Evolution: Trees and Braids.

December 27, 2013, 12:05 am

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One of the most powerful visual tools for thinking about evolution is the tree. When scientists want to present evolution of any kind they typically show this kind of diagram which branches as it travels from bottom of the picture upwards, becoming every more diverse as new lines split from old. The upwards motion itself also invokes metaphors, particularly "up is good" and its corollary "down is bad". We forget that every living thing presently alive, from bacteria to blue whale, is the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution and thus equally evolved.

The tree diagram shows us for example that humans and chimpanzees had a common ancestor some 5 million years ago, and indeed that all life seems to have evolved from a single kind of organism. We see the same paradigm in physics and diagrams of the evolution of the universe and in the study of ancient texts. Diversity of similar objects in the present seems to automatically imply a common ancestor.

Buddhists use to paradigm to point to the common origins of Buddhism. However in my last essay I cited Paul Harrison's comments on the Vajracchedika: "...to put it in a nutshell, the idea that the wording of any Mahāyāna sūtra can be restored to some original and perfect state by text-critical processes must be abandoned: all lines do not converge back on a single point." (Harrison 240, emphasis added)

In this essay I will try to show that the tree diagram inevitably falsifies evolution and other complex developmental processes. The project of making lines converge is not always able to account for the complexity of reality. I will also propose another, better, metaphor for conceptualising and visualising these processes. In writing this I also have in mind a discussion on Sujato's blog about how we interpret and make conjectures about the origins of Buddhism based on the textual evidence which dates from some centuries after the putative origin.

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Let's begin with bacteria. The standard view of bacteria is that like other forms of life they evolved into thousands of species which can be classified in the standard taxonomies, using the standard Latin nomenclature: Genus species. For example Bifidobacterium longum occurs in the gut of infants and plays several roles including breaking down the complex sugars in milk to help the infant digest them. While Streptococcus pneumoniae is a very different bacteria that colonises the lungs and other tissues and causes pneumonia and also meningitis. These two bacteria have very different habits. And yet Lynn Margulis argued that bacteria have no species because they can all shared genetic material.

Biology blogger, Julius Csotonyi, has called them "Plagiarizing Wizards", Csotonyi's account of "horiziontal gene transfer" is amusing and informative at the same time. Any bacteria can share genetic material with any other bacteria and some viruses (which Lynn Margulis characterised as stripped down bacteria). It is partly this ability that geneticists employ when the insert or remove genes from organisms. This assimilation of genetic material changes the organism. We might say that in assimilating foreign genes they had become a new species, just like that.

Furthermore, Csotonyi says "Even more amazingly, there is evidence that under stressful conditions (e.g. heavy metal-polluted waterways), the rate of horizontal gene transfer between bacteria increases, as if stress induces a more urgent swapping of genetic ideas for a solution."

Graphical representation of horizontal gene transfer. The branched tree-like structure represents the evolutionary lineage (geneological tree) of representatives of earth's major types of life forms. Sometimes genes can be transferred (horizontal gene transfer) between otherwise distantly related species. This is illustrated by bridges forming between branches of the tree, where genes 'jump' from one lineage to another.

Image: Barth F. Smets, Ph.D.

via Evolutionary Routes

Bacteria always live in communities of many 'species' or as we ought to say 'varieties'. And these varieties swap genes. Each gene codes for a protein which performs a specific task. It may be a structural element, or an external marker used for communication, or very often it will be an enzyme which facilitates and/or catalyses a particular kind of chemical reaction. In the heavy metal example, a protein might chelate a heavy metal atom - i.e. warp it in an organic molecule that effective seals it off from the chemical environment surrounding it, rendering it inert. Chelation is the first line medical treatment for heavy metal poisoning. And this ability which one bacteria has, can rapidly spread through a whole population of bacteria under ideal conditions. For example, this is how bacteria can acquire immunity to antibiotics. It only takes one bacteria to express a gene that produces a protein that neutralises the antibiotic agent. That bacteria survives in a situation of drastically reduced competition for resources and thus breeds rapidly, but also passes on the gene that makes it successful.

Thus the tree structure cannot describe the process by which the current variety in the population of bacteria occurs. The diagram looks more like the image on the left. The technical term is a reticulated network, but below I will propose a metaphor drawn for nature for it.

In the diagram above, higher level structures such as mitochondria and plasmids are also shared between varieties. Further up the taxonomic ladder we strike the phenomenon of hybridisation. We are probably all familiar with the popular, and useful, definition of a species that says that two organisms are different species if they cannot breed and produce viable offspring. Thus a horse and a donkey can produce offspring, mules, but they are sterile and we consider them different species. We also see lion and tiger hybrids in captivity producing sterile, so called, ligers. Wolves and dogs on the other hand produce viable offspring, and as a result the domestic dog has been reclassified as a sub-species of wolf. Hybridisation is far more common than has previously been suspected. Reporting on an article in Nature the National Geographic News said "on average, 10 percent of animal species and 25 percent of plant species are now known to hybridize." Of course most times these inter-species matings result in infertile offspring. But not always. When the offspring are fertile then a new species is born. Off course the chances of successful hybridisation are low, but they seem to be considerably higher than the likelihood of a beneficial mutation in a single gene, let alone the accumulation of such mutations.

Clearly any hybridisation event that is viable produces a cross-link in the "tree". Certainly in the plant kingdom where this is going on in 1 in 4 species the result is going to be a highly cross-linked reticulated network, rather than a tree. For animals less so, but the cross-linking is going to outweigh the splitting supposed to be caused by beneficial mutations by orders of magnitude.

Family tree of the four groups of early humans living
in Eurasia 50,000 years ago and the gene flow
between the groups due to interbreeding.
Image credit: Kay Prüfer et al.

One of the fascinating genetics/evolution stories of recent years was the discovery in 2013 that modern humans in Eurasia appear to have Neanderthal DNA indicating that our two species Homo sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis interbred to some extent (see Discover) before Neanderthals went extinct. We Eurasians, then, are hybrids of H. sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis. There was also apparent interbreeding between other late varieties of modern humans such as Homo Denisova and Floriensis (see also here and here and this). It's getting more and more difficult to maintain the the genus Homo can be represented by a simple tree. The hominid family tree is highly cross-linked and in fact resembles a reticulated network. That said all present day humans are considered to be the same species and subspecies, i.e. Homo sapiens sapiens.

A Braided Skein

I've often commented on the way that Buddhism has hybridised with the cultures that surround it. If the Iranian Origin thesis is correct then the Śākyas arrived in the central Ganges plain at a time (ca. 850 BCE) when it was extremely culturally diverse. First wave Indo-Aryan speakers had already begun to dominate over local speakers of Tibeto-Burman, Austroasiatic, and possibly Dravidian languages, but the latter were still present. Second wave Indo-Aryans (the Vedic speaking Brahmins) were already moving east and starting to influence and be influenced by the cultures there. Not only this but there is evidence of considerable genetic variation in India also (e.g. Ethnic India; DNA Testing). I've described the emergence of Buddhism, Jainism and Ājīvakism (and to some extent Upaniṣadic Brahmanism) as the culmination of a process of assimilation and synthesis of elements of the cultures associated with these various languages. So by the time Buddhist texts are composed we see influence from Brahmins in the form of gods such as Indra, Brahmā, and (probably) from Austroasiatic in the form of local spirits associated with water and/or trees such as yakṣas and nāgas for example. In the Buddhist doctrine of karma we can see influences from Brahmanism and Jainism along with remnants of Zoroastrianism (hope to get this conjecture published soon). And we know that such hybridisation continues. Buddhists continue to borrow elements from other cultures and religions down to the present.

Rakaia River on its way
to the sea.

Even if the Iranian Origin thesis is wrong, the course of the development of Buddhism is clearly not a simple tree structure resulting from internal splits. generating the traditionally names sects. No doubt there were internal splits, but there was a great deal of hybridisation as well. The tree image is inadequate to describe such development. Taking my cue from Indian use of river metaphors, I have envisaged the development like the course of a braided river system. There is an overall flow in one direction, but the flow constantly branches and recombines across a broad bed. There are no straight lines. At times there seems to be a "main-stream" and at other times no one stream dominates, the patterns of branches and convergences is constantly changing.

And of course even if the Śākyas did originate in Iran, things were by no means simple there and then. The influence of Egyptian religion, particularly in the matter of eschatology (or afterlife) for example is quite obvious. Witzel's method of comparative mythology, in his book Origins of the World's Mythologies, purports to trace the roots of our story telling to Africa ca. 65,000 years ago as the first (successful) migrations of modern humans into the rest of the world commenced. And so on back and back until we can no longer determine any source.

Metaphors and Schemas

One of the basic schemas identified by George Lakoff by which we organise and conceptualise our experience is the origin-path-destination schema. The tree diagram is a variation on this basic schema adding binary divisions and multiple destinations to a single point of origin. And it seems natural for us to organise information along these lines because the schema is one of the fundamental patterns we use to build conceptual metaphors. The origin-path-destination schema is something like a Kantian a priori. But in this case the metaphor does not quite fit reality. We need to invoke another schema to better fit our experience. I suggest that in terms of fundamental human experience the schema that best fits is the community made up of a number of inter-marrying families. As time goes on certain characteristics tend to be retained in families over generations, but at the same time characteristics morph and change because of intermarriage. Likewise the community may remain relatively stable as an entity over many generations despite continual changes in personal due only to birth and death.

The concept of common origins, of seeking for common origins certainly has power at times and it certainly has a powerful grip on our imaginations. But it always over-simplifies the origin. Whether we are dealing with evolution as a whole, the human species, or the products of our culture like the Buddhist religion, or the texts produced by our Buddhist ancestors, there is extremely unlikely to be a simply origin. We Buddhists in particular want to trace everything back to one man. But that one man was just as much a product of his conditioning as any human being. We all have to learn the language and the ways of our family, community and nation. In a multicultural environment like 500 BCE Ganges Plains, or 21st century UK, we also have to engage with differences. Looking backwards there are always continuities and discontinuities and hybridisations. Whoever the Buddha was, he was a member of a family and a community that shaped him just as we were shaped by our families and our communities. Indeed one of the implications of the Iranian Origin thesis is that we should place more emphasis on the culture of the Śākyas as a community as the source of Buddhist beliefs, especially regards morality, and less on any one individual. This might explain why a name had to be invented for the founder at a later date. It is interesting that Buddhists were often known as Śākyans in ancient India - the early medieval Mīmāṁsā thinker Kumārila refers to Buddhists as 'the Śākyas'.

