This is part I of III | Part I | Part II | Part III |


In my forthcoming book on karma and rebirth I cite one of the leaders of the Triratna Buddhist Order on the importance of beliefs in Buddhism. In his 2007 essay, There Are Limits, Subhuti says:

The first snag that we hit comes almost immediately because, based on discussions over the years, I can identify around a dozen different views on karma currently held by members of our Order. Some of which are mutually incompatible. So belief in karma is not a simple matter. The threads of karma doctrine form a tangled mess that take a book length project to unravel (not that my book will do this). In this essay I will, therefore, take one view of karma that is fairly common in our Order and test its compatibility with reason. This view is the one deriving from Nāgārjuna's treatment of the subject in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, though this source is seldom acknowledged and the view is generally absorbed by reading modern day Tibetan Madhyamaka philosophy of one kind or another.

The second snag is that what Subhuti means by "reason" is not entirely clear. My Dictionary of Philosophy opens its entry on reason by explaining that reason is,

The dictionary goes on to note that one important distinction is between reason and other mental qualities such as "imagination, experience, passion or faith." I think Subhuti probably has something like this distinction in mind. The implied comparison with Christian articles of faith reinforces the impression. In others words Subhuti seems to be referencing the common distinction between faith and reason as bases for belief. This distinction has been a feature of Christian theology and the focus of a lot of debate about religion in modern times.

Actually, in theology, faith and reason are both authorities for belief. Faith is usually considered to be the basis of belief, but some theologians have attempted to use reason to prove articles of faith. Faith is clearly important in Buddhist life. In the classical Pāḷi texts, faith (saddhā) arises when one hears a dhamma teaching, i.e. at DN 2 (dhammaṃ suṇāti), and AN 10.61 & AN 10.62 (saddhammassavana). Faith here is faith in the Buddha (tathāgate saddhā). All too often Buddhists (and particularly Triratna Buddhists) insist that Buddhism does not involve blind faith and that saddha (Skt śraddhā) is not blind faith. The Pāḷi texts make it clear that saddhā is precisely faith in the words of a religious teacher lacking demonstrability, at least for the for the moment.

Having practised the methods of Buddhism with success (by which is generally meant, becoming a stream entrant) one may also develop another quality, aveccapasāda‘confirmed confidence’ (or perhaps ‘perfect clarity’). So until stream entry, until we join the āriyasaṃgha, our motivation to practice is based on faith. Beyond this we see people taking Buddhism on faith all the time. Most Buddhists take the possibility of enlightenment on faith, and have to, because there are no enlightened people around. For Buddhists, as for other religieux, belief is based on faith.

As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) says of reason, "Some kind of algorithmic demonstrability is ordinarily presupposed." Here we see why Subhuti might have included "capable of direct verification" as a criterion. To go beyond faith we have to have a procedure to test our belief and see where it leads us. Note that though Subhuti's actual expression appears to be that of a logical positivist, this was probably unintentional. What he means is that the promised results of legend are said to be attainable by anyone. Of course this statement is also an article of faith.

Subhuti has said only that belief must be compatible with reason; not that it must be based on reason. This implies that belief may still be based on faith, as long as reason does not subsequently dis-confirm it. This gives us a little more room to manoeuvre. Most rationalists see faith and reason as antagonistic at best and as polar opposites at worst. However, in so-called Natural Theology, for example, "Articles of faith can be demonstrated by reason, either deductively (from widely shared theological premises) or inductively (from common experiences)." (IEP).

There is a subtle move here from reason as a faculty of the mind, to reasoning as a method for producing knowledge through the application of logical inferences (deduction and inductions). This is not necessarily problematic because reason is often associated with the ability to employ the methods of reasoning. However, it is worth noting the tacit shift from reason as a faculty that exists (ontology) to reasoning as a method of obtaining knowledge (epistemology). The confusion between the ontology and epistemology is a major problem in philosophy.

For example, before materialists ask "What is real?" they divide the world into mental and physical phenomena based, as all such divisions are based, on the epistemological differences engendered by our perceptual apparatus. They conclude that only physical phenomena are real. But this result has confused ontology with epistemology. "Mental" and "physical" are epistemological distinctions. The question is like asking: "Which is more real, hearing, vision, smell, or taste?" Which is to say the question is nonsensical. Also, the question of which kind experience corresponds to reality, is predicated on using mental phenomena to judge the truth. If mental phenomena are not real, then how can they produce accurate judgements on what is real? And so on.

If there is an equivalence between compatibility with reason and conforming to the procedures of reasoning the we have an obvious way to test Subhuti's assertion. Can we, for example, derive the details of the Buddhist belief in karma from first principles? That is to say, can we arrive at a doctrine of karma by applying the various modes of reasoning? In order to answer this question we need to look more closely at how reasoning works.



In the passages that follow I'll look at the three most common methods associated with reasoning: deduction, induction, and abduction. All these logic words derive from Latin ducere 'to lead' hence: de-duce, 'to lead down' or derive; in-duce'to lead onwards' or predict; and ab-duce'to lead away' or explain. We can see why abduct is a synonym for kidnap! From the verb ducere we also get Mussolini's title Il Duce i.e The Leader; other titles such as duke and dux; and a whole raft of other English words: adduce, conduce, conduit, douche, duct, ductile, educate, induct, introduce, produce, product, redoubt, reduce, seduce, subdue, and traduce.

Deduction, induction, and abduction are all methods of inferring new knowledge from something already known. I'll begin, as most philosophers do, considering these activities as solo events, but I will also reconsider them as collective activities which Mercier and Sperber (2011) have argued is the natural context for reason. Although I will not recapitulate Mercier and Sperber's arguments here, I will have them constantly in mind. Their most important observation, which is by no means original or new, is that in solo reasoning tasks most people score so badly that they cannot be said to be reasoning at all. Instead they rely on cognitive bias and logical fallacies. Mercier and Sperber point out that by contrast when critiquing someone else's argument in a small group setting, most people do very much better. In order words when producing arguments we don't use reason, but when evaluating someone else's argument we do. Thus they argue that reasoning is argumentative. A corollary of this is that confirmation bias is a feature (and perhaps even a necessary feature) of argument production, though not or argument evaluation.

Using deductions we try to infer conclusions based on our set of axioms about how the world works. These axioms are what Justin L. Barrett (2004) has called our non-reflective beliefs.* Non-reflective beliefs include our views on such metaphysical concepts as time, space, and causation. These are the beliefs that we absorb while we are growing up, both from our experience of interacting with objects and from interacting with people. We may not know we have these beliefs and they may not even be immediately accessible to introspection. Nevertheless, these axioms are central to how we understand the world.

* I discussed Barrett's ideas in a two part essay called Why Are Karma and Rebirth (Still) Plausible (for Many People)?

This kind of reasoning involves asking ourselves, in the light of our axioms about the world, what event, or sequence of events could have occurred to bring about the current state of affairs. For example most of us non-reflectively believe that there are agents behind most events. So based on the available information we may try to deduce what kind of agent was responsible and what their motivations might have been, based on our internal models of what agents exist and what kinds of events they can cause. So we might hear an eerie cry in the night and experience horripilation, but deduce that this is the kind of noise a fox makes and we conclude we are safe. Since most of us include supernatural elements in our non-reflective beliefs, it often seems intuitive, or at least minimally counter-intuitive, to conclude that an experience has a supernatural cause.

The IEP citation above referred to "widely shared theological premises". This highlights a problem with reasoning with respect to religious beliefs. A deduction from widely shared theological premises is likely to reinforce those same widely shared theological premises. If our widely held theological premise is that the Christian God exists, then deductions we make about, for example, how the world came into being or what is moral, are predetermined by our axioms. We may well perform a perfectly logical deduction from our premise, but this signifies little because the starting premise or axiom was not arrived at by reasoning.

Similarly for our theological premise that karma is, in Subhuti's words, how existence works. What we have done is decide a priori that karma is how existence works and then set out to look for confirmation of this axiom. This is a cognitive bias called confirmation bias. As noted, Mercier and Sperber (2011) have argued that confirmation bias is ubiquitous in argument production, but seldom in found in argument assessment, unless one already agrees with the argument. So getting a believer to critique and argument for karma is pointless. To get rational, objective feedback, one must get feedback from a non-believer, but not one who is so hostile the belief that they cannot think rationally about it.

Looking for confirmation of our beliefs is not rational because of the Black Swan Effect. This means no matter how many times we confirm our view, some evidence may still come along that falsifies it. Thus, a tenet of rationality is that one ought to seek falsification rather than confirmation, which for most people is counterintuitive. Most of us, set a problem in which we have a choice between seeking confirmation and seeking falsification of a belief, opt to seek confirmation. We look for evidence to support our argument. We only try to disconfirm arguments produced by others.This is an important observation: what is intuitive is not necessarily rational and vice versa.

If our in-group is Buddhist then our argument is typically with out-group non-Buddhists. Within the group we tend to confirm and reinforce each other's views (which is not compatible with reason), while without we argue against the other's views (which is compatible with reason). This suggests that most of the time in-group beliefs won't be compatible with reason; and that reasoning about our views can only be found in those who disagree with us. This failure of groups to produce an internal critique can lead to groupthink, another cognitive bias in which the desire for harmony or conformity overwhelms reasoning in a group. In this sense the wide range of incompatible views on karma in the Triratna Buddhist Order is a good thing, or it would be if people were willing to argue about their views (there is some resistance to arguing with me about views I find).

One of the buzz-words of the day is echo-chamber. This compound word was coined to refer to the mistaken view that our social media environments tend to restrict our exposure to dissenting political views, so that we end up only seeing and hearing views which seem to confirm our own view. Yang et al (2017) showed that in fact that social media exposes people to more dissent rather than less. Making deductions about the world based on widely held religious premises is only ever going to result in our conclusions echoing our existing beliefs.

Deduction is a useful tool for reasoning, but it has rather severe limitations. When it comes to reasoning about beliefs, that limitation becomes catastrophic if our articles of faith are taken as axiomatic. Since articles of faith are treated as axioms and not themselves arrived at by reasoning, the danger is that our conclusions simply reflect our existing beliefs. Logic and reason are not always the same thing. Deductions logically derived from irrational axioms can and will be irrational.

So in this sense I disagree with the Natural Theology crowd that deduction enables us to reason about belief. Deduction is completely dependent on what we believe.

We use inductive reasoning to arrive at generalisations about experience and to form rules of thumb for dealing with similar experiences. Generalisations are possible because experience has patterns. Experience has patterns because the world evolves in regular ways, our minds operate in regular ways and experience is a function of both. A lot of induction relies on the general principle that the future will most likely be like the past. Probabilities are an important form of generalisation about the future.

For a generalisation to be valid does not require that all experiences confirm it. It's not like a law of nature. If 80% of experiences fall into known categories, then it can be efficient to proceed as if they all will and be alert for exceptions, than to have to assess each experience individually. It's like a compression algorithm that only notes the part of a video that are changing. There's no need to compute the whole picture every time if large chucks of the background are not changing. Of course, if we don't notice the exceptions then we are led into error by generalisations.

One thing I want to flag up here is the problem of generalising from a single or rare experience. A made up example might be that I try mint and licorice ice-cream and I conclude that I do not like ice-cream. This is an over-generalisation, because mint and licorice is an unusual flavour and there are more conventional choices that I probably would like.

Another problem is when we combine this with confirmation bias. For example, astrology may seem to make sense if we generalise from the predictions that confirm our belief and ignore those that do not. A random prediction is likely to be right some of the time. By filtering out all the times the prediction is wrong, we come to the conclusion that astrology is generally pretty accurate. This aggressive filtering of experience is not only possible, but very likely to happen. And it explains the persistent popularity of irrational claims like those made by astrologers.

These kinds of generalisations from one experience, or just a few experiences, are extremely prone to cognitive bias. And many of our experiences in meditation are unique or unusual. But even if they are not, they tend only to coincide with being in an altered state of consciousness. Thus we ought to be wary of generalising on the basis of them. However, Buddhists often rush to the conclusion that is supported by the norms of the group. A vision in meditation is not an hallucination, but a confirmation of the transcendent reality that our latter-day Buddhists metaphysics describes.

Another problem we Buddhists face is the premise that what applies in meditation is applicable everywhere, i.e. that features of our awareness that we identify in the altered states achieved in meditation are general features of awareness or indeed general features of reality. If we stop to consider this, it is quite a bizarre inference to make. The effort required to get into the altered state is considerable and the state itself is so qualitatively different any other kind of experience. The very fact that I can describe these as altered states, reflects that they are unusual rather than common. Why would we choose to infer knowledge about reality on the basis of unusual experiences instead of usual experiences? Since it is common to be completely absorbed in these states and completely cut off from sensory perceptions of the world, why would we infer that they reflect the world more accurately?

Inductive reasoning is even more susceptible to bias than deductive, or at least susceptible to more kinds of bias that skew the conclusions we come to. One of the common biases is to see ourselves as less biased that other people (bias blind spot). Wikipedia has a list of almost 200 cognitive biases, most of which apply to the process of inductive reasoning. In his Cognitive Bias Cheat Sheet, Buster Benson has provided a more structured overview of cognitive bias that I find quite useful. Biases creep in when we have too much information or too little; or when we are trying to arrive at an answer via a shortcut (which we do most of the time). Too much information creates the secondary problem of what to remember.

So again, induction is not a very reliable way of reasoning about belief. Beliefs themselves create cognitive biases (like confirmation bias) that distort the reasoning process in favour of what we already believe. In fact most of the time we arrive at a belief or a decision and then, and only then, we look for reasons to retrospectively justify our belief or decision. So when you ask a Buddhist why they believe in karma and the answer is, "Because it seems intuitive", the first suspicion must be that it seems intuitive because it's what that person believes. Belief itself makes the belief seem intuitive and thus we will tend to infer that our belief is rational.

We have one more approach to reasoning. Is it any better?

Abduction is the process by which we infer explanations from observations, and use these explanations to make predictions. Where deduction proceeds to a certain conclusion, and induction to rules of thumb, abduction seeks to produce the best explanation given some facts that do not allow for a certain conclusion. Whenever we "jump to a conclusion" we are using abduction. And in this lies the downside of abductive reasoning. Many of our shortcuts are motivated by cognitive bias or logical fallacy. So if we hoped for a fool-proof approach, we aren't going to find it in abduction.

One of the most famous applications of abduction is the quote by Sherlock Holmes that:

Eliminating impossible explanations is an important process in abductive reasoning. One of the reasons philosophers frequently refer to Occam's Razor (aka the principle of parsimony) is that it places a useful limit on how we should go about the process of producing explanations. Attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), though it definitely existed before him, Occam's razor takes many forms, but the basic form is that the explanation which makes the least assumptions is best. This is sometimes over-simplified and presented in terms of "the simplest explanation is best". However, this version is not very useful. Sometimes a complex explanation is best because it makes fewer assumptions.

A great example this is the reasoning behind Jan Nattier's argument for the Heart Sutra being composed in China. The larger Prajñāpārmitā text (LPT) is taken from India to China via Central Asia, where it is translated, extracted, and framed to create the Heart Sutra, whereupon it is exported back to India, back-translated into Sanskrit, lengthened, and then re-transmitted to China. This is by no means a simple scenario. But it makes very few assumptions compared with other possible explanations of the available evidence. Red Pine, for example, has to assume that in addition to the Sanskrit and Chinese versions of the texts that we still possess, a separate large Prajñāpārmitā text with different wording was composed, transmitted to China, and then lost in both Sanskrit and Chinese leaving only the Heart Sutra as a record of it. But this is hardly credible.

Also some assumptions are more likely than others. If our explanation of events requires a miracle, then Hume's comments on miracles become pertinent:

Science at its best is the epitome of abduction at work. And science at its best also involves a process which we have only mentioned in passing, i.e. comparing notes. Since this is often left out of accounts of reasoning, I want to highlight it here. But first a word about salience.

Clearly reasoning has some limitations. On our own we may not reason at all, but take some shortcut or invoke a rule of thumb instead. Humans are poor at solo reasoning tasks because we fall victim to many cognitive biases and logical fallacies. However, even if we were competently reasoning, there are many cases in which given the same information two people would come up with entirely different conclusions, generalisations, and explanations. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of politics.

The Political Compass website assesses political affiliation on two axes: progressive-conservative (or economic left-right) and authoritarian-libertarian. But no matter which quadrant you end up in, anyone who takes the test has access to pretty much the same information. The differences come about because of salience. George Lakoff's (1995) explanations of the different underlying political metaphors of our divisions are very salient to my understanding of politics. They related to the kind of family that feels right for us.

For example, conservatives conceptualise the nation as a self-contained family with a strong father-figure in charge, who is strict, strong, and calm. Part of being self-contained is always paying off debts promptly. Happiness is found by everyone playing their role and following the rules. Children are taught obedience and self-reliance. Liberals by contrast see the nation as a family of two equal parents in which everyone is cared for and loved. Happiness is found by playing positive role in the community and work. Children are taught to love their parents and to care for themselves and others.

These metaphors underpin reasoning in the political domain. The conclusions, generalisations, and explanations produced by political reasoning is powerfully shaped to fit. So given, to take a topical example, a shortfall of funding in the National Health Service, conservatives will tend to want to cut costs and balance the books whereas liberals will want to insure that everyone is looked after. We used to pay a lot more in tax and the government had a number of income generating assets and businesses. But the Neoliberal (really a conservative libertarian) forced the government to lower taxes and to sell off assets, because of an ideological commitment to small government and minimal government involvement in individuals lives. As Ronald Raygun framed it, it was about relieving the tax burden. Tax here being a burden imposed on the individual rather than a way of the community taking care of its own. But with low taxation and eliminating other sources of income comes a crisis in funding the health service. But the health service conflicts with conservative values in fundamental ways: it does not encourage self-reliance, people get something for nothing (creating a debt that cannot be paid), and people who injure themselves through carelessness or poor lifestyle choices get the same treatment as those who are careful and who make good lifestyle choices.

Different people reasoning about the same situation, with the same information, but coming to very different conclusions, making very different generalisations, and explaining the situation using very different principles.

I have often written about this: when we assess information we may go through a cognitive procedure to assess its veracity, but we register how important the information is to us emotionally. This importance is what I call salience. The emotionality of salience is what enables us to have a "gut reaction" to news or to make "intuitive" choices.

Salience is also an aggressive filter on what we consider when making decisions. Given a wealth if information we all filter it. Dealing with too much information is a major source of cognitive bias. If we always had to evaluate every option we would be unable to make decisions at all. The solution to the problems of bias, error, and salience is comparing notes, to which I will now turn.

The evidence is that humans are extremely poor as solo reasoning tasks (Mercier and Sperber 2011). It's not very credible to assume that humans can reason things out on their own under normal circumstances.

In fact we seem to have evolved reasoning in the context of decision making in small groups. And this means that all this reasoning needs to be reframed as a group activity. And after all we are social animals, we evolved to live in communal groups. This social aspect of human beings is all too often simply left out of accounts of how our minds work. When we look at other social mammals, many social relations are fully functional without language or abstract reasoning. This has led me to suggest that, although we typically see the hierarchy of science as going from individual psychology to collective sociology, in fact sociology is more fundamental and so profoundly shapes our psyches that it ought to be the other way around, i.e. out of biology emerges sociology, which shapes the minds of individuals. Indeed, we are so attuned to our social environment that "individual psychology" may be an oxymoron.

Some years ago Sean Carroll's Twitter bio read,

"I'm sure if the blind guys had compared notes they'd have figured out it was an elephant."

For me this captured something important not only about our search for knowledge, but the stories we tell about our search for knowledge. Comparing notes (in the form of literally comparing notes, but also of presenting results in seminars and conferences where they can be discussed, and in formal peer review prior to publication) is one of the things scientists do that makes science an effective knowledge seeking activity. Knowledge seeking is typically a collective activity. "Science is sold as facts and it's not, it's process. And that process is mainly arguing." (Edwards 2017)

It is precisely when we do not compare notes that we are most at risk of falling into some logical fallacy or cognitive bias. By comparing notes and, well, arguing about what they mean, we are more likely to be rational. Of course groups are also prone to cognitive bias, so even then we must proceed with caution. For example, simply comparing notes in a naive way can be unproductive. We can uncritically accept the other's conclusions, generalisations, and explanations because they support our own.

When we compare notes uncritically we get a consensus reality. For example, part of consensus reality is the supernatural. If I have an experience and describe it as supernatural to someone who has come to a similar conclusion about some experience they have had, we may both reinforce the delusion of the other. Critical comparing of notes leads to what I call a collective empirical realism. In this approach there can be no unquestioned axioms. All axioms are up for discussion and criticism. Other people who participate in the comparing of notes critique methods as well as conclusions. By being sceptical about axioms, methods, and results, we can begin to eliminate the illogical and irrational elements that inevitably creep into our narratives, along with the other purely subjective elements.

What science does that other forms of knowledge seeking do not, is to look at why different observers come to different conclusions or explanations. Scientists try to get at the underlying principles of our beliefs to see which are most consistent with reality. Hence for the first few centuries of science, the emphasis was on reductionism. Given the human propensity for bias and error, we had to really get clear on the underlying substance and principles under discussion. And note that in the general population bias and error are still dominant forces. Supernatural beliefs are de rigueur for example. Even within science bias and error cannot be eliminated except by retrospectively subjecting results to collective criticism and weeding. Wrong results and claims are published all the time. But the approach of science means that before a result can be widely accepted it must be replicated and shown to fit in with the system of knowledge that has developed.

The concept of reason is by no means straightforward. When we say that our beliefs are compatible with reason we are making some big assumptions. We assume we are capable of reasoning and capable of understanding when some belief of ours is compatible with reason. Looked at in the cold light of day these are doubtful assumptions. Our beliefs are much more likely to be unreflective assumptions based on bias and fallacy. Which may explain why our expectations and intentions are so very often thwarted.

Clearly if humans are poor at reasoning then a lot of what is said about reason is bunk. If you look up popular quotes on the subject, it is variously supposed to be what separates us from other animals (we called ourselves Homo sapiens); our highest faculty; a kind of pure and abstract virtue; the quality that helps us triumph over nature; etc etc. But this is all bunk. Most of us don't reason, but instead rely on irrational rules of thumb and shortcuts. It's not that we are incapable of reason. We are certainly capable, but we prefer not to and have other means of arriving at decisions that we prefer to use instead. Yes, we can, if called upon, give reasons for our beliefs and decisions, but the overwhelming likelihood is that we did not use reason when arriving at them. For most of us, the best we manage on a day to day basis is post hoc rationalisation for beliefs we already hold or decisions we've already made without the benefit of reason.

Reason and reasoning have been widely misunderstood in history. For the most part they are still widely misunderstood. What is called "reason" is often something else entirely. All too often it is simply ideology or some kind of Freudian wish-fulfilment fantasy. Those people who come across as more severely rational are almost always simply good at hiding the emotional basis of their decision making and good at persuading people. Most top politicians call into this category: irrationally committed to an ideology, emotionally self-contained (and thus impervious to criticism), and highly persuasive. All qualities we might also associate with psychopaths.

If our religious identity resides in adopting certain beliefs, and that identity is important to us, then our ability to think clearly about belief is severely compromised. If we have made great sacrifices in our religious life—the extreme example is refraining from sexual activity—then our reasoning is always motivated towards confirming the value of our sacrifice. Which is why monks are such vocal apologists for Buddhism. Others will be inspired by such sacrifices and also want to confirm the value of them, since they get status by association. Outsiders can never appreciate the true meaning or significance of religious identity and their opinions hardly matter. Thus, religious belief becomes a self-sustaining process within a religious group.

We can see that compatible with reason is a very high bar to reach. Having explored the general issues surround reason and reasoning, in Part II of this essay, I'll begin to look at the reasoning behind morality, such as it is, because karma is the Buddhist explanation for morality. Part III will focus on assessing a particular version of karma doctrine is compatible with reason.

~~oOo~~

4.1 Views

In this section of the essay I will extend my critique of karma by focussing on some general ideas related to reasoning and karma; and then in Part III, I will outline a more specific critique of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma.

One of the functions of Dharma study in the Triratna Buddhist Order is to help identify and quantify our existing views or what Justin L Barrett (2004) calls non-reflective beliefs. This process is more effective if we experience cognitive dissonance. That is, when our beliefs are challenged by information that is true, but seems to contradict our worldview. Without the dissonance, we might never even know that we had a view, since many non-reflective views are transparent to introspection. Simply asking ourselves what our views are, is ineffective. Creating cognitive dissonance is a reliable method of identifying such views. Our negative reactions are a window into the unconscious, non-reflective belief system that shapes our worldview. This worldview can be quite different from our professions of belief and the doctrines that we recite as religieux. So our reactivity is an important clue to where our true beliefs lie. Which I find salutary. On the plus side reactivity is part of the process as long as we reflect on it.

Ironically, converting to Buddhism often involves consciously taking on a whole raft of views. It can take many years to internalise these views, but one the goals of conversion is to achieve fluency in the jargon and behavioural quirks of a particular Buddhist group. Part of the goal is to develop what John Searle (1995) calls dispositions. Dispositions are generalised behavioural habits that allow us to behave in ways that are consistent with social norms, without us having to consciously follow rules all the time. As we internalise the rules, following them becomes a background capability. As Subhuti indicates (Part I), such beliefs and dispositions can be seen as constitutive of being Buddhist. The moment when one is acknowledged to have internalised the norms of the group and is accepted as a full member of the group is an important step in the religious life. In the Triratna Buddhist Order this corresponds with ordination.

When membership of the group is predicated on endorsing certain views, we can always find confirmation of such views from other members of the group. The resulting effect is called an echo-chamber (where we all reflect each others view) and it can lead to groupthink, a cognitive bias in which we all go along with a perceived consensus for fear of being social isolated. This is part of a broader psychological phenomenon called social proof, in which we judge the safest course of action to be doing what everyone else is doing (this may be related to the basic level of empathy, i.e. emotional contagion). On one hand these are behaviours we can expect to find in all social animals because they strengthen social bonds and promote security; and on the other they are highly limiting for individuals and suppress reasoning. If our views are to be compatible with reasoning, then we cannot simply go along with what everyone else says or does, even if that means that our membership of the group is threatened.

Few people step outside and confront intelligent criticism of their views. In the case of Buddhism, very little intelligent criticism of Buddhist doctrine exists. So, even if one does step outside, one goes from an echo-chamber to a virtual vacuum. For example, in my collection of articles on karma I have just two that make any attempt to assess the idea on its merits. If one wanted to critically evaluate karma based on published sources one would find two kinds of literature: religious apologetics and scholarly works that take Buddhism on its own terms. To my knowledge there is no general survey of the dozen or so competing Buddhist accounts of karma, no critical or comparative studies of these views, no sense even that Buddhists might disagree on the subject of karma. There is no attempt to reconcile karma with modernity or to acknowledge the difficulty of such a project.

As Subhuti hints above, Buddhist karma is inextricably linked to rebirth. Karma refers to a variety of doctrines which boil down to: actions cause rebirth. The quality of our actions in this life determine the quality of our rebirth, unless we are liberated. The primary goal of traditional Buddhism is to end rebirth, either for oneself or for everyone. Since both virtue (dhamma) and vice (adhamma) lead to rebirth (See Thag 304), albeit better (sugati) and worse (duggati) rebirths, the Buddhist has to transcend all willed activity that might lead to rebirth. This way of looking at the Bauddhadharma has a flavour of the Jainadharma to it, as it was the Jains who saw all activity as karmic and resolved to do no action - the acme of which was to sit in meditation until one died, probably from dehydration or starvation.

Unfortunately, beyond this bare outline, almost every detail of karma doctrine is disputed, and some modern proponents of karma theory would dispute even this much. Karma is a rubric for a wide range of views on morality, many of which are mutually exclusive. So reasoning about karma is much more difficult that it seems at first glance, because we first have to establish which karma belief is being reasoned about.

4.2 Actions have Consequences

One common view on karma, mistakenly equates it to cause and effect. Karma is not a theory of cause and effect. Karma only applies to our willed actions and the vast majority of events in the universe are not caused by willed actions. Humans are just one species, on just one planet, in an observable universe of two trillion galaxies, each with about 100 billion stars. So let's not overstate our role in matters.

Based on our past interactions with people we can deduce that certain types of behaviours have desirable consequences and others have undesirable consequences. All social animals have a disposition to being prosocial, but each group has it's own aesthetic norms that we must learn and internalise. A group is the sum of the personalities of the individuals that make it up, though a social group may be a structure that has emergent properties (culture).

By the time they reach adulthood, a young social mammal has to had have enough experience to generalise about what kind of interactions are favourable and which are not, in their group. They have to have internalised these as dispositions to enable them behave within social norms most of the time without having to laboriously reference rules consciously. Social animals typically acknowledge that gaining this knowledge and experience takes time. For example, social animals are typically very tolerant of infants, but have higher expectations as group members approach sexual maturity. Most social mammals have a very low tolerance of anti-social behaviour amongst adults.

We humans don't always get this right. For example, we may behave in an antisocial manner and be treated roughly, but come to the wrong conclusion. We may not have insight into our own role in the interaction, conclude that other people are mean, and continue to act in antisocial manner. Our modern, large impersonal cities regularly produce anti-social behaviour that becomes entrenched.

That said, I think probably every one I know would consider the proposition that actions have consequences to be a self-evident statement of fact. Which suggests that it is a belief at the non-reflective level, albeit one that is accessible to introspection. For most people it is simply axiomatic in human relations. Even people who are habitually antisocial seem to understand that their actions have consequences. Often the problem is that they do not identify with the (often large, amorphous) group that is trying to obtain their compliance, but have allegiance to a local, more personalised group. Indeed the acceptance of actions have consequences seems to be universal amongst humans and to have analogues (at least) amongst other social animals.

Some of us take the axiom, actions have consequences, to be a summary of the doctrine of karma. But this is not what the traditional view was. Traditionally karma is always linked to rebirth. Karma usually says that we are reborn according to the weight and kind of our deeds in life; or if liberated, we are not reborn at all. That is: karma causes rebirth. In some versions of the karma doctrine, karma may also ripen as an experience (vedanā) within a rebirth, but rebirth is still the primary manifestation of karma. Karma without rebirth is not karma. Those who leave rebirth out, are often adjusting karma to fit with a secular humanist outlook. I have some sympathy with this approach, but calling it "karma" seems to miss the point. All karma is moralistic; but not all morality is karmic.

"Actions have consequences" is about the vaguest true statement about morality that one could possibly make. It is true, but it doesn't say much. Everybody knows it and the vast majority internalise it as infants. There is nothing particularly Buddhist about it. If we are talking about karma then there is something missing (apart from rebirth). By this I mean that there is no implication that the consequences will be appropriate to the action. And this leads us naturally into considering fairness and justice.


4.2 Fairness and Justice

"Actions have consequences" is the minimum one needs to know to understand how to behave in social groups. Probably all social mammals have some grasp of this concept. But on its own it is hardly good enough to explain morality. Morality according to Frans de Waal is based on two qualities found in social animals: empathy and reciprocity. I've essayed these two qualities (See The Evolution of Morality), but here will focus on reciprocity and its implications for karma.

Social animals understand reciprocity. It is a feature of the social lifestyle that animals share what they have. At a minimum they club together for defence, share food resources, and especially in social primates, access to mates. And part of reciprocity involves keeping track of sharing: who shares with us in particular. We preferentially share with those who share with us and we don't share with those who don't share with us. As I noted in my exposition of Frans de Waal's ideas on the evolution of morality, this entails a basically generous disposition: in principle each individual must be prepared to start off sharing, else no one would share with anyone. This disposition to generosity and sharing means than when another group member does not share we are attuned to this as a kind of threat to the group. When things are unfair we feel it.

The classic example of this is the much watched video of the capuchin monkey who, perceiving that his comrade is receiving better rewards for the same task, angrily throws his food back at the researchers and screeches at her. All of the social animals which have been tested seem to grasp basic fairness related to rewards for tasks. They all notice another individual getting too much reward. Chimps also notice an individual getting too little and are able to reason out that the one getting too little may retaliate later on.

Even for these animals, who are trained to perform actions for rewards and thus fully comprehend that actions have consequences, the consequences cannot be arbitrary. They will perform the task for a lesser reward as long as the others are getting the same reward. They expect the rewards to be fair.

For consequences to be fair they must be appropriate to the action and appear in a timely manner. These two restrictions (niyāma) are explicit in Buddhist karma doctrine, though they are not always formalised, and even then not until relatively late. In Buddhaghosa's conception of niyāma, appropriateness is symbolised by the rice seed giving rise to a rice plant and is called the germinal-restriction or bīja-niyāma. Results appearing in a timely manner are symbolised by the timely arrival of the monsoon or the season for flowering or fruiting; and this is called the seasonal-restriction or utu-niyāma. Buddhaghosa added a third restriction which was that consequences of willed actions were inescapable, which he called the action-restriction or kamma-niyāma. As I explored in my article Escaping the Inescapable (Attwood 2014) this restriction was deprecated by Mahāyānists who proposed that consequences could be avoided through religious exercises. The idea of avoiding karma through religious exercises probably came from Jainism since it is a characteristic of their religion, but absent from early Buddhist accounts of Buddhism.

Justice involves the idea that unfair situations can be made fair by taking actions. And as morality is based on reciprocity, justice is often seen in terms of balance or debt. An antisocial action upsets the balance or creates a debt. It must be balanced out by pro-social actions. Or the debt must be paid in kind. A criminal has to "pay their debt to society". Arguably the capuchin, by displaying and flinging food was taking action to restore fairness and was thus pursuing justice.

It is not enough for actions to have consequences, we have to add some restrictions, some niyāmas. The consequences of actions have to have be appropriate and timely for the situation to seem fair. This principle is starting to look sufficiently sophisticated to account for morality. It is certainly broad enough to encompass many definitions of fairness and justice. Some accounts of karma stress that one gets the rebirth one deserves; one's life is a logical consequence of actions in a previous life.; and so on. Where we get squeamish is when someone who is not obviously evil is struggling with some burden like congenital illness. We wonder what they can have done in a past life to deserve such a fate. Blaming the victim for their misfortune is an unfortunate aspect of the just-world fallacy.

This brings up the major problem that we have. The whole point of the idea that actions have consequences is that I suffer the consequences of my actions; and you suffer the consequences of your actions. Additionally I may suffer from your actions and vice versa, and this must figure in any rational moral theory, but karma doctrines emphasise the way my actions lead to rebirth for me. The connection between action and consequence is specific and completely non-random. There is no question that if you suffer the consequences of my actions, that you will perceive this as unfair and unjust. The problem is that karma is restricted by dependent arising. And dependent arising, as usually interpreted, disallows any persistence of effect beyond the cessation of its condition (imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati). The best we can offer is that the person who suffers the consequences of the action arises in dependence on the agent of the action. This is a rather distant relationship compared to most moral formulas.


4.2.1 Fairness in Buddhism

In fact this distance between action and consequence must have troubled Indian Buddhists as well. We know this because their literature is full of morality tales, in which actions in a past life have consequences for the same person in their present life. These are the jātaka stories (which occur throughout the literature as well as in a specific collections such as Jātakapāḷi and Apadāna). The typical framework is that something happens, then the Buddha tells a story of a deed done in the past, and concludes with identifying how the event in the present is affecting people now because of their behaviour in previous lives, explicitly identifying them as the same people. In jātaka stories there is a direct line from action in the previous life to consequence in this one. It seems to have escaped the sustained attention of scholars that this is a direct contradiction of dependent arising. Despite the contradiction, jātaka stories became enormously popular in Indian Buddhism. They are the main theme of stūpa decorations during the Asoka period for example. And they are the main vehicle for teaching morality in Theravāda countries down to the present.

So Buddhists maintain two distinct narratives in relation to morality, one which emphasises pragmatic morality and the other which emphasises a negative metaphysics of self.

1. My actions have appropriate and timely consequences for me, especially rebirth.
2. There is no "I" who can will actions.

The generally unacknowledged corollary of 2. is that without an "I" there can be no morality. Nāgārjuna does more or less acknowledge it at the end of Chp 17 of Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā, but it ends him the sobriquet of nihilist from the rest of the Buddhist world, to the extent they were aware of him (he appears to have had zero influence on Theravāda Buddhism for example). A closer look at Nāgārjuna's answer to the problem of karma makes up the bulk of Part III.

