in hopes of controlling a reality that does not exist. It is precisely through the veil of delusion that names provide a sensation of timelessness and of being above the world. Is it really the black cat that is haughty, or is it humanity with its endless pursuit of subduing others (humans and non-human animals alike)?
Through the guise of a non-human black cat, Neil Gaiman brings an excellent contribution in challenging some naturalised views on reality, that shouldn’t be taken lightly by theologians, and that highly resonate with the Buddhist discussion on emptiness.
References
[1] See Donald Engels, Classical cats: the rise and fall of the sacred cat. It is available online thanks to the efforts of the Internet Archive:
https://archive.org/details/classicalcats00dona/page/183/mode/1up (last access in 09/11/2023).
[2] Commonly translated as emptiness.
© Patricia Guernelli Palazzo Tsai, 2024.
This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
Cover Image: “Black cat” by malfet_ is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Patricia Palazzo Tsai teaches at the Buddhist Theology undergraduate program from Instituto Pramāṇa, in Valinhos, and is also Legal Director of the Buddha-Dharma Association in Brazil (http://buda.org.br). She is a Buddhist practitioner from Mahāyāna Geluk tradition. She is a member of the Scholars at The Peripheries research group from University of St. Andrews (coordinated by Prof. Mario I. Aguilar), and also a member of Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women (and also member of the Sakyadhita Sao Paulo chapter). She researches Mahāyāna Buddhism, Buddhist Ethics, and Interreligious Dialogue. She tweets as @PalazzoTsai.