Even if we can point to a single founder, he himself was the product of complex processes. When we see the Buddha as a like a spring (a origin-path metaphor) we actually falsify what we know about every human being - even the most remarkable people are shaped by their environment, by teachers, by family, by history. In fact since he wrote nothing, it was the Buddha's followers who shaped our views of what Buddhism is. What they remembered, what they emphasised, and what chance allowed of that subset to survive is at least as influential as the Buddha himself presuming he existed.

Buddhism is the product of complex historical and cultural processes - a braid rather than a tree.

~~oOo~~

Update 31 Dec 2013: Seems my use of the word "braid" was on target: Viewpoint: Human evolution, from tree to braid by Professor Clive Finlayson. "Some time ago we replaced a linear view of our evolution by one represented by a branching tree. It is now time to replace it with that of an interwoven plexus of genetic lineages that branch out and fuse once again with the passage of time."

↧

If there is no self, who is responsible for what actions?

January 3, 2014, 12:27 am

≫ Next: Who Translated the Heart Sutra into Sanskrit?

≪ Previous: Evolution: Trees and Braids.

"I suppose a question I have is: if there is no 'self',

how can we be responsible for our actions?"

A few days ago one of my colleagues asked this question in response to Dayāmati's essay What does one not have when one does not have a self? This is one of the crucial questions of Buddhist metaphysics. If there were no self, then there could be no moral agent or moral agency, and there would be no one who could be held responsible for actions. It would be an odd world. But modern Buddhists continue to argue that Buddhism involves not having a self on two levels: the self we currently have is an illusion; and once we are awakened we'll realise we have no self.

This highlights a major discontinuity in the early Buddhist texts. I already have an essay ready and waiting which addresses another dimension of this problem, but I found the phrasing of this particular question interesting enough to dash off a reply.

As far as the early Buddhist texts are concerned none of them ever comes out and says "you don't have a self". They seem to me to be saying something quite different and much more subtle. My starting point would be that early Buddhist texts focus on a particular domain (visaya) of knowledge. They say that all the knowledge we have is experiential: everything (sabbaṁ) is just the senses and the qualities of sense experience (solidity, resistance, volume, colour etc). Our perceptual world (loka) is the product of perceptual processes (khandhā). Sensations (vedanā) only arise when sense object and sense organ connect in the presence of sense consciousness. But we are intoxicated (pamāda) by the play of sense experience - and lost in the manifold interpretations of it (papañca). We mistake experience for something else. In Thomas Metzinger's terms we are "naive realists". We treat experience as if it is real; as though we are in direct unmediated contact with objects. Why we do this is another interesting question, but I'll take it as read for the purposes of this essay.

One of the important points made by early Buddhists was that dichotomies like "real" and "unreal" don't apply to experience - this is implied in the critique of the terms atthitā (existent) and nātthitā (non-existent) with respect to loka in the Kaccānagotta Sutta. Be it the immediate sensory experience or the cascades of impressions and associations that follow contact, the ontological status of experience is indeterminate. Experience is best described in process terms as arising when the conditions are in place and ceasing when they are not.

I'm not sure about other people but I don't think of myself as "having" a self, but in terms of "being" a self (I am). It's only in artificially abstract discussions that we begin to talk in terms of "having" a self. Most of the time the sense of being a self is transparent and unconscious. I have a locus of experience, a point of view (I look out through the windows of my senses), a sense of having a certain amount of control, a sense of (and a desire for) continuity, and a sense of ownership over what I am aware of (they are my perceptions). These observations are the background against which I understand my world of experience. These qualities of consciousness are a bit like the "a priori judgements" in Kant's philosophy that structure experience. The language of "having" a self may well stem from the problem of the afterlife and continuity. From a Christian point of view we "have" a soul which survives our physical death. We can use the language of possession because a soul does not participate in the world of matter, it only provides continuity in the afterlife. I've explored this kind of duality of spirit and matter in some depth already so I won't go into it again here (See Metaphors and Materialism).

In the final analysis this sense of being a self is just an experience with the same characteristics as all experiences (anicca, dukkha& anāttan). We experience the world from a first person perspective but it is wrong to say "I am this experience" or "that experience is me" or "this experience is mine". Thus it would in fact seem to be wrong to say that we do or don't have a self. Or that we have a self that is then lost. The world of experience is what arises in our awareness when our body and mind interact with the world of objects (which is never in doubt in early Buddhist texts) including other people, who we can impute have a very similar experience of being to us through communication. Thus experience is neither subjective nor objective but exists in the overlap of the two - it is always both together. And this may be one reason the Buddhadharma is describes as a middle way.

The fundamental problem outlined by early Buddhist texts is intoxication with experience so that we mistake what is impermanent for something permanent and so on. Of course a great deal of ink is spilt on the consequences of this misidentification, but it all stems from being out of alignment (mithyā) with how experience really is. As we know ourselves through experience (since all knowledge stems from experience) then our self shares the characteristics of all experiences.

Though we cannot use the language of real or unreal with respect to experience, particularly the experience of being a self, "we" (the self we experience being) can still take responsibility for what this body, mouth and mind do. This is partly because experience has a physical locus (rūpa, first of the khandhās). Another aspect of having an experience is saṅkhāra or volition, in effect the urge to act on the stimulus. Volition in relation to experience is explained in terms of the mental & emotional responses (cetanā) associated with the different senses. Early Buddhism sees action (kamma) as resulting from responses to experience (cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi AN 6.63). Motivation/intention/reaction with respect to experience does not require a sense of self. It is part and parcel of having an experience in this view. Since both saṅkhāra (the urge to act) and vedanā (the results of kamma) share a locus it can be observed that activities enacted from this locus of experience have consequences at this locus of experience. In other words as well as the observation that experiences arise in a conditioned fashion, we can in addition observe causal relations between actions and consequences. From a first person perspective this is interpreted as 'my actions have consequences for me'. And for most of us this is an important perspective. For if my actions did not have consequences for me, then surely I would be far less motivated to be ethical.

I've argued before that Buddhist morality is primarily focussed on interactions with other people. To speak of "actions" in the abstract can be misleading. By "action" I think we can say that early Buddhists meant our behaviour towards other people considered as other loci of experience. A Pāḷi verse which is repeated in several places suggests that our ability to attribute our kind of experience to other loci is the basis of morality. We understand that 'our' experience is much the same as 'their' experience, and thus we don't go about causing pain because we understand that pain is undesirable. "I" am responsible for actions initiated at this locus of experience if only because this is also where the consequences are experienced.

The realisation of self qua contingent experience is liberating because it allows us to become sober (appamāda) with respect to sense experience. We are not caught up in grasping after experienced pleasure and averting unexperienced pain. We still experience both, but don't get hooked up on them. The Salla Sutta (The Discourse on Being Pierced) makes an important distinction between the unawakened and the awakened. The unawakened, struck by an arrow experience physical (kāyika) pain, but then they also experience a psychological (cetasika) reaction to the pain, as if they are pierced by a second arrow. The awakened experience the first arrow, but not the second. I wrote about this distinction in terms of pain, which we all have, and suffering which only the unawakened have. I imagine the experience of awakening to be characterised by contentment as we are not pulled this way and that by (habitual) reactions to stimulus. Our sensory world becomes less compelling and we can disbelieve it if we choose, or suspend disbelief and plunge in. (Gary Weber describes something like this). However as an embodied being we still have the same perceptual processes going on.

In terms of morality, post-awakening we are able to behave in ways that are consistent (Skt. samyañc) with how experience actually works instead of inconsistent (Skt. mithyā) and especially in relation to other people we don't behave selfishly because we see through our sense of being a self. Thus realising the contingent nature of self and not treating the self as a really existent entity allows for naturally skilful actions.

It's not that at some point we do"have" a self and then later we don't"have" a self. From an early Buddhist point of view we have experiences that we (unconsciously and transparently) interpret as us being a self. We proceed as though I, me, & mine are straightforward propositions. To the point where questioning I, me, & mine in any serious way is unusual and apt to draw blank stairs from most people. When we learn to see those same experiences in the light of awakening then we no longer interpret them in the same way. The problem of agency in the light of not "having" a self doesn't arise because having or not having a self is not the case.

I can't speak to later developments. Buddhists seem to have very quickly got caught up in the pan-Indian conversation about ontology and the competition for influence and resources that accompanied being a large religious institution. They seem to have lost their way doctrinally. Once the Abhidharma is in place as canonical (around the beginning of the common era?), different solutions to the question were required and were supplied with varying success.

~~oOo~~

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Who Translated the Heart Sutra into Sanskrit?

September 12, 2013, 10:57 pm

≫ Next: Reasoning and Beliefs

≪ Previous: If there is no self, who is responsible for what actions?

Xuánzàng

This is the third in a series of essays exploring Jan Nattier's thesis that the Heart Sutra was composed in China in about the 7th century. The last two essays have looked at some of the sources for what ended up in the text. The other main issue addressed by Nattier is the question of who translated the text into Sanskrit. I think it's fair to say that this is still a mystery, but the text itself has some clues.

Let's begin by looking more closely at some of the Sanskrit phrases. Many scholars by now have noted that the Sanskrit used in the Heart Sutra is rather unidiomatic at times. I can assure you that translating the Sanskrit text as it stands is not always easy! It was perhaps this awkwardness that hid a basic grammatical error in the first paragraph which I discovered at the end of last year. In this essay I outline some Chinese idioms identified by Nattier in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra, and show how this supports her Chinese origins thesis and puts some limits on who could have translated it into Sanskrit. Coming out of this examination are concomitant proposals to improve the Sanskrit text, which will be in next week's essay.

In making the case that the Heart Sutra was composed in China, Nattier points to a number of idioms that seem more at home in China than India. For example the phrase niṣṭhā-nirvaṇa is rather awkward in Sanskrit. The Chinese 究竟涅槃 jiùjìng-nièpán is more natural. The last two characters render nirvāṇa while the first two mean 'finally attain' (Nattier has "literally 'ulimate[ly] nirvāṇa"). Nattier comments "[this phrase] is attested in a number of other Buddhist texts, and might well be described as standard (even idiomatic) Buddhist Chinese." (178).

The difficulty of this term can perhaps be exemplified by Edward Conze's equivocation with respect to it. The first two versions of his critical edition (1948) and (1967) have niṣṭhā-nirvāṇa, but (1975) has niṣṭhā-nirvāṇa-prāptaḥ. Conze has added the past participle prāptaḥ'attained' (from pra√āp 'attains') to nirvāṇa extending the compound. This choice is ironic because the text earlier says na prāptiḥ 'no attaining' (this is a verbal noun from the same root). So why choose prāpta? The obvious answer is that it appears in some of the mss. Looking at the footnotes of Conze's 1967 critical edition (confirmed from my own observations in most cases) we find these variant readings:

N^abcdikm: nistanirvāṇaprāptaḥ
N^e: nirvvaṇaprāptās
J^ab, C^cg: niṣṭhanirvaṇaḥ
C^ae: tani nirvāṇam prāpnoti
C^g: niṣṭhanirvāṇā

Thus those mss. which supplement niṣṭhanirvāṇa, supplement it with a verbal form from pra√āp. But prāptaḥ doesn't make sense because the text itself rules it out. This, plus the fact that many mss. leave it out and Conze himself left it out in his first two versions of the critical edition, suggest that it was inserted later to help make sense of the text precisely because niṣṭhanirvāṇa alone is so awkward. It's extremely unlikely that the text was composed with the phrase niṣṭhanirvāṇa in Sanskrit.