Modern day Buddhists tend to segue between these two narratives so seamlessly that it took me 20 years to notice it happening. In talking about morality we insist actions have appropriate and timely consequences for the individual. In talking about metaphysics we assert that the self is at best an illusion, and therefore the one experiencing the consequences is not the same as the agent who performed the action, but not different. When this threatens to undermine morality, we slip back into talking about actions and consequences.


4.3 Just World Fallacy

In our social world we expect the consequences of our actions to have appropriate and timely consequences. In other words, we expect other members of our group to act predictably. Social living is predicated on us all having predictable responses to social situations. It doesn't matter so much what the norms of the group are, with some limitations, as long as most members of the group follow the rules most of the time, the group will thrive. How a group of humans live is as much a matter of aesthetics as morality and practicalities.

This expectation is rational within a social setting, but we go a step further. We infer that if social actions have appropriate and timely consequences, then the whole world ought function this way. This is the just-world fallacy. It is a fallacy because, although the world does follow rules (or least rule-like paths), it does not follow our social rules. The universe does not care about us any more than a landslide, earthquake, or volcano cares about it. Where humans are constantly modifying their behaviour in response to each other, the universe never modifies its behaviour in response to humans. The universe has no trolley problem, it would never swerve to avoid killing anyone.

A contributing factor to this fallacy may be animism, which is the most ubiquitous supernatural belief. In this view the world is full of supernatural beings, often called "spirits". In Burma they are nats; in Japan kami; in India devas; and so on. Most people for most of human history seem to have believed that spirits inhabited the world around them. And these spirits are commonly seen as part of the community. Special people called, shaman, had the role of mediating between physical beings and spirits. It was only natural that any expectations of our social group would extend to these non-material members as well, though they are often more capricious than humans. The extension of this expectation to nature as a whole is no stretch of the imagination.

However it came about, it is common for people to assume that the rules of social interaction apply across the board; i.e. that the world itself is, or ought to be, fair. What this means is that if we are, on the whole good, we expect good things to happen not only amongst our group, but generally in the world. We expect to be lucky for example, to have good fortune, to avoid misfortune. The corollary of this is that if we experience misfortune, it may be that we have inadvertently transgressed or that someone has used magic against us.

It does not take a genius to see that the world is not fair. Consequences of actions are not always (I would say seldom) appropriate and timely. Another aspect of a pre-scientific worldview that is almost universal is belief in life-after-death. An afterlife seems plausible for any number of reasons including, out-of-body experiences, near-death experience, dreams, hallucinations, etc that give credence to the necessary Cartesian-style mind-body dualism. Also we have a very strong desire to continuing living, which operates on many levels. So, in this sense, anything which seems to confirm the existence of an afterlife is willingly accepted and any counterfactual information is quietly buried.

The presumed existence of life after death provides a neat solution to the problem created by consequences which are inappropriate and/or untimely. Everything is balanced out in the afterlife. This may involve literal weighing up of actions, or a ledger of good and bad deed, or in the case of karma some mechanism which is unclear but produces the right results (what I call a black-box function)

Having dealt with a number of generalities regarding morality, in the next part of this essay I will turn to the specific subject of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma as found in Chapter 17 of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

~~oOo~~

4.4 Multiple Versions of Karma


In a sense, the Order reflects the confused history of karma in Buddhism. Different versions emerged from time to time, presumably in response to perceived needs, and many of them were incompatible with others. More or less the only common features are the word karma and the notion that willed actions are somehow significant.

I've critiqued some of the main versions of karma, especially in an essay called The Logic of Karma (16 Jan 2015). So for the purposes of this argument I will focus on my critique of the Madhyamaka version of karma, particularly as set out in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. I don't think I've given a detailed critique of this version before and it turns out to be the one most resistant to reasoned argument and is thus the view most in need of effective refutation.



5.1 Nāgārjuna the Nihilist

The most difficult version of karma to argue against is the one that begins with Nāgārjuna and comes down to us via various groups that assimilated elements of his metaphysics (including those various schools that claim the label madhyamaka). It took me many years of  losing arguments with pseudo-intellectual mādhyamikas to work out what is wrong with Nāgārjuna's explanation of karma. As Nāgārjuna says, near the end of his chapter on karma:

karma cen nāsti kartā ca kutaḥ syāt karmajaṃ phalaṃ |
asaty atha phale bhoktā kuta evan bhaṣyati || MMK 17.30 ||

If action and agent don't exist, how would an action produce a consequence?
And if the consequence does not exist, who would suffer it? 

Ultimately, for Nāgārjuna, there is no action (karma) and no agent (kartṛ), thus there is no consequence (phala), no one who experiences it (bhoktṛ), and thus no rebirth either. At best they are like an imaginary city in the sky, like a mirage, or a dream (MMK 17.33). So Nāgārjuna rejects the idea of actions having consequences.

I've read a number of explanations of Nāgārjuna's approach to karma and they all baulk at accepting his dismissal of karma and restate the mainstream Buddhist assertion that actions have real consequences. For example, Kalupahana concluded:

"The most significant assertion here is that the rejection of permanence and annihilation and the acceptance of emptiness and saṃsāra (or the life-process) do not imply the rejection of the relationship between action (karma) and the consequence." (1986: 55)

But clearly Nāgārjuna does reject the relationship between action and consequence, and what's more he rejects the more fundamental notions of action, consequence, and relationship per se. To Nāgārjuna these concepts are not part of paramārthasatya or ultimate truth. How should we read a statement like Kalupahana's which is echoed in other academic work? It seems that Nāgārjuna's rejection of karma and rebirth does not sit well with anyone who identifies with more mainstream Buddhist ideas. To say that agent, action, patient, and consequence are all just illusions is a form of nihilism.

My sense of Nāgārjuna is that he is trapped by his own articles of faith. In maintaining that nothing persists in the face of plentiful evidence to the contrary, he is left with no choice but to obfuscate and distract us from his dilemma. Ironically, we know this because still have his actual words. They at least have persisted for some eighteen centuries. Mādhyamikās (those who follow madhyamaka ideology) are apt to point out that this is not what commentators have understood him to be saying. However, when the text is clear and the commentary contradicts it, we have little choice but to reject the commentary as driven by motivations unrelated to those of the author.

Nāgārjuna's view is a pernicious one, because it destroys the basis of morality. If actions do not have consequences at all, let alone appropriate and timely consequences, the observation of which allows us to modify our behaviour in the future to obtain different results, then morality is simply not possible. If there is no definite relationship between action and consequences, then there could only be chaos. The view appears to be based on a fundamental confusion.


5.2 Arguing Against Madhyamaka

However, this is also a view that is extremely resistant to rational argument, because part of the madhyamaka ideology, at least in its modern versions, is that rational argument has no place in the Buddhist system. Only personal experience counts towards knowledge and experience, by definition is not susceptible to logic. Here we see medieval Buddhist folly meshing with Victorian Romantic folly to produce a persistent delusion. Mādhyamikas further stretch the credibility of a critic through the structure of their rhetoric. In the typical conservation about karma, the mādhyamika asserts their view (some variation on MMK 17.30) as though it were ultimate truth (pāramārtha-satya). If one disagrees on any grounds, they assign those grounds to relative truth, which is simply an illusion and can be safely ignored. Thus any argument against the asserted view is defeated solely on the grounds that to dissent against the ultimate truth is always wrong. One cannot argue with ultimate truth. The use of reason to undermine the assertion of ultimate truth is dismissed or even mocked, because the ultimate truth allows no role whatever for reason. Having declined to recognise the validity of any objection, the mādhyamika will often emphatically restate their view and then refuse any further discussion.

The view itself is irrational, but the defence that any dissent can only be a manifestation of ignorance is potent. It allows the believer to summarily reject any argument without ever having to consider it. One cannot win an argument with a mādhyamika on their terms, so one must shift the terms and one way to do this is to undermine the foundations: i.e. to point out Nāgārjuna's fundamental errors and argue that the framework itself is flawed.


5.3 The Two Truths

The two truths doctrine is completely absent from the early Buddhist suttas. This suggests that the problem which the two truths were supposed to solve, did not exist earlier. I see this problem emerging from the confusion of experience and reality. This happened partly because Buddhists took a description of experience and tried to use it to describe reality. At the same time they singled out certain rarefied meditative experiences and thought of them as reality.

The early texts are fairly clear that the domain of application of Buddhist practice is experience. There is no word that conveys anything like our word "reality", no discussion of the nature of existence, the nature of objects. The focus is on the nature of experience. As Bodhi has said

“The world with which the Buddha’s teaching is principally concerned is ‘the world of experience,’ and even the objective world is of interest only to the extent that it serves as that necessary external condition for experience.” (Bodhi 2000: 394, n.182

This is highlighted in the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12:15), a text which Nāgārjuna appears to cite, but completely misunderstand. The importance of this text is emphasised by Kalupahana when he suggests that MMK is a commentary on KS. What KS says is that existence (astitā) and non-existence (nāstitā) do not apply to the world of experience (loka). This means that the usual way of looking at objects doesn't apply to experience. When we have an experience nothing comes into being; when the experience stops, nothing goes out of being. The ontology of experience, especially in Iron Age Ganges Valley is difficult to pin down, in a way that the ontology of objects is not.

Experience is what it is, fleeting, insubstantial, and unsatisfactory. This was important at the time because Buddhists were in an argument with Brahmins about the possibility of experiencing absolute being (brahman/ātman). The Buddhist argument was that since absolute being is unchanging, ever-changing experience could not allow access to it. We could not perceive something unchanging, because experience is always changing. So even if an object was existent in this absolute sense, our experience of it would constantly change.

The classical texts say nothing much about the world of objects. Except that they do acknowledge that some objects (particularly our bodies) persist through time. So the world of experience and the world of objects have a different ontology for early Buddhists (to the extent that they have any awareness of ontology). It is only experience that is governed by pratītyasamutpāda. Also there seem to be no Pāḷi texts that seek to explain karma in terms of dependent arising, but by the early medieval period when Nāgārjuna was writing this distinction had been lost. Everything was by then understood to be governed in the same way. The description of mental events arising in the meditative mind was taken to be a universal principle. And this means that nothing whatever in the world might persist even for a second. And this in a world where objects do persist for years, decades, centuries, and millennia (the universe is currently thought to be 13.7 billion years old and will continue expanding indefinitely).

So Nāgārjuna's task was to explain away the ubiquitous evidence of persistence in favour of a reality in which nothing persists, based on an Iron Age theory of how experience works. He had to allow for persistence, because all the evidence of our senses tells us that external objects persist, while not allowing for persistence because dependent arising applied universally ruled it out.

By this time the Brahmanical arguments about absolute being seem to be a distant memory to Buddhists, which is puzzling because Brahmanical influence is seen everywhere in the development of Buddhism. The problem of absolute being is still present, but it is seen as a mistake that everyone makes with respect to their own experience. Some Buddhist groups were struggling to explain the connection between karma and phala. A Sanskrit term exists for this problem, i.e. karmaphalasaṃbandha, where saṃbandha means "connection".

Since it was completely implausible to assert that the world did not exist (or that existence did not apply to the world), Nāgārjuna was forced to accept that the world does exist. But he argued that this existence is saṃvṛti, a word meaning 'concealing, covering up, keeping secret'. Saṃvṛti-satya is often translated as "relative truth", but a Sanskrit speaker would be alive to the connotation of "concealing reality". In defiance of early Buddhists reactions against absolute being, Nāgārjuna contrasted the world with an absolute reality: paramārtha-satya, translated as "ultimate reality", or "ultimate truth".

Both saṃvṛtisatya and paramārthasatya are not true. They are mistaken views that come about when we try to shoehorn dependent arising into everything. This is not to say that the experience of emptiness (śūnyatā) is not profound and transformative, only that it is an experience. It changes the way we perceive the world, which is an epistemological change. Ontology is unaffected by meditation.


5.4 The Confusion of Experience & Reality

Nāgārjuna's method is thus the theory tail wagging the evidence dog. And this methodology is one of the reasons his followers are locked into irrational positions. Evidence is made to fit the theory, not the other way around. And since this requires deprecating reason, rational arguments find no purchase. Compare this to the Pāḷi texts were rational arguments are part and parcel of Buddhism, alongside myth, legend, and inner monologues.

Nāgārjuna's worldview was one in which all domains are governed by dependent arising. He appears to see no alternative to this, despite being familiar with and valuing the Kaccānagotta Sutta. But this creates many problems for him, precisely because the persistence of the world and objects in the world is self-evident. Even something as simple as perceiving movement or change become problematic for Nāgārjuna. And frankly his task is not made any easier by composing his answers in metered verse.

The central problem with karma is what I have been calling action at a temporal distance, but which Indian commentators called karmaphalasaṃbandha. Karma requires consequences to manifest long after the condition for them have ceased. And this is forbidden by the formula of dependent arising.

Knowledge that we get by reasoning about experience is useful (i.e. an accurate and precise guide to interacting with the world), as long as we are actually reasoning rather than relying on a bias. Accurate and precise ontology requires careful comparing of notes and critical questioning of which assumptions in our worldview are valid. We have to switch to using abduction and eliminate all the impossible premises.  We did not begin to get this right until after 1543 when Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres). The critical comparing of notes about experience is what enables us to understand the world. Unless we make a strict distinction between experience and reality, and have a very critical eye out for bias, we are apt to come to erroneous conclusions.

Nāgārjuna's fundamental mistake was to mix up epistemology and ontology, which is to say that he mistook experience, especially meditative experience, for reality; and the nature of experience for the nature of reality. Meditators I know continue to make this same fundamental error. Buddhists are constantly talking about the "nature of reality", but nothing about how we go about seeking insight could possibly tell us about reality.

It is entirely possible that we might gain insights into the workings of our minds, seen from the inside; that we might gain insight into the nature of experience. And this kind of knowledge is certainly very useful for avoiding misery. And even though reality is an over-arching super-set, which incorporates the mind and experience, as I have tried to show in my previous essays on reality, it is layered and descriptions that work on one scale of mass, length, energy or complexity, may not work on another scale. So a perfect description of experience may still be a faulty description of other kinds of phenomena. In fact the classical texts were wrong about the persistence of mental states - these do persist for short periods of time beyond the stimulating sensory contact. Else we could not perceive the passage of time or any kind of change. Language and music both depend on this extension in time.

Nāgārjuna's description of reality is copied from a description of experience. Unsurprisingly, he comes to false conclusions about reality. He takes it as axiomatic that nothing persists. Indeed he says that if anything were to persists that would contradict dependent arising (MMK 17.6). Note again that the classical Pāḷi texts don't have this problem, because they do not take dependent arising as a description of the world, only of experience (i.e. they take it to be an epistemology, not an ontology). In order to accommodate these obviously false conclusion he has to bifurcate the truth into two domains: apparent and ultimate. Because, for example, it is self-evident that our bodies and identities do persist over time. Nāgārjuna accommodates this by saying that it is true, but only relatively true (saṃvṛti-satya), i.e. true only in the sense that we perceive it to be true. In the ultimate view it is not true. Again this mixes up ontology and epistemology.


5.5 Compatibility with Reason

Ironically for modern Western mādhyamikas, our own intellectual tradition, from Heraclitus onwards, tells us that all existence is impermanent. At no point do we assume that if something exists, it is permanent and unchanging, except in the case of God. And since God no longer features in mainstream Western thought, even he is not a problem. For the Western tradition, persistence is not a problem per se because unlike Buddhists we do not associate all being with absolute being. We are not forced into the position of explaining away persistence as an illusion, because temporality is built into our notions of the world. We say quite explicitly that we live in a temporal world.*

* Pedants may be tempted to point out that quantum physics theorists are now suggesting that time might be an emergent property.  1. There is no consensus on this speculation. 2. Even if there were a consensus, descriptions of the quantum level are not relevant to the macro-world that was the whole world until the invention of the telescope and microscope in the early 17th Century. 

Rather than the classical position—that neither existence and non-existence apply to any experience—Nāgārjuna is forced into the bizarre assertion that both existence and non-existence apply to everything. Thus, the obviously false conclusions that his philosophy leads to are rationalised away. This is a philosophy in which obviously false conclusions have to be tolerated; the irrational is valorised; and logic is deprecated in favour of a religious ideal. Paradox becomes the sine qua non. And these conditions fit perfectly with the Romantic threads of modernism. The nihilism also fits the zeitgeist in which people feel that they don't matter and have no influence in the world despite being bombarded with information about events in the world.

However, in our Western tradition, paradox usually suggests a deeper flaw in our understanding, which has led up to make false assumptions, or to frame the problem ineptly. Or they are curiosities. For example "this sentence is not true" is a trivial example of a paradoxical sentence that is both grammatically and semantically well formed, but is logical impossible. All it tells us is that there is more to language than grammar and syntax. A glance at anyone's eyebrows as they speak could have told you the same.

For all these reasons, the Mādhyamikā view of karma is not compatible with reason. It's not a rational view. Nor, I argue, is it resolved by insight, because those with insight seem to be beset by the same confirmation bias as all of us: they seek and find confirmation of their pre-existing views. Most meditators spend many years absorbing the rhetoric of Buddhism before making any significant progress in developing insight. Thus when insights arise, confirmation bias prompts us to see them as proof of our view.

My best informant on the process of having insights suggests that each insight both shatters existing views, but tends to set up an alternative view. One finally sees the truth and is prepared to settle down with it. However, if we persist in practising, the next insight shows the flaws in this new view and points to another view. One has to go through this "Aha... Oh. Aha... Oh." process many times before one stops taking the views seriously and realises that all views are just different perspectives on experience. It's not that one gains insight into reality, but that one stops mistaking one's experience for reality.

However, Buddhists tend to treat Nāgārjuna as a god. Someone who had infallible omniscience. His words, or at least the interpretations of his words by commentators, are seen as ultimate truth. I notice that some people are puzzled that I would argue against Nāgārjuna. It seems to cause cognitive dissonance, because they accept what he says as gospel. To dissent from the "ultimate truth" is almost unimaginable to many Buddhists. It is akin to blasphemy and they often respond the way theists to do blasphemy: with hostility.

So why do modern scholars not take Nāgārjuna to task as someone who mistook experience for reality? After all, they are supposed to bring a certain objectivity to their work, aren't they? Buddhist Studies is all about accepting Buddhism on its own terms, rather than taking a critical stance. So in the 21st Century we still find scholars trying to elucidate Nāgārjuna on his own terms and he is still hailed as probably the greatest Buddhist philosopher. To me Nāgārjuna is the greatest disaster in Buddhist philosophy because his mistake continues undetected and his influence is pervasive (it goes far beyond Madhyamaka). This is partly because the mādhyamika rhetoric is impervious to reason, but partly also because Buddhists don't use reason when thinking about their views anyway: they only seek confirmation, they do not seek falsification. Of course confirmation bias is a feature of argument production, but religious argumentation discourages doubt and scepticism.

This critique will most like not make any impact whatever on the way people see Nāgārjuna or the way his disciples see the world. The way Madhyamaka is set up employs several cult-like features that make adherents particularly hard to reach. Those who do not simply reject the argument out of hand, will condescendingly explain that I have simply misunderstood the ultimate truth. I'm with Richard Feynman however, "I'd rather have questions that cannot be answered, than answers that cannot be questioned."

This concludes the central argument of this essay. It remains to sum up and conclude.




I set out in this essay to explore the idea that the Buddhist belief in karma is compatible with reason. I argued that both karma and reason are complex subjects on which authorities disagree about almost every detail. Karma has few common features across Buddhist sects apart from the proposition that actions cause rebirth. Also, reason and our ability to employ the methods of reasoning have been widely misunderstood. Reasoning is, more often than not, subverted by cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Even so, I tried to set out a coherent account of how reason works and how we might use it to think about karma in general terms. I then critiqued a particular Buddhist view about how karma is supposed to work, by showing how the reasoning in that view is flawed.

The question I posed in Part I of this essay was, could we come up with the doctrine of karma from first principles. That is, based on experience, can we infer—using deduction, induction, and/or abduction—a doctrine in which our actions lead to rebirth; or the watered down version that our actions infallibly lead to appropriate and timely consequences.

Based on observations across many species of primate, Frans de Waal is able to deduce that we all experience empathy and understand reciprocity. From reciprocity we can induce an understanding of fairness and justice. And from this we can construct a highly plausible, bottom-up theory of morality that has broad applicability and explains a great deal. In this view, morality can be understood as a principle in which the social consequences of actions are appropriate and timely.

To get to a doctrine of karma however, we have to go beyond experience and observation, and make a number of unsupported assumptions. Firstly we have to assume a just world. This assumption is so common that it has its own name: the just-world fallacy. Secondly we have to assume that a supernatural afterlife exists, in defiance of the laws of nature. Thirdly we have to assume that this afterlife is cyclic or a hybrid between cyclic and linear. Many religions have a linear eschatology, a single destination afterlife. There is no credible evidence that we cite to help us choose which is the true version of events. In fact the way the world seems to work rules out all these possibilities. Fourthly, we have to assume that some mechanism connects our actions to our post-mortem fate.

None of these assumptions is compatible with reason, since none of these assumptions is based on inferences from evidence or experience, i.e. they were not produced by reasoning. They are assumptions that we make so that our doctrine works in the way that we wish it to. All the evidence suggests that these assumptions are simply false (an afterlife is demonstrably false). So assuming that they are true is certainly not compatible with reason. And yet without these assumptions there can be no karma doctrine. So karma doctrines, as a class, are not compatible with reason.

Forms of morality in which the social consequences of our social interaction are appropriate and timely are at least possible, even if our social groups seldom attain the ideal. Beyond this, reason, fails.

In my critique of Madhyamaka karma I tried to show that the problem of continuity (saṃbandha) remains unsolved and that it seems insoluble within the traditional Buddhist metaphysics. A completely different approach to ontology would be required because the description of mental-states arising does not work as a general description of the world. In other essays I have proposed such an approach. In my proposed ontology all existence is temporary, both substance and structure are real, and structures (such as our bodies and minds) persist over time, for a time. Morality is explain by bottom-up manifestations of empathy and reciprocity, but karma is ruled out because there is no afterlife, no supernatural, and no just-world.

So belief in karma fails to meet standard set in Subhuti's essay (cited in Part I). So the major conclusion of this long essay is that karma is not compatible with reason. By this I mean that no existing Buddhist version of the doctrine of karma is compatible with reason. I also infer that any theory of karma that involves logical fallacies (such as the just-world fallacy) or supernatural elements (such as an afterlife) cannot ever be compatible with reason. Since no logical fallacy or supernatural element is demonstrable, karma also appears to fail Subhuti's verifiability criterion.

~~oOo~~

"Our relation to the world is not that of a thinker to an object of thought"

—Maurice Merleau Ponty. The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences.

In this essay and some to follow, I want to look an an error that many philosophers and most meditators seem to make: the confusion of epistemology and ontology; i.e. the mixing up of experience and reality. This essay will outline and give examples of a specific version of this confusion in the form of the mind projection fallacy.

This distinction between a mind-independent reality and the mind is not ontological, but epistemological. The set of reality includes all minds. However, the universe would exist, even if there were no beings to witness is. The universe is not dependent on having conscious observers. So by "reality" I just mean the universe generally, i.e. the universe made up from real matter-energy fields arranged into real structures that have emergent properties, one of which is conscious states. And by "mind" I specifically mean the series of conscious states that inform human beings about the universe. 

What I don't mean is reality in the abstract. I'm deeply suspicious of abstractions at present. For the same reason I avoid talking about conscious states in the abstract as "consciousness". Things can be real without their necessarily being an abstract reality. Reality is the set of all those things to which the adjective real applies. Things are real if they exist and have causal potential. Members of this set may have no other attributes in common. Unfortunately an abstract conception of reality, encourages us to speculate about the "nature of reality" as though reality were something more than an abstraction or collection of real things. Being real is not magical or mystical.

I'm not making an ontological distinction between mental and physical phenomena. I think an epistemological distinction can be made, because clearly our experience of our own minds has a different perspective to our experience of objects external to our body, but in the universe there are just phenomena. This is a distinct position from materialism, which privileges the material over the mental. What I'm saying is that what we perceive as "material" and "mental" are not different at the level of being.  

When we play the game of metaphysics and make statements about reality, they arise from inferences about experience. There are three main approaches to this process:

• we begin with givens and use deduction to infer valid conclusions.
• we begin with known examples and use induction to infer valid generalisations.
• we begin with observations and use abductions to infer valid explanations.

We can and do make valid inferences about the universe from experience. The problem has always been that we make many invalid inferences as well. And we cannot always reliably tell valid from invalid.

For example, we know that if you submerge a person in water they will drown. That tells us something about reality. However, for a quite a long time Europeans believed that certain women were in league with the devil. They believed that witches could not be drowned. So they drowned a lot of women to prove they were not witches; and burned the ones who didn't drown. The central problem here being that witches, as understood by the witch-hunters, did not exist. The actions of some women were interpreted through an hysterical combination of fear of evil and fear of women, and from this witches were inferred to be real. It was a repulsive and horrifying period of our history in which reasoning went awry. But it was reasoning. And it was hardly an isolated incident. Reasoning very often goes wrong. Still. And that ought to make us very much more cautious about reasoning than most of us are.

One of the attractions of the European Enlightenment is that it promised that reason would free us from the oppression of superstition. This has happened to some extent, but superstition is still widespread. Confusions about how reason actually works are only now being unravelled. And this meant that the early claims of the Enlightenment were vastly overblown. If our views about the universe are formed by reasoning, then we have to assume that we're wrong most of the time, unless we have thoroughly reviewed both our view and our methods, and compared notes with others in an atmosphere of critical thinking, which combines competition and cooperation. The latter is science at its best, though admittedly scientists are not always at their best. 

Into this mix comes Buddhism with its largely medieval worldview, modified by strands of modernism. Buddhists often claim to understand the "true nature of reality"; aka The Absolute, The Transcendental, The Dhamma-niyāma, śūnyatā, tathatā,  pāramārthasatya, prajñāpāramitā, nirvāṇa, vimokṣa, and so on. Reality always seems to boil down to a one word answer. And this insight into "reality" is realised by sitting still with one's eyes closed and withdrawing attention from the sensorium in order to experience nothing. Or by imagining that one is a supernatural being in the form of an Indian princess, or a tame demon, or an idealised Buddhist monk, etc. Or any number of other approaches that have in common that seem to take the approach of ignoring or withdrawing from reality.

It's quite a common problem that we interpret experience incorrectly. As we know the lists of identified cognitive biases and logical fallacies each have over one hundred items. From these many problems I want to highlight one. When we make inferences about reality we are biased towards seeing our conclusions, generalisations, and explanations as valid, and to believing that our interpretation is the only valid interpretation. This is the mind projection fallacy.

An excellent illustrative example of the mind projection fallacy is the sunset. If I stand on a hill and watch the sunset, it seems to me that the the hill and I are fixed in place and the sun is moving relative to me and the hill. Hence we say "the sun is setting". In fact we're known for centuries that the sun is not moving relative to the earth, but instead the hill and I are pivoting away on an axis that goes through the centre of the earth. So why do we persist in talking about sunsets?

The problem is that I have internal sensors that tell me when I'm experiencing acceleration: proprioception (sensing muscle/tendon tension) kinaesthesia (sensing joint motion and acceleration) and the inner-ear's vestibular system (orientation to gravity and acceleration). I can also use my visual sense to detect whether I am in motion relative to nearby objects. A secondary way of detecting acceleration is the sloshing around of our viscera creating pressure against the inside of our body.

My brain integrates all this information to give me accurate and precise knowledge about whether my body is in motion. And standing on a hill, watching a sunset, my body is informing me, quite unequivocally, that I am at rest.

I'm actually spinning around the earth's axis of rotation at ca. 1600 km/h or about 460 m/s. That's about Mach 1.5! And because velocity is a vector (it has both magnitude and direction) moving in a circle at a uniform speed is acceleration, because one is constantly changing direction. So why does it not register on our senses? After all, being on a roundabout rapidly makes me dizzy and ill. It turns out that the acceleration due to going moderately fast in very large circle, is tiny. So small that it doesn't register on any of our motion sensors. The spinning motion does register in the atmosphere and oceans where it creates the Coriolis effect.

Everyone watching a sunset experiences themselves at rest and the sun moving. It is true, but counterintuitive, to suggest that the sun is not moving. Let's call this the sunset illusion.

I'm not sure where is comes from but in the Triratna Order we often cite four authorities for believing some testimony: it makes sense (reason), it feels right (emotion), it accords with experience (memory), and it accords with the testimony of the wise. Seeing ourselves as stationary and the sun and moving, makes sense, it feels right, and it accords with experience. The first hint we had that the sunset illusion not right was when wise man, Galileo, discovered the moons of Jupiter in January 1610.

Even knowing, as I do, that the sunset illusion is an illusion, doesn't change how it seems to me because my somatic and haptic senses are unanimously telling me I'm at rest. This is important because it tells us that this is not a trivial or superficial mistake. It's not because I am too stupid to understand the situation. I know the truth and have known for decades. But I also trust my senses because I have no choice but to trust them.

The sunset illusion is sometimes presented as a 50:50 proposition, like one of those famous optical illusions where whether we see a rabbit or a duck depends on where we focus. The assertion is that we might just as easily see the sun as still and us moving. This is erroneous. Proprioception, kinaethesia, the vestibular organ, and sight to make it a virtual certainty that we experience ourselves at rest and conclude that the sun moving. It takes a combination of careful observation of the visible planets and an excellent understanding of geometry to upset the earth-centric universe. If some ancient cultures got this right, it was a fluke.

The sunset illusion exposes an important truth about how all of us understand the world based on experience. Experience and reality can be at odds.

And note that we are not being irrational when we continue to refer to the sun setting. Given our sensorium, it is rational to think of ourselves at rest and the sun moving. It's only in a much bigger, non-experiential framework that the concept becomes irrational. For most of us the facts of cosmology are abstract, i.e. they exist as concepts divorced from experience. Evolution predisposed us to trust experience above abstract facts.

One asserts that the creations of [their] own imagination are real properties of Nature, and thus in effect projects [their] own thoughts out onto Nature. (1989: 2)

David Chapman has pointed out that there has been considerable criticism of Jaynes' approach in the article I'm citing and has summarised why. He suggests, ironically, that Jaynes suffered from the second kind of mind projection fallacy when it came to logic and probability. But the details of that argument about logic and probability are not relevant to the issue I'm addressing in this essay. It's the fallacy or bias that concerns us here. 

A problem like the sunset illusion emerges when we make inferences about reality based on interpreting our experience. For example, when we make deductions from experience to reality, they invariably reflect the content of our presuppositions about reality. For example, a given for most of us is "I always know when I am moving". In the sunset illusion, I know I am at rest because haptics and vision confirm that it is so. The experience is conclusive: it must be the sun must be moving. My understanding of how the universe works and my understanding of my own situation regards movement are givens in this case. We don't consciously reference them, but they predetermine the outcome of deductive reasoning. This means the deduction is of very limited use to the individual thinking about reality.

If I watch a dozen sunsets and they all have this same character, then I can generalise from this (inductive reasoning) that the sun regularly rises, travels in an (apparent) arc across the sky and sets. All the while I am not moving relative to earth. What's more I've experienced dozens of earthquakes in my lifetime, so I also know what it is like when the earth does move! From my experiential perspective, the earth does not move, but the sun does move. Given our experience of the situation, this is the most likely explanation (abductive reasoning).

So here we see that a perfectly logical set of conclusions, generalisations, and explanations follow from interpreting experience, which are nonetheless completely wrong. I am not at rest, but moving at Mach 1.5. The earth is not at rest. The sun is at the centre of our orbit around it, but it also is moving very rapidly around the centre of the galaxy. Our galaxy is accelerating away from all other galaxies. The error occurs because our senses evolved to help us navigate through woodlands, in and out of trees, and swimming in water. And we're pretty good at this. When it comes to inferring knowledge about the cosmos, human senses are the wrong tool to start with!

A common experience for Buddhists is to have a vision of a Buddha during meditation. And it is common enough for that vision to be taken as proof that Buddhas exist. But think about it. A person is sitting alone in a suburban room, their eyes are closed, their attention withdrawn from the world of the senses, they've attenuated their sense experience to focus on just one sensation and have focussed their attention on it. They undergo a self-imposed sensory deprivation. They've also spent a few years intensively reading books on Buddhism, looking at Buddhist art, thinking about Buddhas, and discussing Buddhas with other Buddhists. We know that sensory deprivation causes hallucinations. And someone saturated in the imagery of Buddha is more likely to hallucinate a Buddha. This is no surprise. But does it really tell us that Buddhas exist independently of our minds, or does it just tell us that in situations of sensory deprivation Buddhists hallucinate Buddhas? 

The Buddhist who has the hallucination feels that this is a sign; it feels important, meaningful, and perhaps even numinous (in the sense that they felt they were in the presence of some otherworldly puissance). They are immersed in Buddhist rhetoric and imagery, as are all of their friends. As I have observed before, hallucinations are stigmatised, whereas visions are valorised. So if you see something that no one else sees, then your social milieu and your social intelligence will dictate how you interpret and present the experience. If you mention to your comrades in religion that you saw a Buddha in your meditation, you are likely to get a pat on the back and congratulations. It will be judged an auspicious sign. And all those people who haven't had "visions" will be quietly envious. If you mention it to your physician, they may well become concerned that you have suffered a psychotic episode (though in practice psychotic episodes are rather terrifying and chaotic, and not all hallucinations are the result of psychosis). 

So not only do we have the problem of our own reasoning leading us to erroneous inferences, we have social mechanisms to reinforce particular interpretations of experience, especially in the case of our religiously inspired inferences. Our individual experience is geared towards a social reality. One of the faults of humans thinking about reality is to think that reality somehow reflects our social world. A common example is the nature of heaven. Many cultures see heaven as an idealised form of their own social customs, usually with the slant towards male experiences and narratives. Medieval Chinese intellectuals saw heaven as an idealised Confucian bureaucracy for example. If we take Christian art as any indication, then Heaven is an all male club. The just world fallacy probably comes about because we expect the world to conform to our social norms in which each member is responsive to the others in a hierarchy where normative behaviour is rewarded and transgressive behaviour is punished.

So given the way our senses work, given the pitfalls of cognitive bias and logical fallacies, given the pressure to conform to social norms, the mind projection fallacy can operate freely. As we know, challenging the established order can be difficult to the point of being fatal. And understanding the power of the something like the sunset illusion is important. Facts don't necessarily break the spell. Yes, we know the earth orbits the sun. But standing on a hill watching the sunset, that is just not how we experience it (our proprioception and vision tell us a different story that we find more intuitive and credible, even though it is wrong). And this applies to a very wide range of situations where we are reasoning from experience to reality.

The second form of this fallacy was rampant in 19th century scholarship. In the first form, one erroneously concludes that one understands something and projects private experience as public reality. Mistaking the sunset as resulting from the movement of the sun, because our bodies tell us that we are at rest. This leads to false claims about reality.

In the second case there is also a false claim about reality, but in this case it emerges from a failure to understand and the assumption that this is because the experience or feature of reality cannot be understood. This is a problem which is particular acute for intellectuals. Intellectuals are often over‑confident about their ability to understand everything. These days it is less plausible, but 150 years ago it was plausible for one intellectual to be well informed about more or less every field of human knowledge. So if such an intellectual comes across something they don't understand, then they deduce that it cannot be understood by anyone. 

A common assertion for example is that we will never understand consciousness from a third person perspective (leaving aside the problematic abstraction for a moment). Very often such theories are rooted in an ontological mind/body dualism, which may or may not be acknowledged. Many Buddhists who are interested in the philosophy of mind, for example, cannot imagine that we will ever understand conscious states through scientific methods. They argue that no amount of research will ever help us understand. So they don't follow research into the mind and don't see any progress in this area. On the other hand they hold that through mediation we do come to understand conscious states and the nature of them. Many go far beyond this and claim that we will gain knowledge of reality, in the sense of a transcendent ideal reality that underlies the apparent reality that our sense inform us about. In other words meditation takes us beyond phenomena to noumena. 

Another common argument is that scientists don't understand 95% of the world because they don't understand dark matter and dark energy. People take this to mean that scientists don't understand 95% of what goes on here on earth. But this is simply not true. Scale is important, and being ignorant at one scale (the scale that effects galaxies and larger structures) does not mean that we don't understand plate tectonics, the water cycle, or cell metabolism, at least in principle. The popular view of science often seem to point towards a caricature that owes more to the 19th century than the 21st. Criticism of science often goes along with an anti-science orientation and very little education in the sciences. 