In Pāli we find a strikingly similar idiom, though only in a single text, Gaṇakamoggallāna Sutta (MN 107):

Appekacce kho, brāhmaṇa, mama sāvakā mayā evaṃ ovadīyamānā evaṃ anusāsīyamānā accantaṃ niṭṭhaṃ nibbānaṃ ārādhenti, ekacce nārādhentī’’ti. (M iii.4)
When, O Brahmin, my disciples are advised and instructed by me, some do indeed succeed to the ultimate goal nibbāna, and some do not succeed.

Note that the verb here is a causative from ā√rādh 'to suceed, attain, accomplish' rather than pra√āp. The Chinese counterpart, Madhyāgama 144, was translated ca. 397 or 398 CE probably from Gāndhārī. In Chinese the verb is 得 de'get, obtain, etc'. Thus where there is a verb in a similar Indic phrase it was supplied by some Chinese translators.

Nattier argues that no one would use niṣṭhānirvāṇa (with no verb) when composing a text in Sanskrit, but that the same idiom is right at home in Chinese, thus the Sanskrit reflects a Chinese original. Recall that, in the case of those sections known to be from the Pañcaviṃśati, the Sanskrit wording has almost invariably changed after going through Chinese. In the next essay we will see that Kumārajīva used the phrase 究竟涅槃 to translate several different Sanskrit phrases, and show that there are several that are better candidates than niṣṭhānirvāṇa. This in turn provides us with possible improvements to the Sanskrit Heart Sutra.

Another phrase that stands out is satyam-amithyatvāt. Conze (1975) takes poetic flight in translating this phrase: "...in truth, for what could go wrong", but this is not grounded in the text. Satyam is easy enough, it means 'truth' and being a neuter word is in either the nominative or accusative singular. The preceding phrases are the epithets of prajñāpāramitā, discussed last week, and we might therefore suppose that here satyam is predicated of prajñāpāramitā. That is to say that we would naturally read this as saying that prajñāpāramitā is true. The fact of being true is of considerable importance to Buddhists.

The other word amithyatvāt is much more troublesome however. The word mithyā is a contracted form of mithūyā and means 'inverted', or 'contrary' and thus 'false'. The root is √mith which Whitney's Roots glosses as 'alternate and altercate'. The term is often paired with samyañc (from saṃ + √añc'to bend') which becomes samyak or samyag in actual use. Samyañc roughly means 'to go with' and mithyā'to go against'. The form amithyatvāt has a prefix and a suffix, and a case ending. We add -tva to create an abstract noun, mithyatva meaning 'a state of being false' or 'falseness'. This is negated by the prefix a- so that amithyatva means 'a state of being true, truthful', however it's typical to retain the Sanskrit morphology and render a word like this as 'non-falseness' or 'a state of not being false'. Finally the whole word is in the ablative case, indicated by the ending -āt, which tells us the reason for the action of a verb (the verb here being a tacit 'to be').

Putting it all together we may say that satyam amithyatvāt literally means 'it is true because of non-falseness' or even 'it is true because of [its] truth'. This is as awkward in Sanskrit as it sounds in English. Nattier assures us that the Chinese version 真實不虛 zhēn shí bù xū is "entirely natural in Chinese" (177). Nattier suggests it means "genuine, not vain". 虛 xū can mean 'false, worthless; empty, hollow, vain'.

The suggestion is that satyam amithyatvāt is like the common idiom "long time no see". This phrase is thought to have derived from a Chinese greeting and to retain the Chinese grammar. It may be compared to Mandarin phrase 好久不見 (hǎojiǔ bù jiàn), which can be translated literally as "long-time, no see".

However, as I will show next week, this is not in fact an artefact of back translation from Chinese, but the result of a poor decision by Conze in creating his critical edition. There were other options available to Conze from his manuscripts that would have made more sense, despite being minority readings.

Finally compare this line:

na rūpaṃ na vedanā na saṃjñā na saṃskārāḥ na vijñānaṃ

With these:

na cakṣuḥśrotraghrānajihvākāyamanāṃsi.
na rūpaśabdagandharasaspraṣṭavayadharmāh.

The former is just what we would expect from a Buddhist text. Buddhists are not afraid of repetition, especially not where the longer Perfection of Wisdom texts were concerned, and so use na in each case. The latter two lines look unusual (and the 'infelicity' was spotted for Nattier by highly experienced Sanskritist Richard Salomon. See 214: note 57). Nattier quotes from the Gilgit ms. of the Pañcaviṃśati: "na cakṣur na śrotram na ghrāṇam na jihvā na kāye na manaḥ". Compare the Pañcaviṃśati version from Kimura's edition (2007):

na cakṣurāyatanaṃ na rūpāyatanaṃ (no eye base, no form base).
na śrotrāyatanaṃna [na] śabdāyatanaṃ
na ghrāṇāyatanaṃ na gandhāyatanaṃ
na jihvāyatanaṃ [na] rasāyatanaṃ
na kāyāyatanaṃ [na] spraṣṭavyāyatanaṃ
na manaāyatanaṃ [na] dharmāyatanam,

The Chinese Heart Sutra has:

無眼、耳、鼻、舌、身、意；
Wú yǎn, ěr, bí, shé, shēn, yì;
No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mind;

And this in turn precisely follows the Large Perfection of Wisdom Text of Kumārajīva except in the matter of punctuation, all of which was added by later editors:

無眼耳鼻舌身意 (T 8. 223 p.0223a18.6).

It seems reasonably clear that na cakṣuḥśrotraghrānajihvākāyamanāṃsi reflects Chinese syntax with a single negating particle for all of the items being negated. Sanskrit syntax would give each item it's own negative particle as we see from the Sanskrit Pañcavīṃśati.

For Nattier the weight of evidence suggests that the Heart Sutra is a back translation from Chinese to Sanskrit. However this is only the most obvious conclusion of her investigation. There is a further conclusion from these facts that Nattier does not explicitly draw, but which is implicit given the facts.

The composer of the Sanskrit Heart Sutra was probably a Chinese speaker.

For Nattier the main suspect in the mystery of who composed the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is Xuánzàng. He lived at about the right time, travelled to India and learned Sanskrit at about the right time. Thus he had the opportunity and the means. He was also known from his memoir of travelling to India to have been a devotee of the text.

Nattier invites us to imagine that Xuánzàng had arrived in India only to find that the Indian monks had not heard of this text. Upon learning the language would he not be tempted to compose a version in Sanskrit? Early in my own attempts to learn Sanskrit, the Heart Sutra was one of the first texts I looked at precisely because it is familiar and concise. As I mentioned in my last essay, an Indian provenance was crucial to the authenticity of a Buddhist text in China. The whole point of Xuánzàng's journey to India was to return with authentic Indian texts. To discover that one's favourite text was not extant in Sanskrit might tempt the most scrupulous monk to compose a new Sanskrit "original".

Xuánzàng was unlikely to have composed the Chinese Heart Sutra however. It is recorded that he was given the text. A man who he had cared for during an illness taught him the Heart Sutra out of gratitude (179). It subsequently became a favourite to chant in troubled times, such as crossing the Gobi desert.

Xuánzàng included all his translations of the Prajñāpāramitā texts into one huge volume, treating the various texts as chapters. The only translation of his not included is the Heart Sutra. Also the vocabulary of the Heart Sutra (T 8.251) closely matches Kumārajīva's translation of the Large Perfection of Wisdom text in most cases. Given that Xuánzàng led the effort to translate all of the extant Prajñāpāramitā texts, and developed a whole new approach to translating Sanskrit, why would he not use his own terminology?

A couple of terms used in the Heart Sutra are distinctive to Xuánzàng. Kumārajīva transliterates the name Śāriputra as 舍利弗 Shèlìfú. Here 弗 fú transliterates the first syllable of putra. Chinese transliterations frequently leave off the final syllable. Xuánzàng, on the other hand prefers 舍利子Shèlìzi, replacing 弗 with the Chinese word for 'son'子.

Kumārajīva translates Avalokiteśvara as 觀世音 Guānshìyīn (whence Guānyīn also spelt Kwan yin), whereas Xuánzàng prefers 觀自在 Guānzìzài. As I have noted before, this change in transliteration reflects a change in the Sanskrit name from Avalokita-svara to Avalokita-īśvara (with sandhi resolving a-ī to e and giving Avalokiteśvara). This change is discussed by Alexander Studholme and involves Avalokitasvara absorbing some of the characteristics of Śiva who is converted to Buddhism in the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra and in the process absorbing the epithet īśvara'lord', which replaces svara'sound'. Nattier notes that Xuánzàng's own students tended to retain the more popular form of the name, Guānshìyīn, even when they adopted his new readings of other terms including the name Shèlìzi (216, n.84).

These usages are innovations introduced into Chinese Buddhist texts by Xuánzàng. And thus we know that at the very least Xuánzàng, or someone familiar with this work, must have edited T 8.251, and have done so after Xuánzàng learned Sanskrit in India and devised these new transliterations of Indic names and terms.

Whoever did translate the text into Sanskrit, they were soon vindicated by the adoption of the Heart Sutra into the pantheon of Prajñāpāramitā texts. In China commentaries were produced from the 7th century onwards. In India a number of commentaries (now only preserved in Tibetan) were written from the 8th to the 11th centuries (see Donald Lopez 1988, 1996). All of the Chinese commentaries are based on the Chinese version attributed to Xuánzàng (i.e. T 8.251), and all the Indian commentaries are of the long text. The split in the dates of the commentaries of East and South Asia, as well as the text they chose to comment on are supporting evidence for Nattier's Chinese Origins thesis.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Conze, Edward (1948) ‘Text, Sources, and Bibliography of the Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya.’ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, April 80(1-2): 33-51.
Conze, Edward. (1967) ‘The Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdaya Sūtra’ in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies: Selected Essays, Bruno Cassirer, pp. 147-167.
Conze, Edward. (1975) Buddhist Wisdom Books: The Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. George Allen & Unwin.

Kimura Takayasu (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. Online: http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010].

Lopez, Donald S. (1988) The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.
Lopez, Donald S. (1996) Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University press.
Nattier, Jan. (1992) The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text? Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. Vol. 15 (2), p.153-223. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707
Studholme, Alexander. (2002) The origins of oṃ manipadme hūṃ : a study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Albany: State university of New York Press.

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Reasoning and Beliefs

January 10, 2014, 12:17 am

≫ Next: RIP MIchael Dorfman

≪ Previous: Who Translated the Heart Sutra into Sanskrit?

In a desultory way I have been articulating a theory about religious belief over the last few years. As someone interested in factual accounts; as someone who's worldview has been changed by new facts on several occasions; and as someone who regularly spends a fair amount of time amongst credulous religious believers, I've been fascinated by the relationship between reason, factual information, and beliefs.

So for example, following Mercier and Sperber, I understand reasoning to be a function of groups seeking optimal solutions to problems. M & S argued that reasoning has confirmation bias as a feature when putting forward solutions to problems and that critical thinking, generally speaking, only works well when criticising someone else's proposed solution. The individual working in isolation to try to find the truth using reason is at a considerable disadvantage. Similarly, others have found that reason does not operate as predicted by mainstream accounts of it: "We’re assuming that people accept something or don’t accept it on a completely rational basis. Or, they’re part of a belief community that as a group accept or don’t accept. But the findings just made those simple answers untenable." (When it Comes to Accepting Evolution, Gut Feelings Trump Facts)

Furthermore I apply results published by Antonio and Hanna Damasio which suggest that emotions play a key role in decision making. (I outlined this idea in a blog called Facts and Feelings). Most real world problems are complex and making decisions about them, including deciding what we think is true, requires us to sift and weigh up a broad range of information. Before we can make a decision we have to assess the relevance of the information or category of information to the decision at hand, i.e. what is salient. Most of this process is unconscious and is based on emotional responses. Or in other words emotions function to help us decide what is important in any decision making situation. Decisions are then made by comparative weighing up of our emotional responses to the solutions we are aware of and have judged to be salient. Once a decision is made it is then rationalised to fit an existing personal narrative. This insight was also outlined at a library marketing seminar I attended almost 20 years ago.

The ability to unconsciously determine salience is what we often call our "gut feeling" or "intuition". This type of unconscious information processing seems to rely on pattern recognition and considering many options at once (parallel processing). The end result is decisions made with no conscious awareness of the process of thinking it through. Indeed the result often comes to us in a flash or after a period of sleep. The speed of this type of processing seems to contraindicate the usual cognitive processes of conscious problem solving, so that the answers that come via this route may not be fully integrated into the sense of self - spatially the answer comes from nowhere, or from outside us. Thus this kind of information process can coupled with views about metaphysical self that is not tied to the body and become "divine inspiration". (See Origin of the Idea of the Soul which relies on work by Thomas Metzinger).

The cognitive gap that opens up when we set aside information as non-salient is often filled by what neuroscientists call confabulation. Oliver Sachs poignantly described a man with no ability to make or retrieve memories (see Oliver Sach's Confabulating Butcher). Asked why he is present in the hospital or engaged in an activity he cannot say, but instead confabulates - he produces a plausible story and presents it as truth. There is no conscious lie, and the patient is not trying to deceive his interlocutors. He is presenting the most plausible account of himself that he has, despite being aware of inconsistencies, because he has no other account and the state of not being able to account for himself seems to be unacceptable at an unconscious level. Something similar happens whenever we have a flash of insight or intuition. The thought pops fully formed into our heads and then we confabulate a story about how it got there, and this generally speaking has nothing to do with how the mind or the brain works. Thus conscious thought is not a good paradigm for how the mind works. It is the just the tip of the iceberg.

Now this theory is still rather nascent and a bit vague. I'm still getting up to speed with the literature of evolutionary approaches to religion, though my views seem to have much in common with scholars like Ara Norenzayan. The theory does make an interesting prediction. It predicts that where people have strong existing views they will treat new contradictory information in a limited number of ways depending on how they feel about it. Where a view entails a major investment of identity and social status (e.g. a religious view) a person will tend to judge contradictory information as not salient and reason in such a way as to set aside the new information without having to consider the real implications of it. My idea was that this could be tested at some point on people with religious beliefs. On paper it does seem to account for some behaviours of religious people with respect to new information, for example the Christian fundamentalist confronting the facts of evolution.

With all this in mind I was fascinated to read an article by Steve Keen describing something very similar in the field of economics. Keen highlights a paper by Dan M. Kahan et al. "Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government" Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 307. Keen, formerly Professor of Economics & Finance at the University of Western Sydney, is best known for his vehement polemics against the Neoclassical consensus in economics, epitomised in his book Debunking Economics. Neoclassical economics is what is taught to virtually all economics students at all levels across the world and has a monopoly over economics discourse that is disproportionate to its success as a body of theory.

Keen is one of a small number of economists who predicted the economic crisis that began in late 2007, and probably the only one who did so on the basis of mathematical modelling. One of his main criticisms of Neoclassical economists is that they ignore debt in their macro-economic models because aggregate debt cancels out: if I borrow £1 and a bank lends me £1 then the balance is zero. On the face of it this seems reasonable because our view of banks is that they lend out deposits. But in fact banks lend orders of magnitude more money than their actual deposits. When they lend they, in effect, create money at the same time. Problems occur when too much debt builds up and the repayments become a burden. For example private debt in the UK soared to 500% of GDP or five times the annual economic output of the whole country. Conditions may change and render debtors incapable of repaying the debt, which is what happened on a huge scale in 2007 and the sub-prime mortgage scandal. The levels of debt at that point meant that banks started to become insolvent as their income from interest payments plummeted and their own ability to service debts was compromised. From their the crisis spread like toppling dominoes.

Thus banks and debt are far from neutral in the economy. Perhaps in a post-crash world in which the role of banks in creating the crisis through a massive over-expansion of the money supply is public knowledge, the theory might be expected to change? But it has not. A global economic crisis has not caused any great soul searching amongst macro-economists who did not see it coming. Tweaking is the main result.

Keen predicted the crash on the basis of the rate of change of debt. As we take on debt (private rather than public debt) growth ensues and , for example, employment levels grow. As shown in this graph there is a tight correlation (0.96) between changes in debt and the employment rate.

Thus when the rate of change of debt began to fall sharply in 2006 it was a harbinger of collapse in the economy. In the USA employment levels fell from 95% to 90% and have yet to fully recover.

This mathematical analysis ought to have been of interest to people trying to predict the behaviour of economies. Especially in post-crash hindsight it ought to be interesting to those whose job was to predict how the economy would perform and utterly failed to see the worst economic disaster in a century coming. As late as mid-2007, just months before sub-prime began to kick off, the OECD were still predicting strong economic performance in their member countries for the foreseeable future. However Keen's work, and the work of other economists who were successful in predicting a major recession/depression has been roundly ignored. Keen also argues that mainstream economic models are incapable of predicting a recession because it is not a possible state in those models, whereas his models do allow for recession.

Not a man to mince words, Keen has been highly critical of the mainstream of economics. But now he puts that failure to react in the context of a theory of belief and decision making similar to the one outlined above. In the paper by Kahan et al, the participants were given tasks to assess their "ability to draw valid causal inferences from empirical data." The results were counter-intuitive and surprising. Numeracy – skill in understanding numbers – was a negative predictor of performance on these tasks if they conflicted with existing beliefs.

"It seems that when an issue is politically neutral, a higher level of numeracy does correlate with a higher capacity to interpret numerical data correctly. But when an issue is politically charged – or the numerical data challenges a numerate person’s sense of self – numeracy actually works against understanding the issue. The reason appears to be that numerate people employed their numeracy skills to evade the evidence, rather than to consider it."Steve Keen (emphasis in the original)

This is consistent with Mercier & Sperber's account of confirmation bias as a feature of reasoning. And it is consistent with my Damasio derived theory about the role of emotion in decision-making, if we read "politically charged" as signifying strongly held political beliefs, and associate that in turn with strong emotional responses to the issue. The authors tied this in with personal and social psychology:

Individuals, on this account, have a large stake – psychically as well as materially – in maintaining the status of, and their personal standing in, affinity groups whose members are bound by their commitment to shared moral understandings. If opposing positions on a policy-relevant fact – e.g., whether human activity is generating dangerous global warming – came to be seen as symbols of membership in and loyalty to competing groupsof this kind, individuals can be expected to display a strong tendency to conform their understanding of whatever evidence they encounter to the position that prevails in theirs. Steve Keen (emphasis added).

Kahan et al. extend the problem of salience of information to the social setting. Professed beliefs are often explicit markers of group membership and being well versed in group jargon and able to articulate group beliefs is part of what determines one's status in the group. In an economic setting, mainstream economists are able to ignore facts (such as a very high correlation of the rate of change of debt to the employment rate) that might change their worldview (particularly the way they view the role of debt in economics) because their status as members of a group requires them to conform to norms which are in part defined by holding a particular worldview. They are blind to facts which challenge their views. Keen points out that this is not a new observation and that some years ago that the great physicist Max Planck, who had struggled to have his work accepted by his peers, quipped that knowledge progresses "one funeral at a time".

This result reinforces the limitations of thinking of human beings in terms of individual psychology. It's a hard habit to break in the West. We are influenced by Freud, the Romantics, and the various revolutionary thinkers who championed the rights of individuals. Of course to some extent we are individuals, but not as much as we make out. Much of the inner life that appears to make up our individuality, is in fact determined by conditioning in various groups (family, peers, nation, religion, education) and by our place within these groups. We simply do not exist in isolation.

Any philosophy of consciousness, mind, or morality which sees individuals as the main subject for study is of limited value. And the practice of trying to make valid inferences from the individual to the group is less likely to be accurate than the other way around. At the very least individuals exist in a series of overlapping gestalts with various groups.

This view of people will most likely conflict with what we know. Most of us are convinced that we are individuals, who make our own decisions and think our own thoughts. We live in a society which highly values a narrative about "reason" and about what a reasoning individual is capable of. However, very few people are convinced by facts because that's not how reasoning works. That view of reason is isolated from other aspects of humanity such as emotions and our behaviour as social primates.

Those people who bombard us with facts fail to convince. By contrast the advertising profession has long understood that in order to change minds and behaviour one must change how people feel about the facts. Half the ads I see nowadays have almost no intellectual or factual content. It's all about brand recognition (familiarity) and a positive emotional response. One might say that for advertising the facts are now irrelevant. And so, liberals campaigning for protection of the environment, say, often fail to convince a sizeable proportion of the population or indeed anyone that disagrees with them to start with. Meanwhile advertising is a multi-billion pound industry, consumerism is rampant, and the environment is daily degraded in the direction of being unable to sustain human life.