The basic confusion in both cases is mistaking what seem obvious to us, for what must be the case for everyone else, either positively or negatively. 

The basic problem here is a confusion between what we know about the world (epistemology) with what the world is (ontology). In short, we mistake experience for reality. And this problem is very widespread amongst intellectuals in many fields.

The problem can be very subtle. Yet another illuminating example is the idea that sugar is sweet. We might feel that a statement like "sugar is sweet" is straightforward. Usually, no one is going to argue with this, because the association between sugar and sweetness is so self-evident. But the statement it is false. Sugar is not sweet. Sugar is a stimulus for the receptors on our tongues that register as "sweet". We experience the sensation sweet whenever we encounter molecules that bind with these receptors. But sweet is an experience. It does not exist out in the world, but only in our own conscious states. Sugar is not sweet. Sugar is one of many substances that cause us to experience sweet when they come into contact with the appropriate receptors on our tongue. Equally, there is no abstract quality of sweet-ness, despite the effortless ease with which we can create abstract nouns in English. Sucrose, for example has nothing much in common with aspartame at a chemical level. And yet both stimulate the experience of sweet. Indeed aspartame is experienced as approximately 200 times as sweet as sucrose, but this does not mean that it contains 200 times more sweetness. There is no sweet-ness. The experience of sweet evolved to alert us to the high calorific value of certain types of foods and the enjoyable qualities of sweet evolved to motivate us to seek out such foods. 

For Buddhists, the application of this fallacy comes from experiencing altered states of mind in meditation. Meditators may experience altered states of mind that they judge to be more real than other kinds of states, causing them to divide phenomena into more real and less real. And they manage to convince people that this experience of theirs is reflects a reality that ordinary mortals cannot see. A transcendent reality that is obscured from ordinary people. 

The problem is that an experience is a mental state; and a mental state is just a mental state. No matter how vivid or transformative the experience was, we must be careful when reasoning from private experiences (epistemology) to public reality (ontology) because we usually get this wrong. I've covered this in many essays, including Origin of the Idea of the Soul (11 Nov 2011), Why Are Karma and Rebirth (Still) Plausible (for Many People)? (15 Aug 2015) etc.

Most of us are really quite bad at reasoning on our own. This is because humans suffer from an inordinate number of cognitive biases and easily fall into logical fallacies. There are dozens of each and without special training and a helpful context, we naturally and almost inevitably fall into irrational patterns of thought. The trouble is that we too often face situations where there is too much information and we cannot decide what is salient; or there is too little information and we want to fill the gaps. 

Our minds are optimised for survival in low-tech hunter-gatherer situations, not for sophisticated reasoning. The mind helps us make the right hunting and gathering decisions, but in most cases it's just not that good at abstract logic or reasoning. Of course some individuals and groups are good at it. Those who are good at it have convinced us that it is the most important thing in the world. But again this is probably just a cognitive bias on their part. 

The whole concept of reason and the processes of reasoning are going through a reassessment right now. This is because it has become clear that very few people do well at abstract reasoning. Most of the time, we do not reason, but rely on shortcuts known as cognitive biases. A lot of the time our reasoning is flawed by logical fallacies. Additionally we are discovering that  most mammals and birds are capable of reasoning to some extent. 

In this essay I have highlighted a particular problem in which one mistakes experience for reality. Using examples (sunset, visions, sweetness) I showed how such mistakes come about. Unlike others who highlight these errors, I have tried to avoid the implication that humans are thereby stupid. For example, I see the sunset illusion because my senses are telling me that I am definitely at rest. Social conditioning is a powerful shaping force in our lives, and visions are valuable social currency in a religious milieu.

In terms of our daily lives the sunset illusion or the sweetness illusion hardly matter. It's not like the mistakes cost us anything. Such problems don't figure in natural selection because our lives don't depend on them. We know what we need to know to survive. Although our senses and minds are tuned to survival pre-civilisation environments, we are often able to co-opt abilities evolved for one purpose to another one. 

But truth does matter. For example when one group claims authority and hegemony based on their interpretation of experience, then one way to undermine them is to point out falsehoods and mistakes. When the Roman Church in Europe was shown to be demonstrably wrong about the universe, the greater portion of their power seeped away into the hands of the Lords Temporal, and then into the captains of industry. For ordinary people this led to more autonomy and better standards of living (on average). Democracy is flawed, but it is better than feudalism backed by authoritarian religion.

But as Noam Chomsky has said:

In subjecting Buddhism to rational inquiry I do often elicit incomprehension or outrage. And sometimes not masked at all. There are certainly Buddhists on the internet who see me as an enemy of the Dharma, as trying to do harm to Buddhism. As I understand my own motivations, my main concern is to recast buddhism for the future. I think the urge of the early British Buddhists to modernise Buddhism and particularly to bring it into line with rationality was a sensible one. However, as our understanding of rationality changes so Buddhism will have to adapt to continue being thought of as rational. But also we have to move beyond taking buddhism on its own terms and to consider the wider world of knowledge. The laws of nature apply in all cases.

While Buddhism is largely influenced by people who mistake experience for reality, Buddhism will be hindered in its spread and development. This particular error is one that we have to make conscious and question closely. Just because it makes sense, feels right, and accords with experience doesn't mean that it is true. The sunset illusion feels right, but is wrong. It feels right to say that sugar is sweet, but it isn't. It feels right that meditative mental states are more real than normal waking states. But are they?

~~oOo~~

The Ship of Theseus has been a staple of philosophical discussion and teaching for millennia. The folk version of this conundrum is grandfather's axe, in which the axe in question is favoured despite having had its head and handle replaced many times. Can it be the same axe? Grandfather thinks it is, and we the audience hearing the story doubt that it can be. I have certainly not surveyed every instance of it, but introductions to this story always seem to take the same approach to the problem and to leave it hanging as a paradox.

So why does this problem continue to fascinate philosophers? Partly, I think, philosophers like problems that can be argued over but not resolved (and their worldviews resist a resolution). However, I think it is also because the ship is a metaphor for ourselves. We visibly change over time and, at least for philosophers, this raises the question of identity. The combination of continuity and change seems to be particularly problematic for philosophers, East and West. 

The problem is often portrayed as having only two mutually exclusive answers with nothing to decide between: it is either the same ship or a different ship. And thus the story contains a kind of paradox. I will try to show that it is only a paradox because of the way the problem is framed and that by reframing it we can resolve the paradox. I suspect that all apparent paradoxes are related to framing problems.

Over the years philosophers have added new twists to the problem. What if we collect all the discarded old planks and build another ship out of them? Can there be two boats that we identify as Theseus’ ship? What if Theseus stays aboard the ship as it travels, but running repairs result in the same exchange of old timbers for new. Does Theseus arrive on the same ship that he set out on? And so on. All of these trade on the same framing of the problem.

The framing here focusses on the relationship of the complex wholes and parts (which may themselves be simple or complex). I want to reframe the problem by pointing out that in all of the arguments about Theseus's ship, no one ever questions that the structure is a ship and no amount of plank changing alters this fact. And this gives a clue to how to deal with the question. Let us start with the idea of "ship".

What are the minimal features an object must possess so that we can recognise it as belonging to the category "ship". And here I'm going to ignore the complexities of the semantics of ships versus boats and all their myriad variations. For my purposes ship here represents water-craft in a very general way. 

Firstly, any material that can be made watertight and is malleable can be used. One can build a ship from paper, wood, concrete, or steel. What really matters is the average density of the volume contained by the ship's hull. Any object which is less dense than water will float in it. A ship's hull encloses a large volume of space with a thin wall so that the average density of the enclosed volume is very much smaller than the density of the building material, and less than the density of water. Hence, we can build a ship from steel which is eight times denser than water, by ensuring that the hull encloses more than eight times the volume of the steel used.

Secondly, the hull must be water-tight, or as close to it as possible. In practice most ship designs in the ancient world would have been leaky. Planks can be made to fit together with sub-millimetre accuracy, but still have to be caulked. (For a fascinating insight into ancient boat building techniques see the Jewel of Muscat Project)

convergent evolution

Thirdly a ship needs to be hydro-dynamically efficient, i.e. it needs to move through the water easily. The best configuration for this is a hull that it is considerably longer than it is wide. A broad-beamed ship will still make way, but with considerably more effort than a long and narrow ship. A prow that converges to a point is also advantageous, though not essential. River boats often opt for a flat bottom and blunt prow, for example. A smooth surface is also advantageous. The efficiency of these criteria can be seen in the way that the evolution aquatic animals has tended to converge on the same long, thin, pointy, smooth design.

Lastly, a ship needs some kind of motive power to propel it through the water. A water-craft that is not propelled is a raft. A ship can be propelled by any number of sources of power, though in ancient Greece it would have involved a combination of oars for rowing and a square or lug sail for the wind. Both methods impose constraints on the design. A mast must be stepped and stayed, and sailing requires a method to prevent leeway for example; while oars require a fulcrum and somewhere for rowers to sit (or stand in some designs).

With just these features, an object may be called a ship. But there is something more going on here. A ship is not a ship merely because it possesses some intrinsic features. A log possesses most of these features. A ship performs a function. The function of a ship is to transport people and/or cargo over water. Note also that we can use "ship" as a verb and it is no longer confined to moving cargo by ship. As John Searle has pointed out, a function is an observer relative feature of the object. In other words the object we are calling a "ship" can perform the function of transporting Theseus to Minos and back, but this is not an intrinsic feature of the ship. The intrinsic features a ship has make it suitable for performing this function, but the function itself is relative to the observer. And observer relative features of an object are created by the mental states of the observer.

For example, if we take the ship out into the middle of the desert and show it to people who've never seen a large body of water, they might not be able to deduce its function from intrinsic features. They may well conclude that rather than displacing water, the hull is designed as a cistern for storing water. And that the configuration makes it easier to drag over sand. The intrinsic features of the object alone do not tell us what function it serves for human beings. We have to have the concept of a ship in our minds as well.

Consider also someone visiting Athens who did know the story of Theseus. They might see a ship, but they would not see Theseus's ship. The connection between the ship and Theseus does not exist for them, because they haven't heard of Theseus. One might argue that Theseus exists despite his not being known about and that even in ignorance the ship is still Theseus's ship. However, the uninformed visitors could not discover this information through examining the ship. The ownership by Theseus is not an intrinsic property of the ship. The association with Theseus is also observer relative.

So "ship" is an observer relative feature of an object with the appropriate intrinsic properties. Thus, a "ship" is not an ontologically objective fact. Nor is "Theseus's ship" an ontologically objective fact. The "ship" is an epistemically objective fact, but ontologically it is subjective, i.e. it only exists relative to mental states in the observer.

So in fact the idea of "Theseus's ship" involves some intrinsic subjectivity. And part of what makes the ship interesting is the analogy of our own identity. I'm a good example because my name appears to be unique in history. There is, and has only ever been, one being called Jayarava. The fact that I am Jayarava is an ontologically subjective fact. But in my Sangha it is epistemically objective - everyone in my milieu knows that's who I am, and many do not know me by any other name (i.e. did not know me before my ordination). On the other hand parts of me are ontological objective. If you literally run into me, you'll certainly feel it. And parts of me are both ontologically and epistemically subjective, i.e. my private thoughts. So my "identity" as Jayarava spans all these possibilities (and possibly more) depending on the point of view of the observer.

The identity of Theseus and of Theseus's ship both rely on a range of types of facts and this makes the problem very much more complicated. There are no simplifying assumptions we can make without excluding essential information. 

A ship, as I have defined it, is a combination of materials and construction. Considerable time and effort is required to turn the materials into an object with the necessary intrinsic features to perform the function of ship. The parts have to be shaped and then fixed together in ways that create the necessary structure and give it enduring integrity. However, the usual way of framing the problem of Theseus ship, only looks at materials and ignores the structure itself. This may be why no one seems to notice that despite all the changes, the ship is still a ship.

It seems that many philosophers are blind to the role of structure in the world. Ships are complex objects, made of many parts assembled in the right order to fit the category of ship. There is a tendency to default to a reductionist paradigm in which only the parts are relevant to the question of identity. We do not see structure as real. We only see substance as real. Therefore if we are going to invest identify in anything it ought to be, in this view, in substance. Structure is apparently incidental. 

If we replace one plank of wood in a ship made from dozens of planks, we have no problem in identifying the structure as the same, with a repair. If we replace all the parts we struggle because in reductionism the parts are where identity is vested. If there are no original parts then identity is lost. Somewhere in the middle is a cross-over point. We're not quite sure where it might be, but at some point we begin to suspect that if we replace that arbitrary number of parts, then the identity of the whole somehow changes. And this despite the fact that the ship is continually existent as a structure.

This see-saw—yes/no—approach has characterised Western philosophy for years. Eastern philosophy was mired in its own problems, but clearly the Buddhist philosophy that I am familiar with also tended to reductionism and thus did no better at dealing with change. However, there is a better approach.

It is better to acknowledge that the ship is both made from parts and constitutes a whole. When we analyse the ship into parts we see that parts on their own are not ships and mostly do not have the necessary intrinsic features to be a ship. The epistemically objective "ship" only emerges when we assemble all of the parts into the appropriate structure and we, the observer, have the appropriate mental states. The integrated whole has features which the the parts to not possess: especially buoyancy, hydrodynamics, and motive power. To fully understand the concept of ship we have to take into account both sides of the coin: substance and structure; as well as the observer relative status of the concept of "ship". 

In this view, the structure of the ship is causal. The structure causes the ship to float, to displace water, and to move in ways that parts alone cannot. The materials on their own do not have these features, or at least not enough of them to fit into the category ship. A lump of steel rapid sinks in water. But if we hollow it out so that it encloses a volume more than eight times the volume of the original lump, then it will float. Given the density of steel as a substance, we expect it always to sink. But a steel ship floats because it is ship-shaped. Here structure is more important than substance in understanding the nature of a ship.

The structure also persists over time, despite the replacing of some or even all of it's parts. So the structure also exists and is causal. The structure does not exist independently of its parts, but since identical parts can be substituted with no change in the structure, then structure is not absolutely dependent on its parts. Indeed, we can often remove parts from a structure and it remains intact as a structure. Removing a plank from above the water-line of a ship does not destroy the intrinsic features of the object, nor does it stop the object from performing the function of ship.

Thus we can say that the structure is real. Reductionists assert that only substance is real. Antireductionists assert than only structures (or systems) are real. My view, following Richard H. Jones (2013), is that both substance and structure are real. The planks and the ship are both real, and the structure has emergent features that are not features of the planks. Planks have their own important features that enable them to function as a good building material. The individual fibres or cells of wood do not have the features of a large tree cut into planks.  At every scale we look at both substance and structure are important. However, if you dismantle a structure into its parts, the features of that structure no longer exist. So the reductionist approach to structure nets us no information because it destroys the object of interest. This is a fact every biologist is aware of.

I've already pointed out that identity is an observer relative function and not something intrinsic to insentient objects. We may project it onto objects, but in this case the identity is something we believe and someone who does not believe this will not be able to deduce it from simply interacting with the object. In this section I want to raise some other problems with how Theseus's ship is identified.

Is the ship that sits in the harbour and gradually has all its parts replaced, Theseus's ship? The question assumes that Theseus is a point of reference. But Theseus himself is subject to change. He ages. He sails to Minos and kills the Minotaur. How could such events not change him? Is he the same man afterwards? Well, yes and no. The structure that we think of as Theseus has been extended by having new experiences and some of the parts have been exchanged, but the fundamentals are still there. When Theseus returns, everyone recognises him as Theseus. But they probably also notice that the events at Minos have changed him as well. There is both continuity and change.

Some people approach the question of the identity of Theseus's ship by ignoring the continuity and focussing on the fact of change. In this case neither Theseus nor the ship are the same. And the difference takes on an exaggerated importance when continuity is excluded from the equation. And some ignore the change and focus on the continuity.

I can walk out my door and within a few minutes be standing on top of a large mound of dirt, piled up by the Normans in 1068 CE, which has commanding views of Cambridge and the surrounding area. The mound has been there for about 950 years as I write this. Or, on a slightly longer walk, I can visit buildings that were constructed in the 13th Century. These are structures that have persisted for centuries. Not without change and/or repair, but still, arguing that they don't exist is nonsensical. There they are, and there they have been for centuries! One has to go under, over, or around them, one cannot just pretend they are not there. For those who believe that a brick wall does not exist, the recommended procedure is to bash your head against it repeatedly, until wisdom dawns.

These objects are real by any sensible definition of the word. Real and impermanent. Impermanence does not make an object unreal, it only makes it temporary. Buddhist intellectuals have struggled with this because ancient Buddhists defined existence as permanent. An impermanent object cannot be said to exist. In fact they were mixing up experience and reality. The original target of the criticism was the existence of absolute being (ātman) in experience (pañca-skandhāḥ). Since experience is impermanent, no absolute being could be found in experience. Unfortunately they went too far with this and equated all being with absolute being. From this they argued that no being of any kind could be found. But this is simply a misunderstanding of an ancient criticism of ātman. 

Over time, structure persists. In the light of this we can say that the structure of the ship once owned by Theseus persists, helped by the exchange of rotten planks for good ones. At the same time the substance of the ship has changed so that no plank of the original is left; but because planks are essentially identical this doesn't affect the structure. If we vest identity solely in the structure then this is Theseus's ship. If we vest identity solely in the substance, then it is not Theseus's ship. There is no paradox here, because where we vest identity is simply an arbitrary decision we make, though probably motived by presuppositions and non-reflective beliefs.

Similarly if we take the old planks and build a new ship, how we see it depends on whether we focus on structure or substance. The new ship is a new structure, made from old substance. So if identity is substance this is the same ship, and if it is structure it's a completely different ship.

The two extremes are not the only possible answer here. Part of what philosophers do to win arguments is to back us into corners by artificially making us choose one side of a duality. This is another example of the arborescent fallacy, which sees us frame the question as having an either/or answer. In this fallacy, the world appears to us as a series of binaries. The term arborescent is also used in graph theory and botany; and was the title of an album by Ozric Tentacles. Another name for this is false dilemma. Edward de Bono independently wrote about this problem as a feature of neural networks, which he called knife-edge discrimination (1990: 108ff).

After my critique of the tree metaphor in evolution (Evolution: Trees and Braids) I stumbled onto the same critique produced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980), whence the name arborescent meaning 'tree-like' (from arbor'tree' and the suffix ‑escent  'a process or state of being'). Unfortunately, having looked at their book I found it suffered from all the usual faults of French philosophy of that period: the writing style is obscurantist and the argument jumbled and poorly structured. So I still don't know what they say about the fallacy except what is on Wikipedia (so potentially I know nothing).

The problem of Theseus ship is framed according to a logical fallacy that results from a cognitive bias to see things in binary terms. Once I realised that both substance and structure were real, the problem I knew as grandfather's axe no longer seemed to me to be an either/or problem. The apparent paradox is simply a limitation artificially imposed by intellectuals who haven't fully grasped the situation they live in. They labour away with theories about how the world should be, based on idealistic or romantic fantasies. Education is a good thing, but all too often it leaves us with unexamined presuppositions that hinder our understanding. For example, most people finish their science schooling believing in reductionism and this is an obstacle to understanding because reduction is strictly limited in its application. 

Another complaint is that identity is a fairly slippery concept. It makes more sense to speak of a conscious entity having identity, than a ship. Without a mind, the ship itself has no sense of identity. Therefore any identity that we perceive is a quality that we have projected into the ship. Identity in this case doesn't reside in the ship at all. It resides in our own minds! What we're really wondering is whether we recognise the ship as being the same or not, which again comes down to whether we look at substance, structure, both, or neither. And I argue that we have to look at both.

Since no object is entirely stable, no matter how long it persists, insisting that identity is a function of some fixed quality rather than something dynamic is just arbitrary. Castle mound is by no means exactly the same as it was ~950 years ago when it was heaped up as the base for a defensive stockade to guard a key crossing point on the River Cam. But it is a mound and there has continuously been a mound on that spot for ~950 years. A mound exists. Whether the mound exists is just something to argue about in a framework that doesn't allow a resolution. If we focus on the grains of soil, then it is not the mound, but another identically shaped mound in the same location as yesterday (by coincidence apparently). If we focus on the structure itself it is the same mound, but the parts have all changed.

Answers are so often already implied by how we frame questions. Logic doesn't stop us getting things wrong.

So to recap, the problem of Theseus's ship is problematic mainly because of how it is framed and the presuppositions of the person who asks the question. Reductionist methodologies cannot cope very well with persistent structure. Reasoning from the assumptions and methods of reductionism on its own produces nonsense and/or contradictions.

To understand and appreciate structure requires an antireductive approach. We have to see structures as persistent, dynamic systems, with their own (emergent) features and causal powers: e.g. buoyancy and hydrodynamism. Such a structure can function as a ship, but only in relation to other systems, such as the ocean. Also the function of the object as a ship, is an observer relative function. While it is epistemically objective, the fact of being a "ship" is ontologically subjective. A naive observer would not look at a ship and conclude that it could convey people and cargo across the ocean, especially if they were not familiar with oceans.

Identity is not vested in either parts or wholes of any inanimate object, but in our own conscious states. Any identity Theseus's ship might have is a projection from our minds onto the object. It is Theseus's ship if, and only if, we believe it to be so. Different people, at different times and places, may have different reasons for believing that it is Theseus's ship, but apart from a tiny number of long dead eye-witnesses (whose testimony may still be inaccurate), the rest of us take it on faith.

If we restrict ourselves to focussing on substance and change then the ship is not the same. But if we restrict ourselves to structure and continuity then it is the same. But the dichotomy is not intrinsic. Any object we can see has both structure and substance. Both are real and therefore when considering the question of Theseus's ship, both are equally important.

The problem is that we seek something essential in a complex object in which the parts are being changed for identical parts but the structure remains stable. To simply ask "Is it the same ship?" is an incomplete question. One might counter, "the same as what?" Or in other words, what is the point of comparison?

If we resolve the paradox by reframing the problem and selecting appropriate methods to understand it, does it shed any new light on the problem of identity? I'm not sure that it does. We all have this experience of continuity with change. We have memories that provide us with continuity, even if they are not 100% accurate. Over a normal human lifespan change occurs rapidly at the beginning, slowly in the middle, and rapidly at the end. But we experience ourselves as continuous through our lives. Not, as some Buddhists insist, as unchanging, but as connected over time. We all understand that we change physically and mentally. Externally we age and internally we accumulate experience.

That there is change-with-continuity or continuity-with-change seems fairly obvious when you think about it. However, everywhere we turn this is denied. Theists argue that we have an unchanging eternal soul. Buddhists deny any kind of continuity when discussing metaphysics, but insist on continuity when discussing morality. Philosophers frame the problem of Theseus's ship so that it is a paradox. But everyday experience is of change and continuity. There is a dialectic between substance and structure and it is helpful to acknowledge the contribution of both to experience. 

* FTFY Fixed That For You (h/t David Chapman)

Bibliography

de Bono, Edward. (1990) I Am Right - You Are Wrong. Penguin

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. (1980). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia . Continuum, 2004. [First translated into English 1987; originally vol. 2 of Capitalisme et Schizophrénie]

Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.

In other words if we think of an arrow flying through the air, the arrow is the same length throughout the flight. It takes up the same amount of space. At any given moment in time, the arrow is at a given location in space, taking up a given space. If we could freeze time at any random moment the arrow would appear to be stationary; it would not be moving, it would only be in one place. So if at any moment the arrow is stationary, it is stationary at every moment. Which is paradoxical. Nāgārjuna wrestles with motion and time in a similar way because moments are built into the Buddhist understanding of time also.

In a YouTube video interview, George Lakoff explains to an interviewer, in the space of approximately 3¾ minutes, that the paradox is due to the metaphorical nature of our thought and the framing of the problem. In this essay I'm going to recapitulate his argument in my own words.

So the first thing to notice is the way I write about a space of time the previous sentence. This is a metaphor. It turns out that metaphor TIME IS SPACE occin almost every human language. But there are two main ways of conceptualising time as space. Firstly time is a stationary path along which we move:

Time is typically a one dimensional space, so it can be long or short for example, but seldom wide, narrow, or tall. Occasionally we may talk about a window of time, though what this comes down to is a slot marked by a beginning and end time. Here the metaphor is not TIME IS A WINDOW, but that instead MOMENTS ARE WINDOWS. TIME FLIES, but this is a variant on the flowing time metaphor where we are fixed and time goes past us. Time may also be a container, so that events happen "in time", in the space of an hour. Again the metaphor is, MOMENTS ARE CONTAINERS. A window can be a container, because it is framed. In this essay I'm going to focus on the linear spatial metaphors for time.

Metaphors are linguistic structures. In the first lot of three sentences we have a human agent which acts on time (time is the patient of the verb). In the second group of three, time itself is the agent of the action. In one, time is passively acted on by us, and in the other time is actively acting on us. And the actions in both cases are motions (go, pass, approach, recede). These are linguistic structures that help us to conceptualise and talk about of the flow of events that make up experience. However, these linguistic structures do not correspond to structures in reality. Part of the reason they do not is that the two metaphors contradict each other. Time cannot be both stationary and in motion at the same time. Maybe we could call this Lakoff's Paradox.

* The obvious candidate, 'endure', actually comes from a root *deru meaning "to harden"; from which, ultimately, we also get our word 'true'.

These metaphors for time describe a linear progression. But it only seems to go in one direction. We can move in any direction in space, why is the dimension of time different? This is a question that Lakoff doesn't answer, but its always useful when thinking about time, to get into this.


Time's Arrow

The answer is well known to us now as the arrow of time, a concept developed by Sir Arthur Eddington (who was also the first to test a prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity). The basis of the arrow of time is entropy. The second law of thermodynamics says that in any closed system entropy always increases. More simplistically we can say that disorder tends to increase over time. So comparatively a whole egg has low entropy, a broken egg has more entropy (more disorder), and a scrambled egg has high entropy. The arrow of time means that if someone shows us a film of an egg being broken and cooked backwards we can almost always tell straight away because the film shows us things moving in ways that are not possible and events happening in an order that contradicts the arrow of time. In reality eggs never uncook themselves and reform into white and yolk.

Incidently it's frequently pointed out that living things are an exception to this rule because they sustain order against the second law. There are two responses to this assert. Firstly, living organisms are temporary motes of complexity, and complexity varies differently than disorder. Entropy increases steadily over time, but the complexity need not. If we take the example of the universe as a whole, entropy steadily increases as times goes on, but complexity starts at a minimum, rises to a maximum at about 10¹⁰ years (about now in fact), and then declines back to a minimum by about 10¹⁰⁰ years. The universe will continue to expand indefinitely, but once we reach a certain point the universe is as disordered as it can get and there is no arrow of time. Secondly, life increases the entropy of the universe more rapidly than non-living systems. For every low entropy photo of sunlight that falls on the earth, living things radiate 20 high entropy photons back into space. One way of defining living things is that we are systems for efficiently converting low entropy energy into high entropy energy. So life doesn't break the second law of thermodynamics, it uses energy to create complexity, that speeds up the increase in entropy locally. 

Coming back to time, it is a narrow path or flow, and it goes one way. But why do we see time as being broken up into moments? And is it really like that?

We measure time relative to cyclic phenomena. There are natural cycles such as planetary orbits, annual seasonal changes, the phases of the moon, menstrual cycles, the diurnal cycle, breaths, and heartbeats. And to these we have added phenomena such as burning candles, dripping water, oscillating pendulums, vibrating piezoelectric crystals, and finally the oscillations of radiation emitted by excited caesium atoms relaxing (in "atomic" clocks). In addition to this there are firing cycles of neurons in the brain that coordinate the beating of your heart, your breathing, and other cyclic bodily events, thought these are quite variable depending on how active we are. We measure time by counting numbers of regular cyclic phenomena. A stretch of time is so many repetitions of a cycle. A "moment" in time is the time for one iteration of the shortest cyclic phenomenon.

In reality, time is not composed of moments at all. Time is a way of conceptualising the procession of events that happen as the universe evolves. These events happen at their own pace. Events are not coordinated like a symphony orchestra is coordinated by a conductor. Events are more like a marathon where everyone runs at their own pace. 

The division of time (and space) into units is arbitrary. For example, note that years, months, and days are all based on natural cyclic phenomena, but they do not match up. A year is not a whole number of months (moon cycles) or days. This is why our calendars have to be adjusted occasionally, such as adding an extra day every four years, because the year is ~365.25 days. There is no "snap to grid" feature when it comes to time. 

Coming back again to linguistics, when we use language to describe events the verbs we use contain information on aspect. Different languages note different aspects, but it includes such information as the beginning, persistence, or ending of an event; and event in progress, completed, or yet to begin; and whether an event is continuous, cyclic, iterative, and so on. Amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) wrote some interesting essays on aspect in indigenous American languages. In English I can indicate continuing or completed actions in the past, present, or future.

The structure of time into past, present, future is common to Sanskrit, and thus I presume to Indo-European languages in general. We can also indicate repetitive actions. So one walk is a tramp. To repeated walk over something is to trample it. One oscillation is a wag, many is a waggle. Though in English we often express aspect through adverbs like, 'constantly', 'repeatedly', 'occasionally', or 'persistently'.

In most English time metaphors, the present is where we are now, the future is what is in front of us, and the past is what is behind us. In the time-flow metaphors of some languages, the future sneaking up from behind us and we cannot see it, while the past flows away from us in front, where we can see it. The future could be quite unnerving in such cultures!

If we are the agent, then the "present" is the moment we are in. Where a "moment" is an entirely arbitrary unit of time. And we still favour traditional measures because our sense of time is geared to them. A moment is roughly a heartbeat. The idiom "in a heartbeat" means "instantaneously". But we also have idioms for moments such as "in the blink of an eye", "a finger snap", "half a tick". Of course we can measure time many orders of magnitude more precisely than this now, but anything much shorter than a heartbeat is difficult for us to imagine. Past, present, and future are features of the metaphorical structure of language, but not of time in reality, because the present is an arbitrary time.

In John Searle's language, the present is an observer relative function. The present isn't an intrinsic feature of the universe, but occurs to us as a subjective feature of time. So epistemically we understand there to be this structure to time, and since we all agree on it, it is epistemically objective. But it is ontologically subjective. The present only exists in our minds, because our minds have the features they do. 

Which brings us to the question of the reality of time. When the interviewer asks Lakoff about the reality of time, he says:

Time is unlikely to exist independently of our metaphorical conception of it. This seems to be consistent with the universe that physicists describe at quantum and cosmological scales. The universe simply evolves in patterned ways. Some of those patterns persist as structures and those structures form increasingly complex layers of structure. In a sense we could say from this point of view that there are no entities, there are just some persistent processes, like standing waves in a river. Many physicists now think that time is not fundamental, but that it emerges as a property of the interactions of quantum fields. What his might mean in human terms, like most of quantum theory, is far from obvious, or in fact completely obscure. It may not even be possible to disentangle our metaphorical time and what time is in reality, if it is anything. 

This insight into the metaphorical basis for how we understand time is important for deconstructing Zeno's arrow paradox. The paradox is based on reifying the notion that time can be measured in moments. It assumes that the moments we perceive in time relative to some other cyclic events are real. But they are not. In reality the evolution of the universe is continuous and not broken down into moments. 

As we know, different layers of the universe require different descriptions. At the quantum level, events may be discrete, such as the transition of an electron from one energy state to another. This is what the quantum part of quantum theory means. At the quantum level, change can be discontinuous. But at the macro level (i.e. at the mass, length, and energy scale relevant to human experience) changes is never discontinuous. It may happen very rapidly, but it is always continuous.

So if change is continuous and we divide it up into moments, what happens is that we lose information about the continuity of the process. The same thing happens when converting music to a digital format. If the sampling rate is less than about twice the highest frequency we can hear then the loss of fidelity at the high end starts to become obvious. The average healthy person can hear sounds up to about 20 kilo-Hertz. Which is why digital music samples at roughly 48 kHz or more. But even if we sample at 96 kHz or more, we still lose information. Other factors intervene. Our equipment for turning digital signals into analogue waves in the air will not produce 100% fidelity either so sampling a million Hz would be pointless. The point is that dividing time into moments is a lossy process.

Time is not a series of moments, it is an unfolding of events: a marathon rather than an orchestra. So for example, there is no such thing as "the present moment" because the idea of a moment is defined relative to some cyclical event, and we are free to choose difference reference points. Different authorities define the present moment as lasting a different number of units or fractions of seconds. A second is the length of time that it takes for a 1 meter pendulum to complete an arc. Or a second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom". In other words, a second is arbitrary, but if we all choose the same arbitrary measure, then we agree on how long a second is.

We now have enough information to understand the misunderstanding that creates the paradox.


Resolving the Paradox

Zeno's arrow is not stationary at any given moment. Moments are arbitrary and are arbitrarily long. If the moment is 0.001 of a second, the arrow is still moving during that time, though the amount of movement may be too small for us to see, it still moves. When the arrow is in motion it is constantly moving. Similarly, if we observe a mountain for a year it may not perceptibly change, because mountains change on geological time scales (millions of years). A photograph of a bird on the wing may give the illusion of stillness if the exposure is short enough, but even then if one looks carefully one may find movement blur at the wingtips.

In reality, there are no moments. Moments are a structure that we subjectively impose on the flow of events. Time itself may be an emergent property of quantum systems. And events go at their own speed, with no coordinating universal clock. Time's arrow is a result of steadily increasing disorder in the universe and will disappear once entropy reaches a maximum. 

So Zeno's arrow paradox and Nāgārjuna's laborious fumbling around the subjects of time, duration, motion, and change, are difficult because they do not understand the distinction between how they conceptualise time and what time might be in reality. In other words we once again meet the mind projection fallacy or the problem of confusing experience for reality. George Lakoff dispenses with Zeno in less than four minutes. Of course there are many secondary questions and a lot of gaps to be filled in, but once a problem is correctly framed, things can move along more rapidly. 

~~oOo~~

In this essay I will attempt to summarise and critically assess the article Apocryphal Treatment for Conze’s Heart Problems by Huifeng (2014). The article is long and complex. It deals with three philological problems in Conze's Sanskrit text of the Prajñāpāramitahṛdaya or Heart Sutra. Conze himself highlights these problems and Huifeng tackles them by using the method, suggested by Jan Nattier and Nobuyoshi Yamabe (Nattier 1992), of tracing the passages back to the Prajñāpāramitā source texts in Chinese and Sanskrit. Huifeng discovers that the  person who translated the Heart Sutra from Chinese into Sanskrit misread the text. However, Huifeng leaves open the correct readings, which I will attempt to supply. I will also discuss the problems raised by this discovery (which in many ways parallels my own discoveries about this text) and I disagree with Huifeng on how to translate a key term.

I'll separate the three problems into two separate installments: this one will deal with the Conze's phrases na prāptir na-aprāptiḥ and aprāptitvād; the next will deal with the phrases containing the compound a-citta-varaṇa , which occurs twice in different grammatical forms. In the conclusions we will see that this whole passage needs to be reinterpreted and retranslated.

Nattier's Chinese Origins hypothesis been shown beyond reasonable doubt to be the only plausible account of the history of the text. Until such time as it is refuted, I take it for granted. This gives us a timeline like this:

I understand the later Chinese Heart Sutras (T252-7) to be translations from Sanskrit texts, except T255 which is a translation from Tibetan. I take the two early short-text Heart Sutras (T250 and T251) to derive from the no longer extant Chinese ur-text. The Heart Sutra was mainly composed of passages from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (PPS) aka the 25,000 Line Prajñāpāramitā Text. See also my list of Chinese Heart sutra texts, with translators and dates. My focus is almost entirely on the relationship between the Sanskrit and Chinese short texts and when I refer to the "Chinese Heart Sutras" I mean only T250 and T251 unless otherwise specified.

At some point I hope that Ben Nourse will finish his study of approximately 300 short text manuscripts in Chinese and Tibetan found at Dunhuang, but until then, I won't be considering them.

The passage that concerns us initially, begins "Therefore, Śāriputra, in emptiness..." (Tasmāc chāriputra śūnyatāyāṃ); negates the skandhas etc, and then concludes with "no wisdom, no attainment and no non-attainment" (na jñānam, na prāptir na-aprāptiḥ)(Conze 1975: 89). Here, the Sanskrit word prāpti means "attainment". It is an action noun from the verb prāpṇoti (pra√āp) which means "to attain, to reach, arrive at".