Most people cannot be reasoned with, because neither people nor reason work the way they are popularly conceived to work. Those of us who want to make the world a better place must pay close attention to these issues of how people's minds actually work. If we want to convince people that we have a better solution it cannot be through facts alone. They must feel that what we say is salient in the context of their existing values. And even then, if what we say conflicts with strongly held beliefs then we can expect to be ignored. We tend to get so carried away in our enthusiasm for our own values that we fail to empathise with those whose minds we really need to change in order to change the world: i.e. political, military and business leaders.

~~oOo~~

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RIP MIchael Dorfman

January 11, 2014, 11:17 am

≫ Next: Unresolvable Plurality in Buddhist Metaphysics?

≪ Previous: Reasoning and Beliefs

Michael Dorfman

There's a thread on Reddit saying that Michael Dorfman, a long time reader of and commenter on this blog, and a penpal of mine, died on Christmas Day 2013. He was 49, a year older than me. It seems he took his own life.

As often happens with internet relationships I never really knew much about Michael personally, except that he knew a lot about Buddhism and thought a great deal more highly of Nāgārjuna (the subject of his MA thesis) than I did. He wrote to me quite often expressing his enthusiasm for my writing, but also not hesitating to criticise my mistakes and trying to make me think again. Lately we mainly did this behind the scenes through email rather than in comments.

One of his last emails to me gives you a good idea of the kind of thing we talked about, and how generous he was with his praise and how keen he was to get things across to me (he was like this on the Reddit website as well):

I'm impressed you have the patience to argue with Sxxxx and Bxxxx -- they seem to be acting willfully obtuse, uncharacteristically so. I would have thought it absolutely indubitable that (a) we have no direct evidence of the pre-Aśokan period, so anything we do is a reconstruction of some sort, and (b) the form this reconstruction takes is going to be governed in large part by what hermeneutical axioms we bring to bear on the indirect evidence.

The Diamond Sutra piece is very much of interest-- I've been waiting for the library in Oslo to send me the volume of the Schøyen manuscripts with the Harrison piece, but they keep sending me other volumes instead, which is fascinating but a bit frustrating. I think I've mentioned that the software experiments I am working on are aimed at Braarvig and his Bibliotheca Polyglotta.

In any event, I'll try to write up a proper response to post on your blog-- I think your analysis is very interesting, and quite similar in its results to where I've been heading, albeit from another direction (i.e., not via philology in my case, but via philosophy.) I think you are quite right that Nāgārjuna and the PPM literature are aimed at Abhidharmikas who have ontologized experience; unlike you, perhaps, I think that the notion of the "two truths" is a useful way of responding.

If we look at Harrison's translation:
Subhūti said, “His personal presence would be substantial, Lord, it would be substantial, Blessed One. Why is that, Lord? The Realized One has described it as an absence. That is why it is called ‘a personal presence.’ For it is not a presence. That is why it is called ‘a personal presence.’”

I'd highlight the "is called", i.e., dependent designation; it is conventionally 'a personal presence' because it is ultimately not a presence at all.

But I think your problematization of the "because" here is very interesting, and something I'm going to have to think about.

Michael Dorfman 15 Nov 2013

As one can see from this he is highly engaged in the discussion and we continued on at some length over the next few days exchanging thoughts on the Perfection of Wisdom tradition. The last time I heard from him was on 4 Dec 2012.

He was also a good promoter of this blog, often posting my essays on Reddit.com under /r/Buddhism/ which typically generated a goodly amount of traffic from that site. Judging by the tributes there he was highly regarded by many Redditors.

I always enjoyed getting emails from Michael and I will miss having his perspective on my writing. He understood the spirit of scholarship and had some sympathy with my approach, though did not always agree with either my methods or conclusions. In disagreement I found him a generous debating partner and able to argue the point quite vigorously without taking it personally. I felt we were kindred spirits and I'm sorry he's gone.

Apart from a number of tributes on Reddit (link above) there is one other online memorial to Michael on The Endless Further. (if you know of others, please let me know).

~~oOo~~

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Unresolvable Plurality in Buddhist Metaphysics?

January 17, 2014, 12:14 am

≫ Next: Origins of Myth: The Other Evidence

≪ Previous: RIP MIchael Dorfman

image: Indiwall

In discussion over my forthcoming article describing changes in the metaphysics of karma, I raised the problem of the moral force of karma in the absence of personal continuity. An interlocutor responded that the tradition had resolved this problem, but I'm convinced this is not the case. I think this problem is decidedly unresolved. Most writing on the subject of karma assumes that a unified view is intended and can be discovered in the early Buddhist texts, but I see plurality that seems unresolvable.

One specific problem is this. The moral force of karma derives from the notion that we must live with the consequences of our actions and that even death is no barrier to the consequences being visited on us (or someone linked to us in a way we care about). It is fundamentally fear of negative consequences, particularly a bad rebirth, that pushes the unawakened Buddhist to be ethical; and the prospect of liberation from repeated death that pulls them along. This implies that the person who lives out the consequences of my present actions must in some way still be me. I must feel a sense of ownership over my actions and their consequences. In other words karma implies some kind of personal continuity or it doesn't make sense in human terms.

I'm well aware that this is specifically denied in texts such as the Milindapañha. According to tradition the one who experiences the results is not the same as the one who acted, but not different either. That person is dependently arisen (I'll come back to this). However if this was intended to make people behave according to Buddhist norms I can't help thinking that it's a rather poor attempt at motivating people. Theoretically the problem is solved, but practically it still disconnects the actor from both their actions and the consequences and thus can hardly motivate anyone to do anything.

Teachings on karma emphasise this implication by telling stories which explicitly link past and present lives. Such stories as the many hundreds of Jātakas (both in the two books of the Pali Jātakas and spread throughout the Nikāyas, Vinaya and other collections such as the Avadāna). In Theravāda countries the Jātakas are the main vehicle for teaching morality precisely because they emphasise living with the consequences of actions performed in part lives. However this is not to say that karma is only presented in these terms in Buddhist texts. Compare also such texts as SN 15.1 which describes saṃsāra in terms of ancestors stretching back through beginningless time; and SN 15.10 which by contrast describes one person (ekapuggala) wandering through saṃsāra leaving a mountainous pile of bones behind them. Karma is also said to be quite specific. My actions determine my rebirth, they do not determine your rebirth and vice versa. Similarly your actions do not give rise to my suffering except where they directly impact on me. But direct impact is unnecessary for karma generally since it is intention that determines outcome for the actor.

Now contrast the metaphysics of paṭicca-samuppāda applied to the sense of selfhood. For the most part Buddhists seem to insist that, in reality, there is no self. There is a strong influence of the Two Truths teaching in such statements which use the language of existence or non-existence, i.e. the language of ontology. The Two Truths are a pervasive tool for dealing with the paradoxes and contradictions thrown up in Buddhist ontology. However if there is no self, then there is no continuity over time and Buddhist ethics simply does not work. The language of ontology is carefully avoided in many early Buddhist texts that emphasise the application of paṭicca-samuppāda to experience only (the locus classicus being the Kaccānagotta Sutta SN 12.15) which is why I do not find the Two Truths teaching, with a foot in the camp of existence, useful (See Not Two Truths).

But even if we reject the language of ontology as belonging to the wrong domain (avisaya; cf. the Sabba Sutta SN 35.23) we are still left with a denial of personal continuity. The one who is reborn is not the same as the one who died, though not different either – they arise in dependence on causes. As Nāgasena says to king Milinda when asked about this problem: “It is not he, nor is it another” (na ca so, na ca añño. MP 41; c.f. S ii.18ff). The idea that vedanā arises because of oneself or another simply misunderstands how experience arises. Indeed the very question "who suffers?" is deemed unsuitable (no kallo) (SN ii.13). This is clear enough. But it's not clear how morality would work on this basis. If it is not me that suffers (or enjoys) the consequences of my actions then what is my motivation for practising virtue and avoiding vice? I don't believe that a morality based on such an abstract notion of responsibility is viable. And I would argue that the Buddhist tradition, in a tacit acknowledgement of this problem, does not teach morality in this way. Most Buddhists or whatever time and place teach some variation on "your actions have consequences for you and the people around you." Cf Buddhanet, The Budddhist Centre (1st sentence in both cases), SEP (§1 sentence 2). The theme recurs in many introductions to Buddhist ethics.

There is a fundamental disconnect between the metaphysics of karma and the metaphysics of paṭicca-samuppāda. I cannot see how to resolve these two while preserving the essential features of both. On the face of it this problem ought to have produced a crisis in Buddhist philosophy, though to the best of my knowledge it never has.

Why Do We Seek a Singularity?

Is it possible to step back from the content of this question and ponder why it is important to frame problem the way it is framed? In other words I want to ask if it is essential to attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. I said above that writing on the subject of karma assumes that a unified view is intended and can be discovered in the early Buddhist texts. The central historical narrative of Buddhism is that it all springs from a single individual, the Buddha. The Buddha is presented as having first cut his ties to society (i.e. to all the conditioning of his early life from family, clan, class). Then over an extended period he pursues practices designed to break his identification with his body (practices which were historically associated with Jain ascetics). Then, completely cut off from his antecedents, the Buddha produced a new insight (prajñā) and founded a new lineage of instruction (anuśāsana). All Buddhist traditions take their teachings to be the direct or indirect words of the Buddha, if not in his historical manifestation then of the Dharmakāya.

Conventionally we expect that all the lines of the development Buddhist thought ought to converge at some point in the past. We expect the teachings to be unified and systematic. Many scholars of Buddhism declare that, from their point of view, unity implying a founder figure is clear in the texts. However even a relatively obtuse reader becomes aware that all is not unified. There are apparent discontinuities. The twelve nidānas are sometimes ten and sometimes eleven. And sometimes other numbers. I don't know how the tradition dealt with this, but in modern scholarship we have the handy model of evolution. If a teaching exists in various different forms then we can line them up chronologically (if only relatively) and argue that as the Buddha lived 80 years he must have refined his teaching as he went on and what we have preserved are various versions of the teaching from different periods of His "career"; or that it was developed by later disciples. Thus anomalies that might make us question the story of "unity" are used to support it using evolutionary models.

Lately I've been questioning the applicability of the the linear models that result from applying simple Darwinian ideas to the development of Buddhism (see Evolution: Trees and Braids). The tree structure, with its linear, binary diverging leads back in time to a singularity. A braid allows for divergence and convergence that is not unidirectional. Might it be that because the tree metaphor dominates our view of evolution or development that even when we find inconsistencies we still perceive them as springing from a single source? Such a reaction would also be consistent with my theory of how people with strong beliefs handle counter-factual information.