I've noted previously that some editors and/or copyists get carried away with the negations and modify the nidāna section of this passage—i.e. nāvidyā nāvidyā-kṣayo yāvan na jarāmarṇnaṃ na jarāmaraṇakṣayo—so that it reads (interpolations underlined):

It would seem that the double negative na-aprāptiḥ in the current passage falls into the same category, though curiously the editor has not included na ajñānaṃ. It is contradictory to state, as Conze's Heart Sutra appears to, that there is "no nonattainment" (na-aprāpti) and then in the next sentence say that it is precisely "because of being in a state of non-attainment" (a-prāpti-tvād) that bodhisatvas get enlightened. The Chinese Heart Sutras lack any equivalent of nāprāpti. Since Conze includes the this phrase he has to resort to convoluted explanations for the apparent contradiction, which are not very convincing. Thus we can treat na aprāpti as an interpolation and a clumsy one at that. 

The phrase na jñānaṃ na prāpti is found in the section of PPS that is quoted in the Heart Sutra. However the original passage lists na prāptirnābhisamayo, i.e. "No attainment, no realisation" and then continues on listing types of attainment, from stream-entrant up to Buddhahood. At least one Heart Sutra manuscript also has na prāptirna abhisamaya, e.g. Cb aka T256 (a Sanskrit text transliterated using Chinese characters). I'll return to this when considering the Chinese texts.

Conze's next sentence begins tasmāc Chāriputra aprāptitvād bodhisattvasya..., which he translates as "Therefore, O Śāriputra, it is because of his non-attainment-ness that a bodhisattva...", which is one of the more egregious examples of his Buddhist Hybrid English. We need to be aware of how Sanskrit uses abstract nouns (indicated by the suffix -tvā). It can be very like English, in which case the suffix -ness can work well. However the abstract can also represent the idea of being in a particular state. Coulson's discussion of abstract nouns is instructive: "English noun clauses ('that the grass is green') and noun phrases with a verbal component such as an infinitive ('for the grass to be green') tend to be replaced in Sanskrit by a straight abstract noun ('the greenness of the grass')" (2003: 130-1). And thus in translation we sometimes have to produce a noun clause and noun phrase to translate a Sanskrit abstract noun.

Conze is surely correct to interpret aprāptitvād as an ablative of cause ("because"), but the abstract noun can't really be forced into a single word here. The compound must mean something like, "because of being in a state of non-attainment". As PPS explains repeatedly, if a bodhisatva were to think "I am a bodhisatva", or "I have an attainment", then they would not be a bodhisatva. I believe that this kind of talk relates to what in Pāḷi is called suññatāvihāra or "dwelling in emptiness", something the Buddha was said to do frequently. This involves cultivating the formless (arūpa) meditations and sustaining the samādhi in which one experiences nothing at all (śūnyatāsamādhi), i.e. one is alert, but without any sense of being a subject observing an object.

Having described and tidied up the Sanskrit Heart Sutra passages we now turn to the Chinese texts and begin to unpick the Sanskrit translation, and of course any English translations based on it.

There is a problem throughout the Chinese Canon because translators, especially Kumārajīva, have "flattened" the lexicon by using the same character to translate multiple words. This means that there can be considerable ambiguity when looking at a Chinese text as to what Indic word was being translated. So for example, Huifeng notes that the character 得 has been used to translate √bhū, prāpta/prāpti, √budh, √labh, and other terms (81).

Unfortunately we also have to add the almost ubiquitous possibility of problematic Chinese translations. As Jan Nattier has said:

T250 and T251 are the same at this point, though both slightly different to the Sanskrit text. Between na jñānaṃ na prāpti , and aprāptitvād bodhisatvasya... the Sanskrit has tasmāc chāriputra"therefore Śāriputra". The Chinese text does not have this, but reads (without the modern punctuation):

All modern editions punctuate, and translate as two sentences (see below). Here 無智 would appear to correspond to na jñānam; and 無得 to na prāpti. However, because the Gilgit ms. of PPS has na prāptir nābhisdamayo at this point, Huifeng would like to read 智 as abhisamaya (85). This would also mean that the order of the two negated terms had been switched. With the inherent ambiguity of the Chinese translations, this is plausible. My view is that the Gilgit PPS ought to be treated as authoritative when it comes to the correct Sanskrit of quoted passages. 

The phrase 以無所得故 presents us with some difficulties. The verb is again 得. Huifeng points out that the character combination 以 ... 故 usually stands for a Sanskrit instrumental (2014: 80). However, note that Kieschnick & Wiles (2016) say of this same structure:"故 often works together with 以, meaning “for this reason”, “because”" (39), i.e. it can be consistent with an ablative of cause, which also fits this context. Huifeng also notes that 故 "...when alone after a verbal form is usually grammatically equivalent to a Sanskrit ablative form" (81). For Huifeng 所 before a verb indicates a past participle. Kieschnick & Wiles (2016) explain that "when placed before a verb or verb phrase, 所 turns it into a noun."

When he compares the use of this Chinese phrase he finds: "examination of other examples reveals that the majority of the appearances of the Chinese phrase “以無所得故” (yĭ wú sŭodé gù) directly corresponds to the Sanskrit an-upa√lambha-yogena" (88). The phrase frequent appears appended to sentences describing practices, and means "by being engaged in non-apprehension".

Despite meaning prāpti in the immediately preceding phrase, here 得 appears to equate to a Sanskrit verb upa√labh"obtain; perceive, behold". Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary lists anupalambha as meaning "inconceivability, inconceivable", particularly in relevant phrases such as śūnyatānupalambheṣu dharmeṣu"in regard to states of being which because of voidness are inconceivable". However s.v. upalambha, Edgerton defines upalambhayogena as "by the (erroneous) method of upalambha"; and the latter means "mental perception or apperception, realization by the intellect (c.f. Tibetan dmigs-pa). This supports reading anupalambhanayogena as "by the method of non-perception".

Thus Huifeng argues that, in the phrase 以無所得故 the verb 得 has to be read differently to its use in the previous 無得. He points out that, in any case, denying attainment is inconsistent with the passage in which the bodhisatva attainsnirvāṇa (niṣṭhanirvāṇaprāptaḥ). Though note that I have already showed that niṣṭhanirvāṇa is probably another mistake and that what was intended by the Chinese phrase 究竟涅槃 was more likely to be nirvāṇa-paryavasānam ("whose culmination is extinction").

Having said that 所 indicates a past participle, which would be upalabdha or upalabdhita, Huifeng does not note any such forms, but instead finds forms such as upalambha (action noun) or upalabhamāna (present participle). So here 所得 probably stands for the noun derived from the verb upalambha, and 無所得 for anupalambha; and thus we expect 以–無所得–故 to translate anupalambhena (instrumental) or anupalambhāt (ablative). Apparently the yoga was simply left out. But this is not uncommon in Chinese translations.


Structures

Various modern versions punctuate the Chinese text differently, but the oldest versions of the text have no punctuation. Huifeng thinks that other modern editors have broken the sentence in the wrong place. He argues that the version punctuated as:

This creates a structure in which the whole passage opens with the words, "Therefore in emptiness" (是故，空中) proceeds to say there is no form (無色) etc, but concludes, in Huifeng's new English translation, "...due to engagement in non-apprehension" (以無所得故)(2014: 103). This also means we would read the Sanskrit differently. As Huifeng says this introduces a major shift in orientation:

This view is consistent with my own reading of the Prajñāpāramitā literature as continuing an epistemological stance found in the Pāḷi suttas and described in detail by Sue Hamilton (2000). The main focus of early Buddhism is experience. Similarly the Prajñāpāramitā literature is focussed on the experience of states which are characterised as "empty", i.e. states in which there is no sense of being a subject observing an object, and no arising and passing away of experience. In this altered state there is just alertness and no content. It is cultivating this state that is the summum bonum of Buddhist practice. I suspect that in the Prajñāpāramitā texts, the character of Subhuti represents this point of view, while Śakra and Śāriputra represent other points of view; most likely dhyānic meditation and abhidharma-style analysis.

The problem here, however, is that Huifeng appears to overlooked another kind of boundary in the text. In fact 無智亦無得 is the end of the quotation from PPS and 以無所得故 is part of the text composed in China. There is no reason to think that the non-quoted parts of the Heart Sutra were composed by Kumārajīva and thus no a priori reason to think that they will conform to Kumārajīva's idiom. Importantly, because of this transition from quotation to composition there is no necessity to read 得 as being from two different verbs, which after all is a rather startling ambiguity. Just as the translator has read 以無所得故 as aprāptitvād, so might we.

This issue becomes more interesting if we repeat Huifeng's search for this phrase to see who used it. Using the online CBETA Lexicon tool, I search for the phrase and found that it occurs 238 times in the Taishō edition of the Tripiṭaka. Before Kumārajīva it is used just once:

• T318 文殊師利佛土嚴淨經  a translation of the Ratnakuta Sutra on the Prediction of Mañjuśrī to Buddhahood (cf 310.15) translated by Dharmarakṣa 竺法護 in the Western Jin [西晉] (A.D. 240 ~ 290)

I would further quibble with Huifeng's translation of anupalambha as "non-apprehension" and replace it with "non-perception". The meaning of the term is the same, but I think it more clearly conveys the epistemological stance of the text. Apprehension is a metaphor quite at home in this context, however it implies that something is there to be apprehended which is not apprehended, whereas in the state of emptiness there is nothing to apprehend. I think non-perception conveys this better.

Another effect of this is to cast doubt on the use of Tasmāc Chāriputra in this passage. The earlier use is probably also an interpolation, but here it definitely gets in the way and contradictions the sentence structure. So again it looks like an interpolation that ought to be excised. However, note that in PPS this quoted passage begins "So, therefore, Śāriputra..." (tathā hi śariputra) (Kimura 1-1: 64)

Note that in some of his the first Sanskrit edition (1948) Conze follows aprāptitvād with bodhisattvasya,  i.e. bodhisatva in the genitive singular case. This was a mistake that was corrected in the 1967 edition, to bodhisattvo, i.e.the nominative singular. Unfortunately the second edition of Buddhist Wisdom Books (1975), originally published in 1958 using the 1948 text, doesn't include the correction. This change was not picked up by Kazuaki Tanahashi in his recent Heart Sutra Book (2014: 181).

~~oOo~~

In this and the previous essay I am summarising and discussing Huifeng's article on terminology in the Heart Sutra. To reiterate, in this essay we are assuming that the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is a translation from a Chinese text (though not one of the surviving versions). So we're investigating how a translator might understand the Chinese text, and were subjecting the received Sanskrit text to a critical examination in the light of comparative philology, especially within the Prajñāpāramitā literature, facilitated by electronic texts and word searches. The fundamental (radical) question we are asking is, "Is the received Sanskrit text an accurate translation of the Chinese Heart Sutra?" But this also hints at an unasked question, "Which Chinese Heart Sutra is the Sanskrit a translation of?" The latter question will have to wait for another day

We now move onto the phrases 心無罣礙 and 無罣礙故 which were translated into Sanskrit (in Conze's edition) as acittāvaraṇa and cittavaraṇa-nāstitvād. Conze is again in poor form translating the latter as "without thought coverings" and "in the absence of thought coverings".

This section of the text was apparently composed to accompany the quotation which finished as the end of the last section. So we do not expect to find exact equivalents in the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā literature, but we might wish that the Sanskrit translation of the Chinese was at least consistent with that literature. Although one might equally argue that the requirement is still to be true to early medieval China. 

The easiest part of this passage is 心. We expect citta in Sanskrit and we find citta in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. So far so good. 

The translation of 心無罣礙 as acittāvaraṇa was a phrase that Conze had a great deal of trouble with. In his edition he notes some manuscripts have acittālambana and he describes how one might have become the other through a series of scribal errors of the type that are so common in the Nepalese manuscripts (e.g. mistaking v and b). However, Huifeng finds that neither of these possibilities—āvaraṇa or ālambhana—are plausible readings of 罣礙 (2014: 98-9). For example he cites what seems to be an important passage from Kumārajīva's Large text:

Now, the awkward phase "hung-obstructed" is not very convincing and I find that I cannot go along with Huifeng in either his interpretation of 罣 as "hang" in this context. The basic meanings of the two verbs here are according to Kroll (2015):

If we are describing the way an arrow shot into space travels as "無礙" then it seems straight forward to say it is "not impeded". If we are looking to compliment this with 罣 then "hung" is not an obvious choice, whereas some kind of entanglement is. The arrow is not impeded or entangled in anything - therefore it continues on its way. 

As Huifeng points out this is only reinforced by the Sanskrit equivalent of the phrase 無罣礙 in this simile which is: na kvacit sajjati. The form sajjati is unusual. The Sanskrit verb is √sañj which means "adhere to, be attached to, cling to". Other Sanskritists I consulted all took the verb sajjati to mean "cling" on face value. And we expect a passive form sajyate. In Pāli this is sajjati. So this looks like an example of a Prakrit form being used in Sanskrit. That it occurs in a Buddhist text makes this quite likely as Buddhists mixed up forms from Prakrit and Sanskrit very often.

One of the things about this verb is that it governs the locative - the place of clinging or attachment is given in the locative case. Hence kvacit"anywhere", a locative adverbial pronoun.

So the Sanskrit phrase na kvacit sajjati means "it doesn't stick anywhere" (and this time Conze accurately translates "...does not get stuck anywhere"). Elsewhere saṅga means "attached" and asaṅga means "unattached" or "without attachment" (hence the name of the Yogācāra co-founder). Huifeng's argument for "hung, hanging", is not wrong, but it overlooks the obvious meaning. It is true that √sañj can mean "hang", but when describing the arrow or the mind of the meditating bodhisatva., the basic sense works fine. Also an arrow shot into space doesn't stick anywhere, as opposed to an arrow shot at a target which does. We don't say that an arrow that strikes a target is "hung" on the target. It's sticks into, or is embedded in it.

Some other passages show that Kumārajīva also used the character 礙 for Sanskrit prati√han"to strike against." This adds a certain semantic richness, but the basic sense of √sañj "stick" conveys the meaning of the text. There's also an unnoticed play on words here, because the secondary verb in the Sanskrit, translating 依, is āśritya and this has a connotation of "to adhere to, to attach one's self to". So the sentence is saying that because he is attached to the perfection of wisdom, the bodhisatva doesn't stick elsewhere. In Chinese 依 means "to rely on, fall back on; be guided by". 

Huifeng's grammatical commentary also informs us that 故, "alone after a verbal form is usually grammatically equivalent to a Sanskrit ablative form" (81) suggesting that 無罣礙故 corresponds to an ablative form. The received Sanskrit cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād i.e. (citta-āvaraṇa-na-asti-tvād),  is such a form, though the idea of negating a verb by compounding it with nāstitvā 'non-existence-ness' is idiosyncratic at best, and I can find no examples of this form in PPS. Where PPS does use the abstract form of nāsti (as a stand alone term), it opts for nāstitā not nāstitvā (e.g. Kimura 1-1: 154, 1-2: 17). The form ‑nāstitvād doesn't fit the Prajñāpāramitā idiom. I've not been able to turn up this idiom anywhere except in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. We can see what it means, but not why anyone would chose to translate 無 this way.


Translating from Chinese into Sanskrit

Unfortunately Huifeng does not commit to a Sanskrit translation at this point, though he does give an English translation that reinterprets the Chinese text.

Given my discussion of this above, my rendering of this same passage (trying to avoid Buddhist Hybrid English) would be

We can see now why some mss. have bodhisatva in the genitive case, they want to indicate that the mind in question is possessed by the bodhisatva. What I take the passage to mean is that through insight style meditations such as the contemplation of the skandhas, and dwelling in emptiness, the bodhisatva disentangles themselves from the snares of sensory experience and becomes free (vimokṣa).

Now that we are clear what the text says and what it means, and we know roughly what kind of words the authors of the Prajñāpāramitā literature might have used, we can try to translate 菩提薩埵 依 般若波羅蜜多故 心無罣礙 無罣礙故 into Sanskrit.

So we want a compound that says "unattached mind" or "mind which is unattached" or "mind which is not stuck". We can see why a translator might have adopted a-citta-āvaraṇa, since in Buddhist Sanskrit and in Pāḷi āvaraṇa means "hindrance" or "obstruction" (BHSD). The translator has understood impediment and opted for a common word, but without reference to the Prajñāpāramitā idiom. Still it can mean "without mental hindrances". Note also that the Sanskrit texts interpolates viharati as a main verb and treats 依 as a gerund āśritya. The former is odd, but the latter fits the context.

One way to say in Sanskrit, what we understand the text to say, and which doesn't diverge too far from the Chinese source text would be:

[Yo] bodhisatvaḥ prajñāpāramitām āśritya [tasya] cittam na kvacit sajjati. Asaṅgatvāt so 'trasto...* 

That bodhisatva, relying on perfect wisdom, his mind does not stick anywhere. Being unattached he is unafraid...

Words in square brackets have no Chinese word equivalent but are added to create grammatical Sanskrit.This is necessary because the grammar of Sanskrit is more elaborate than that of Chinese.  Kvacit is implied by Kumārajīva's idiom and a locative is required by the verb. In plain English

Because the bodhisatva adheres to perfection of wisdom, his mind doesn't get stuck elsewhere. Not being stuck, he is fearless... 

* Thanks to Dhīvan and Dayāmati for help with composing this Sanskrit. It will no doubt be subject to revision.

The conclusions of both part one and two of this essay are similar. Whoever translated the Chinese Heart Sutra into Sanskrit could have done a better job of it. They mistook 以無所得故 for aprāptirvād and mistook 心無罣礙 無罣礙故 for acittavaraṇaḥ | cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād  when in fact these are not very likely translations in the light of the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā traditions. The idiom nāstitvād is particularly nasty. In fact although we stipulated the Chinese origins hypothesis at the outset, the awkwardness and idiosyncrasy of these two phrases alone make the hypothesis seem plausible.

So over and above what we can glean from the manuscript tradition of the Heart Sutra, it seems that the Sanskrit ur-text was botched. The question for scholars and Buddhists is then: Should we correct these errors?

Given that the errors are in the order of 1300 years old and universally attested in the Sanskrit manuscript and epigraphical witnesses, given how familiar they are to Buddhists and scholars alike, perhaps we ought to leave them alone? We can treat the Heart Sutra as a quaint oddity, a somewhat perplexing, but unarguably positive one. I imagine that many practitioners would like to continue to chant the familiar text.

On the other hand what Huifeng has identified in his article are errors. Since I have identified other errors, I think there is a growing case for retranslating the Heart Sutra from Chinese into Sanskrit that is more consistent with the Prajñapāramitā tradition and the improved understanding of the text that philology affords. Of course the Indian tradition was originally one that spoke Gāndhārī and reconstructing that vocabulary would be difficult to say the least. But we can, and I argue that we should, construct a better Sanskrit Heart Sutra. One that makes sense, that eliminates the bizarre contradictions, and is in keeping with the other Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā texts at least at the time the sūtra was composed, ca. 7th Century.

To this end we have three Gilgit manuscripts of the PPS. One of which has been published in facsimile and partially transcribed. We know from recent publications that full transcriptions of all of the manuscripts are well underway and that we can expect a critical edition at some point. There is a huge amount of comparative information in Karashima et al. (2016).

~~oOo~~

Kuījī

It was apparent, even to the late 7th Century commentators Woncheuk and Kuījī that the Heart Sutra contained quotations from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (PPS) (Nattier 1992: 206-7, no. 33). In this essay I will compare and contrast the various source texts for part of one of the quotations. We will see that a substantial change was introduced in translation of the PPS produced by Kumārajīva's translation team in 404 CE, though we don't know if this was evident in their source text or was an innovation at that time. Jan Nattier (1992: 205, n.26) already noted this in her watershed article on the Chinese origins of the Heart Sutra, but it has received scant attention since. And it raises interesting issues regarding authenticity and the role of modern philologers.

Nattier compared various versions of the quoted passage from PPS with the versions found in the various Heart Sutras. The Chinese Heart Sutra extra is nearly identical to the Chinese PPS created by Kumārajīva's translation team ca. 404 CE (i.e. Taishō Sūtra No. 223). The Sanskrit Heart Sutra is however different in many ways from the extant Sanskrit PPS manuscripts (one cache from Gilgit ca, 6th Century and another from Nepal ca. 19th Century). The versions differ in syntax at some points and it differ in lexicon at others, but they mostly do not differ in semantics. Where sentence structures and word choices are different, the Heart Sutra still conveys the same message. Except in one case, which I will call "Section 3" in this essay (I've broken the quoted passage into a sequence of sections for my own purposes).

The obvious conclusion is that the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is a paraphrase of the Sanskrit PPS, while the Chinese Heart Sutra is a direct quote from T223. The paraphrasing occurred because the extract went from Buddhist Sanskrit (composed ca. 1st Century CE) through the filter of Middle Chinese (sometime between 404 and 664 CE) and back to something like Classical Sanskrit (before the death of Xuanzang in 664). The meaning was preserved but many particulars of how that was communicated were changed.

We can see how this might work using Google translator to go between English to Mandarin and back.

The words mean the same, but they are paraphrased. The effect on a highly inflected language like Sanskrit could be rather more dramatic, because a good deal of grammatical information is lost in converting to Middle Chinese. And if the translator from Chinese into Sanskrit was not familiar with the Prajñāpāramitā idiom in Sanskrit, then this would also amplify the effect.

We have five versions of the quoted passage from different times and places:

The syntax here is one of the key differences that Nattier noted in 1992 as evidence for her Chinese origins hypothesis. PPS has na anya X anya Y, whereas Heart Sutra has X na pṛthak Y. Note that anya"other" is a pronoun which takes the gender, case, and number of the noun it qualifies. These both mean the same thing, i.e. that X and Y are not different, or in plain English "X is the same as Y".

Comparing the versions, we can see here that Xuanzang largely followed Kumārajīva. All that he changed was the spelling of the name Śāriputra. Kumārajīva uses a phonetic transcription which in Middle Chinese would have been something like sharibut. The final /t/ was pronounced strongly in Old Chinese and may have sounded very like the Central Asian pronunciation of the name in Prakrit (cf. Gāndhārī: Śariputra; Pāli: Sāriputta). Note that final -a is also dropped in modern Hindi with similar effect (compare also Nattier 1992: 216, n.91). Xuanzang kept the shari, but replaced the last syllable with the Chinese character for son 子 to translate Sanskrit putra.

An oddity is that Gil. has Śāradvatīputra for Śāriputra. This is actually common, but not reflected in the Chinese translations, which all have the latter.

These are all saying something similar. Here, something does not arise (不見生, 不生, na sā utpadyate, notpadyate) it does not cease; it's not defiled and not pure; it is not deficient* and does not grow; it is not part, future, or present. The big difference involves what that something is.

In both the Gilgit and Nepalese PPS texts, it is śūnyatā that is the subject of these sentences, i.e. it is śūnyatā itself which does not arise or cease etc. However, in the Chinese text of Kumārajīva a whole new phrase is inserted which says: "all dharmas are marked with emptiness" (是諸法空相). Xuanzang also has this phrase by may simply have followed Kumārajīva. As Nattier points out, "In this context, without an explicit subject in the Chinese text, the reader would most naturally conclude that the subject is 'all dharmas'." (1992: 205, n.26). And this is indeed how the translator of the Heart Sutra seems to have read the text, translating sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatālakṣaṇā...

This discrepancy is not one of paraphrasing or selecting different synonyms as it is in other cases. The new phrase completely changes the meaning of this sentence, though the (intransitive) actions are the same, the subject "undertaking" the actions is different.

Nattier notes (172 and notes) that where the Sanskrit PPS has singular verbal forms, consistent with śūnyatā being the grammatical subject, the Heart Sutra has nominal forms in the plural. She reminds us that while plurals may be marked in Chinese, they frequently are not; and that any given character may function as noun, adjective, or verb depending on context.

Repairing this artefact of translation would be relatively easy were it not for the phrase 是諸法空相. However, the Chinese Heart Sutra contains this phrase because it is in the source text. Admittedly the terms have been altered from verbal to nominal forms, and we could fix this, the matter of the extra phrase is more difficult because we only have a small number of Sanskrit texts and it is not found in either, despite the antiquity and relative fidelity of the Gilgit ms.

Where does the phrase 是諸法空相 come from? The CBETA Lexicon tool shows that the phrase does not occur in any Chinese text before Kumārajīva uses it in T223, his translation of PPS. In the Sanskrit PPS (kimura) the compound sarvadharma occurs quite often with svabhāvaśunya eg:

This doesn't really help us because here it is prajñāpāramitā that is marked with emptiness (śūnyatālakṣaṇa). Now we have a third object to which this condition can apply. In a related passage from the Aṣṭasāhasrikā we find:

The point is that śūnyatā cannot be broken (√ruj, pra√ruj), which is at least related to the idea that is doesn't arise and pass away.

And the reason this is true is that, "all dharmas are in a state of emptiness" (śūnyatāgatika sarvadharmāḥ).

Another interesting passage is the section which uses the Gāndhārī alphabet (a ra pa ca na...) as an acrostic by which to remember various aspects of emptiness upon which to meditate. In PPS (Kimura 1-2: 85) we find the phrase

Here mukha is usually (following Conze) rendered as "door" or "opening", but may also mean "mouth, face, head; chief". What the letter 'a' (a-kāra) is, in practice is a mnemonic, a place holder, or a reminder, for a word that begins with that letter, i.e. anutpanna 'unarisen'. More hints about the meditation practice are found elsewhere in the text:

Although I don't think there is any direct connection between the Heart Sutra and the Arapacana Alphabet this does at least confirm that the idea of dharmas not arising was also stated in this context. However, as discussed in the essays about form is emptiness, I think this refers to the state of śūnyatā-samādhi where there is no experience. Buddhists involved in the Prajñāpāramitā texts seem to have come to ontological conclusions on the basis of this experience. By this I mean they adopted the stance that śūnyatā-samādhi was reality, or at least a more fundamental reality than what we normally experience. When you take consciousness and subtract all experience, what you are left with is awareness with no subject or object, no spatial or temporal orientation, and so on. This state is often described a luminous.

In many cases where the Heart Sutra is problematic, where Conze has made a mistake (Nattier 1992, Attwood 2015) or where the original Sanskrit translator has made a mistake (Huifeng 2014, Attwood 2017), the philologist can see the error and suggest a solution (although some philologers seem reluctant to offer such solutions, I am not). Of course, whether religieux accept such suggestions is another matter. Even errors can be authoritative when they are over 1000 years old.

That said, the idea is itself fairly orthodox and in keeping with many statements found elsewhere in the Prajñāpāramitā literature. So it is not wrong in the way that some other parts of the Heart Sutra are wrong. Once again, we see the issues of authority and authenticity are complex with respect to the Heart Sutra. The creator of the text appears to have faithfully copied a passage from Kumārajīva's text, and the Sanskrit translator to have tackled it with some success, even if some of his word choices were not. But where did Kumārajīva get it from? Did Xuanzang also have a source with this phrase, or did he include it because it was in Kumārajīva's text, which he was apparently copying (at least in this passage)?

~~oOo~~

Is this scene that I've just sketched real? Or is it all an illusion? Or is it something else? What do I even mean by "real"? These are philosophy questions and for some people the answer doesn't seem to matter. We can get on with our lives without ever answering these questions. I used to not care that much, but I gradually got drawn into thinking about such questions, partly because so many Buddhists seemed to have such obviously wrong answers to these questions that they were peddling as the ultimate truth. Was I completely missing the point or were they?

For me the scene is real and ongoing. Some things, such as the wall or my desk, are not perceptibly changing as I write and providing a static backdrop against which change stands out. While I write the scene is gradually shifting, the sun is moving, and the music playing out, and I'm hungry so will go down to the kitchen soon to get breakfast. I don't expect it to last and I don't expect it to be static, not even the wall over the long term. Buddhists often seem to assert that I do expect it will last, that I do expect to the world to be static. But I don't. And I doubt anyone does or ever did. "Everything changes" is just a banal truism.

The idea that there is a world that is independent of my mind seems obvious, but so is the fact that it changes (and I haven't even started on science yet). Early Buddhists seem to have thought so too, but that they were almost completely uninterested in that world, probably because they spent a lot of time doing religious exercises that mostly involved consciously withdrawing any and all attention from the sensory world until ordinary experience completely ceased (called variously yoga, bhāvana, etc). It is also true that they understood this state to have far reaching consequences - it liberated the practitioner from rebirth (punarbhava) and redeath (punarmṛtyu).

If there were not a world independent of my mind it would be very difficult to explain certain things. Without it there is no common reference point for us to refer to. So, for example, my description of my early morning experience would not resonate, because the reader would not be able to relate to my wholly individual experience. What makes such a description evocative (as I hope it is) is the way that we can relate the words to our own experience of morning, the sun, warmth, etc. The words may well be merely conventional, but the experiences the words refer to are shared.

Take a tennis match at Wimbledon - two players, a referee, various other match officials, and a few thousand spectators. If there were no ball, independent of the players and the crowd, how would a tennis match make sense? How would players track and hit the ball back and forth? How would the referee adjudicate? How would spectators know where to look? If there were no mind-independent world, some far more convoluted explanation would be required to account for the kinds of coherence or simultaneity that make tennis comprehensible to everyone involved; and, mutatis mutandis, that make our everyday experiences comprehensible (to the extent that they are).

Whether we go by intuition, Occam's razor, or Bayesian inference, or some other method, the existence of a world independent of our minds is the best way to make sense of our experience. All the other options force us to adopt absurd positions. This doesn't mean they are false, only that extraordinary evidence would be required to make them plausible and until that turns up we have a clear outright winner in the explanation stakes. The mind-independent world wins by a country mile.

Objective

We tend to think of the world in terms of objects and actions. And because we can all agree on the general characteristics of objects we sometimes call this the objective world in contrast to our mind which is our private subjective world. I'm not entirely happy with this terminology. After all if I am experiencing something that is real, then my experience is not entirely subjective, since it rests on an object and everyone who sees the object sees the same object. Similarly, all animals with brains make inferences about perception that mean that experience is never wholly objective either. 

Benjamin Lee Whorf, in a still popular but controversial theory, proposed in the mid-20th Century that this way of dividing the world up was based in our language, i.e. it derived from the linguistic structures of nouns and verbs. He proposed that grammatical relations precede and define how we perceive the world. His evidence for this came from indigenous North American languages, particularly Hopi. Whorf claimed that at least one language community only conversed in verbs, suggesting that the noun/verb distinction was arbitrary. The details of Whorf's ideas would take us too far afield, but I highly recommend his essays on language - they are stimulating, and like many very bright people, even when he is wrong, he is wrong in interesting ways (to paraphrase Feynman). I think the consensus is that Whorf was wrong, though in a very interesting way. Language does have an impact on how we understand our world, but not to the extent he suggested. Grammar does not precede the world, but emerges from it, especially from the way that we physically interact with it. Objects are still objects and actions are still actions; they exist and happen without our being aware of them.

So the world is objective, in the sense that it's made up from structured objects, but it's not objective in the usual sense of the world. And calling the mind-independent world, "the objective world" doesn't seem right to me. In any case objective is defined relative to our minds, and the world we are talking about is independent of our minds. 

Another thing that we sometimes call this mind-independent world is "reality". Reality must be something like the sum total of all the real things and actions. But it's not a neutral term. Anyone who is "out of touch with reality" is either mad, ignorant, or in some other way defective. How we treat them varies from bad to worse. However, "real" turns out to be quite a difficult concept to define.

We have a number of synonyms: real, true, exist; or abstractly reality, truth, and existence. They are all equally difficult to define. So a definition on one in terms of the others is no help. If the only access the individual has to knowledge is their senses then reality is more or less impossible to define. Scholars are often guilty of solipsism in that they do try to define reality this way. In my way of thinking, something may be considered real if two or more people can perceive it and generally agree on its characteristics. But of course numerous examples show that even multiple people can be deceived - like the sunset illusion. Determining what is real requires sustained and persistent inquiry involving collecting empirical data, identifying and testing assumptions, and cross-referencing with other data. We undercut the sunset illusion by observing the motions of the other planets and concluding that they cannot be in orbit around the earth, and so on.

In reductive approaches to ontology, to be real something has to be independently existent, not simply independent of our minds, but independent of anything else as well. Following Patricia Churchland's discussion of freewill, we can call this "contra-causal independence". In this reductive approach,only the fundamental, unstructured (atomic) layer, at the bottom of the layers of structure is ultimately real. However, degrees may be admitted, because it is also implicit that parts are more real than wholes. When you analyse (i.e. break apart) everything down to the smallest units and cannot go any further, anything that is left is considered real. Atoms were so-named because they were thought to be indivisible (Greek: a-tomos). It's possible, if Fay Dowker and her colleagues exploring causal set theory are right, that spacetime is made up from Planck scale "atoms" as well. Time will tell whether this granular view of spacetime replaces the smooth image we get from relativity, but they did accurately predict the universe expanding at an accelerating rate.

This reductive view is flawed. Parts are not a priori more real than wholes. Reductionism is an ideology, not a philosophy. For example, structures are routinely as stable as (or in some cases more stable than) their parts, have unique properties not possessed by their parts, and, importantly, have causal potential. By most definitions this makes structures real also. As I have argued at length, following Richard H. Jones (see A Layered Approach to Reality), the only viable ontology is reductionist with respect to substance and antireductionist (or emergentist) with respect to structure. And this means that "real" extends over the whole of the layer stack - from the Planck scale to the universe as a whole. It's all real. 

Reality is a loaded term, not just because it helps us define who is mad or sane, but because whoever defines reality has a superior position and tends to exploit it to create a hegemony. When one says, rhetorically, "Look, the reality is.... ", one is asserting superiority over the interlocutor. If someone hits you with this, they are saying that whatever it is that you are on about, you are completely wrong - you are out of touch with reality. The reality is the final word on anything. Fortunately no one can agree on what reality is, at least for long. But how a society defines reality determines how some of its outliers are treated. The cultural baggage that comes with "reality" is so hefty that it makes the term unhelpful a lot of the time.

So, I tend to think in terms of a mind-independent world rather in terms of reality. A jargon term is only useful when there is an agreed definition. And reality is, ironically, not a unifying concept, but is contested with a view to owning the intellectual and moral high-ground. On the whole the word is best avoided if one doesn't want to be drawn into interminable arguments with people whose only commitment is to winning arguments. But however we define reality, it does not alter the fact that there is a world that is independent of our minds.

One of the big problems we have in discussing the mind-independent world is that it seems to attract all of our psychological projections. I've already explored this with respect to the term reality. One of the problems is that human beings want to live in a particular kind of universe, i.e. one that is fair and just. A fair and just universe allows us to anticipate what we need to do next and do it. It allows us to find the optimal path to navigate through life avoiding pain and suffering. And if the world is just, then it must be perfect. And since the world we see is not perfect, in the sense that it is not just, then the perfect world must be either elsewhere (usually in the skyfor reasons I have explained elsewhere) or hidden. Thus, depending on who you ask, reality may be:

There is pie in the sky. Though ironically, the word sky itself comes from a Germanic word meaning "cloud, covering". However, there is nothing empirical to indicate that the mind-independent world is any of these things. There is no a priori reason why a mind-independent world should fulfil any of our human longings for perfection, justice, completion, longevity, or satisfaction. Nor is reality up in the sky. In fact, everything suggests that the mind-independent world is entirely indifferent to us and our longings. There is no perfection, no cosmic justice, no completion, we all die, and satisfaction is all down to how live. The mind-independent world is neutral. 

Through careful observation and meticulous comparing of notes, scientists have begun to map out the characteristics of this neutral mind-independent world. Before the invention of the telescope and the microscope, we thought the world spanned about 7 or 8 orders of magnitude (i.e. roughly from millimeters to a few 10s of 1000s of kilometers). Now we know that the structures of the world can cover between 60 and 100 orders, depending on what we are measuring. For example length goes from the Planck scale (~10^-35 m) to the universe as a whole (~10²⁷ m) and thus covers roughly 62 orders of magnitude. My readers may well point out that the Indian imagination was more fecund and on a much grander scale than the Europeans of the same time. It is true that Indians imagined a much larger universe, but the mind-independent world we actually live in is nothing like the fantasies of Iron Age India.

We know that the neutral mind-independent world is made of certain kinds of stuff, but that the stuff combines in all sort of ways to create many layers of structure. As complex structures pile up, we find that emergent properties begin to dominate and that we have to adopt different descriptive paradigms. The stack of layers is not linear. So we can still usefully employ broad categories such as physics, chemistry, and biology (and the many sub-divisions of these), where each science has distinctive methods and theories that dominate their discourse. 

What the 'scopes told us was that there are domains of the world beyond what our senses can register. Quantum physics hints that there are domains that our minds cannot register also. Our minds are tuned to navigate and survive in the macroscopic world. So most of us struggle with the extremes: time-frames in femto-seconds or millions of years; or lengths nanometers or parsecs. As well as an observable universe, we might also need the idea of a comprehensible universe. What lies beyond is the domain of specialists. But this we do know, in order for some entity or force to interact with our world, it too has to be observable. Either something interacts with matter and energy, in which case we can see and measure it; or it does not, in which case we can ignore it. And in the case of the mass, length, energy scales relevant to ordinary human lives (that narrow range of 7-8 orders of magnitude that we easily comprehend) we don't need anything extra to explain it. Physics is complete within these parameters (see There is No Life After Death, Sorry, especially links to Sean Carroll's arguments for this on his blog). There are new discoveries to be made at the extremes, but not in the middle where we live. The supernatural is an answer for which there is no longer any question.

One of the key functions of our mind is to recognise agentive behaviour in our environment. Julian Barrett has pointed out we are evolved to find agency in the world because it has survival value. It is better to avoid 100 imagined tigers, than to fail to avoid one real tiger. But this error in favour of seeing agency makes us animists, we see agency where it is not. Many animals are also animists in this sense (Guthrie) And some experiences—classically the so-called "out-of-body experience"—convince us that our own minds are not tied to bodies. This leads to mind-body dualism, which despite the alterations of science is still by far the most popular view in the general population. Body is physical, heavy, matter, bound, opaque, etc. Mind is the opposite immaterial, light, luminous, free, transparent etc. Freed of body at death, mind naturally rises up to the sky which it is like. The idea that our minds are just motes of sky/heaven/absolute, embodied for a time, and will return to the sky at death, is probably the most powerful idea humans have ever had. This is also why reality is so strongly associated with the sky also. It is both compelling and also completely wrong.

To some extent I'm repeating myself here from previous essays. The repetition is for emphasis, but also because I am refining this argument as I go along. And it leads on to the second half of this essay which considers our place in the mind-independent world and the implications of this for Buddhism.


Substance & Structure. (5 Jun 2016)
Buddhism and Existence (17 Jun 2016)
A Layered Approach to Reality.

• Part I. (17 Jul 2016)
• Part II.1. (22 Jul 2016)
• Part II.2. (29 Jul 2016)

Experience and Reality. (17 Feb 2017)


Searle on Consciousness and Social Reality

For the longest time we considered ourselves to be apart from the world. There was the universe and there was us. And we were special. So special that the universe was made just for us; and/or we were made to decorate the universe. And typically this specialness was fractal - at whatever level you look, people believed something along the lines that they were "God's chosen people". This has led to untold conflict and suffering as "the chosen ones" sought to convince others of their specialness by killing, raping, pillaging, and/or enslaving them. I'm this writing in the aftermath of a series of religiously inspired mass murders in London (mind you, I'm also against our government committing similar murders in the Middle-East).

Our discoveries about the world have dissolved us into the world. What we have learned has reduced any distinctions between us and the world; between us and other animals; and between different tribes amongst us. We are very much in and of the world. We're pretty much all alike, tell the same kind of stories about the world and ourselves, have the same kinds of longings. Most people's needs are actually pretty simple: shelter, food, sex, and community. The more we look, the less special human beings are. We just happen to be better at a particular combination of functions that are widely found in the living part of the world; and to have co-opted some key functionality to other tasks (such as shape recognition being adapted to reading).

I make the distinction between experience and a mind-independent world (sometimes I say "experience and reality") because it's a useful way of talking. The distinction is methodological, to some extent epistemological, but not ontological. From my point of view, your mind is independent of my mind, but it is not independent of the world, indeed it counts as part of the world. You have a similar frame of reference with respect to other people. And with all due respect to the psychonauts exploring the far reaches of mind—who say, for example, that they "have no self"—their sensory field is still created by their senses not mine, and they still only have access to their thoughts and only have motor control over their body. Even if they don't feel a sense of ownership, they still have to acknowledge the physical limitations of being embodied and the applicability of natural laws. I think they know this, but struggle with conditioning which prompts them to see their experience as reality. Our minds are not little motes of non-world, are not separate from the world, but are merely a subset of the world.

John Searle makes the distinction between objective and subjective modes of being. I'm not entirely happy with this terminology, but it can be useful in emphasising this point about mental activity. What happens in our minds is only directly accessible to us, which is why we might say that it has a subjective mode of being. The neural activity that generates the mental activity is itself objective. It's only the emergent results that are subjective (i.e. accessible only to our own minds). The analogy I use is that the nutrients from the food we eat are only accessible to our bodies, because when we ingest them the chemical processes of digestion take place inside our bodies. Similarly the processes that produce minds take place inside a body and the results are only directly accessible within that body. So mind is subjective in the same way that digestion is subjective.

Just as we have an objective science of digestion, there is no reason we cannot have an objective science of mental activity. Although I predict it won't be through reductive methods and theories. Reductionism is fine for exploring substance, but it destroys structure and mind is all about structure and emergent properties of structures. We've scarcely begun to explore antireductive methods of understanding reality, because most of us (including Buddhists) are still obsessed with the successes of reductionism. To the best of my understanding, enlightenment doesn't change any of this.



Minds (all minds) do work in a distinctive way. Our ideas and images need not be real or conform to the laws of nature. I can imagine a pig with wings. I may mentally give it many details so that it becomes incredibly vivid in my mind's eye. However, at no point in this process does a pig with wings exist. I can even infect your mind with my image, by describing the pig with wings to you. Now you have a pig with wings in your mind too. But there is still no pig with wings in the world. Imaginary objects are not bound by the same rules as real ones. One couldn't just stick wings on a pig an expect it to fly. For example birds have many specific adaptations that enable them to fly, including hollow bones, feathers to create an aerofoil, musculature to produce the required power, and so on. Our mental images and creations don't have to deal with these physical limitations. We can be fairly sure that any animal that plays or dreams has the same interesting capacity to some extent.

I think most scientists and philosophers now believe that, despite the freedom of mental content, the mechanisms that generate that content do follow the laws of nature. Even though we're not quite sure how its done, we've ruled out other possibilities. For example, there is no need, no room, for a supernatural explanation of mental activity. We can be confident that mental activity is an emergent property of a living brain. Not absolutely certain, but as certain as we can about anything. We leave open the possibility that miraculous testimony might one day be backed up by miraculous evidence, but until then we focus on what seems overwhelmingly likely.

Any living body that has a functioning brain will display far more complex behaviour than one without, and the motions of that body will deviate from the norms dictated by simple physics. If you stand me and a bowling ball at the bottom of the stairs in my house, the bowling ball will never spontaneously go upstairs; whereas I do this all the time (as does my landlady and her cats). Some aspects of having a mind are obvious from the outside. If I go upstairs empty handed and return with a coffee mug, it's no great stretch of the imagine to speculate that I went up stairs for the purpose of getting that mug and that I am now going to do some mug-related activity like making coffee or washing up. You can infer how my mind works based on your previous knowledge of me, on your general knowledge about people, and on how your own mind works. This procedure is not unerringly accurate, but good enough at the level for which we evolved the capacity (i.e. to enable a small-to-medium, mutually-dependent social group to thrive). We can model how each other feels through noting and imitating facial expression, tone of voice, posture, etc., though experience suggest we're less good at attributing motives. These forms of mind-reading apply for social mammals and even work both ways to some extent between us and domesticated animals. 

In John Searle's terms some parts of the world have a subjective mode of being (i.e. mental activity), and some have an objective mode of being. However, I think Searle goes wrong at this point. He argues that our experience of things that have an objective mode of being is "direct" (a favourite word amongst Buddhists). In other words he consciously adopts a naive realism. There is so much evidence against naive realism that one boggles that such a clever guy, who has made such major contributions to how we understand ourselves, would go off the rails at this point and argue for something as daft as naive realism.

Not only is our mental activity a small part of the world, but the mental activity we are aware of is a small part of the overall activity. Our brain is constantly processing and producing information, but just occasionally it shunts something into the part of the brain that deal with self-awareness. The conscious part of our mental activity is just the tip of the iceberg, though again we tend to privilege this part because we identify with it as special. The "direct" quality of perception is an illusion. And the best evidence for this is the large number of perceptual illusions we are prone to. Experience is never direct. However, many Buddhists claim that they can, through mental exercises, perceive "direct experience". In this case they mean "direct" in an entirely different sense that is more to do with stripping away any conceptual overlays. Voluntarily shutting down one's higher brain functions produces a certain way of perceiving experience that aficionados recommend, but there is nothing direct about it.

So this is the situation that we find ourselves in. We live in a particular kind of world, but we are also wholly in and of that world. A tiny part of the world is dependent on, and only accessible to, my mind; but for the most part the world—the incomprehensibly vast universe covering dozens of orders of magnitude—is independent of any mind.*

* If the reader is still thinking, "But what about the need to observe the cat in the box?", I direct them to my essay, Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat (29 October 2010). 

My view is also a form of realism, we might call it a qualified realism. I take seriously what scientists tell me about how I perceive the world. Early Buddhists seem to have got this at least partially right: experience is not simply the subjective domain of the world, it is what happens when the objective and subjective domains overlap. I follow the representationalists (especially Antonio Damasio and Thomas Metzinger) who argue that our brains form virtual models of self and world, and that these are what we experience, or that these are experience (in which case they correspond to the five skandhas of the Buddhist tradition). My seeing a form is mediated by a large number of brain areas that process vision, but also with areas that recognise what things are, that name attributes, that create emotional responses, and that inform me of how I might interact with what I'm seeing. To perceive something is to infer knowledge about it, but also to infer possible interactions, and so on.

One of the key methods in neuroscience to-date is to tally all the ways in which perception, cognition, and our sense-of-self, can go wrong and then try to infer what the mind must be like to be able to go wrong in that way. When one takes all the evidence into account there is no other plausible explanation: perception and particularly our perception of a sense-of-self, are virtual rather than real. "Virtual" here means, having all the properties and functions of a real thing, but not being physically instantiated. The brain is a reality emulator. The sense of having a first-person perspective on experience can break, or we can shut it down through meditative techniques. Unfortunately if this happens to us, it tends to lead to unwarranted metaphysical speculation. In particular, for Buddhists, the shift in perspective is interpreted as an insight into the nature of reality. Religieux indoctrinated with different views take this experience as meaning something else, such as being one with God or merging with the absolute.

Experience is an emergent property of living, embodied brains. Experience only exists, to the extent that it exists at all, as a product of our interactions with a mind-independent world. In this, experience is unlike the world, i.e. experience is dependent on our mind. It is presumably more efficient to employ a model of the world because the sheer volume of incoming information would otherwise quickly overwhelm us and render us incapable of action or reaction. After all this is why human employ models when dealing with complex situations.

We can make a methodological distinction between experience and reality, with some caveats. Firstly, "reality" is used in the value neutral sense that I have described; and, secondly, we have to acknowledge that ultimately experience is an aspect of reality, i.e. that part of reality, with a "subjective mode of being", that only we have access to. However, roughly speaking, experience is our personal world; while reality is the public world that we all share. For each of us there is an epistemological distinction between self and world (our thoughts are clear to us, others' thoughts are opaque). And it can be useful to talk as though these were separate as long as no one is confused about the context.

While the ancient Greeks were busy speculating about "reality", in ancient India they had figured out that if you completely ignore sense experience, there is a class of experiences that one can have that are unlike any other. By focussing internally, one can withdraw into a state of peaceful bliss. This is not only very evocative of mind-body dualism, sky-beings and all that, but it also gives the meditator a totally new perspective on experience. Reflecting on experience, especially in the light of being aware while experience stops and then restarts, can result in permanent changes to how we experience the world. The first-person perspective can drop away, leaving us operating in a field of experiences without a subjective reference point. Those who do experience the world in this way describe it in glowing terms.

For many Buddhist traditions this luminous experience is reality. Part of my project is pointing out that it isn't. Selflessness is still experiential, or at least involves a perspective on, inferences from, and interpretations of experience. Granted, the luminosity or selflessness or whatever are unlike anything humans normally experience, but they are still experiences being had by a person. The interpretations of the significance of these experiences are so very obviously culturally determined, that calling it "liberation" in any ultimate sense is clearly going beyond the data. One may well be free of certain types of conditioning as a result, but intellectually many well-worn ruts still exist and channel the thoughts of the "enlightened". Typically the liberated person judges their experience to confirm the doctrine that they have been indoctrinated with. Thus the liberated still appear to suffer from confirmation bias. I've recently come across work by Jeffery A. Martin, which I have yet to fully evaluate, but at the very least he appears to have a useful vocabulary for this kind of experience, which he calls "non-symbolic". Enlightenment in his terms would be persistent or on-going non-symbolic experience. I think this may turn out to be a very useful of talking about enlightenment to disentangle it from the legacy terminology of Asian tradition (not to mention unhelpful English translations of such terminology).

Unfortunately the non-symbolic experience is so engrossing and all encompassing, that those who have it are often supremely confident in their interpretations of their experiences. They are often unwilling to contemplate any other interpretation. I accept that at least some of the people who claim to have no self, really do have a different experience of the world, but I'm unwilling to accept their metaphysical/ontological claims on face value.

Experiences of the non-symbolic type led to Buddhists to develop an influential discourse that begins with a simile: "form is like an illusion" (rūpam māyopama). Here "form" represents all of the five branches of experience, i.e. form, sensations, perception, volition, and cognition. These are how early Buddhist conceptualised the processes required to have experiences. So we could read this as, "experience is like an illusion". The skandhas are still not a bad list, even if the definitions of the items have become overly vague. Many people find the skandhas provide a useful methodological focus for reflecting on experience. "Illusion", here, translates the Sanskrit and Pāḷi word māyā, which comes from a root (√mā) meaning "to create", and is related to the creative power of gods. In Buddhist myth, for example, the Buddha's mother is called Māyā, which probably means something like "Creatrix" (it's a Brahmanical name with Brahmanical religious connotations). However, in Buddhist texts māyā usually refers to something conjured up, usually by magic, which deceives the mind into thinking it is real, when it is not. 

How can we understand the idea that experience like an illusion? In the context I have been outlining, we can say that experience, is like an illusion to the extent that it is unlike the mind-independent world. In other words the question about experience and illusion only makes sense when the contrast between solid objects and ephemeral experience is clear.

I had an insight into this on a long retreat some years ago. I was standing with a friend, both of us looking at a 100m vertical rock face. And I said, "but it doesn't change". My friend's response was "close your eyes". In that instant of closing my eyes, the rock did not change one iota; but my experience of the rock changed completely. My experience changed from a primarily visual one to a primarily mnemonic one (I had a fresh memory of seeing the rock). When I opened my eyes again and switched back to a visual experience, the rock was again apparently unchanged, but my experience changed completely. It's not that everything changes, although, of course, it does. It's that experience is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and insubstantial. In fact experience can completely cease, leaving us alive and aware, but not aware of anything. This is not reality, but is better described as the experience of the cessation of experience (nirodha or nibbāna).

The idea of a mind-independent world is not explicitly endorsed by any Buddhist text. However, the early Buddhist model of perception requires that there be what we would call an "object", but which they called a "foundation" (ālambhana) that is not encompassed by their idea of mind. The foundation is contrasted with the sense faculty (indriya) and sense cognition (vijñāna). In other words the foundation for perception is independent of the mind. However, nothing is ever said about the nature of the foundations of perception. It is merely a background to the act of perception and the focus in entirely on the cognitive aspects of the act. However, it does mean that a mind-independent world is entirely consistent with the early Buddhist model of perception.

The philosophical position that the world is an illusion is common in other Indian traditions (especially in Sāṃkya-darśana and the traditions it influenced such as Vedanta and Patañjali's Yoga ). However, this position is not practical and long ago ceased to be interesting. In fact, we know that the world is not an illusion. The world is real, in the value neutral way I have described. Experience can certainly deceive us about the world, but this is a commentary on experience, not on reality.

The world is not an illusion or even like an illusion. Quite the opposite. The world is the (relatively) stable reality against which the concept of "illusion" has meaning. We contrast experience with the world and discover that unlike the world, experience is like an illusion - virtual, fleeting, unsatisfactory, insubstantial. This is an epistemological distinction. The ontological argument that mind and body, or mind and world, are substantially different or made of different stuff is untenable. Everything is a manifestation of one kind of stuff and reductionism is the right method for dealing with questions of stuff or substances. However, structures made from stuff are also "real", i.e. existent and causal. Reductionism fails at this point precisely because the associated methods destroy the very structures we wish to study. 

In Part 1, I argued for a mind-independent world. Or at least I summarised arguments that I have previously made at greater length, based on ideas I have drawn from various sources, especially Sean Carroll, Richard H Jones, and John Searle. I argued that this mind-independent world is value neutral, that it doesn't fit the narratives developed over centuries in which the world mirrors projections of human desires. The world is not absolute, transcendent, ultimate, divine or any of that. It just is what it is.

In this part I have tried to show that our relation to this world is not separate or unique, but integrated and of the same type. However, I also noted that our experience is not like the mind-independent world. Indeed, it is the contrast between experience and the world that helps up to makes sense of the Buddhist claim that experience is "like an illusion". This is a distinction I think few Buddhists will easily accept, because most of us are deeply indoctrinated to believe the exact opposite: either some form of idealism in which the mind literally creates the world; or that experience is the world. I see the standard Buddhist narratives as problematic and in the next part I will explain why. In the briefest possible terms, Buddhism as it stands is not compatible with the laws of nature. There could hardly be a worse situation for Buddhists.

In the first two parts of this essay I set up a scenario. I made a case for a mind-independent world, arguing that it is consistent with scientific knowledge and not inconsistent with early Buddhism. This dual approach hints at the overall purpose of the essay. I also tried to stress that I don't think we can project the human desire for perfection onto the mind-independent world, so that referring to it as Transcendental, Absolute, or even fair, is not warranted. The idea of an ordered universe is compelling; but why should it be ordered according to human standards? In fact, it isn't. Humans are only important to humans. An important and ongoing intellectual task is to identify the myths linked to such desires—just-world, perfect world, afterlife, immortality, supernatural, etc.—and reclaim them as human desires rather than as properties of the kosmos per se. The world isn't like that, but we are. On a practical level if we acknowledge our desires, we can figure out which are achievable and organise things as best we can to achieve them. It's not like fairness is a crazy idea, for humans.

Having established that there is a mind-independent world and that it is neutral with respect to our values, I tried to locate humans wholly within that world. Just because the world is independent of my mind, from my perspective, does not require that there is an ontological distinction between mind and world. There is an epistemological distinction due to the channels by which we gain knowledge. We tend to conflate the classic five physical senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) as providing us with information about the world and treat our mind-sense, that part of our mental activity which brings sensations and inferences to our attention, as providing a completely different form of information. Early Buddhists by contrast placed the mind-sense in the same category as the classic set of five senses.

The opening question of Part 1 was whether my experience was real or an illusion. I've been researching the history of the phrases from the Heart Sutra that begin "form is emptiness" (rūpam śūnyatā). These were originally a reference to that familiar Buddhist simile, "form is like an illusion (rūpam māyopamaṃ). There are two ways of looking at the skandhas: they can be seen as categories into which all phenomena—mental and physical—can be slotted, i.e. the skandhas encompass everything and are an ontology or a theory of existence. In some views this totality (sarvam) is real and in others it is unreal, an illusion. The middle way is to say that this totality is neither real nor unreal, but because it is contingent and ephemeral, it is like an illusion.

Alternatively, the skandhas can be seen as the apparatus of experience or the experiencing apparatus and are concerned only with experience (i.e. with mental phenomena). In this case the metaphysical question about real/unreal doesn't arise. Experience per se is like an illusion, because (in Western terms) it's all just representations in our heads. Experience is virtual - not real, not unreal. In this case the skandhas are not an ontology, but an epistemology; a theory of knowledge or of how we produce knowledge.

Sue Hamilton has made a good case for taking early Buddhism as referring to experience. And over many years of reading early Buddhist texts, I have found this by far the most productive approach to them. It also works extremely well when reading the Prajñāpāramitā texts. Where an ontological reading throws up paradoxes and conundrums, many times an epistemological reading is far more straightforward. This impression has been reinforced by discovering certain modern approaches to ontology and epistemology. But all this begs the question...

What does this account of experience and a neutral mind-independent world gain us? Why insist on the epistemological nature of Buddhist insight, e.g. that the skandhas are experience? The reason is compatibility. And hence the title of the essay. Traditional Buddhism—e.g. the skandhas as ontology—is incompatible with what we currently know about the world. This can hardly be a surprise since Buddhist ideas originate in Iron Age North India and are developed in a number of medieval Asian contexts. Very little knowledge about the world from these periods (ca. 500 BCE to 1800 CE) is considered accurate or reliable any more.

During the last 400 years in Europe and its imperialist enclaves around the world, we have discovered a great deal about the value neutral, mind-independent world. In 2003/4 of Cambridge Buddhists went to India on pilgrimage to walk in the footsteps of the Buddha. Right here in Cambridge many of the giants of the Enlightenment have studied, lived, and worked. Not figures of myth, but genuine historical people such as Newton, Rutherford, Darwin, Krebs, Crick, Maxwell, Eddington, Turing, Goodall... to name a few personal favourites. People whose ideas helped me to make sense of my world. Hundreds of other luminaries across the entire spectrum of human knowledge (and folly) lived and worked just down the hill from here. Why go to India?

A lot of Buddhists, especially Buddhists I know, are powerfully influenced by Romanticism. As such they can be carelessly dismissive of the European Enlightenment, some of them, rather ironically, use the internet to devalue science and technology. They seemingly forget that, though the Enlightenment did go down some culs de sac from time to time, it did a huge amount of good. For example, the Enlightenment effective broke the power of the church over all our lives. It extracted concessions for ordinary people in the form of basic freedoms and rights for the first time. Nor did these freedoms exist in any Buddhist country, where totalitarianism was the norm. Power shift away from ecclesiastical hierarchies, to democratic institutions. As new, more reliable ideas began to emerge, superstitions lost their grip on our lives, particularly the big superstition, God. Nietzsche announced the death of God, but it was the great figures of the Enlightenment who killed him. And a good job that was. The Roman Church and its Protestant spin-offs subjugated the people of Europe and the people conquered by Europe for more than millennium.

But things were no better in Asia or India. Buddhist nation states routinely denied citizens basic rights and freedoms, they substituted the kinds of religious ideologies that made subjects content to be subjects. The idea of karma was used to undermine Buddhists' sense of agency in the present, by insisting that what is happening now is a fate predetermined by how we lived our previous lives. We need to be clear that traditional Buddhism seeks to turn back the clock and take us back to a medieval worldview. The risk with this is that we relinquish the basic freedoms wrested from the church and put an ecclesiastical hierarchy back in charge. The level of sycophantic deference directed towards "venerable" monastics suggests that many Buddhists are all too willing to be subjugated by them. Just as it's important to resist the rise of the far-right in France, the "moral majority" in the USA, and the right-wing nationalists in the UK or India, we have to recognise the regressive and backwards social and political organisation associated with Buddhist nation states and Buddhist monasticism.

What I hope to show is that there is a middle way between embracing the intellectual slavery of religious ideology and the complete, nihilistic rejection of Buddhism. In other words, acknowledging the kind of world we live in, both in a physical and political sense, I want to show that we can easily imagine a Buddhism which is compatible with the modern world, but still worthy of the name "Buddhism".



The account of Buddhism as concerned with epistemology is consistent not only with key features of early Buddhist and Prajñāpāramitā accounts of experience, but also with a number of post-Enlightenment accounts.

On the Buddhist side, I associate the ideas most strongly with Sue Hamilton, but for example Bhikkhu Bodhi has also commented that the world with which the Buddha's teachings are concerned is the world of experience. It is also a view that seems to resonate with those people I personally know who have made most progress with meditation and insight, though not always with the people who have adopted so-called "direct pointing" methods, with whom I am still out of step. The latter still seem to believe that they have discovered "reality" in their experience, and while this is an understandable mistake, it is a mistake and only sets back the project of modernising Buddhism.

My approach does undermine those streams of Buddhism which purport to be about reality or metaphysics. Buddhism has nothing of interest to say on matters of existence, causality, space, or time. Nor does any religion. Buddhists may have a major contribution to make on the nature of experience and on the role of the first-person perspective in organising experience, but only if we can disentangle it from our narratives about "reality".

Buddhism as ontology is not compatible with what we know about the value-neutral, mind-independent world. When some Buddhists assert that the mind creates the world in the sense that "mind precedes matter", they are clearly at odds with most of philosophy and all of science. Those Buddhists are asserting a form of causality for which there is no evidence, and which appears to go in the opposite direction to "reality". Worse, Buddhist narratives about reality are not even supportable on their own terms (as I have been pointing out for some years now in considerable detail on this blog). When they come into contact with modern methods and knowledge, these narratives cannot compete, except where people positively want magical explanations and are thus willing to be fooled (and I know plenty of people like this). However, if we interpret "world" as the early Buddhists texts clearly did, as "world of experience", then yes, the mind does create that world, or at the very least is a central element in creating that world. (Note, it's not that Buddhist texts lack a social world, or a physical world. In fact it uses the word loka for all three. But the world we gain insight into is specifically the world of experience). 

This epistemological account of Buddhism is compatible with basic, macroscopic laws of nature because it says nothing about them and nothing that is at odds with them. There are other accounts of Buddhism which have similar compatibility. This is not a monolithic argument for Jayarava-ism. It's a general argument in favour of compatibility, using my ideas as an example of a compatible account.

When we confuse experience and reality then the result is usually inconsistent with laws of nature, because the contents of our minds, as virtual representations, are not constrained the same way that physical objects are (I illustrated this in Part 2 using the image of pigs with wings). When we correctly distinguish experience and reality, then we gain some wriggle room. Unfortunately for Buddhism, science is very accurate when it comes to the human scale physical world. At the scales of length, mass, and energy that we work with in our daily lives and which our naked senses can take in, science makes predictions far more accurate than our ability to perceive them, and in some cases more accurate than our ability to measure them at all.

When we take Buddhism to be concerned with epistemology we gain in two ways:

1. we gain an internally coherent reading of doctrines that are incoherent under an ontological reading;  and 
2. we gain an accommodation with science as the leading knowledge system of any time or place by stepping out of its way.

Some years ago I was obsessed with the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy. I emulated his efforts, often using discarded objects to create ephemeral sculptures. I began making freestanding arches out of whatever was at hand. A big feature of my four month ordination retreat was using my spare time to create arches from the abundant local stone (some pics here). I also got into making tall thin spires of stone, but I want to focus here on arches. A stone has certain properties: rigidity, density, external texture, colour etc. The stone I was working with was weathered from surrounding cliffs. Individual stones tended to be fairly flat and had a rough texture. Now a simple pile of stones does not have rigidity as a property, it is less dense than the stones that make it up, and doesn't really cohere into an object. It's more of an aggregate. When you make an arch you create something more than a pile of stones. You create a new kind of entity that has properties that piles of stones don't have. Archs are structures with emergent properties. 

My method was to erect two towers of stones that curved toward each other until there was a final gap that could be plugged by one more stone - the keystone in arch-making jargon. Up to that point neither tower would be capable of supporting itself, but relied on a substructure to hold it up. Inserting the keystone to complete the arc feels a bit like an act of magic (I know). The two unstable structures become one structure that is stable, there is a palpable shift in the distribution of forces as two things that feel inherent unstable, become one that is stable. The best arches are lifted off their support a little by wedging in the keystone, so that the arch is already free-standing at that point.

No investigation of the properties of the stones would throw up the possibility of making arches if one did not already have the idea of an arch as a structure in your head. The building blocks do not enable us to predict the architecture. This is the fundamental limitation on reductionism with respect to structure. On the other hand one can analyse arches to see how the properties of the stones, assembled in a particular way, create the new property that enables the freestanding arches to remain standing. 

The basic principles of arch-making are old. The Romans were already experts at making them. The physics is all quite well understood and can be described in classical terms. Cambridge and the surrounding area are home to some spectacular medieval architecture. The fan-vaulted ceiling of King's College Chapel is an apotheosis of the architectural arch. The Norman cathedral at Ely is a classic of the type and full of spectacular arches and a dome. However, these days we have pre-stressed, reinforced concrete, steel beams, lightweight metal-alloy cladding, and toughened glass. It's nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing, but to some extent it democratised grand spaces.

Architecture tells us a lot about a society. For example, the periods of self-indulgent monumental architecture in Britain, associated with the Normans and later with the British Empire, were signs of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a tiny ruling elite at the expense of both British workers and the indigenous people of the various colonies. During the height of the Empire, for example, typical housing for working people was rows of tiny, small-roomed houses, crammed together; built at minimal cost, with the cheapest materials, and little or no decoration. Walls were thin, the houses were not insulated, and many had little or no garden space. Socialising in such houses was next to impossible, so this was done at the local pub for adults, or out in the street for children (weather permitting). Meanwhile the bourgeoisie were building a network of country mansions, each with vast landscaped gardens, and a staff of peasants. Many of them on what was once common land, previously owned by no one but used by peasants as back-up for when work dried up. The huge dome of St Pauls Cathedral in London represents, as much as anything, the cruel inequality of British society and the avarice of the Church of England at the time. You also learn a lot about British society by noting that the statues lining the walls inside the cathedral are mostly military figures, rather than saints. The role of the military is to protect commerce.

We need to be clear that the meeting of Buddhism and modernism is not like two leaning towers of blocks coming together with only the keystone missing to join them into one harmonious whole. No. While Buddhists are hunting around for just the right keystone to complete the arch from the ancient past to the present, secular modernists have already just dropped a couple of massive steel beams across the gap, bypassing our religion entirely. Mindfulness is already a secular commodity and enlightenment is about to become one (Look up Jeffery A Martin for one version of how this might look, complete with hi-tech gadgets).

Once people realise that they can have the enlightenment experience without the burden of memorising a bunch of words in a dead language, a load of ancient Indian myths, some rather doubtful "history", and incoherent ancient philosophical speculations, then "Buddhism" is going to become an even more niche activity; a theme park attraction or a Asian fetish. Like most people, while I do appreciate the elitist grandeur of the Norman Cathedral, I mostly just want an affordable roof over my head.

As beautiful as arches are, and as fascinating as it is to make them, they no longer serve as structural features in buildings. Where arches are used, they are merely decorative rather than functional. Load -bearing is handled by modern materials in modern configurations. We might mourn the loss of the arch, but no one is arguing that we stop using steel beams or prestressed concrete and go back to using them as functional features of our buildings. Idea on the value of arches in structures is pretty much irrelevant.

Some critics of what they call "Buddhist Modernism" complain that the values being promulgated by Western Buddhists are just modern liberal values masquerading as Buddhism. I suppose to some extent this is true, but what is the alternative? Look around at societies in which Buddhism is the dominant religion. Look at their values. Most are nominally democracies, but until very recently most have also been dictatorships, very often military dictatorships. Most have been engaged in civil wars recently; many in wars with other nations. Democracy and human rights are not so much embraced by nominally Buddhist nations, as they are imposed on them by external, secular influences (one of the main ones being the cultural imperialism of the USA). 

Here in the West we now take liberal values—such as democracy and human rights—for granted. A couple of weeks ago, 68% or around two-thirds of eligible voters turned out for an election in the UK and this figure was considered "high". A third of the electorate not voting is outrageous when you consider what people went through to get the right to vote in this country! Ironically, traditional Buddhism, unmolested by modernism, might never have produced the kind of liberal values that we hold dear, if traditional Buddhist countries are anything to go by. Traditional Buddhists are likely be fatalistic about their lot in life, about the unfairness of the system, and about who is in power. As often as Buddhist monks protest oppression, they are the oppressors.  

If Japan had won the Pacific War for example, and subjugated Asia and the USA, leaving the Germans a free hand in Europe and Africa. Would we expect to have the UN declaration of human rights? History makes it fairly clear that the authoritarian, imperialist, militaristic government of nominally Buddhist Japan, with support from Buddhist clergy, was not heading in that direction. Communist China was brutal in Tibet, but it would have been much worse if Buddhist Japan had completed their conquest of Asia (which had begun some years before WWII).

So yes, we Western Buddhists have created a Buddhism that is consistent with our liberal values. But to be fair, we have created it from an idealised version of morality as found in Buddhist scripture, not from the historical values of Buddhist societies. Critics can be grateful for that, because in most Buddhist regimes, critics are not tolerated! We Western Buddhists may be religious, but we're not idiots. To argue that this is a form of modernism rather than a form of Buddhism is to ignore the highly eclectic intellectual history of Buddhism. The critique of Buddhism seems itself to be motivated by Protestant ideas about what a religion ought to be like. Sometimes I think it is ironic that my friend David Chapman touts a modernist version of tantric Buddhism, itself a syncretistic amalgam of various elements of medieval Indian and indigenous Tibetan religion, as a better "alternative" to what he calls consensus Buddhism. On the other hand, he is probably right that embracing the hedonistic tendency of the West is more likely to be successful than the suppression of it required by renunciation-focussed forms of Buddhism. Puritanism still has it's appeal to many Europeans (especially in the colonies they founded to allow Protestants to follow their religious ideology unmolested), but it's never been a realistic alternative to the way of life most people prefer.

The Protestant trend in religious critique, combined with simplistic readings of Foucault and others on the idea of power and society, has made Westerners overly suspicious of community. Indeed it seems to be de rigeur for critics of modern Buddhism to define the social aspects of Buddhism as not Buddhism. Modernists Buddhism is sometimes narrowly defined in terms of a few elite practitioners with on-going non-symbolic experiences. Which excludes 99% of Buddhists from the category of "Buddhist". Pop psychology buzz-words like "group-think" or "echo chamber" seem to be over-worked at the expense of any attempt to understand humans as social animals. Still, I think Buddhists embracing Protestant attitudes is probably neutral. At least in Protestantism, fatalism is undermined by the imperative to actually do something about one's faith, something sorely lacking in traditional Buddhism.

It is essential for any modern critic to acknowledge that human beings are social and hierarchical by nature (which is incidentally by I am a socialist and not an anarchist). The same is true for all social mammals and many social birds as well. Yes, some social situations are open to exploitation by sociopaths, but a human set apart from society, alienated from society, is far more vulnerable than one in a group. Isolation is cruel and unusual punishment for a reason. Alienated individuals are prone to addiction and mental illness.

Foucault's notions of power embrace the role of the subject in hierarchical relationships. As social animals we instinctively subject ourselves to the group norms in a trade off for the protection and other benefits that community membership (ideally) provides. Some of the happiest people in the USA live in strictly religious communities. Amongst the Amish, rigid social norms constrain the behaviour of individuals in ways that look oppressive to outsiders. However, an Amish knows that they can rely on their community to a much greater extent than any outsider can on theirs. And in most cultures, this tradeoff of conformity for a very high degree of support is the norm. It is ironic that in secular society, with all it's freedoms, inequality is orders of magnitude greater and so many people appear to have no support at all. The destruction of the union movement, for example, has decoupled employment rates from wages. Employment is at record highs in the UK, while wages have been falling in real terms for 10 years and continue to fall. Divided, we fall.

The embracing of Romanticism and the rejection of science however, seem positively detrimental to me. Of course, alpha-critic, David McMahan, highlights ways in which he thinks Buddhists have embraced science, but my observation is that the influence is tiny in practice. Those Buddhists who do embrace science are few, and have started to form breakaway movements, though it remains to be seen how well they can integrate the two. They often failed to make the corrective move away from ontological readings of Buddhism, leaving them attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. Or else they throw out far too much in an attempt at reconciliation. 

More interesting are those who have some ongoing non-symbolic experience and have either modified or largely abandoned the tradition to focus on just the elements that appear to directly contribute to non-symbolic experiences. This exacerbates the old tension (I almost said, the old injury) already mentioned, in which the social and cultural aspects of Buddhism are devalued in favour of isolated people doing specific meditative techniques. One of my friends characterises this as the distinction between Buddhism and the Dharma. Some movements are teaching people how to be Buddhists; others are solely focussed on creating non-symbolic experiences. I think we need both.