The fact that we buy into the idea of an historical founder is also a cultural lens. It also predisposes us to see unity if we believe in a founder figure. But which comes first? Do we read widely with an open mind and discover a unity which demands that we accept the idea of a founder figure? Or does the idea of a founder figure cause us to read with confirmation bias and see only unity and ignore and explain away diversity? Is not Buddhism always presented as the teachings of the Buddha? And if our religious beliefs predispose us to believe very strongly in the historical reality? And if we identify him as someone who shares our religious, philosophical and cultural concerns as most modern Buddhists do?

If we extend the image of a braided river and look at the sources of the river we find that many tributaries contribute to the stream. It's not always clear which is the mainstream and which the tributary. If we follow one tributary to source it may resemble a singularity, but we must always keep in mind that there are many tributaries with equal claim. Indeed we can say that each source spring is reliant on a watershed, and that the hydrological cycle recycles water in complex ways. The metaphor is complex, dynamic, and undermined singularity thinking. And since the object is human culture, we require any metaphor to have these qualities.

In my writing about the Buddhist texts, over many years now, I have noted broadly Vedic influences, more specifically Brahmanical influences, Jain influences, animistic influences that I take to come from (one, many, or all of) the Austroasiatic, Dravidian and Tibeto-Burman speaking substrate populations inhabiting the foothills of the Himalayas (before Vedic speaking people even entered India). I've also noted some Iranian and/or Zoroastrian influences, some of which are certain and some speculative. Of course it is always possible that all these influences came together and were synthesised in the person of a founder. Possible, but not very likely. Cultures tend to be assimilated and synthesised by other cultures. And in our case this may well have extended both before and after the time of the putative founder.

My theory about early Buddhism has two aspects in relation to this problem. Firstly the morality we associate with Buddhism is probably (broadly speaking) the mores of the Śākya tribe. In my writing on the Śākyans (published and unpublished) I have argued that the Buddha and his contemporaries should be seen as representing the culmination of a process of synthesis that began with a group of Iranian tribes migrating into India. They becoming naturalised and then were forced by climate change to migrate again and so ended up on the margins of the kingdoms of Kosala-Videha and Magadha. And, contra Bronkhorst, I argue that Kosala was the cultural centre of gravity of this time and place (it is the setting for the debates with Yājñavalkya in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad for example). Importantly the pan-Indian rebirth eschatology met and was synthesised with the Zoroastrian idea of single destination—Heaven vs Hell—eschatology based on morality. The result was most obviously the various Śrāmaṇa faiths, but there was also considerable influence on Brahmanism outside the Āryavarta as well. As yet no plausible explanation has been put forward for why the Brahmins suddenly became dissatisfied with being reborn amongst their ancestors. However, if eastern, Kosala based, Brahmins were interacting with Zoroastrian influenced tribes, they might have been attracted to an afterlife in an eternal heaven and adapted the idea to their own uses. The earlier appearance of karma in Brahmanical texts simply reflects a predisposition to encapsulating religious ideas in texts that early Śrāmaṇa groups did not share until centuries later.

The Braid of Buddhist Metaphysics.

If there was an influence from Zoroastrian eschatology then it would emphasise the impersonal inevitability of post-mortem judgement, and would suggest post-mortem personal continuity. Personal continuity was already a feature of pan-Indian rebirth eschatology. Thus personal continuity ought to surface as an element in early Buddhist morality since it is present in the substrate belief systems on which Buddhism is built. And this is what we find in the Jātakas. Many aspects of the Jātaka literature, in particular some characters and moral themes, seem to cross sectarian boundaries and reflect shared culture.

The other aspect of my account of early Buddhism, which is heavily reliant on Sue Hamilton's account of the khandhas, is that paṭicca-samuppāda was initially applied only to the process of having experiences. The basic description is vedanā (from √vid 'to know) arising from contact between sense object, sense organ and sense cognition, and the polarities involved in vedanā in turn giving rise to the mental processes by which we become infatuated and intoxicated with sense experience (papañca). My argument has long been that properly understood paṭicca-samuppāda only applies to this domain of experience.

However, it is only natural that having discovered a principle like paṭicca-samuppāda that Buddhists would want to see what light it could shed on all aspects of their lives. And after all, as I have pointed out, the impermanence of the world and human life is quite universally acknowledged (Everything Changes, But So What?) My account of early Buddhism predicts that paṭicca-samuppāda applied outside the domain of experience ought to produce metaphysical problems. Thus the principle applied to the sense of self is a powerful lever that can shift our perspective on experience, but when we start to ask whether our self is real or unreal and try to answer in the same terms, we end up with nonsense. Asked if your self exists, later Buddhists are forced to answer both yes and no. And the yes/no answer is still being debated almost 2000 years after it was proposed by Nāgarjuna and his contemporaries (Not Two Truths). The metaphysics of the ontology of the Buddhist self are enormously complex and confusing. The result is some of the most convoluted discourses that end up degrading into insoluble paradoxes and are presented as representing the ineffability of the truth. It's notable that early Buddhist texts which apply paṭicca-samuppāda in the correct domain (visaya) never seem to resort to paradox or convolution in this way. Experience has three salient characteristics: it is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and lacking substance. The experience of selfhood is just another experience, has the same three characteristics, and is subject to the same limitations. Whether or not the self is real is completely irrelevant to the discussion of experience and how to manage it for our well-being. All other ontological questions seem also to be set aside as unanswerable and therefore irrelevant.

In this view the application of paṭicca-samuppāda to an ontological question such as personal continuity, particularly post-mortem, will be unlikely to produce entirely consistent answers. Experience is inherently discontinuous whereas the afterlife requires some kind of continuity. And this leaves us with an unresolvable problem in the area of morality. Considerable ingenuity must be employed to join the Buddhist morality to the principle of paṭicca-samuppāda. It is no coincidence that the question is one that troubles King Milinda. That the first answer never satisfied Buddhists can be deduced from the fact that it has been constantly revisited and reshaped. And even so when teaching morality it was and is common for Buddhists to embrace the idea of personal continuity, as in the Jātakas, for pedagogical reasons.

Conclusion

The kind of dependent continuity proposed by Buddhists as underlying Buddhist morality can hardly motivate people to practice virtue or avoid vice. Without the experience of actions having consequences for oneself, particularly in personal relationships, that Buddhist morality hardly makes sense. Without continuity between actor and the experience of consequence we have no motivation to alter our behaviour. As social animals were keenly attuned to the impact of our behaviour on others and theirs on us. If there were no personal continuity, or even if it were experienced as the kind of nominal continuity that Buddhist theorists propose, then we could not correlate actions and consequences in this life, let alone across lifetimes. Thus, ironically, it is the sense of our self as an entity continuous through time that underlies morality, at least in the unawakened.

Or we could see this as part of a pragmatic program. Morality is best taught with a strong grounding in personal continuity. Morality is concerned with our personal relations and without continuity the word "relations" is meaningless. Approaching morality in this way helps to eliminate major conflicts and prepare the mind for meditation. When it comes to reflecting on the nature of experience in religious exercises designed to liberate us from suffering, its best to point to discontinuity and to emphasise that the sense of self is no different from other experiences. To me this suggests the marriage of two very different activities and modes rather than a unified teaching.

In fact what we see in the Pāli texts is a sea of partially integrated plurality, in crucial ways irreconcilable, and with a considerable amount of flotsam and jetsam from non-Buddhist systems of thought and practice. This isn't a problem if the Buddhist program is pragmatic rather than systematic. A lot of Buddhists are embracing pragmatism as an antidote to the idea of Buddhism as a systematic tradition. That said a surprising number of pragmatists are highly critical of, for example, teaching mindfulness to people who are anxious or in pain, precisely because it does not fulfil their criteria of Buddhism as a system. In the face of the plurality of doctrine, usually the best we can do is select a subset of the teachings that hang together and gloss over the discontinuities. A dense and complex jargon combined with an anti-intellectual discourse helps us to obfuscate such problems. Even those who study the texts more directly are doing so through cultural and historical lens that predispose them to see unity and continuity and to gloss over evidence of the opposite.

~~oOo~~

For a view on how the Buddhist tradition makes use of eternalism as an argument against nihilism and then mitigates eternalism with a specifically Buddhist argument. See:

Del Toso, Krishna. (2008) 'The Role of Puñña and Kusala in the Dialectic of the Twofold Right Vision and the Temporary Integration of Eternalism in the Path Towards Spiritual Emancipation According to the Pali Nikayas .' Esercizi Filosofici 3, 2008, pp. 32-58. Online academia.edu.

I have some reservations about this article. It is presented in terms of what Gotama taught, e.g. "Gotama makes a dialectical use of Eternalism as means to eliminate Nihilism." which I think is indefensible unless by "Gotama" the author means "the Buddhist tradition" and he does not seem to make this distinction. However the observations about the rhetorical uses of eternalism are very interesting.

Del Toso also refers to:

Hallisey, C. (1996) 'Ethical Particularism in Theravada Buddhism,' Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 3, pp. 32-43.

And in this article Charles Hallisey highlights the Mahāmaṅgala Sutta, which gives a list of desirable practices. Hallisey points out that the list of duties in the sutta and Buddhaghosa's exegesis argue "against any attempt to find a single metaethical principle that would make sense of everything on the list with an account of the occasion on which the canonical text was first taught." Hallisey's point is that although the audience for the text could agree on the auspiciousness of particular acts, they could not identify universal criteria of auspiciousness and Theravāda Buddhist ethics is thus particularist rather than generalist.

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Origins of Myth: The Other Evidence

January 24, 2014, 1:14 am

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image credit: intrepidtravel.com

A few weeks ago I reviewed Michael Witzel's book Origins of the World's Mythologies. In that review I focussed, as Witzel does, on the evidence from comparative mythology. It's fairly obvious that if we share a grand narrative into which our myths fit, that there ought to be other evidence that follows a similar pattern. And Michael Witzel devotes a chapter of Origins exploring this evidence.

It must be said that none of the evidence is unequivocal and much of it is still rather ambiguous. More information is being added all the time. For example in the main text the book claims that there is no evidence of interbreeding between Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis. However between writing and publishing just such evidence was found indicating that all humans outside of Africa, New Guinea and Australia share a small number of genes with Neanderthals and Witzel acknowledges this in the forward. In the meantime further examples hybridisation have been discovered. (See Evolution: Trees and Braids)

To briefly recap, Michael Witzel sees a shared grand narrative in the mythologies of Europe, Asia, Oceania and the Americas (what Witzel calls "Laurasia") that is distinct from the grand narratives found in Sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea and Australia ("Gondwana"). The Laurasian narrative involves creation of the universe from nothingness (void, chaos) via an egg or giant; the emergence of the earth from an abyssal ocean; the birth and lives of gods who fight amongst generations; the pushing apart of (father) sky and (mother) earth; the genesis and age of humanity, with an heroic age followed by our more mundane times; and finally the destruction of this universe, sometimes followed by the creation of a more perfect one. Local variations exist in abundance, but the overall story-arc seems to follow this broad outline. Gondwana mythology, by contrast, places no importance on creation.