If a Buddhist group is only teaching people how to act like a Buddhist (which of course may include a regular meditation practice) then they would seem to be guilty of the complaint often laid at the door of secular mindfulness teachers: i.e. that their program is incomplete. On the other hand a group that only offers intensive meditation instruction and no pastoral care or community support also seems to be incomplete. On one side is the danger of fatalism, complacency, and formalism; while on the other the danger is solipsism, alienation, and delusions of grandeur. Is there a keystone waiting to be inserted? I'm not convinced there is on. I suspect this will be another case of steel beams making keystones irrelevant.

The rejection of science is particularly problematic for Buddhism. It is true that the scientific project is incomplete. There is a great deal that is not understood. And it is problematic that so much of science is dominated by reductionist ideology, which ignores structure and emergent properties. This seems to be changing. It's mainly physicists and neuroscientists who are obsessed with reductionism. A lot of other branches of science, such as biology, AI, or cosmology, understand that antireductionism is required where structures and systems are concerned. Chemistry is somewhere in the middle. We chemists know that everything is made of atoms, but that the really interesting objects are molecules and macromolecules, because they have properties and variety that are not found in atoms. No one designing a semiconductor or superconductor can afford an ideological commitment to reductionism, because the very properties that they investigate are systemic and emergent. Imagine if an architect only ever studied bricks and thought houses (let alone mortar) were not relevant because, being composite, they are not real. That's where a lot of science is right now. On the other hand, it's also where Buddhist doctrine has been stuck for 2000 years or more.

In the clash of Buddhism and modernity, Buddhism stands to lose unless Western civilisation collapses and we go back to medieval or earlier forms of knowledge. I suspect that in fact the tipping point has been reached and traditional Buddhism has peaked. Buddhism as a religion is going to be gradually eclipsed by recycled secular presentations of our best ideas (few) and practices (many). However, if we cede the domain of reality to science we gain in two ways. We are still the experts in understanding the world of experience (for now) and we are seen not to insist on the kinds of obviously false claims about reality that religieux typically make.

In his first book on Buddhism, authored from notes for a series of talks delivered in 1954 in India, my first Buddhist teacher, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, Sangharakshita, wrote that he prefered Buddhist doctrine to rational inquiry in all things (A Survey of Buddhism, Chp 1). Even then the romantic influence on this thinking is apparent. For example, describing Wong Mow Lam's translation of the Platform Sutra he says

Sangharakshita studiously ignored science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) throughout his long teaching career despite the advances that occurred during his career, including the discovery of DNA, the integrated circuit, space flight, personal computers, organ transplants, brain surgery, and so on. None of this ever seems to attract his attention. Even when he spoke about evolution (a 19th Century theory) in the 1960s, rather than citing Darwin, Sangharakshita innovated a teleological and vitalist approach to evolution that was completely out of touch, not to say at odds, with the science of his own day (let alone the science of our day). Sangharakshita's layered approach to "reality" under the rubric of niyāma (an unfortunate misnomer that considerable effort from scholars of Pāḷi in the Order has been unable to shift), recently reiterated and elaborated on by Subhuti, incorporates elements of the 19th Century Western thought of Comte and Mill, via the Edwardian figure of Caroline Rhys Davids. However, again Sangharakshita incorporates no insights from the STEM fields, but simply reiterates his vitalist teleology.

I know I find this frustrating and I'm sure many of my STEM educated friends and colleague do also. I seldom make the challenge direct and personal, but I think this time I have to. The idea of a value-neutral, mind-independent world eviscerates Romanticism. My whole approach is anti-Romantic. And it is a considered stance that I believe is necessary, however confrontational it appears (my motivation is not to provoke confrontation, it is to rescue Buddhism from obscurity). While any influence is unconscious, it is potentially pernicious. This seems to me to be consistent with the early Buddhist criticism of dṛṣṭi or "views".

On the other hand, I have never articulated a theory of aesthetics. Art and music do affect our states of mind. And if we are in pursuit of altered states of mind, then for this reasons, aesthetics are important. The lack of an articulated approach to aesthetics is something I ought to address at some point (art and music have been important to me most of my life). In an environment in which aesthetics has become synonymous with Romanticism, what would an anti-Romantic aesthetic even look like? But if I have failed to engage with aesthetics, then I'm in good company, because nor has any other critic of traditional Buddhism. 

A major remaining problem for modern Buddhism is the supernatural. I no longer find anything about the supernatural plausible - it is not required in a value-neutral, mind-independent world. But virtually all religious and even some non-religious people do. Many intelligent people are willing to remain, or insist on remaining, agnostic on this matter. I know that many of my Buddhist colleagues and acquaintances are fully committed to supernatural interpretations of experience and structure their self-views around supernatural narratives. The supernatural is a fact to many people and likely to remain plausible to them for reasons I have previously explored on this blog. I find the evolutionary accounts produced by scholars such as Justin Barrett, Thomas Metzinger, Robin Dunbar, and Stewart Guthrie compelling. However, if their accounts are accurate, then factual arguments will most likely never convince believers that they are wrong. The supernatural will remain plausible and will be impossible to eradicate from religion. It will continue to form the core of religion, but it also informs people's views about the world far beyond the religious sphere. Unfortunately, the supernatural involves built-in falsehood, and it can only hinder any attempt to free ourselves from harmful views. 

Meanwhile our methods and insights are being repackaged even now and represented in secular terms that appeal to a growing number of people who are not otherwise interested in religion, let alone an exotic minority religion like Buddhism.

I suspect that at some point Western Buddhism will split into two broad factions over the issue of the supernatural. If this happens then a lot that is good about the tradition in terms of stories, myths, art, and so on will be lost. I say this because I think that Buddhism, as presented to Westerners, is not sufficiently in tune with Western Values to ever be anything but exotic, with appeal to a tiny minority. As much as critics complain about the presentation of Western liberal values as Buddhist morality, in fact many Buddhists are scornful and dismissive towards Western values. Politics (and with it concepts like freedom and liberty) and STEM are seen as outside the scope of valid knowledge. And the view seems to be that once one in enlightened one's values will be radically altered to be consistent with the sentiments of the English Romantic Poets (a bunch of degenerate freeloaders who spent a lot of time getting out of their skulls on opium).

Since science and technology more or less define our modern values, any religion which eschews them or demonises them, as Buddhists tend to, will not grow beyond the 1% that we have attracted to date. And we will watch in frustration as other supernatural narratives, particularly God's love, divine forgiveness, and everlasting life, continue to outperform ours. It's a lot of hard work for quite meagre returns, and not really sustainable. Of course a diaspora who have nothing left but their deeply religious culture will probably keep the traditions alive for centuries. Judaism shows just how powerful cultural identity can be under extreme adverse conditions. 

In this longish essay I've outlined a view of the world that I think provides maximum compatibility between contemporary knowledge of the world and Buddhism. It requires a considerable compromise on our part. In this last part I've tried to make it clear, using the imagery of arch building, that the task is not simply finding the right "keystone" that will allow science and Buddhism to map onto each other. In fact I think it far more likely that science will simply bypass traditional Buddhism and leave it behind as a curiosity or fetish for Asiaphiles. Instead, commodified, secular versions of our key approaches to experience will eclipse traditional Buddhism, making much of it irrelevant. All it lacks at present is a sense of communal values, though of course the very act of commodifying something strips it of much of its value; and the therapeutic model steers away from creating communities.

I want to finish with a different metaphor. In his book on the canon of Western literature, curmudgeonly literary critic, Harold Bloom (The Western Canon), turns the tables on Freud. Freud had infamously diagnosed many of Shakespeare's characters with psychopathologies. Bloom was of the opinion that Shakespeare had the greater insight into the human psyche, and argued that Freud probably agreed with this, at least subconsciously. Freud was reputed to be obsessed with Shakespeare. Where Freud had diagnosed Hamlet as having an Oedipus Complex—a rather simplistic and gross reading of the character—Bloom turns it around and diagnoses Freud as having a Hamlet Complex as a result of his feeling that Shakespeare had the deeper insight. However plausible we find this characterisation, the idea of a Hamlet complex is one I find useful in considering many things in life, but particularly the potential fate of Buddhism.

Hamlet discovers from his father's ghost that his uncle Claudius, at his mother's bidding, has murdered his father and usurped the throne of Denmark. The testimony of a ghost would not stand up in court, but the knowledge compels him to act. He knows his mother, Gertrude, is complicit, so to confront his uncle is also to condemn his mother which he recoils from. For a while he feigns madness, or perhaps is a little mad, and during this period rebuffs his childhood friend and sweetheart, Ophelia. Things go from bad to worse when he inadvertently kills Ophelia's father, Polonius. Ophelia is so distraught from Hamlet's rejection and Polonius's death that she kills herself. There seems to be no course of action or inaction Hamlet can take to relieve the unbearable tension of his knowledge. Hamlet's attempt to expose Claudius using the play-within-a-play only alerts Claudius to Hamlet's awareness of his crime. Claudius plots to kill Hamlet, resulting instead in the deaths of his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the end, events overrun Hamlet as Ophelia's brother Laertes returns and, prompted by Claudius, accuses Hamlet of responsibility for her death. Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel. At the duel Claudius offers poisoned wine to Hamlet, but Gertrude drinks it instead and dies. But not before Laertes cuts Hamlet with a poisoned blade supplied by Claudius, sealing his doom. Hamlet's dying act is to stab Claudius with his sword, a final act of justice. 

We can define the Hamlet Complex as when one understands the situation, knows that action is required, but is prevented from acting not simply by indecision or cowardice, but also by the terrible unintended consequences provokes by attempts at action, and by the machinations of opposing agents. Eventually, events overrun the protagonist; leading to the worse possible outcome. (I'm not sure that this applies to Freud, but I'll pass over that)

To me Buddhism has a Hamlet Complex. I think deep down we all know that the world has changed and indeed is changing rapidly around us. I suppose we might go down the route of the Amish. We might reject the modern world, get off the internet, stop using electricity, motor-vehicles, and modern medicine; we might give up personal freedoms and adopt rigid social norms; and that might be a satisfying life. I've certainly dabbled in it, during for example my four month ordination retreat. But we'll never sell this as an ideal which modern Westerners can aspire to.

So here we are. We know the God is dead and religion is dying. We know that fewer and fewer people are religious. And yet we who are still religious stand by as some promote an identical program but call it something else, and some pick out parts of our program and commodify it. We have good PR to an extent that we don't deserve, but we can't seem to capitalise on it, because we are promoting the one thing that no one wants any more. And yet with some adjustments we could make it interesting to everyone.

On Twitter this week, David Chapman asked what Buddhists offer the world. We offer a vision of human potential; a practical path for realising that potential; and a community of people who want more from life than mindless consumerism and blind obedience to the dictates of commerce. These are our gifts (ratna) to the world. If we were more aware of the limitations of these gifts (particularly the powerful constraints on who can achieve their potential) and of what we don't offer (an ontology; politics), then I think we would be in a stronger position. Perhaps we can boil it down to the idea that, at our best, Buddhists offer a way for people to experience a powerful sense of interconnectedness; something they crave, but which modern life does not provide. Let's not allow ideology to get in the way of giving our gifts with an open hand. 

~~oOo~~

A few weeks ago, I struggled through one of the dullest articles from Buddhist studies that I've ever read. It was long, pedestrian, and had nothing much to say, but it touched on something I've been working on so I had to persevere.  Jonathan A. Silk's 2015 article on philology in JIABS could not be more of a contrast. Silk is incendiary in his approach to philology, burning to the ground many of the cherished assumptions of the field. After reading the article I discovered that the text is from a conference paper delivered at Oxford University in 2013, a video of which is online. I recommend it, as Silk is a good presenter (which is rare amongst academics reading papers) and his topic is of great interest to anyone working with or interested in Buddhist texts. The reasons that academic writing and presentation are so bad is another subject entirely. 

I learned philology by reading examples of it, rather than systematically studying it under the guidance of a teacher. I'm fortunate that a few scholars have given me assistance when I've requested it, Jonathan Silk being one of them (he is an expert on the Heart Sutra in the Tibetan Kanjur). Since I met Richard Gombrich in 2006, while attending his Numata lectures at SOAS, his approach to philology and that of his friend and teacher, K. R. Norman, have been particularly influential. Reading the articles of Professors Norman and Gombrich was my education in Buddhist philology. Norman said that the philologer tells us not only what a text says, but why it says that (and not something else, he seems to imply). I've always tried to take this to heart.

In this essay, I explore aspects of Silk's thesis on philology by looking at how it applies to the Heart Sutra, a text which exemplifies many of the problems he identifies. Silk and I are on the same wavelength on this. I have been coming around to some of the same conclusions, but without the expertise and clarity that he brings to the subject.

Deciding what a text says, let alone what it means, is far more difficult that most people imagine. I've outlined some of the difficulties in my essay Is There Any Such Thing as 'a Text'? (20 December 2013). For example, every single manuscript and inscription of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is different from the others. Mainly the differences are simple scribal errors, but most of the witnesses also suffer from cack-handed "editing". The late Nepalese manuscripts (18^th - 19^th Century) are so full of errors that they make no sense anymore. In 2014, I described a previously undocumented Heart Sutra text, containing more than 140 omissions, additions, and errors (using Conze's edition as a reference point).

The execrable state of the Nepalese manuscripts is one reason that, since Max Müller first described them in the late 19^th Century, the principal witnesses for the Heart Sutra have been the two manuscripts preserved in Japan (one of the short and one of the long text), particularly the so-called Hōryūji manuscript of the shorter Heart Sutra. However, even these, which probably dates from the 8^th or 9^th Century, are problematic. They suffer from grammatical and scribal errors (i.e. spelling mistakes); as well as odd punctuation and some adventitious defilements. On the other hand, argues, Silk, such idiosyncrasies can be informative about the history of textual production.

However, the question Silk raises is this: what is the reference point for making such comparisons? I used Conze's edition, but it was before I became thoroughly dissatisfied with it and with Conze's entire body of work on Prajñāpāramitā. 

The manuscript and epigraphical witnesses of the Heart Sutra give a confused testimony. Just as a dozen witnesses to a crime will all recall different details and will disagree on many of them. Out of this chaos, Conze scraped together a text that is more or less coherent, but what is the relationship of his eclectic edition with any historical Buddhist community? Even taken at face value, there is no evidence that a Sanskrit text like Conze's ever existed before he created it in 1948. This is a problem for all eclectic editions of Indian texts, and most especially Buddhist texts. The value of eclectic editions lies in the assumptions we make about what they represent.

Philologists take the possibility of recreating an ur-text from existing witnesses as axiomatic; the methods of doing so to be sound; and the results of these methods to be valuable. And Buddhists seem more than happy to accept the work of philologists on face value. But there is no objective reason to believe any of this. It is possible that we might identify common features of texts by comparing them, and we might conjecture about the immediate ancestor of the witnesses in hand. But that such a creation can be considered the ur-text is incredibly naive. We usually have no way of testing our conjectures. New archaeological finds often prove our conclusions wrong. And in the case of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, a number of errors have lurked in the text. Intense interest in the Heart Sutra has not translated into intense scrutiny of the text.

In the case of the Heart Sutra, it is apparent that we do not have an ur-text or anything like it. Though claims are made for a Sanskrit ur-text, and for two of the Chinese short texts, i.e. T250 and T251, according to my understanding of standard philological methods, none of the three could be the direct ancestor of both the others. So the ur-text appears to be lost and the confusion amongst the extant witnesses makes recovering it impossible.

Philology, drawing on underlying assumptions of the Western intellectual tradition, assumes a singularity at the beginning of history. The norm is that a single author composed a "work", instantiated it as a fixed "document", and created a "text" in the form of manuscript or inscription (Cf. Silk 2015: 206). This original work is understood to be a pure representation of the author's thoughts. In this view of the pure "original", we are forced to see differences in contemporary witnesses as corruptions. This language is suspiciously reminiscent of the Old Testament, which is not a coincidence.

Buddhist philologists inherited our methods and attitudes from European Biblical scholars. As they were dealing the word of God, the early philologists had a real problem with the variability of their manuscripts. It only got worse as they colonised the world and looted old Bible manuscripts, only to discover major differences from European received texts. That so much human error was apparent in the Bible was alarming for Christian scholars to say the least. Their urgent task was to establish an authoritative version of the Bible, eliminating human error entirely, to reveal the words of God. They also had to hide the existence of this variability from an unsuspecting public, because what would people think if the Bible were revealed to be a human production? The Buddhist public is similarly insulated from the variability of Buddhist texts. Buddhists often speak of, for example, The Heart Sutra, as though it is a unitary document. But it isn't. News slowly leaks out of scholarly discoveries, but scholars are generally careful not to rock the religious boat and the pieces are seldom brought together in ways that would cast doubt on the established view (here I differ from my mentor Richard Gombrich as he sees no reason to doubt the story that the Pāḷi texts tell about themselves and I see every reason to doubt it).

When Darwin was describing evolution, he chose a branching tree as the central metaphor for the process. He was of his time, focussed on describing how variety emerged by natural selection. Unfortunately, this was a poor choice, because, in both biological and textual evolution, hybridization is common. For example, in the last few years, we have discovered that all Homo sapiens outside of Africa have genes from Neanderthals, Denisovans, and some other, as yet unidentified species of human. Europeans, Asians and Americans are all hybrids, or in the vernacular, mongrels. A branching tree cannot show this, as it never recombines. Similarly, texts show every sign of different lines of evolution crossing over and influencing each other. That such influence is referred to as "contamination" is revealing of the attitude underlying the philological method. I have proposed (to the void) that we adopt the braided stream as our metaphor for evolution. Features such as tributaries, mainstream, side-streams, confluences, branching, recombining, ox-bow lakes, give us a much richer metaphor for dealing with the real world complexities of change over time. Fortunately, some biologists better placed for influence than I am are saying similar things (For some examples, see the notes at the end of my essay, Evolution: Trees and Braids). 

In the rest of this essay, I will offer some reflections on philology and the Heart Sutra under four headings: authenticity, authority, ownership, and aesthetics. To my mind, these issues are closely interrelated and thus not strictly separable. However, by taking each as a starting point for reflection different aspects of the problems with Buddhist philology come into focus.



The situation is worse still since there are three versions of the Heart Sutra in the Chinese Tripiṭaka:, i.e. T250, T251, and T256. All are different from each other. The earliest dated inscription is almost identical to T251, differing in only one character (used twice) though the substitute has the same phonetic and tonal value. Woncheuk's commentary suggests that at least one more Chinese version was circulating at the end of the 7^th Century and that a Sanskrit text was consistent with it rather than with T251, but he made T251 the normative text for his audience. He may have been influenced in this by the commentary of his rival Kuījī who also used T251 as his text. The three canonical texts are traditionally considered to be translations by from Sanskrit, but now we know that they are not translations and in each case the attribution to a particular translator is questionable. None of the three is an obvious source text for a putative Sanskrit "original". This suggests a missing Chinese mother text that underwent multiple parallel revisions resulting in the different daughter texts and was then lost.

So, in fact, none of the versions of the Heart Sutra, and certainly not Conze's Sanskrit edition, can be considered "authentic" in the sense required by philology. And here we run into the limits of philology when dealing with religious texts.

It gets a bit more interesting when we look at the situation from an anthropologist's point of view. In Chinese Buddhism, for example, T251 is the undisputed authentic Heart Sutra. Although other texts are preserved, it is only T251 that has ever been the subject of commentaries (since Kuījī and Woncheuk in the late 7^th Century). In Japan the authentic Heart Sutra is T251 written in Chinese, but pronounced according to Japanese conventions, making it incomprehensible in either language. In Tibetan Buddhism, by contrast, only the longer version was canonised and commented on, giving it the stronger claim to authenticity. Tibetan translations of the short text were found at Dunhuang (briefly ruled by a militaristic Tibetan empire) but none of them was incorporated into the Kanjur. Western Buddhists frequently recite the sutra in English translation, but there are dozens of different translations each of which is seen as authentic within the context in which it was created.

So from an anthropological point of view, the authenticity of the sutra is not a matter of reconstructed ur-texts or "originals". Not even (solely) a matter of putative original languages. The authentic Heart Sutra is simply the received text within a particular practice community, whatever form that may take.

Since commentary on the text assumes that it doesn't make sense on face value, commentators are largely able to skate over the incomprehensible parts, though Thích Nhất Hạnh is a notable exception to this because he actually dares to change the text, a fact we'll revisit under the heading of ownership. A garbled text can still be authentic in this anthropological sense if it is the text that a community prefers and uses. Another example of this I have written about is the 100 Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra which is usually chanted in a garbled form. Despite being easily restored to classical Sanskrit, as it is found in the earliest textual source, there is considerable resistance to such restorations.

Of course, a historian of ideas may wish to trace the development of a work as it changes over time, and it may be valuable to do so in that it gives us insights into the process of producing Buddhist texts. But one cannot really argue that any one version is more authentic than the others. Each community that uses a text defines what counts as authentic. This is not a recycling of post-modernist critical tropes, but an acknowledgement that the nature of the text in Buddhist literature is fluid; and that Buddhist communities are seldom interested in philology even though they are very interested in the issue of authenticity.

This situation is curious. I confess that I experience resistance to the idea that there is no authentic text except in the locally defined sense and no effective critique of the authenticity of a locally accepted text. The text is what it is, to the community who accept it; and it means just what they say it means (the Humpty-dumpty Principle). Which brings us to the issue of authority in relation to the Heart Sutra.

The authority of a religious text has nothing to do with how true or factual the text is; nor even its virtues as literature, since the literary merit of most religious writing is minimal (and made worse by translation). This is particularly so in the case of Buddhist scripture, which is often highly stylised according to aesthetic and practical considerations relative to ancient North India. By modern standards, Buddhist sutras are repetitive, turgid, and stilted. This is not helped by translations that ape the archaic language of the King James Bible; and which employ English vocabulary arranged according to Sanskrit syntax, aka Buddhist Hybrid English. 

Philology plays almost no role in the issue of authority in Buddhist communities. The authority of scripture comes from the collective agreement of people to treat it as authoritative. And that seems to be the extent of it. Of course, this seems insufficient to the philologist, but Buddhist communities just don't seem to care. They care more about respecting the author of a commentary than about the text. This is an aspect of the crisis in Buddhist philology.

However, the text does play a role in humans asserting their authority. For example, the text can be a tool for a person to assert a superior position in the hierarchy; or it can be a symbol of their superiority. Conze's commentary on the Heart Sutra is full of oblique references to his special insights into the meaning of the text, which he does not expect ordinary readers to understand. Conze set himself up as an authority on Prajñāpāramitā, outside of any community. Throughout his books on Prajñāpāramitā, Conze taunts his audience with their failure to understand the text. It is only decades later that we realise that Conze's work was very often shoddy and that his gnomic pronunciations on the text were more influenced by readings of German Idealist philosophy than by Buddhism. The irony is that despite his still authoritative reputation in Buddhist circles, Conze is an unreliable guide to Prajñāpāramitā. Conze-ism is a very peculiar reading of Buddhism.

Authority with respect to the Heart Sutra is part of a feedback loop: people seeking authority interpret the text and in the process, the text becomes a symbol of authority. When enough people point to the sutra was embodying something important, then people treat it as important, even when they don't understand it (which almost no one does). Not being able to understand something associated with the exercise of authority (be it economic ideology, or scripture) is treated as a sign that it is profound (as opposed to difficult, complex, or wrong). Confusion produces awe, especially when a high-status individual tells us that they understand the thing that puzzles us and our peer group acknowledges their authority. See also what Dan Sperber calls "the guru effect".

In terms of authority, it's not what you know, but who you know. Back in the 7^th Century, the two men were in direct competition to be the official successor of Xuanzang. Both wrote commentaries on the Heart Sutra. Kuījī went on to become famous as the co-founder, with Xuanzang, of a major Yogācāra based school of Chinese Buddhism. The other man, Woncheuk (a Korean), was passed over. It's likely that the Heart Sutra was a popular magic charm up to this point, written out and carried on the body to ward off misfortune. It is the commentaries themselves that establish the Heart Sutra as a text with a message. The source text for the Heart Sutra, i.e. Pañcaviṃśati (T223) and/or the commentary or Upadeśa (T1509), were important for Chinese Buddhism. The Udapdeśa was particularly seen as the most important interpretation of Prajñāpāramitā, partly because it was attributed to Nāgārjuna (again it's the person, not the text). Because the Heart Sutra is associated with Xuanzang it is considered weighty. Though T251 is attributed to Xuanzang, Nattier casts doubt on this. In fact, the evidence of Xuanzang's association with the text mostly seems to date from after his death. The Heart Sutra continues to play the role of magical protection (and this is also associated with Xuanzang), but it also becomes the essence of Prajñāpāramitā: a summary of the ineffable.

People sometimes ask me which book on the Heart Sutra to read and I usually say "none of them". There is Mu Seong's imaginative, but wildly inaccurate work; or Kaz Tanahashi's recent elaborate pretension to "scholarship" in a language he cannot speak or read; or one can turn to Conze's grumpy elitist mysticism, which continues to be reprinted; or to the Dalai Lama's little book, which perpetuates his pose of being a "simple monk" offering simple wisdom. All are designed to flatter the reader and the author.

I'll focus on Red Pine's "translation" and commentary since it is probably the most popular of these awful books. Pine trades on his reputation as a translator of Chinese texts. Here the translation is purportedly from Sanskrit, but Pine appears to struggle with the language and the English text is a mere paraphrase of Conze. He offers no real insights into the Sanskrit text and, worse, no comprehension of the context of the sutra beyond repeating some cliches that appear to originate with Conze. The commentary revisits the well-worn Zen absurdist approach to the sutra, popularised by Suzuki in the 1950s and 60s (which also forms the foundation of Conze's interpretation). Pine's folksy but ultimately vapid commentary is certainly popular. People seem to treat Pine as an authority on the Heart Sutra. However, as a work of philology, his book is worse than worthless, since it gives wrong information and misleads readers about the text.

Almost every prominent Mahāyāna Buddhist clergyman since the 7^th Century has composed a commentary on this text, though few rise above the level of a paraphrasing existing commentaries. The result is that we think of the sutra itself as authoritative, i.e. as possessing a human characteristic. The claim that the Heart Sutra communicates the "essence of the Dharma" is endlessly repeated. But as far as I can tell it doesn't. It really doesn't. It does give us some insight into the meditative state of emptiness or cessation. But it tells us nothing about "reality" or "transcendental wisdom" or how to practice.

Despite more than 150 years passing since the first translation of the Heart Sutra into English by Rev. Samuel Beal (1865), philological scholarship made little progress until 1992 and Nattier's article. Twenty-five years later, a good deal of basic philology remains to be done, and few scholars seem interested in doing it. Working through the implications of Nattier's copious footnotes alone could have sparked a PhD or two, but her main thesis seems not to have drawn the kind of attention it deserves. There has been no radical reassessment of the landscape of Mahāyāna or Prajñāpārmitā in China. Dan Lusthaus and Huifeng have both raised concerns about Nattier's thesis. I've reviewed their efforts here and here respectively. Neither produces any serious objection to the Chinese origins hypothesis. The text repeatedly referred to as "the most popular text in Mahāyāna Buddhism" consistently fails to attract sustained attention from philologists.

I believe the situation is somewhat different in Japan, but the majority of Japanese scholars publish only in Japanese, and very little of their output ever makes it into English. Nattier (1992) is clearly reliant on Japanese scholarship, but without proficiency in Japanese language (on top of Sanskrit and Chinese) a scholar is cut off from their efforts and insights. This seems unlikely to change anytime soon.

Ironically the most popular Buddhist text is one the least well studied and understood texts, not counting the hundreds that are entirely ignored. The context of the quoted sections is routinely ignored for example (I have partially addressed this in Attwood 2015). There is, to the best of my knowledge, not a single study of the larger passage from Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā, of which the Heart Sutra uses perhaps a third (I hope to begin to address this in a forthcoming article). Wouldn't it make sense to see the quotation in context? Kuījī knew the text was a quote in the 7^th Century, but more than a millennium later there is no comparative work on the source and quote. Perhaps the forthcoming publication of the Gilgit manuscripts of Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā will make a difference to this? On current form, it won't.

The question of ownership seems to be complicated. For example, it seems that anyone can offer a new English translation of the Heart Sutra and they are not bound by any convention. One can change the way key technical terms are rendered, or one can interpolate at will to "clarify" the meaning of the text; one can arbitrarily punctuate the text and break the text into sections. There is a curious lack of constraint regarding translation, but quite a strong taboo on changing Sanskrit sources which are still widely seen as "original" and thus sacrosanct.

In 2014, Vietnamese monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, changed his popular English translation because he found a mistake in the Sanskrit (that he left intact). Meanwhile, Huifeng (2015) has pointed out that the Sanskrit translator has misunderstood his Chinese source text. Huifeng offers a new English translation of the Chinese, demonstrating the correct reading, but refrains from offering a better Sanskrit translation. I pressed him on this point by email and got nowhere. Despite being ungrammatical, unidiomatic, or incorrect, no one seems to believe that the Sanskrit text may be changed. I recently pointed out that the Sanskrit translator has misunderstood the characters 明咒 (Attwood 2017) and have proposed that the Sanskrit be amended to vidyā. Interestingly I sent my article to a prominent web-based translator of Chinese texts who dismissed it out of hand and insisted that he would retain the wrong translation. Tradition always trumps philology.

It may be that this reluctance is related to a reluctance to accept Nattier's argument. After all the conclusion is that the Heart Sutra is what philologists call "apocryphal". I'm not sure the term has much meaning in Mahāyāna Buddhism, though of course, some Mahāyānists do believe that their sutras were literally spoken by the Buddha. All Mahāyāna texts are apocryphal in that they were composed centuries after the putative lifetime of the Buddha and contain many innovations which have no precedent in early Buddhist texts. The popular books which mention Nattier's article appear to struggle with it. Red Pine proposes that there is another Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā now lost which is not in the usual Sanskrit Prajñāpārmitā idiom and that this imaginary lost manuscript is the "original" from which the Heart Sutra is created. Tanahashi says that he accepts the thesis but then carries on as though he has not even read the section on the attribution of the Chinese texts to Kumārajīva and Xuanzang.

Anyone can create an English translation, but the Sanskrit is "sacred". A philologist is allowed to create a new edition as long as they maintain the fiction that they are reconstituting "the original". Editions gain the inviolable status of "the original". People still talk about the Sanskrit original of the Heart Sutra. In 2012, I noticed that Conze made a simple grammatical error in his 1948 edition of the sutra (retained in subsequent revisions in 1967, 1973). It took me three years to research and publish the solution (Attwood 2015). In short, Conze mistakenly read the historical present verb vyavalokayati sma as intransitive (lacking a patient) and read pañcaskandhāṃs (accusative plural, the patient of the verb) as pañcasakandhās (nominative plural, agent). Conze tried to smooth over the resulting lumps using punctuation. The result is weird. Anyone familiar with Sanskrit ought to have seen that Avalokiteśvara was the agent of all three verbs in the sentence and that he was examining the five branches of experience (vyavalokayati sma pañcaskandhāṃs). This correction brings the Sanskrit in line with the Chinese versions and allows for the removal of all punctuation since phrase boundaries within the sentence are clearly marked.

In the 67 years before I corrected Conze's mistake, at least a dozen top Buddhist studies scholars, including a number of experts in Sanskrit (including my scholar-hero Nattier), had commented on the Sanskrit text and offered translations. Red Pine built a reputation as an authoritative scholar on the basis of his "translation". But none of them questioned why the first sentence could not be parsed. Note that my 2015 article has yet to be cited by anyone, which presumably means that most people interested in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra have yet to get the news.

Why is the Sanskrit text, even in the form of newly generated editions, inviolable? The huge variability in the manuscript bears stark witness to the fact that the text has been changed in the past. But most punters never have any contact with the manuscripts (If you want some click here). In fact, the Prajñāpāramitā literature was frequently altered by editors, some of whom seem quite inept. All the pre-Tantric prose texts (the texts with numbers in their titles, as well as Vajracchedikā) grew over time. The fetish for fixing Mahāyāna texts in a Canon was something that developed in China and then Tibet. There is a contrast here with Pāḷi texts which were canonised quite early on. There really is no historical rationale for not changing a Mahāyāna text if we find a mistake. Mistakes were made. 

Part of what Silk is saying in his article on the failings of philologists is that texts are rooted in communities. If some Japanese Zen practitioners chant T251 (the Chinese text attributed to Xuanzang), in a Japanese pronunciation that is not comprehensible either as Japanese or as Chinese, and they feel it has meaning for them, it's not for us to judge. This is an anthropological view. The philologist is focused on what texts say and why they say that, but the anthropologist is interested in questions such as how chanting the incomprehensible scripture affects the behaviour of the community, how it enacts their values, and how it helps them to create a shared identity. And if each community, in time and space, uses a different version of the same scripture it doesn't really matter. The scripture that a community uses is the authentic and authoritative text for that community.

What we may ask makes a Mahāyāna text valuable in our society? In her book, A Few Good MenJan Nattier pointed out that just three criteria determine which of the hundreds of Mahāyāna sutras are popular in the West. The three criteria are that:

This may help explain the reluctance to improve Sanskrit texts by correcting errors. An extant Sanskrit text has an intrinsic value for Western Buddhists (as long as what it says can be interpreted as supporting liberal Western values). It may be that here we see the influence of Protestantism with its cult of the book. Certainly, we are taught to see Sanskrit as the "original" language of the sutras. Not all Buddhists directly buy into the Indian superstitions surrounding Sanskrit as the "perfect language", but this attitude may be an influence. Learning Sanskrit is a fairly major undertaking that few Buddhists are willing to commit to. Indeed few translators of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra seem to be willing to commit to it either. The fact that one cannot read the "original", and the taboo around Sanskrit texts, help to intensify the aura of mystery; and, I would argue, the submission to authority that characterises our communities. 

If this section of the essay seems a bit disconnected, it's probably because I struggle to make sense of the complex situation. In fact, I think the situation is bizarre. Some days I think it is hilarious. There is no rhyme or reason to the different attitudes to the Heart Sutra. Philologists seem uninterested in the text as philologists, and unwilling to engage with any philological problems that are identified, even if they themselves identify the problems! Meanwhile, Buddhists churn out translations and mystical commentaries with increasing frequency (accelerated by Tibetan Lamas joining the Zen bandwagon). One can do anything at all to the text in English; but the Sanskrit translation is taboo, even though the Sanskrit text people think of as "original" was created in 1948 by Conze whose methods and results leave a lot to be desired; and even though the original Sanskrit translation from Chinese appears to be have produced by a bungler. How does one make sense of any of this? 

The range of tribal values and attitudes that inform the approach to this text is impossibly broad and contradictory. I don't think the Heart Sutra contains paradoxes, but the way Buddhists and scholars relate to it does seem to involve paradoxes. There is no conclusion here, but lastly, I want to move on to consider some aesthetic issues involving the Heart Sutra.

In Austin and Searle's work on speech acts they make an interesting distinction between what you say (locution), what you mean (illocution), and what your audience understand (perlocution). There is no necessary relationship between the three aspects of speech. It is vital to know this in England, where what a person says is frequently unrelated to what they mean.Some days it seems as though everyone in the country is being sarcastic all the time. The famed English politeness is often a trojan horse. A polite English person may well be expressing contempt for someone of perceived higher or lower status. For example, using the title "Sir" is very often an expression of contempt rather than deference. I'm sure all societies have varieties of this and I suffer from being a cultural (though not genetic) immigrant, but I want to highlight these kinds of differences when considering the Heart Sutra from an aesthetic point of view.

It's quite likely that at the start of its life, the point of the Heart Sutra was apotropaic magic, i.e. for the purpose of warding off evil. Medieval Chinese Buddhists would have the text copied, roll it up, and wear it about their person. Or someone with more money would have it carved onto a "dhāraṇī pillar"—an octagonal pillar of stone, with a pagoda-like 'hat' on top—and placed at a strategic place to prevent evil spirits from intruding. Xuanzang is supposed to have chanted it to scare off demons in the Gobi desert on his way to India. Curiously this is the only time the Heart Sutra is mentioned in his memoir and I suspect it was inserted later to cement a relationship between the two of them by someone seeking to further legitimise the apocryphal sutra after his death.

Unfortunately for a long time dhāraṇī was seen in the context of Vajrayāna as a type of mantra, and thus in the province of tantric Buddhism. The confusion over the translation of the character 咒 (incantation, dhāraṇī or mantra depending on time-frame) has not helped this. Until the invention of Tantric Buddhism and its introduction to China in the later 7^th Century, i.e. for some hundreds of years prior to that, dhāraṇī were chanted mainly as magical protection along the same lines as the Theravāda practice of reciting certain suttas as protection (parittā). This has nothing to do with tantra and teleological approaches which treat dhāraṇī as "proto-tantra" miss the point. Dhāraṇī recitation and copying is an important Mahāyāna practice in its own right, though until the last ten years or so it has received almost no scholarly attention as such until Paul Copp's book The Body Incantatory. Dhāraṇī operates in an entirely different aesthetic to mantra.

On the other hand, as early as the late 7^th Century (the precise dates are unclear), commentaries were composed commenting on the Heart Sutra as a doctrinal text. The first commentaries were by Yogācārins, both students of Xuanzang. Kuījī acknowledges that there is a Madhyamaka reading of the Heart Sutra, but his commentary asserts his own Yogācāra interpretation as superior. This view of Yogācāra as superior to, and partially superseding Madhyamaka, became common in East Asian Buddhism (it finds its way into the doctrines of Kūkai in early 9^th Century Japan for example).

The sutra continues to play a dual role: a magical ward and a written record of ineffable doctrine, though members of different sects all see it as demonstrating their own sectarian doctrine. In the sense of a speech act, the illocutionary force of chanting the text is ambiguous, especially in the light of the sutra typically being chanted in a way that obscures the words, e.g. chanting it in a language the devotee does not speak. One of the special qualities of this text is that the devotee need not understand it for the "power" of the text to be effective. I've met people who claim to have had profound shifts in their consciousness on hearing the Heart Sutra for the first time - usually in Sanskrit (which usually means Conze's flawed edition). Chanting the sutra, in whatever form, retains a certain magical quality. Buddhism has this flavour of magical wish fulfilment throughout - though the "wish-fulfilling gem" is a Mahāyāna invention. 

Many of the extant Indian manuscripts seem to have been created not for reading, but as objet d'art or even as objects of worship, placed on shrines and offered flowers, candles, and incense rather than read or studied. Tibetan Buddhists have made a fetish of not allowing a book to touch the ground for example - or the proxy of the ground in the form of the floor of a house. I once attended a Tibetan puja at someone's house. Seated cross-legged on a cushion on a mat, I put the puja text on the carpet in front of me. One of the members, without saying anything, came and placed a cushion under it. It was never explained to me what was going on and I didn't ask. The carpet seemed clean enough to me and it certainly was not the "ground" as houses in New Zealand tend to sit on piles that elevate them above the ground. I can only suppose that it was related to the old Indian superstition of the feet being taboo. 

And yet, contrarily, the apparent meaning of the text—the ineffable meaning— is considered to be vitally important and so the text is assiduously studied by generation after generation of Buddhist acolytes. Dozens of commentaries have been composed in dozens of languages. Typically, alongside chanting an incomprehensible version of the text, students of Mahāyāna will also study commentaries of the text in their own language. So for example, Westerners will chant the text in Sanskrit or Chinese, but study an English language commentary by a famous Buddhist such as Thích Nhất Hạnh or the Dalai Lama. Chanting is magic, but apparently one must also try to understand a text that it is claimed defies understanding. Most teachers are more circumspect in explaining the inexplicable than Conze, in that they don't gloat about their superior insights. All of the commentaries I have seen quietly resort to hand-waving and misdirection when it comes to explaining "form is emptiness". The little books on the Heart Sutra also flatter the reader with simplistic explanations that are comprehensible. With practice, the reader can reproduce such interpretations so that they appear to understand the ineffable - at least well enough to win an argument. On the other hand, no one really seems to explain why the positive identity (form is emptiness) logically implies the negation of, for example, the Four Noble Truths. If "form is emptiness" then the Four Noble Truths are naturally affirmed rather than negated. I think however that Buddhists get a little frisson of excitement seeing their central doctrine being dismissed. They assume that it must be very profound indeed. Yet if someone outside Buddhism was to simply deny the Four Noble Truths, no doubt they would defend them to the hilt.

Here again, I struggle. Because from a philological point of view, most commentary on the Heart Sutra is worthless or positively deleterious to understanding. And yet a "teacher" with a very tenuous grasp of Sanskrit who produces a flaky commentary of minimal literary or intellectual merit, may nevertheless have succeeded according to the aesthetic criteria of their sect. Commentators such as Red Pine or Mu Seong, seem to me to badly mislead their readership, but are still highly popular and even revered for their efforts. And my efforts to point out their mistakes are treated with scorn and derision. 

As someone with a great interest in philology, I struggle with an aesthetic sensibility which raises an error to the status of a profound truth, and in which a correction is resisted often with considerable hostility. The tension between philological and anthropological approaches to the text cannot easily be resolved because they are expressions of quite different values. But the tensions between these two outsider (etic) viewpoints are as nothing to the conflict of either with insider (emic) views. The anthropologist seeks to understand the insider on their own terms, but also to analyse those terms dispassionately, i.e. not accepting those terms. They study the emic view but retain an etic overview, relating their observations to some theory of human culture for example.

The insider simply accepts the terms, hook, line, and sinker. In return, they gain acceptance to the group with all of the benefits membership bestows (or ought to). In a sense, acceptance is the key human value. Acceptance is primal. Foucault pointed out that we willingly subject ourselves to power, willingly make ourselves into subjects, in return for membership. That power in human relationship does not force people to accept the situation, that we ourselves make it happen. We are not the victims of power, we actively participate in power-relations whether we are high-status or low-status. This is far more obvious in other primates with their simpler lifestyles. One need only read Jane Goodall or Frans de Waal to see what primate societies are like and how we are very like them in many respects (though different as well). 

Is there really a crisis in Buddhist philology? In fact, despite Jonathan Silk's effort to provoke a crisis (and my own modest contribution), if one looks at the Buddhist Studies literature, it is very much business as usual. Philologists continue to churn out critical editions and studies of texts based on such editions. They still construct phylogenetic trees or stemma to illustrate how the texts are related to each other. However, in order to attract funding and meet artificial objectives, they study more and more obscure texts. Many of the new studies are on texts I've never heard of and that seem to have very little historical interest. 

The movement of research in the field of Buddhist studies can be glacial. Knowledge progresses over decades, if at all. There are very few exciting new developments or paradigm changing articles. Nattier's article on the Heart Sutra is still treated as provisional after 25 years, and very few people have paid it any critical attention. It has not provoked a flurry of follow-up articles. It has not changed minds. Silk himself (2013, 2015) still refers to the Chinese Heart Sutra as a translation from Sanskrit. 

In the meantime, Silk has launched The Open Philology Project to explore more dynamic ways of presenting texts that are more consistent with the reality of Buddhist texts. It will run over five years and hopefully produce some innovations in how philologists deal with Buddhist texts.

In reality, there is no crisis, but there should be one. The Heart Sutra illustrates this need because it cannot be contained or understood within the current philological paradigm. The very idea of an ur-text crumbles. The values by which we judge the worth of the Heart Sutra cover such broad ground that even the metaphor of a spectrum doesn't cover it. I've suggested the image of a braided stream, but in fact, a riot might be more appropriate in this case.

The different starting points for discussing philology and the Heart Sutra—authenticity, authority, ownership, and aesthetics—give a broad picture, but it is an abstract expressionist picture. The Heart Sutra is an enigma, not for the reason people think, but because of the reactions it provokes: from mystical fascination to studied indifference; from magical thinking to serious (though dead-end) philosophy. The Heart Sutra has a way of reflecting the views that people take to it. It is both tabula rasa and carte blanche.

Even if Buddhist philology has the decency to have a crisis, I don't think that will have any effect on most Buddhist communities. They demonstrably operate under a very different set of values when it comes to texts. Despite being almost entirely dependent on the preservation and translation efforts of scholars, people interested in the Heart Sutra maintain a rather grim contempt for intellectuals. If anything the crisis in conservative Buddhist establishments is social and related to the general decline of organised religions. They are content with medieval philosophy and resent intellectuals poking their noses in. If anything philosophers are counter-revolutionaries, who tend to abandon their critical thinking when approaching medieval Indian "philosophy" and go native. I've seen many modern attempts to get to grips with Nāgārjuna's method, with apparent relish of the experience of confusion. I have yet to come across a single published attempt to identify, let alone assess the validity of, the axioms that Nāgārjuna takes for granted. As far as I can see some of them are demonstrably false, and that undermines the whole enterprise. 

It is 25 years since Jan Nattier exposed the flaws in the received tradition about the history of Heart Sutra. In what is probably the best Buddhist Studies article ever written, she methodically works through the main thesis as well as a host of secondary issues with admirable clarity and thoroughness. Despite the comprehensive nature of her argument, Nattier left open a number of questions that have subsequently been largely ignored. In our three long articles, Huifeng and I have barely scratched the surface. I hope to get another long article published before the end of 2017 and have two shorter articles in mind.

I no longer think we will find interesting answers to important questions in ancient texts. They are fun to explore and I have been enriched by learning the languages, but pragmatically the future is ahead of us and the Iron Age has little to say about our problems. We cannot keep reinterpreting ancient texts and, in any case, the Buddhist establishment has little interest in new interpretations. Those developing secular applications of Buddhist techniques have little or no interest in the Buddhist superstructure of ancient ideas. Buddhist Studies as a scholarly field has resolutely avoided any confrontation with Buddhism (especially over axioms), and as the field is increasingly funded by Buddhists and staffed by Buddhist monks the situation is probably only going to get worse.

There isn't a crisis in Buddhist philology, but there ought to be one. As Jonathan Silk concludes:

"... if we wish to come to terms with Buddhist scriptures, their forms and their authorship, if we wish to think critically about establishing texts, how to interpret texts and how to translate them, there are deep, deep waters into which we must plunge, thinking about and considering issues of authority, of ownership, of intension [sic], of our place in the long... transmission of this literature (2015: 223). 

~~oOo~~

My worldview has undergone a few changes over the years. Not just because of religious conversion or obvious things like that. It has usually been a book that has shifted my perspective in an unexpected direction. Take for example Mercier and Sperber's book The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.

We all just assume that actions are explained by reasons. If actions are baffling then we seek out reasons to explain them. What is the reason that someone acted the way they did? Given a reason, we think the action has been explained. But has it? How?

Furthermore, when discussing someone's actions we assume that particular kinds of internal motivations are sufficient to explain the actions. We almost never consider external factors, like say peer-pressure. It's not that we're not aware of peer pressure, but that we don't see it as a reason.

So if person P does action A, we expect to find a simple equation, P did A for reason R. R is likely to be expressed as a desire to bring about some kind of goal G, call this R(G). So the calculus of our lives is something like this:

But this is not how reasoning works and it is not how people decide to do things. Most decisions, even the ones that feel conscious, are in fact unconscious. The decision making machinery is emotional and operates below our conscious radar - the result that pops into consciousness is preprocessed and preformed. Essentially, it is what feels right, on an unconscious level.

Having decided, we may either just do it with a conscious sense of it feeling right (so-called "feeling types") and only produce reasons after the fact (post hoc) when asked; or we may first seek a reason (so-called "thinking types") and then act. Both kinds of reasons are post hoc - the decision to act comes first, then we come up with reasons to support that decision. The number of times that someone asks "why did you do that?" and you come up with nothing, is a sign of this.

The most extreme examples of this occur in people with no memories due to brain damage. Oliver Sachs described the case of a man who asked "What are you doing here?" never knew, because he could not remember. But the part of his brain that still worked would conjure up a likely reason, and since it fit the criteria of a reason, that's what we would say. But he would not remember saying it and asked again, might come up with another equally plausible answer. He was only ever accurate by accident. He was not consciously lying, but not understanding the deficit caused by his injury was speaking what popped into his head.

We are very far from assiduous in generating and selecting reasons. For a start, we all suffer from confirmation bias. We typically only look for reasons to support and justify our decision. Ethics is partly about realising that our actions are not always justified and admitting that. Not only this, but we are also lazy. Once we come up with one reason that fits our criteria, we just stop looking. We typically take the first reason, not the best one, but having settled on it, will defend it as the best reason.

Of course, we can train to overcome the cognitive biases, but most of us are still bought into the paradigm of P did A for R (G). It's transparent. We don't see it. I know about it and I don't usually see it. It's only when I'm being deliberately analytical that I can retrospectively see the nature of my reasoning. And it is not what we have taken it to be all these centuries. 

I'm never been very convinced by so-called post-modernism. They make the mistake that I would now call an ontological fallacy - they mistake experience for reality. But the mistake is so common amongst intellectuals that they cannot be singled out. This idea about reasoning might well be the kind of epistemic break that would really constitute our either leaving modernity behind or more likely, finally becoming truly modern. The idea that modernity represents a break with medieval superstition, is also clearly not quite right because our reasons are no better than superstition in most cases. 

And of course, some of us are able to see more complex networks of cause and effect. We see political complexities, or sociological complexities, for example. These produce more sophisticated reasons, but even these tend to get boiled down into generalisations or interpreted from ideological points of view. And ideologies make sense to people because of reasons. 

The whole 2010 UK general election was fought on the basis of a single idea: Labour borrowed too much money. This falsified the situation in a dozen different ways but because it offered a reason for the disastrous economic crash in the UK in 2008, and because Labour could not offer a similar simple reason, it won the day. A lot of the political right appears to be convinced that this explains everything. So the of the whole world has the same economic problems, and economies are incredibly complex, but it all boils down to Labour borrowed too much money. And this—this simplistic, fake fact— is widely considered to be plausible. The UK is leaving the EU for reasons. And so on. 

But here's the thing. Reasons, on the whole, do not explain behaviour. They are just post hoc rationalisations of decisions made unconsciously on the basis of the value we give to experiences and memories, which are encoded as emotions. The reasons you give for your own actions, let alone the reasons you give for mine, do not explain anything. And as I have said, we simply ignore some of the more obvious reasons that any social primate does what it does (because of social norms). It's not a matter of deliberate deception. After all, we all believe that the reasons we give sufficiently explain our actions and that we can accurately gauge the kinds of reasons that are applicable (and we believe this for reasons). The problem is more that we don't understand reasons or reasoning.

How does this affect the issue of culpability? 

Any student of Shakespeare will be familiar with the problem of people being puzzled by their own actions. Shakespeare might have been the first depth psychologist. But if we are discussing the issue of culpability then things get really difficult. One could write a book on the actions for which Hamlet might be culpable and to what degree (probably someone has!). 

The whole notion of culpability has taken a beating lately. Advocates for the non-existence of contra-causal freewill are persuasive because metaphysical reductionism is a mainstream paradigm of reasoning. One hopes that the flaws in such arguments will eventually be exposed—contra-causal freewill isn't relevant or interesting; structure is real; reductionism is less than half the story of reality; etc.—but until they are, discussions of culpability are likely to remain confused. 

Mercier and Sperber's argument about the nature of, and the relationship between, reasoning and reasons is a deeper challenge. Because we now know that even if we get a sincere answer to the question "Why did you do that?", very few of us are even aware that the reasons we give are simply post hoc rationalisations and that they are not sufficient to explain any action. Clearly, our will is always involved in deliberate actions, but we ourselves may not understand the direction our will takes. We generate reasons on demand because society has taught us to do so... for reasons. But at root, most of us are mystified by our own actions most of the time. 

Legal courts still represent a pragmatic approach to culpability. Did P factually do A? Yes or no? If yes, then punish P in the way mandated by the legislative branch of government. As readers may know, George Lakoff has analysed in this dynamic in terms of metaphors involving debts and bookkeeping. If action A incurs a debt to society, then P is expected to repay it We still largely operate on the basis that the best way to repay a social debt is to suffer pain, but we have created "more humane" ways to make people suffer that are on-the-whole, less gross but also more drawn out than physical punishment. Indeed we consider inflicting physical harm as barbaric. And why? Oh, you know, for reasons. 

If you're going to make someone suffer, it's better to inflict psychological suffering on them―through extended social isolation, for example, or enforced cohabitation with unsavoury strangers―than to inflict physical harm. Because of reasons. If my choice was between years of incarceration with criminals and being beaten senseless one time, I might well opt for the latter (well, I wouldn't but some might). Quite a lot of people are beaten and raped in prison anyway, and a majority are psychologically damaged by the experience so a one-off payment in suffering might make more sense. It's more economical. Just because you are squeamish about beating me, but not about psychologically torturing me by imprisoning me, doesn't make your squeamishness more ethical. You are still seeking to inflict harm on me in the belief that it will balance out my culpability for acting against the laws of society... for reasons. 

Then again, if I am an Afghani, fighting for my homeland against a foreign invader, you might just choose to drop a bomb on me from 40,000 ft, killing me and my entire family, because of reasons. 

What happens to justice when reasons are exposed as fraudulent? And they may as well we fraudulent because they're only relevant by accident. We see this happening all the time. The UK no longer has the death penalty not because British people don't like killing (Britain has been almost constantly fighting wars it has initiated or encouraged for 1000 years!). Rather we realised that we killed a few too many falsely convicted innocents. That means we have created a debt for which we ought to suffer. D'oh! 

We're for or against capital punishment for reasons. We vote left or right for reasons. We are for or against, this or that for reasons. We love, marry, fight, work, take on religious views and practices, choose our haircut, our friends, etc... for reasons. Good reasons! Sound reasons. Thought out reasons. Wait! We can explain. And you have to take our reasons seriously, because of... other reasons. Don't you see? It all makes sense... doesn't it? 

In other words, our whole lives are based on post hoc rationalisations of decisions we do not understand and cannot explain, but which we are convinced that we do understand and can explain. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's fucked up.


So, how confident should anyone be about their reasons? 

We so often seem very confident indeed (because of reasons), but if there is one other rational person who disagrees with us, then we ought to be at best 50% certain. If it's just a matter of reasons... then 50% seems optimistic, because chances are that neither party has any real idea of why they believe what they do. On most social matters one can usually find a dozen rational opinions based on reasons, and we believe our own reasons (for reasons), or we are persuaded of a different view for other reasons.

What does any of this amount to?

And more to the point, how can we tell what is of value, if reasons are not a reliable guide?

I think Frans de Waal has got the right idea (for reasons). Ethics (i.e. social values) is based on empathy and reciprocity, capacities we and all social mammals evolved in order to make living in big groups possible and tolerable. It all builds from there. Other rational opinions are available, but for reasons, I like this one. I still have no idea what gives something an aesthetic value, but I do believe (for other reasons) that we experience that value as an emotional response. Again, other rational opinions are available.

I cannot help but think that my view, cobbled together from other people's views, makes more sense than any other view I've come across. But then, everyone thinks this already. So then the question is, how do some opinions become popular? And I think Malcolm Gladwell has some interesting things to say on that matter in The Tipping Point. In his terms, I'm a "maven", but not a persuader or connector. 

~~oOo~~

~o~ 

One of the many linguistic puzzles of the Heart Sutra is the construction nāstitvād that one finds in Conze's Section VI. I have been worrying away at this problem for five years and just now had a breakthrough, but it requires some context. The text in Conze's revised, 1967 edition and 1975 translation of the Heart Sutra tells us 

Almost everything about this translation is wrong. It is one of the most egregious examples of Buddhist Hybrid English in the entire canon of Buddhist translations. The English is execrable and incomprehensible. "Non-attainmentness" is a rather ugly neologism. And what on earth is a "thought-covering" (and why is it hyphenated)? Nor have other translators ever really got to grip with this passage. Those who purport to translate it from Sanskrit have failed to see a very basic mistake in Conze's Sanskrit (incidentally repeated by Vaidya in his edition). Red Pine simply dismisses the rules of Sanskrit grammar at this point with hand-waving and produces a translation that fits his preconceptions but has nothing to do with the underlying text (See p.137 of his book). 

As with previous essays of this kind I will make frequent use of the Chinese. In a previous essay, I worked through Huifeng's treatment of the Sanskrit acittāvaraṇaḥ in light of the Chinese text. I accepted that he was right to reinterpret the passage, but disagreed on the definition of the key verb. He wanted 罣 to mean "hang" and I insisted on the more basic meaning of "stick".

The Chinese passage in T2521, which most East Asians take to be the Heart Sutra, reads (though note that the punctuation is modern):

Next, Huifeng has shown that aprāptitvād is an incorrect translation of 以無所得故.  In fact, Kumārajīva most often uses these characters to represent anupalambhayogena. And Huifeng makes a very good case for taking this word with the previous section and as ending a sentence. So if we make these corrections we get a working text that looks like this

Now, bodhisatvo does not just start a new sentence, it starts a next paragraph or section. Focusing now on this new paragraph, since we have eliminated the possibility that 以無所得故 means acittavaraṇaḥ, it is extremely unlikely that 無罣礙故 can mean acittavaraṇaḥ nāstitvād (and anyway this is a very weird construction). Moreover there is no verb like viharati "dwell" anywhere in Chinese.

Unfortunately, although he gave an English translation which conveyed the correct reading of the Chinese, Huifeng didn't give a Sanskrit reading (and declined to do so when I pestered him in person). With the help of some colleagues I came up with an alternative Sanskrit reading based on the hints in Huifeng's article:

The phrase "does not get stuck" could also be "does not get attached" But how to deal with Cittāvaraṇa-nāstitvād atrasto viparyāsa-atikrānto nishṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ? It is at this point that Red Pine simply abandons grammar and simply makes up a translation to suit his purposes. But the fact is that these is nothing very difficult here, except that Conze has once again led us astray.

In his 1948 edition the last word in the sentence is nishṭhā-nirvāṇaḥ. Let us start here. Nirvāṇa is an adjective and thus properly takes the gender of the noun it describes. Buddhists often use it as a noun, and when they do so it is invariably neuter. The eagle eyed reader will note that here nirvāṇaḥ has a masculine nominative singular ending. This can mean only one thing (and there is nothing "vague" here, contra Mr Pine)  which is that nishṭhā-nirvāṇa is a bahuvrīhi or adjectival compound. And it is describing a noun in the masculine nominative singular case. In Conze's Sanskrit there is no such noun in this sentence. However, there is one in the previous sentence, i.e. bodhiasatvaḥ (and not that -aḥ followed by p is unchanged, so bodhisatvo is wrong in Conze).

This tells us that Conze has blundered (again). Here we have just one sentence. It also tells us that we don't need prāpta. Prāpta (the passive past participle of prāpṇoti "to attain") was added to provide a verbal derivative because, just as in English, a Sanskrit sentence has to have a verb or a verbal derivative acting as a verb. By dividing one sentence, with one main verb, into two sentences, Conze has created an ungrammatical entity. Ancient scribes added prāptaḥ or in one case the verb prāpṇoti, but it was never needed. It also makes Red Pines decision to take atikranto as the verb look silly (not to mention that this leaves viparyāsa undeclined which is also not allowed).

The rules of grammar in any language are not simple. But the person who composed the Sanskrit followed those rules and it is the subsequent editors, translators, and commentators who have been at fault. Conze was an expert in Sanskrit, so I cannot imagine why he went off piste in this case. Other experts, some of whom I hold in the highest esteem, have also failed to notice which rules were being applied.

A quick comparison with the punctuation of the Chinese text T251 tells us that the editors of Taishō were on the same wavelength (though inconsistently, T250 they side with Conze and break the passage into two sentences!). But we can refine this further. I said above "it is extremely unlikely that 無罣礙故 can mean acittavaraṇaḥ nāstitvād". Based on Huifeng's research the Chinese characters most like mean asaṅgatvād "because of being without attachment". And this gives us

Note that T250 and T251 differ slightly here (added spaces for comparative purposes)

The extra bits are 一切 meaning "all" (literally, "a single cut") and 苦惱 meaning "misery and trouble" where 苦 is the character most often used for Sanskrit duḥkha. In T250, 離 means "depart, go away"; while in T251, 遠離 has the same meaning, but with greater emphasis. A similar distinction is found in Sanskrit between atikranta and saṃatikranta for example.

At the very least this essay has shown, again, how poorly the Buddhist community has been served at times by philologists and traditional exegesis. Here is a short text, barely 250 words or characters, that is supposed to be chanted daily by millions of Buddhists, and we still don't have an accurate text to chant.

~~oOo~~

There's been quite a lot of talk of "meta-rationality" lately amongst the blogs I read. It is ironic that this emerging trend comes at a time when the very idea of rationality is being challenged from beneath. Mercier and Sperber, for example, tell us that empirical evidence suggests that reasoning is "a form of intuitive [i.e. unconscious] inference" (2017: 90); and that reasoning about reasoning (meta-rationality) is mainly about rationalising such inferences and our actions based on them. If this is true, and traditional ways of thinking about reasoning are inaccurate, then we all have a period of readjustment ahead.

It seems that we don't understand rationality or reasoning. My own head is shaking as I write this. Can it be accurate? It is profoundly counter-intuitive. Sure, we all know that some people are less than fully rational. Just look at how nation states are run. Nevertheless, it comes as a shock to realise that I don't understand reasoning. After all, I write non-fiction. All of my hundreds of essays are the product of reasoning. Aren't they? well, maybe. In this essay, I'm going to continue my desultory discussion of reason by outlining a result from experimental psychology from the year I was born, 1966. In their recent book, The Enigma of Reason, Mercier & Sperber (2017) describe this experiment and some of the refinements since proposed.

But first a quick lesson in Aristotelian inferential logic. I know, right? You're turned off and about to click on something else. But please do bear with me. I'm introducing this because unless you understand the logic involved in the problem, you won't get the full blast of the 50-year-old insight that follows. Please persevere and I think you'll agree at the end that it's worth it.

If P, then Q.

Say we posit: if a town has a police station (P), then it also has a courthouse (Q). There are two possible states for each proposition. A town has a police station (P); it does not have a police station (not P or ¬P); it has a courthouse (Q); it does not have a court house (¬Q). What we concerned with here is what we can infer from each of these four possibilities, given the rule: If P, then Q.

The syllogism—If P, then Q—in this case tells us that it is always the case that if a town has a police station, then it also has a courthouse. If I now tell you that the town of Wallop in Hampshire, has a police station, you can infer from the rule that Wallop must also have a courthouse. This is a valid inference of the type that Aristotle called modus ponens. Schematically:

If P, then Q.
P, therefore Q. ✓

What if I tell you that Wallop does not have a police station? What can you infer from ¬P? You might be tempted to say that Wallop has no courthouse. But this would be a fallacy (called denial of the antecedent). It does not follow from the rule that if a town does not have a police station that it also doesn't have a court house. It is entirely possible under the given rule that a town has a courthouse but no police station.

If P, then Q.
¬P, therefore ¬Q. ✕

What if we have information about the courthouse and want to infer something about the police station. What can we infer if Wallop had a courthouse (Q)? Well, we've just seen that we cannot infer anything. Trying to infer something from the absence of the second part of the syllogism leads to false conclusions (affirmation of the consequent)

If P, then Q.
Q, therefore P. ✕

But we can make a valid inference if we know that Wallop has no courthouse (¬Q). If there is no courthouse and our rule is always true, then we can infer that there is no police station in Wallop. And this valid inference is the type called modus tollens by Aristotle.

If P, then Q.
¬Q, therefore ¬P. ✓

rule	given	inference	validity
If P, then Q.	P	Q	✓
	¬P	¬Q	✕
	Q	P	✕
	¬Q	¬P	✓

~Wason Selection Task~

You are presented with four cards, each with a letter and number printed on either side.

"This shows, Evans argued, that people's answers to the Wason task are based not on logical reasoning but on intuitions of relevance." (Mercier & Sperber 2017: 43. Emphasis added)

What Evans found was that people turn over the cards named in the rule. Which is not reasoning, but since it is predicated on an unconscious evaluation of the information, not quite a guess either. Which is why the success rate is worse than random guessing.

















Bibliography



See also my essay: Reasoning and Beliefs 10 January 2014

When I mention to anyone that I work on the Heart Sutra, there is a better-than-even chance that that person will declare that they like Red Pine's book on the text (2004). This small book purports to be a translation from the Sanskrit along with a commentary. However, Pine is not very good at Sanskrit and there are a load of mistakes in his book, and his commentary is sectarian, to say the least. My Amazon UK review of his book suggests that it is "a facile book on modern Japanese Zen rather than a serious book about the Heart Sutra." I say this whenever his name comes up, but his reputation survives intact. The response is usually along the lines "We trust him, we don't trust you (so fuck off)". The last may be sotto voce, but sometimes it is expressed just like that.

Facts don't necessarily win arguments or establish reputations; and nor do falsehoods necessarily lose arguments or destroy reputations. No one alive today can doubt this truism. Nevertheless, I still try to deal in facts and here are some facts about Red Pine's attempts to understand the Heart Sutra.

One of the characteristics of Pine's approach is his outright rejection of Jan Nattier's thesis that the Heart Sutra was composed in China.

"... we are shown no proof that the Heart Sutra was originally composed or complied in Chinese, that any part of the first half was extracted from the Large Sutra or any other Chinese text, or that the mantra was added later."  (2004: 23)

Pine instead proposes a "lost manuscript thesis". That is to say, he argues that the Heart Sutra quote from the Pañcavimśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, is from a (now lost) sūtra with the same name, and with the same meaning, but written in an entirely different Sanskrit idiom from any other Prajñāpāramitā text. In other words, he believes that the Indian sūtra existed in at least two prose versions, which paraphrased each other; meaning that one of them was in the standard idiom of all other Prajñāpāramitā texts, and one was in an idiom unknown except for the passage in the Heart Sutra. The fact that the Chinese Heart Sutra is coincidentally identical to Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśati is apparently irrelevant (note: it is T250 that is character for character identical; T251 has a line removed in the middle and a couple of key terms changed). 

In taking this perverse approach, Red Pine is asserting that the Sanskrit text is original and authoritative and that the Chinese text is just a translation. But as we will see, this is not what he believes in practice. I draw your attention to Section VI of Conze's edition and to Red Pine's "translation". 

Conze's edition chops up the Heart Sutra into sections to make it easier to comment on. The earliest manuscripts of the Heart Sutra do not have sections. In fact, they don't even have sentence or word breaks. They have no punctuation at all. In Conze’s edition the passage reads:

This section has already been examined in detail by Huifeng (2014), but there is work to do yet on the Sanskrit. I am about to submit a short article tackling the mistake introduced by Conze, and am working on another article which tackles what went wrong with the original (back)translation from Chinese to Sanskrit. Here, I just want to look at Red Pine's approach and what it reveals about his methods.

The second sentence in particular is puzzling. Jan Nattier notes that it seems "abbreviated at best", but doesn't seem to clock why. Others seem to gloss over the problems. What Pine says is this:

If we look at the Sanskrit text it is apparent that there are problems with this passage. The two words viparyāsātikrāntaḥ and niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ are both bahuvrīhi compounds or compound adjectives. The two words in the compound work together to describe a noun: "one who has overcome delusion" and "one whose extinction is final". But there is no noun for them to describe. Nor does the sentence have a verb or anything that might substitute for one - and just as in English, a sentence without a verb is a contradiction in terms.

A compound cannot be arbitrarily cut into pieces under any circumstances. It is never allowed.  There is nothing vague about this rule. For one thing, were we to do that to viparyāsātikrāntaḥ, as Pine does, we would leave  viparyāsa with no case ending and thus no relationship to the other words in the sentence (grammar is all about relationships between words). The role of the compound in the sentence is entirely determined by the second member of the compound, which does have a case ending (in this case masculine nominative singular).

The passive past participle atikranta cannot function as a finite verb under any circumstances. The root verb ati√kram does not mean "see through" it means "go beyond, transgress, transcend". Given the Prajñāpāramitā idiom, it probably ought to be samatikranta, which cannot be construed as "transgress", but that is a another story.

Pine has misread the sentence and, in asserting that there are any "vagaries" here, has gone completely off piste. The problem, as my forthcoming article will show, is that Conze has incorrectly put a full stop (US "period") in the middle of the sentence, stranding the three adjectives (atrastaḥ is the third) apart from the noun they describe, i.e. bodhisatvaḥ. Note that the Chinese text in the CEBTA version of the Taishō Edition of the Tripiṭaka has a semicolon at this point, rather than a full stop. Conze had little or no facility with Chinese and never checked the Chinese texts when preparing his Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā texts.

Why is it so obvious in this case? Because the noun nirvāṇa is invariably neuter (nominative singular nirvāṇaṃ), but in the Heart Sutra it has a masculine ending, -nirvāṇaḥ. The only time this is permitted is when a word is used as an adjective for a masculine noun, in the nominative singular: adjectives take the gender, case, and number of the noun they describe. Thus niṣthānirvāṇaḥ can only be a bahuvrīhi compound, an adjective, and can only be related to a masculine noun in the nominative singular, and could not be anything else. The only candidate noun within 20 words in either direction is bodhisatvaḥ, in the previous "sentence". When we remove the full stop we have one perfectly good Buddhist Sanskrit sentence.

Conze blunders again and the whole (Buddhist) world blindly follows him off the cliff.

The essential problem, then, is that cittāvaraṇanāstitvād atrastro viparyāsātikrānto niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ is not a well formed sentence. It's just a qualifier and three adjectives, with no verb, no subject, and no noun to be described. When we remove the full stop, and merge it with the previous sentence, we supply all three. That is why Pine is struggling, but he doesn't see it. And rather than take the simple and obvious solution he abandons Sanskrit grammar altogether and claims that Sanskrit grammar itself is "vague". Given that he has abandoned grammar, why does he choose the particular configuration he does? If he is abandoning the rules of grammar then he might have opted for any combination of words. The answer lies in the Chinese text.

The text that everyone in Asia considers to be the Heart Sutra is T251. It differs from T250 at this point, but only in a minor way (I will deal with this in the article, but not here). The Chinese parallel to the Sanskrit phrase cittāvaraṇanāstitvād atrastro viparyāsātikrānto niṣṭhānirvāṇaḥ in T251 is:

Here the particle 故 gives the first word the same sense as the Sanskrit ablative of cause, it is a qualifier meaning "because, since". The previous sentence concluded that "[the bodhisatva's]  mind 心 is unattached 無罣礙". So the qualifier links the two phrases, in the manner of "; because of that...". Then we have a statement that appears to logically follow from it, i.e. "because he is unattached, he is without fear". Then we have a verb "he goes beyond" and it has a direct object "delusions and illusions" and an indirect object "final-nirvāṇa". So it says:

I want to draw your attention to two things here. Firstly the sentence structure of the Chinese is completely different to the received Sanskrit and some of the words are different. I've already pointed out that the second part of Section VI cannot be a standalone sentence in Sanskrit. But in Chinese, we do have a well formed sentence with verbs and nouns (the subject is implied, but it is the bodhisatva in the preceding phrase). Translating this we don't struggle, at least we certainly don't have the kind of problems thrown up by Conze's Sanskrit edition.

Secondly compare how Red Pine has construed the Sanskrit text to make atikranta the verb (= 遠離), viparyāsa a standalone noun (= 顛倒), niṣthā an adverb (= 究竟), and nirvāṇa a standalone noun (涅槃). To make it plain, Red Pine has chopped up the Sanskrit sentence, abrogating the rules of Sanskrit grammar, to make it read (more or less) like the Chinese, but with a concession to his Zen ideology. The concession is that he takes niṣṭhā as an adverb "finally" related to the "verb" atikranta, rather than part of the adjective "final-extinction". This allows him to construe the possibility of "finally seeing trough nirvāṇa". Again Sanskrit does not allow parts of compounds to come adrift and act independently, so this reading of the Sanskrit is wrong. I don't think it works in Chinese either, though at a pinch it might be a plausible reading. A broader look at the phrase 究竟涅槃 in Chinese shows that it is always a single compound and not an adverb-noun combination. But Red Pine does not seem to know this.

The main point I wish to make here is that Red Pine prioritises the Chinese text over the Sanskrit (and not just here either).

As I noted above, Red Pine says that he considers the Sanskrit text to be the authentic original Heart Sutra. The Chinese text is merely a translation. But when he meets a problem in the Sanskrit text he does not deal with it in Sanskrit (even though there is a simple and obvious solution to his problem), instead he uses the Chinese text as a guide to butchering the Sanskrit, to make it read like the Chinese.

I discovered this some weeks ago and I still laugh out loud every time I explain it to anyone. Despite what he says in relation to the Chinese origins thesis, and despite claiming that he is translating from Sanskrit, in practice Red Pine treats the Chinese text as authoritative and translates from Chinese (on more than one occasion). 

Now to give him his due, Red Pine is almost unique in admitting that he had any problem at all translating this part of the text. Most religious translators hide their struggles and their methods from their readers giving the illusion of greater understanding than is humanly possible. In this case Conze's edition is unreadable and untranslatable. A sentence with just a qualifier and three adjectives is nonsense and nonsense cannot be translated into sense. But strangely enough all the English translations seem to make sense. How does that happen? 