Comparative Linguistics

The science of comparative linguistics is Witzel's home turf. He has, for example, studied the regional vations in Vedic Sanskrit and mapped the geographic areas that can be associated with various Vedic texts. He has also extensively studied loan words in Vedic showing that Munda may well have been the substrate language in Northwest India where the Vedic speakers first became firmly established. The early successes of comparative linguistics in the 18th and 19th centuries were impressive. It initially became clear, for example, that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit sprang from a common ancestor language. Germanic, Celtic, Iranian, and Slavic languages were soon added to the family, now most commonly called Indo-European. Systematic changes (such as /f/ for /p/ in Germanic as compared to Latin, part of Grimm's Law) across whole languages make it certain that they share a common ancestor and that language can be reverse-engineered on the basis of its surviving transformations. The reconstructed ancestor language is called Proto-Indo-European. The theory for example predicted three laryngeal sounds (related to our /h/) for PIE, which were not found in any living language, but were subsequently discovered in a written form of Hittite.

More recently the effort has been to try to create superfamilies by trying to locate systematic relationships across families or in reconstructed proto-languages. One result of which is a super-family called Nostratic (= "our language"). Nostratic includes Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Austric (South-east Asia and Polynesia) and American Indian languages. The reconstruction is yet to find universal support amongst linguists. Witzel thinks this is in part due to artificial limits placed on the possibility of language reconstruction, but also due to the inherent difficulty of comparing so many languages at once. After all, few have the linguistic skill to do so. If we accept the proposed Nostratic language superfamily then we are immediately struck by the fact that its range is almost identical to the Laurasian mythology. For Witzel this is no coincidence, though he concedes that more work is required to establish Nostratic as a reality. But the tantalising conclusion is that the Laurasian mythology might have originally been framed in something like a Nostratic language. We are not there yet, but we have fine null hypothesis to try to disprove.

Genetics

Where language provides tantalising hints at an underlying unity in the form of a common ancestor tongue, the field of genetics provides further insights into the relatedness and movements of peoples around the world. Two main subjects make up this evidence: phylogenies (or family trees) of mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter; and phylogenies of Y chromosomes which are passed from father to son. Both types of DNA change only slowly, but at a rate we can estimate. However of all the evidence, the genetic evidence is most difficult to follow. The results of experiments are somewhat confused at times and the use of acronyms is intense.

In outline genetic studies show that all modern humans are related and that our ancestors lived in Sub-Saharan Africa. Anatomically modern humans emerged ca. 150 kya (1000's of years ago) plus or minus about 50 kya. More than one migration event seems to have taken place, but the one that succeeded in populating the earth seems to have happened about 65 kya. There are competing models for exactly how this was accomplished, but most include a small group of between 1000 and 10,000 travelling along the coastline eastwards. Sea levels were between 50m-150m lower, the figures cited vary wildly even within Origins, so evidence for this migration is mostly now covered by the ocean. But modern humans arrived in Australia (having crossed the open ocean) by about 45 kya for which we have good archaeological evidence. They continued North as well settling in China between 42-39 kya. Across Eurasia, modern humans encountered other species of hominids, but in every case survived, probably at the expense of the predecessors (and probably also interbred with them to some extent). The image below shows an up-to-date outline of the migrations based on mitochondrial DNA.

Migrations: approximate routes and times from Guha et. al (2013)

Theories on how the rest of Eurasia was settled are much less clear. There are two most likely scenarios. Firstly a second wave of migrants left Africa ca. 45 kya and went north into Western Asia and spread from there. Or secondly part of the first wave, perhaps based somewhere in West Asia, were the source of the expansion (this is what the image above shows). Eurasia being backfilled from China is also a possibility. In any case modern humans entered Europe 40-50 kya where they met, and to some extent interbred with, Neanderthals. From about 20-11 kya successive waves of migration occurred from Siberia into the Americas which were very quickly settled all the way to Tierra del Feugo. From about 5 kya inhabitants of Taiwan began the epic ocean voyages that peopled the islands of Polynesia, reaching New Zealand ca. 800 CE, but not before making contact (directly or indirectly) with South America or people from there. These dates are broadly supported by archaeological and anthropological evidence.

The dates for the settling of the Americas are important in dating the Laurasian mythology. Since the mythology is shared between all of the Americans and Eurasians the main outlines must have been in place before the first American migrations across the Beringia land bridge ca. 20 kya. This is long before any evidence of civilisation in the form of agriculture or large-scale permanent settlements. However, if Witzel is right about the implications of shared narratives then we have to accept that the narrative was in place by 20 kya at the latest.

Beringia Land-bridge from Balter (2013)

Recently a complete genome was sequenced for a child who died some 24 kya in Mal'ta, southern Siberia (Balter 2013). This boy is closely related to Amerindians, but also, surprisingly to populations in west of the Altai mountains. "Before 24,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans and the ancestors of today's East Asians split into distinct groups. The Mal'ta child represents a population of Native American ancestors who moved into Siberia, probably from Europe or west Asia. Then, sometime after the Mal'ta boy died, this population mixed with East Asians. The new, admixed population eventually made its way to the Americas."

And just as with language studies the broad outlines of this evidence is consistent with Witzel's hypothesis. If a people, probably (initially) sharing a language or group of related languages, spread through Eurasia then we would expect to see evidence of relatedness in their genes. The best fit to Witzel's myth and language data involves two out-of-Africa migrations. The first, beginning ca. 65 kya, along the southern coastal route to Australia took with it the Gondwana mythology and certain mitochondrial genes. They left behind a string of languages with no connection to the languages of Laurasia. The second began around 45 kya and pushed first north and then both east and west populated Laurasia. These people spoke languages unrelated to the first migration, had a new, or at least different, mythology, and shared variants of mitochondrial genes not common amongst the first wave.

Archaeology

It is often commented on that although anatomically modern remains are found by about 150 kya, other features we associate with ourselves - burial, complex art, music - are first seen only about 40 kya. Witzel notes that more recent research indicates a slow build up to this so-called explosion of culture. But none-the-less there does seem to be a turning point. Most of the complex cave art begins around this time. The first evidence of musical instruments in the form of bone flutes are found. And burials with valuable items or indications of a belief in an afterlife also date to around this same period.

I've already cited the migrations to America as a latest date by which the Laurasian mythology can have been known in a more or less complete form. Since we know that the Gondwana mythology was unknown in Africa, New Guinea or Australia ca. 45 kya we have a upper limit for it's existence. It would seem then that the creation of the Laurasian mythology broadly coincides with the expansion of culture into Europe and Asia ca. 40 kya., but not later than 20 kya.

Thus, with many caveats and hedges, we can draw out from the evidence a coherent picture in which ca. 40 kya a change took place amongst the ancestral Laurasian population that they subsequently spread, along with their genes and their language, across all of Eurasia, the Americas and the Pacific. Perhaps it is no coincidence that this story itself fits the Laurasian mythology, what we might call the Laurasian worldview. It is a peculiar feature of human beings that we are constantly seeking out new frontiers, while at the same time obsessing about our origins.

It's important to note that in the case of genetics and language we see evidence of hybridisation - shared genes across species on one hand, and loan words and regional language features on the other. The image we tend to have in our minds is a tree structure branching out from a singularity. This singularity almost certainly never happened. If you view railway lines going off to the horizon they appear to converge due to parallax error. I think we need to be aware of the historical equivalent of this. Just because we can find common factors underlying present complexity, does not mean that everything converges. History is complex at whatever magnification or scale we choose.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Balter, Michael. (2013) 'Ancient DNA Links Native Americans With Europe.'Science. 25 October 2013: Vol. 342 no. 6157 pp. 409-410. DOI: 10.1126/science.342.6157.409.

Guha P, Srivastava SK, Bhattacharjee S, Chaudhuri TK. (2013) Human migration, diversity and disease association: a convergent role of established and emerging DNAmarkers. Frontiers in Genetics. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2013.00155. eCollection 2013. Aug 9;4:155.

Witzel, E. J. Michael. (2012) Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford University Press.

↧

Dharma-niyama in the Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya

January 31, 2014, 12:31 am

≫ Next: Good and Evil

≪ Previous: Origins of Myth: The Other Evidence

restraints

The term dhamma-niyama (Sanskrit Dharma-niyama) has taken on increased significance in the Triratna movement over the last few years since Saṃgharakṣita, through Dharmacārī Subhūti, informally published his more recent thoughts on the five niyamas (pañcavidha niyama) as an intellectual framework for understanding Buddhist practice and doctrine (See Revering and Relying Upon the Dharma July 2010).

In our discourse one now frequently hears reference to "the dhamma-niyama" in the place that used to be occupied by phrases drawn from German Idealism, such as "the Transcendental" and "the Absolute". Saṃgharakṣita himself has backed away from use of these phrases and suggests that his use of them was misunderstood. In which case it seems that in reifying the term dhamma-niyama (indicated by the use of the definite article) we have once again misunderstood him.

Just before Saṃgharakṣita published his new ideas on the niyamas, however, a side discussion was started up in the order by my friend and colleague Dharmacārī Dhīvan. Dhīvan circulated a long essay "Sangharakshita, the Five Niyamas and the Problem of Karma" (2009), which argued that Saṃgharakṣita's use of the term niyama was in fact an innovation and not based, as was claimed, on a traditional interpretation. He showed how the idea of the niyamas developed from the 5th century commentarial literature where it first occurred, through the interpretative lenses of Ledi Sayadaw and particularly C. A. F. Rhys Davids. The latter was an influence on Saṃgharakṣita in many ways. Dhīvan argued that though Saṃgharakṣita was largely drawing on Rhys Davids, his doctrinal innovation was both justified and necessary, and indeed successful, in responding to the concerns of his followers. The niyamas teaching is authentically Dharmic, just not traditional. One of the main differences of opinion was the meaning of the word niyama.

"However, according to my understanding of the Pāli language and the Theravādin commentarial tradition, the word niyama does not mean what Sangharakshita or Subhuti take it to mean, and Sangharakshita’s list of five niyamas is a creative re-interpretation of Mrs Rhys-Davids’ creative mis-interpretation of what the commentators say." Dhīvan 2013.

Saṃgharakṣita, following Sayadaw and/or Rhys Davids takes niyama to mean 'order of conditionality'. The set of five niyamas are said to outline five "orders of conditionality" i.e. five hierarchical domains in which conditionality operates. But niyama simply does not and cannot mean 'order', it means 'limit, restriction, inevitability'.