What goes through the mind of the translator faced with a text that doesn't make sense, but who wishes to be known as an expert in understanding that text?

Presumably the demands of status mean that these translators simply lie about understanding the text, and then lie to themselves about having lied. And do a lot of hand waving to distract anyone from seeing the lies. They feel safe in the knowledge that very few of their readers bother to learn Sanskrit and that scholars play no corrective role in the process.

And they do get away with this cheating, this intellectual fraud. Time after time.

Surely the publisher of Red Pine's book, Counterpoint Press, also has some responsibility (as do other publishers of non-fiction books)? Counterpoint Press edited the book and presumably sub-edited the English in it. Why was the Sanskrit not sub-edited? No one seems to have bothered to check a dictionary at any point. It seems that they did not do any fact-checking or due-diligence, such as having an expert read the manuscript. At best the complacency of the publisher has facilitated the ongoing deception. 

We expect religieux to fudge things from time to time because they have an agenda that includes overriding ideological concerns. We understand this and while we may not endorse it, at least it is no great surprise to find that a religious translator has manipulated a text to make it fit their preconceptions; or told us what they think it ought to say rather than what it actually says (especially in cases where they demonstrably do not understand it, as here). We expect religieux to have exaggerated reverence for a printed text and not to think about how the text might be wrong (Thich Nhat Hahn is the sole exception to this that I'm aware of, but as I explained, his solution is to hide the problem by manipulating the translation. This is just an exercise in hand waving). 

What of academia? Many of the people who have studied, translated, and commented on this text were academics of quite high standing. Conze's first edition (1948) was published in a prestigious journal, where it was supposedly peer-reviewed. How did all of these experts in Sanskrit, miss the fact that the neuter noun nirvāṇa was in the masculine gender in this text and not see the implications of this? Any undergraduate student could spotted this and have told us what those implications were. 

The fact is that Buddhists have been poorly served by religious teachers and academic experts alike. In the case of the Heart Sutra, huge, possibly irreparable, damage has been done by D T Suzuki and Edward Conze and their Theosophy inspired nonsense. Yet both are almost deified and occupy a kind of pantheon of Buddhist Modernism. Conze has been described by Sangharakshita as "one of the great Buddhists of the Twentieth Century". He was a poor editor and translator, and while his views were influenced by Buddhism (amongst other things), I'm not convinced he was a Buddhist at all.

Red Pine's popular book is full of egregious errors and, as we now know, a degree of deception, inconsistency, and hypocrisy. At best it is a facile book on modern Japanese Zen ideology, rather than a serious book about the Heart Sutra. But there is no doubting that it is popular. So it too has done huge damage.

Where we might have expected correctives from the supposedly objective scholars based in universities, dispassionately studying the languages and documents of Buddhism, we simply see more of the same in most cases (with a few notable exceptions). The most basic level of scholarship has been left incomplete, while scholars pursue ever more obscure objectives. I'm told by insiders that this might be so that they can avoid confrontation with anyone else in the field. Criticism that might affect anyone's career prospects is scrupulously avoided and even suppressed as journals refuse to publish it. Still, Conze has been dead for 43 years, I can't see how criticising him is going to hurt anyone.

Another problem, of course, is that the field is tiny and funding for it in the West has become scarce. Most of the major projects are based in Asia, under the guidance of Buddhist organisations and funders, meaning that scholarship is beholden to those with strong religious ideologies. Dissent is not really possible under such conditions.

The Heart Sutra is frequently referred to as "the most popular Mahāyāna text in the world". Most undergraduates in Buddhist Studies read it. Probably many of them read it in Sanskrit. So actually what I said about any undergraduate spotting the mistake is probably wrong, because several generations of them have not spotted it, or they spotted it and stayed quiet. And so simple grammatical errors have persisted in the most popular Buddhist text for almost 60 years (the anniversary of Conze's edition is in 2018; he died in 1974). 

I'm repeating myself in complaining about Buddhist Studies as a discipline (if "discipline" is the right word). But here I am working systematically through the shortest text in popular use (260 Chinese characters and about the same number of words in Sanskrit) and still finding mistakes in the text and trying to figure out how anyone could have translated the resulting mess. Something is deeply wrong in the world, if an autodidact, amateur, independent scholar is the one finding these fundamental problems. They should have been ironed out by academics decades ago. Conze should never have been allowed to publish his critical edition with errors in it for a start, but they should have been corrected long before now. 

Ironically, in the final analysis, this set of circumstances can only stand because Buddhists themselves are complacent and not paying attention. Perhaps we are in a kāliyuga after all?

People often react positively when I say that I study the Heart Sutra. They often seem imagine that the holiness of the text must rub off on me (I wish!). In reality, I don't find the Heart Sutra particularly interesting, except as a case study in the history of ideas in Buddhism. Unfortunately I found a sixty year old mistake in Conze's edition as I was beginning to learn Sanskrit back in 2012 and for me that meant figuring our how to fix it (see Attwood 2015). But it also meant looking to see in what other ways it was broken. As much as anything, what fascinates me now is that people continue to translate the text even though it is broken in several ways, both by Conze and original translator. What goes on in the mind of a translator who stumbles on a passage that simply does not make sense, but publishes something anyway?

The English language literature on the Heart Sutra mostly celebrates irrationality and mysticism, which goes a long way to explaining why no one noticed that the text did not make sense. It reminds me of that popular formulation of the laws of thermodynamics (aka Ginsberg's Theorem), which I can paraphrase for our purposes as: you can't understand, you can't hope to understand, there is nothing you can do that will bring about understanding. Call this Conze's Theorem, though it could equally well be Suzuki's. If someone accepts Conze's Theorem then their chances of spotting grammatical errors plummets. 

Amidst all the smoke and mirrors we don't usually see that, like many philosophers, priests and mystics actively get in the way of understanding. They impede us by asserting falsehoods, contradicting themselves, and above all by trying to convince us to take up the defeatist, fixed mindset (in the Professor Carol Dweck sense) that Conze's Theorem represents. If anyone actually understood, all the priests would be out of a job, or they would have competition. On the other hand, there is a symbiotic relationship between those who confuse and those who wish to be confused (or to justify their state of confusion or be absolved of responsibility for it). Priest and congregation co-exist and feed off each other.

A friend who likes to produce his own translations of the Heart Sutra, partly based on our long discussions about it, was criticised recently for "taking the mystery out of it". What can I say? The mystery of the Heart Sutra is how Buddhists get away with promoting magical thinking.

Anyway, sometimes my desire to understand forces me (reluctantly) to read books about the Heart Sutra. It's a bit like, having dropped my glasses in the toilet while having a piss, I have to fish them out before I flush, just in case they go past the U-bend. For some reason I had high hopes about Kazuaki Tanahashi’s book. I think it might have been the nice cover. The book does have a very nice cover (right). As the subtitle suggests this was an attempt at a comprehensive account of the Heart Sutra. However, like Red Pine, there was a mismatch between the author's expertise, the subject of the book, and the scope of his ambition. Tanahashi is even less proficiency than Red Pine in Sanskrit and appears to be entirely reliant on third parties, who apparently mislead him on many occasions. His commentary on the Sanskrit text is full of errors of lexicon and morphology and, as a result, quite unreliable.

I'm not even going to mention the new English Heart Sutra contrived with help from Roshi Joan Halifax. Instead in this essay I want to focus on how Tanahashi deals with the news, delivered in 1992, that the Heart Sutra was composed in China, in Chinese. It was not Indian and not written in Sanskrit, and therefore not a sūtra. Tanahashi devotes almost four pages to outlining Nattier’s ninety-page article in a fairly neutral manner. His gloss is more or less accurate and he states that he thinks it is plausible (2014: 73-76). 

Then in a separate chapter, he notes the horror with which the article was received in Japan. He cites the late Japanese scholar, Fumimasa-Bunga Fukui (福井文雅), as saying “it would be a matter of grave concern if [the Heart Sutra] were proved to be an apocryphon produced in China” (2014: 77). Fukui (who died in May 2017) was a major figure of the Japanese Buddhist establishment, though almost completely unknown in the West because he didn't write in English (e.g. he only has a Japanese Wikipedia entry). Fukui, unsurprisingly given this attitude, is not convinced by the evidence presented, though Tanahashi does not really say anything about Fukui's reasoning. 

Tanahashi also records Red Pine’s objection, which I have already dealt with to some extent (Red Pine's "Vagaries of Sanskrit grammar". 13 October 2017). However, unlike Pine, Tanahashi declares himself satisfied by the case that Nattier has made for the Heart Sutra having been composed in China. On the surface this is a victory for reason (sorely needed), but watch what happens next.

The chapter that starts off assessing Nattier's thesis veers off on what seems to be a tangent. Tanahashi notices that T250 is closer to T223 and dubs it the “alpha version”. Despite the fact that T250 differs considerable more from the received Sanskrit text than T251, Tanahashi proposes it as the source text for the Sanskrit. He is concerned here to rally facts that support the identity of Xuánzàng as the translator, a case which in reality is very weak. Someone as familiar with the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā literature as Xuánzàng undoubtedly was, would be unlikely to make so many idiomatic mistakes or to misread the Chinese text.  The reasoning becomes increasingly specious, but it comes around to an unexpected conclusion:

So having accepted the rational argument against the text being authentic, Tanahashi uses deduction to show that after all it is authentic. The reasoning here is quite something and it might be instructive to diagram it.

Note that Axiom3 assumes that the Heart Sutra complies with Axioms1 & 2. Nattier shows, however, that the Heart Sutra was composed in China some time between 404 CE and 672 CE. And so we get the syllogism:

Conclusion1 is the complete opposite of Axiom3. One or other must be false. Nattier in fact downplays this conclusion, presumably out of sympathy with her many Asian Buddhist Colleagues. But anyone can see the implications for this most popular of all East Asian texts. To put it baldly: it's a fake. Anyone who promoted it is a fool. Even if you did understand it, the understanding itself would not be authentic. This is the fear anyway. In my view the Heart Sutra is an authentic expression of early medieval Chinese Buddhism, but that's probably not enough for the traditionalist. 

Buddhist religious authority is partly predicated on the authenticity of the sūtras, and for Japanese Zen Buddhists this sūtra has a central and vital role. The Heart Sutra is the central mystery in the mystery religion that is modern Zen Buddhism (especially after D T Suzuki’s influential Theosophy inspired presentation of it). Axiom1 is the warp upon which the Zen Buddhist priests weave the weft of their religious authority. If Axiom1 is no longer a given, then the whole fabric of the religious tradition may unravel. Zen Buddhism is in danger of losing all credibility: hence the horrified reaction in Japan to Nattier’s article.

So, for obvious reasons, Conclusion1 is unacceptable: Fukui and Pine reject the evidence out of hand. Pine goes as far as denying that there is any evidence.

Tanahashi is, unlike Red Pine, honest enough to admit that Nattier’s case for Conclusion1 goes beyond any reasonable doubt. However, he is still committed to the three axioms. Therefore, he looks for a weak point in Nattier’s case. Her 1992 article is 90 pages long and covers a lot of ground. One of the subjects she covers is the attribution of T250 to Kumārajīva and T251 to Xuánzàng.

Traditionally, of course, T251 is attributed to Xuánzàng as translator. While Nattier casts enough doubt on this attribution for it to be abandoned, she leaves open the possibility that Xuánzàng produced the Sanskrit translation. This is a very appealing possibility to many Buddhists and in it Tanahashi finds his salvation.

Having definitely identified Xuánzàng as translator Tanahashi constructs a fantasy that goes like this. Buddhists, he says, meditate and sometimes, in meditation, they receive divine revelations. Stories of meditating monks receiving instructions from Maitreya or Mañjuśrī are exceedingly common in Buddhist folklore. In these stories, the figures are usually bodhisatvas and they play the role of a virtual-buddha who provides the necessary imprimatur to meet Axiom2 (sūtras are the word of the Buddha).

It is of course well known that Xuánzàng travelled to India. In his final manoeuvre, Tanahashi imagines that the revelation from Avalokiteśvara conveniently took place in India. This allows him to construct the following syllogism:

The essential axioms are satisfied and the horror of the prospect that the Heart Sutra is an apocryphon is banished, just as Xuánzàng himself banished the demons of the Gobi desert by reciting the Heart Sutra by magic. As Tanahashi says, this possibility “cannot be ruled out”. He is of course right. Just as we cannot rule out the possibility of the tooth-fairy. 

However, Tanahashi cannot cite a single source for this idea. There is nothing in Xuánzàng's own account of his journey to suggest any of this happened. Nothing in the biographies composed by his contemporaries. Not even a suspicious looking legend. There is nothing for anyone to base such speculation on. We associate Xuánzàng with the Heart Sutra, because shoe-horned into his travelogue is a single mention of the text; and because his two main disciples wrote commentaries on the text (which are, curiously, undated - the Chinese dated everything). Xuánzàng is famous precisely for bringing Sanskrit Buddhist texts to China, and translating then into Chinese after he arrived. He was a prolific translator so we have a very good idea of what to look for and the Heart Sutra has none of the tell-tale signs. What is apparent is that someone has inexpertly altered the text to make it look more like a Xuánzàng production, but they didn't do a very good job of it.

So no, we cannot prove that it didn't happen, but there is also no reason to believe it did, except for Axioms1 & 2. 

One weakness that Tanahashi did not exploit, is that while he was in India, Xuánzàng is believed to have made a Sanskrit translation of the Chinese apocryphal text known in English as The Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna. However, in this case the text is widely acknowledged to be an apocryphon. In trying to establish the authenticity of the Heart Sutra, it would be risky to pair it with a known forgery. Tanahashi avoids this potential complication by not mentioning it (though it is equally likely that he was simply ignorant of this fact). 

Having proved to his own satisfaction that the Heart Sutra is authentic, despite also accepting that Nattier has proved that it is not authentic (in that sense), Tanahashi proceeds as though his fantasy is reality. Just three pages later, he says:

This is a neat trick. He begins by making a show of rationality, of gravely considering and accepting the validity of Nattier’s argument, despite the horrifying consequences that have made his prejudiced contemporaries in Japan (and elsewhere) reject it outright. Nevertheless, he proceeds as though Nattier got it completely wrong and the Heart Sutra is everything the Japanese Zen tradition says it is. The level of self-deception and desperation involved is shocking even to this relatively cynical author.

Oh, and the lack of doubt that Xuánzàng consulted T250 is convenient cover for the fact that T251 is not a separate translation at all, it is T250 that has been lightly edited: two lines have been removed, one from the beginning and one from the middle of the quote from the Large Sutra (T223) and/or it's commentary (T1509); and 3 word have been changed to reflect Xuánzàng's preferred "spelling" (Avalokiteśvara, Śāriputra, and skandha).

Anyone familiar with the history of science probably knows about Thomas Kuhn's description of how science makes progress. It is down to him that we use the word paradigm as much as we do. Scientists supposedly resist paradigm change because they stake their careers on the old idea. However, in science, though there may be resistance, attitudes, theories, and practices do change, because scientists respond to evidence (my lifetime has seen many paradigms shift). In religion, it can be a very different story, even in the religion whose unofficial motto is "everything changes". Ideally in science, theory is evidence led. Religion is almost always the opposite: theory leads evidence. Evidence is either made to fit the theory or it is simply discarded as irrelevant. As we have seen in this case.

In all likelihood both Red Pine and Kaz Tanahashi are good men; they are sincere and wrote their books in good faith, not consciously intending to impede understanding by giving false information or creating confusion. They most likely care deeply about the traditions they've given their lives to. They don’t see themselves as deceiving anyone, nor the self-serving nature of their deceptions. In all likelihood, they are just as deceived by their own words as others are (though happy to accept the benefits that accrue to them as a result). The axioms of their worldview override other concerns. Such axioms underpin the deductive logic of the rejection of any counter-factual information. This is the characteristic of a religious mindset.

However, it leaves them vulnerable. Sooner or later, someone like me was going to examine their work and point out the fallacies, biases, and mistakes in their work. The problems that don't just detract from their efforts but characterise them. Everything that is wrong with religion as a cultural institution is on display in Tanahashi's attempt to both accept and subvert the Chinese origins thesis. The rhetoric, the pretence, is that they are concerned with ultimate reality and that they accept that everything changes. But a simple truth such as the Heart Sutra being a Chinese composition, causes such consternation that they revert to type: they obfuscate, deny, and misdirect.

The reality in this case is that the Heart Sutra is changing. It has changed in the past, and it will change again. Buddhism is changing, it has changed in the past, and it will change again. If change is the nature of reality, then the changes wrought by Jan Nattier should be joyfully embraced by Buddhists. Instead, they are fearfully rejected and replaced with fantasy versions of reality. And this is sanctioned by followers because they don’t want things to change either. All too often Buddhism seems like a tragedy blurring into a farce.

The final irony is that, if you could ask the Heart Sutra itself, it would reply: in emptiness there is no Heart Sutra. And the mainstream, the paradigmatic, metaphysical interpretation would be that the Heart Sutra doesn't exist! And laughably, it is precisely my epistemological interpretation (based on Sue Hamilton's reading of the Pāḷi suttas) that rescues the text from this ignominious fate. It's only me arguing that of course the text exists, it's just that perception of it is not governed by the same rules as the existence of it. 

The uncomfortable truth is that text that everyone knows and loves, is full of errors. And faith is getting in the way of fixing them. 

I'm doing some preparation for reading Chapter One of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Aṣṭa) with a friend and have ended up making a load of notes. I'm mainly looking at the edition by Vaidya, but comparing it where possible with the Gāndhārī, and two versions in Chinese, one by Lokakṣema translated in 179 CE (the earliest), and one by Kumārajīva translated in 404 (the most popular). This will be too laborious to do for the whole text, but might help shed light on particular passages (we may well get a publication out of it at some point).

The first sentence is

This kind of hyperbole is what we expect from a Mahāyāna sūtra. By the way, the word "disciples" (弟子) seems to reflect an underlying śrāvaka, though we expect arhat here, and is probably a mistake. It may reflect the idea that arhat was the goal of the śrāvakayāna, whereas the bodhisatva was the goal of the bodhisatvayāna. 

Unfortunately the Gāndhārī manuscript (dated to 70 AD) is damaged and/or missing at this point. By the late 4th Century Kumārajīva's text (T227), while still considerably shorter than the later manuscripts, is completely conventional:

Here the word arhat is transliterated as 阿羅漢 which in Middle Chinese was alahan. It may reflect a Prakrit original (cf Pāḷi arahant), but by Kumārajīva's time was fairly standard, though there were many variant "spellings" in Chinese, e.g.  阿盧漢; 阿羅訶, 阿羅呵; 阿梨呵, 阿黎呵. This was later abbreviated to lohan or louhan (these Romanizations represent modern Mandarin pronunciations)

So the text is seemingly quite different at different times, assuming that the Chinese translations accurately reflect their source texts. Nor are the differences explicable as a linear evolution. Lokakṣema has bodhisatvas present, whereas others did not. So was Lokakṣema's text different or he was taking liberties? We don't know because the Chinese did not preserve the Sanskrit originals of the Indic texts that they translated, and indeed very few texts survive from that period anywhere. The surviving Sanskrit manuscripts of Aṣṭa are on corypha palm leaves and date from about the 10th Century onwards. Note also that—especially in the earlier translations—the translators were working from single manuscripts that were most likely riddled with copying errors.

One of the things this brief comparison shows is that there is no single sūtra called Aṣṭasāhasrikā. I tried once before to bring out this with respect to the Vajracchedikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Is There Any Such Thing as 'a Text'? 20 December 2013). Similarly, Jonathan Silk has recently called into question the applicability of traditional philological techniques of identifying the "original" text, (Establishing / Interpreting / Translating: Is It Just That Easy?), which I used as the basis of my essay, The Heart Sutra and the Crisis in Buddhist Philology (30 June 2017).

Effectively, the text of any give sūtra is different for different people at different places and times. And this is an argument for the prominent position that translations play in Western Buddhism, despite the fact that, as far as the Prajñāpāramitā literature is concerned, there are no good translations as yet. With the forthcoming book by Paul Harrison we may finally have a decent translation of the Vajracchedikā, but as my work has shown, we do not yet have a reliable source text from which to translate the Heart Sutra. An accurate translation of Aṣṭa would be a fine thing.

As I prepare material for my book on the Heart Sutra, I have been collating published responses to Jan Nattier's thesis that the text was composed in Chinese and (back)translated into Sanskrit (Nattier 1992). I suggested in a previous essay that the reception of Nattier's thesis in Japan has been and remains decidedly anti. New evidence of this has emerged in the form of an article by Ishii Kōsei (2015), translated by his English-speaking former student Dr Jeffrey Kotyk. 

Unfortunately, much of the research done in Japan is only ever published in Japanese and is thus inaccessible to the majority of Buddhist Studies researchers in the West. The linguistic burden is high in our field. I have varying levels of skill in Pāḷi, Sanskrit, and Medieval-Chinese, but adding modern Japanese just to get access to secondary literature is not feasible. A review article of the Japanese reception of Nattier's article by some qualified scholar is a desideratum, but since Prajñāpāramitā is a tiny niche in Buddhist Studies, it is unlikely ever to happen. 

Ishii is apparently writing in a milieu in which there have already been well-received attacks on Nattier's thesis of a kind that we have not seen in English. He cites publications by Fukui Fuminasa and Harada Wasō, but these apparently focus on the conjecture that Xuanzang might have been responsible for making the Sanskrit translation from Chinese. The conflation of the Chinese origins thesis with the Xuanzang as translator thesis is unhelpful. Nattier leaves open the possibility, but in the end does not commit to Xuanzang being the translator. On the other hand the evidence for Chinese origins is very strong. Ishii seems to think that it is because we Westerner scholars of Buddhist Studies are "not specialists in this respect" that we have fallen for Nattier's thesis, rather than the strength of her arguments.

Ishii thus see his article as contributing some details to an existing (Japanese)  consensus in the face of a general credulity and ignorance in the West. Without access to that consensus, we are forced to take his article on face value, which I'm sure does not do it justice. Be that as it may, I will briefly outline the main points of Ishii's article and then review his methods and conclusions. I may say that my own published research has touched on many of the issues that Ishii has raised and I am thus in a relatively unique position to comment. I am very much a specialist in this respect (see my list of publications).

Ishii begins by referencing Nattier's 1992 article with a focus on the idea that Xuanzang might have been involved in editing and translating it from Chinese to Sanskrit. The bulk of the article deals with the opening sentence of the Heart Sutra and with Nattier's translation of it, which Ishii suggests follows the Chinese text, largely on the basis that Nattier omits a word-for-word translation of svabhāva  (1992: 155). 

While Nattier is explicitly translating from a modified version of Conze's critical edition, Ishii refers only to the diplomatic edition based on several hand-copies of the Hōryūji manuscript, produced by Müller in 1884 (though he refers to this as a "critical edition", it is clearly not). In order to attempt to refute Nattier, Ishii launches into a lengthy exposition showing that the word svabhāva is present in the Sanskrit text, but absent in the Chinese, and that the passage overall has given translators some difficulty. He tries to establish a case for the word svabhāva being dropped by a Chinese translator (as it is dropped by Nattier). 

Ishii spends a good deal of time speculating on how to translate the Sanskrit text into Chinese, twisting it this way and that according to rules which may be obvious to his Japanese readers, but which are not at all clear to me. His point seems to be that one may, through a series of arbitrary changes, rearrange a Chinese translation of the Sanskrit, to fit the pattern of Chinese one finds in T251 (the standard Heart Sutra in East Asia). However, on face value the Sanskrit and Chinese texts are simply different. I am told that this may reflect the Japanese practice of rearranging Classical Chinese texts into the Japanese word order and only then interpreting them. A procedure known as  kaki-kudashi書き下し.

A particular problem is that Sanskrit has three phrases, marked by the present participle caramāṇo "practising") and two verbs with meaning look (vyava√lok) and see (√paś) - both using the pleonastic particle sma indicating the past or the present-in-the-past tense. One of the problems in Chinese is that there are only two verbs in this sentence, i.e. "practising" (行) and "clearly-seeing" (照見). Ishii seems to be saying that the latter is in fact two verbs in two distinct phrases, but rearranged in a series of aesthetic changes so that the two verb characters are together at the beginning of the two phrases, in the order verb₁ verb₂ phrase₁ phrase₂. 

Ishii then discusses the 照見 combination in Chinese literature (two examples) and the vyavalokayati sma/paśyati sma combination in Sanskrit. However, he seems to show that  照見 is used as a binomial verb - the two characters have to be taken together, rather than as two separate verbs, which undermines his case. He argues that thought the phrase 照見五蘊皆空 ([he] saw the five skandhas were all empty") occurs nowhere else in Chinese, that translating it as two phrases does not make sense. 

Next Ishii brings up the commentaries of Kuījī (Ji in the article) and Woncheuk. Ishii notes that Kuījī does not mention a Sanskrit text and that he used a minor variant of T251, which has an extra character  等 (Sanskrit ādi = English "etc") in two places. Woncheuk was also aware of this variant, and finds ādi in his Sanskrit text, though, of course, his commentary is on the text of T251. It is very likely that these two commentaries established T251 as the authoritative text of the Heart Sutra down to the present. Neither man mentions the differences between the versions in the introductory section. As Ishii hints, had a Sanskrit text been available, it would have been incumbent on the commentator to comment on differences, if only because Sanskrit texts were considered authoritative (this was the entire rationale behind Xuanzang's journey to India after all).

Ishii reveals that his primary goal is still to criticise Nattier's omission of a word for word translation of svabhāva. He has spent 6 of the 8 pages of the article showing this. Though we may say that this is an obvious point and one that has little bearing on the larger issue of where and when the Heart Sutra was composed.

Having laboured this point, Ishii briefly discusses the phrase 真實不虛 "true and not false". The Tang dynasty commentators all take this as a standalone phrase, however Ishii claims that the Sanskrit manuscripts read "satyam amithyātvāt, prajñāpāramitā ukto mantra" which is the way Nattier translates it. Ishii uses the same method to translate the Sanskrit into Chinese, producing something different than the present Chinese text. Ishii seems unaware that Nattier is following Conze's edition, and that Conze's edition gives this passage as:

On this basis, then, Ishii declares that Nattier's thesis is a mistake and untenable. Had I been reviewing this article prior to publication I would have argued that it need major modifications before being published. As it stands the argument is difficult to follow and the evidence does not support the conclusion. 

Nattier's thesis mainly revolves around the core section of the Heart Sutra, which is a quote from Kumārajīva's text of the Large Sutra (T223). The Chinese Heart Sutra, especially T250 is identical with T223. T251 is identical, but missing a line at the beginning and one in the middle; and a few technical terms are "spelled" according to innovations introduced by Xuanzang. The Sanskrit Heart Sutra by contrast is a strangely unidiomatic paraphrase of the Sanskrit Large Sutra (compared to either the Gilgit recension or the later Nepalese recension).

The Sanskrit Heart Sutra contains a number of words or phrases that are hapax legomena (one of a kind) whereas the Sanskrit Large Sutra has a string of stock phrases. The Sanskrit Heart Sutra is unidiomatic in almost every place where it is possible to use a nonstandard synonym, that is, outside the settled technical vocabulary of Buddhist jargon.

There is no doubt in my mind, despite some minor slips on Nattier's part, that the thesis is accurate. I think I have the smoking gun for this, but have not yet had time to check all of the details and write it up. So far as I can tell the term sarvabuddhāḥ tryadhvavyavasthitāḥ "all the Buddhas existing in the three times" is a translation of a phrase that only ever occurs in Chinese. i.e. 三世諸佛. This is literally, "three time all buddha", but we would translate it as "all the buddhas of the three times". Sanskrit texts always use the wording atītānāgatapratyutpannāḥ buddhāḥ instead, i,e, "past, future, and present buddhas". There is no way that the Sanskrit Heart Sutra could be anything but a translation from Chinese, produced by someone unfamiliar with Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā idiom. I need to do a very thorough check on the various texts, but I think this conjecture will stand up to scrutiny and provide definitive proof of the Chinese origins thesis.

Whatever minor flaws we may find in Nattier's analysis, the main conclusion that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese is already beyond reasonable doubt. While I would be interested to get more insights into the problems that Japanese scholars see, I cannot imagine how they think they have disproved the thesis. Ishii has certainly not done so in this article, though strangely he provides quite a good summary of the evidence presented by Nattier. However, Ishii does not even touch on this central problem or any of the evidence for it, but concentrates instead on peripheral and seemingly trivial issues that have no impact at all on the issues at hand.

Both of the passages that Ishii comments on are outside the core part of the text, i.e. not part of the quoted section, but part of the original composition that accompanies it. One in the introduction and one in the concluding passage.

Before addressing Ishii's comments the introduction I need to point out that I have showed that Conze (and for that matter Müller) made a mistake in his edition. In the first (three phrase) sentence, pañcaskandhās is nominative plural and vyavalokayati sma is intransitive, both of which are nonsensical and make the sentence impossible to parse as Sanskrit. In fact, as some manuscripts allow, the noun should be in the accusative plural, pañcaskandhāṃs (simply add anusvāra to dhā). If we do this, pañcaskandhāṃs becomes the object of vyavalokayati sma. The result is a sentence that can be parsed and that does not require any punctuation (Attwood 2015).

Without solving this problem the Sanskrit sentence cannot be parsed or translated without fudging things. Both Nattier and Ishii fail to notice anything amiss here. But then so do all other scholars apparently.  In this respect the Heart Sutra is a curiously neglected text given its popularity. My next published article will identify and solve another simple error in Conze's edition (in Section VI) that has also gone unnoticed (the flaw is already outlined in my essay Red Pine's "Vagaries of Sanskrit grammar" 13 October 2017, but the article will give the conjecture rigour).

The main problem that Ishii highlights, other than Nattier's failure to provide a word-for-word translation of svabhāva, is that the Chinese has two phrases and Sanskrit three phrases. If we assume that the Sanskrit is original, then we expect three phrases in the Chinese as well. In order to make three phrases, Ishii proceeds to rearrange the characters 照見 to make one verb into two verbs, each applying to two different parts of the sentence. 照 can in fact mean "inspect, regard" which is what vyavalokayati means, so in that sense this procedure makes a certain amount of sense.

However, Ishii's method seems to require us to believe that Chinese has no syntax rules. We know that Buddhist Chinese does follow syntax rules, albeit that it sometimes follows medieval Chinese and sometimes Indic rules. Ishii's method is a classic case of making the data fit the hypothesis. It is a post hoc rationalisation. His method is not sound, and not consistent with established principles of philology.

In all of this procedure it is never explained why a Chinese translator would omit the word svabhāva from their translation if it occurs in the Sanskrit text. Nor why they would condense three phrases down to two. Nothing is explained. 

Assuming that we ignore the overwhelming case of a Chinese origin for the core section, there is no way to establish precedence by comparing the number of phrases in a given passage outside the core. In my work on the epithets of the mantra (Attwood 2015) I showed that the number of epithets varied from 2 to 8 in unpredictable ways. Note also that Conze's English translation of his Sanskrit, has an fourth phrase as he struggled to turn his garbled Sanskrit into comprehensible English.

It is ironic that Ishii should bring up 真實不虛, because the Sanskrit is clearly a mistranslation of the Chinese. Although the combination of 真實 and 不虛 is common in Chinese, the combination of satya and amithyā never occurs in Sanskrit outside the Heart Sutra, where is is one of several hapax legomena. Although Ishii provides several examples of the use of 真實不虛 in Chinese, he never gives the Sanskrit equivalent. Since we know that it is not satyam amithyātvāt, it would be most interesting to see what the equivalent is. 

However the problem here is deeper: satyam amithyātvāt is nonsensical as it stands. Amithyā does not mean "false", i.e. it is not an antonym for satya, which would be mṛṣa or even asatya. Mithyā on the other hand is the antonym of samyañj, and it means "wrong" (as in, going about something the wrong way, against the grain, in the wrong direction). Worse, in fact 虛 isn't an antonym of 真實 "true" either, but instead means "hollow, empty; vain, pointless". The passage does not mean "true and not false" it means "true and not in vain". And amithyā cannot be construed as a good translation of this. And the word in Sanskrit that might correspond to this is tucchaka. A better English translation would thus be "true and effective". A better Sanskrit translation would be satyaṃ atucchakaṃ. Again I hope to publish something on this, but it is another case of something that ought to have been obvious to anyone who reads Buddhist Sanskrit texts. 

Syntactically, in Chinese both qualities are predicates of prajñāpāramitā (there is no suggestion that one is the cause of the other). It makes no sense at all, in Sanskrit, to take satyam amithyātvād with the following passage. Amithyātvād is weird: the wrong word in the wrong form in the wrong case. It is not the weirdest thing about the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, but I find it hard to believe that it has not caused other scholars to scratch their heads.

It is strange that Ishii would use Müller's diplomatic edition than the critical editions by Conze. Despite being flawed in places, it is still the result of comparing many different manuscripts. At one point Ishii refers to "most of the extant Sanskrit manuscripts", but he does not cite any one of them. We have to wonder what sources he consulted, or whether he referred to Conze's notes in his edition? In which case why not use that edition as his Sanskrit source?

At one point Ishii makes a big deal of the Chinese translations of the extended version of the Heart Sutra T253, T254, T255, and T257. He must surely be aware that there is no dispute that these are translations from Sanskrit. The dates are clearly recorded in Chinese and that they come from a much later period. They have no bearing on the matter which language the text was composed in. Citing them doesn't help his case at all.

Thinking about Woncheuk's reference to a version with 等 (ādi) in it. Lusthaus (2003) also tries to make something of this. But so what? The version is no longer extant and was not canonised - no one saw it as important enough to preserve. And as before, it doesn't affect the main arguments. Ishii and Lusthaus both fail to see that although Woncheuk appears to have had a Sanskrit text, he does not treat it as authoritative. Rather, he comments on T251 as the authoritative version of the text. So does Kuījī. Under what circumstances does a Sanskrit "original" (as Lusthaus calls it) not trump a Chinese translation in early medieval China? In fact both Kuījī and Woncheuk were aware that the Heart Sutra was not a sutra, and Kuījī at least knew it contained a quote from T223  (see Nattier 1992: 206-7, n.33). So this is not news. It is quite likely that it is precisely these two commentaries that establish T251 as the authoritative text in China and its cultural sphere. This is entirely inconsistent with the pair having a Sanskrit "original".

The text of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is so far from the idiom of Prajñāpāramitā Sanskrit literature, Buddhist Sanskrit literature, or any other kind of Sanskrit literature, that the fact itself is (or ought to be) remarkable. The Heart Sutra stands alone in the entire body of Sanskrit literature and is only related to the other Prajñāpāramitā texts by its use of jargon. This is not consistent with being composed in India. It is consistent with having been composed in China by someone proficient in Sanskrit, but without any great knowledge of idiom. This could not have been Xuanzang - who was more familiar with Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā idiom than anyone in China at the time. I think the mistakes highlighted by Huifeng (2014) also helped to cement the Chinese origins thesis. The translator has misread the Chinese text at times and has struggled to find the Sanskrit vocabulary to express the Chinese concepts at others. Again this is inconsistent with a monk in an Indian Sanskrit-using context. The translator was relatively isolated.

I admit, I was hoping for something a bit more challenging from Ishii and I found the article quite disappointing. He concentrates on peripheral issues and provides no refutation of the very strong evidence put forward already (and added to by Huifeng and myself in the last couple of years). The methods are not sound and the conclusions are weak and do not derive from the evidence presented. It looks like a tendentious throwing together of evidence to support a preconceived conclusion. "It is inconceivable that the Heart Sutra was composed in China, therefore it wasn't. QED." But this is hardly the standard of argumentation and reasoning we expect from a senior academic.

Like other scholars before him, Ishii has simply overlooked the grammatical errors in the Sanskrit text, which I am less and less inclined to forgive in professionals. After all, professionals are, on the whole (with a few notable exceptions), very hard on me when I dare to encroach on their territory and do not meet their high standards. So yes, let's have high standards, but that includes not being duped into accepting simple grammatical errors in our texts. 

We should, of course, not judge Japanese scholarship more generally on the basis of this single example, even though Ishii is a senior member of the Japanese Buddhist Studies establishment. We can hope that the article does not reflect the state of the art in Japan. However, it is not a good sign that such a weak and confused article could be published in a peer-reviewed journal at all. 

~~oOo~~