I joined this discussion in 2012 when I began circulating my samizdat translation of all of the Pali texts that mention niyama, particularly the previous untranslated commentarial literature on the pañcavidham niyamam or fivefold niyama. See also my blog: The Fivefold Niyama. In producing these translations it became clear that Dhīvan's comments regarding the relation to the tradition were spot on. I believe he and I are still the only two members of our Order to have read the source texts in Pāli (and only a handful of others would even be capable). My translations made most of the texts available in English for the first time, save one which was translated by Sayadaw. In The Niyama-Dipani: The Manual of Cosmic Order Sayadaw translates in such a way as to support his modern reinterpretation of the niyamas and often with no reference to the actual Pāli usage. Problems with Sayadaw's translation are dealt with in my translation notes and in Dhīvan's essay and article (see bibliography). Unfortunately Subhūti is uncritical of Sayadaw - referring to this work as "the translation of the Atthasālinī" (p.15). Far from being "the" translation, it is "a" translation and a highly idiosyncratic, not to say tendentious, translation.

While the word niyama (or niyāma, the two spellings are interchangeable in Pāli despite deriving differently) occurs in sutta texts it is not until the 5th century CE that Buddhaghosa takes up the word to produce the five categories of restriction on change. The translation that follows shows how the word dharma-niyama was used in Classical Sanskrit by the grammarian Patañjali commenting on Pāṇini's descriptive grammar, the Aṣṭādhyāyī. The Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya or Major Commentary on Grammar is usually dated to ca. 150 BCE, though this date is somewhat uncertain. In the passage concerned Patañjali is in fact commenting on some glosses on the Aṣṭādhyāyī found in the Vārttika by Kātyāyana. This whole section from the introduction to the Mahābhāṣya concerns the relationship between meaning (artha) and words (śabda).

This translation is really intended for my own use and ought to be treated with some suspicion, and at least read in conjunction with the published translation by Joshi and Roodbergen. My translation relies on the published translation and comments made during our class reading of the text. It must be emphasised that this is my translation and all errors and infelicities are due to my limitations.

Note:

Numbers in square brackets refer to the page numbers of the Sanskrit edition by Keilhorn (3rd ed. 1962).
Numbers in curly brackets refer to section and page numbers in the translation by Joshi & Roodbergen.
Passages in bold are Patñjali's citations from the Vārttika by Kātyāyana.

Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya, Paspaśāhnika (p.7-8)

[7] {80} But how is it known that the connection between a meaning and a word is established (siddha)?

From the world (lokataḥ) [i.e. from people in the world].

{81: 198} In the world, having acquired [in the mind] a thing meant (artha) the words (śabdān) are uttered. They make no effort in accomplishing this. However, an effort is required to accomplish a thing that needs to be made. For example: wanting to do a job with [or requiring] a pot, he goes to the house of a potter as says “Make a pot (kuru ghaṭaṃ), I require it for a job” . On the contrary one who will be using words doesn't go to the house of a grammarian and say [8] “Make words, I will utter them.” Right away having acquired the thing meant, he utters the words.

{82} If, then, the world is an authority (pramāṇa) in this [matter] what is the use of grammar (śāstra).

Where the use of a word is connected to the meaning from the world [as authority] grammar provides a restriction for the sake of religious merit (dharmaniyama).

{83: 200} Where the use of a word is connected to the meaning from the world [as authority] grammar provides a restriction for the sake of religious merit. What is dharma-niyama? It is a restriction for Dharma (dharmāya niyamaḥ); or, a restriction for the purpose of Dharma (dharmārthaḥ vā niyamaḥ); or a restriction aiming at Dharma (dharmaprayojanaḥ vā niyamaḥ)

Just as [in the case of] secular and Vedic [precepts].

{84: 202} The southerners have preference for taddhita compounds. So they say ‘laukikeṣu’ and ‘vaidikeṣu’ [in what is related to the world and what is related to the Vedas] instead of ‘loke’ and ‘vede’ [in the world and in the Vedas].

Or rather, the meaning of the taddhita is appropriate, i.e. just as the precepts (kṛtānta) found in secular and Vedic texts. So far as the world is concerned it is said “a domestic rooster is not to be eaten; a domestic pig is not to be eaten.” And that which is to be eaten is taken for the purpose of removing hunger. And one is also able to remove hunger by eating dog meat. In this case a restriction (niyama) is made: this is to be eaten; this is not to be eaten.

In the same way there is desire for women because of sexual arousal. And satisfaction of sexual arousal may be gained equally from available and unavailable [women]. In this case a restriction is made: she is available; she is unavailable.

{85: 207} Indeed in the Vedas also it is said “a Brahmin takes the vow (vrata) of milk (payo), a king the vow of gruel (yavāgū) and the merchant the vow of curds (āmikṣā)” And that “vow” is taken for the purpose of taking food (abhyavahāra). It is possible to take a rice (śāli) or meat (māṃsa) vow etc, as well. In this case a restriction is made.

Similarly it is said “The sacrificial post (yūpa) should be made of bilva or khādira wood. “Sacrificial post” is taken to mean what the [sacrificial] animal is tied to. And by this an animal might be tied to any bit of timber, erected or not erected. In this case a restriction is made.

Similarly the potsherds (kapālāni) are placed by the fire and the mantra is chanted “bhṛgūṇām aṅgirasām gharmasya tapasā tapyadhvam” [be heated by the heat of Bhṛgu and Aṅgirasa]. Even without the mantra, fire whose action is to burn would heat those potsherds. In this case a restriction is made: “done this way it leads to bliss (abhyudaya) [i.e. to heaven].”

{86:208} Thus here also the understanding of meaning may equally be expressed by correct words (śabda) and incorrect words (apaśabda) a restriction for the purposes of religious merit is made. “The meaning is only to be expressed by corrects words not by incorrect words. Done this way it leads to bliss.”

~o~

Comments

Now in this text it seems most likely, according to the commentaries ancient and modern, that dharma is being used in the sense of puṇya'religious merit'. The idea that doing things in the way constrained by the injunctions or precepts (kṛtānta) will be a "causer of bliss" (abhyudayakārin)confirms this. Artha may have the sense of 'referent' (thing referred to by a word) or 'meaning' (the definition of a word) and it's not always clear if Patañjali makes this distinction.

The audience for this text lived their lives according to many religious and secular constraints. From the text we can see that some of them make sense on face value and some of them don't. Under most circumstances it is clear, for example, who is an available sexual partner and who isn't, even in our rather wanton society. In ancient India it was probably even more obvious since a person's spouse was the only sanctioned sexual partner (though that said prostitutes also plied their trade).

It might not be so obvious why a domestic pig was not appropriate food. The precepts allows for wild pigs to be eaten. And this is partly the point. A negative precept that says 'don't eat domestic pigs' is specific. We might be tempted to take the generally corollary that everything else is OK to eat. We might for example decide that dog meat was OK. But in India, as in the modern west, there was an unspoken understanding that dog meat was not for human consumption. There is no natural reason that this is so. Dog meat is consumed in some parts of the world and is presumably no more prone to disease or no less nourishing that any other kind of meat. But we just don't eat dog, and may even feel a sense of disgust at the thought. There is an implied restriction in the background to the specific restriction.

As mentioned above, one of the points of controversy in Dhīvan's initial essays on the niyamas was over the meaning of niyama. In this text there is no doubt that it simply means 'restriction'. One might eat anything, but there are various kinds of restrictions on what one may eat. One might have sex with anyone, but in practice one has a limited choice of partners. However the specific term dharma-niyama means a restriction for the sake of religious merit. That is to say that it is an injunction whose authority stems from the Vedas and is ultimately aimed at a good rebirth or at liberation through the correct performance of religious rituals.

Fundamentally this argument is about restrictions on what is a correct word (plain śabda) and what is an incorrect word (apaśabda). Pragmatically Patañjali has to admit that many non-standard words are in common use. He is arguing that despite the many choices of words, that some are better than others. In particular he is arguing for what we call the Classical Sanskrit forms sanctioned by Pāṇini as correct and dialectical variations as incorrect. Here he points out even though we always have many choices of how to behave, that various kinds of restrictions apply: secular or worldly restrictions (laukikā) and religious restrictions (vaidkikā) found in the Vedic texts. So too words are restricted by secular and religious usage.

This is not so different to our time and place. Most people would use a different mode of speech when having fun with their friends than they might at a job interview. For English speakers in Britain the issue of local dialect words and expressions is a common one - and at present the mood seems to be going against allowing children to use dialect at school for fear that they won't be able to distinguish different contexts as adults and might use the wrong mode of speech. Or in other words that those with dialects that differ from standard (i.e. receive pronunciation, English as it is spoken in the South East) will be socially disadvantaged.

For the Buddhist who is interested in the idea of the niyamas the import is clear. Niyama means "constraint, restriction, limitation or inevitability". It is about restricted choices, vows made, and precepts imposed. In the Pali texts it refers to the restrictions on how change occurs. Thus is cannot mean a kind of "order" or "level" of conditionality, but only a constraint on how conditionality plays out. Things change, but not randomly. Plant a rice grain and it can only grow into a rice plant (and no other kind of plant). Perform an evil action and it must inevitably ripen as a painful vedanā.

In the case of dhamma-niyama it is used by the Buddhist tradition to explain the series of miraculous events that accompany the birth of a Buddha. There is a restriction on the universe related to the life history of a Buddha. As it says in the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī (DA 2.431)

"The shaking of the 10,000 world system when the bodhisatta enters his mother’s belly and other such phenomena [associated with the life story of the Buddha as told in the Mahāpadāna Sutta], this is called the inevitability of natures (dhamma-niyāma). Inevitability of natures is understood as consisting in this."

Such miracles as occur are bound to occur; they are what is required for the life story of a Buddha. I might well have translated dhamma-niyama here as "a restriction imposed by religion". In other words this is simply something that Buddhists believe, and, like the audience for Patañjali, they believe it because it is said in a sacred text.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Dhīvan. Sangharakshita, the Five Niyamas and the Problem of Karma. 2009. (See also Dhīvan's website for some other related bits and pieces)

Dhīvan. 'The Five Niyāmas as Laws of Nature: an Assessment of Modern Western Interpretations of Theravāda Buddhist Doctrine.'Journal of Buddhist Ethics. Volume 19, 2012

Dhīvan. 'The ‘Five Niyamas’ and Natural Order.' [Blog Post] 5 June 2013. http://dhivanthomasjones.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/the-five-niyamas-and-natural-order/

Jayarava. Source Texts for the Five-fold Niyāma (pañcavidhaṃ niyāma). 2012

Joshi, S.D. & Roodbergen, J. (Ed. Tr) Patanjali's Vyakarana-Mahabhashya. Paspasha-Ahnika. Poona, 1986. Online: scribd.com

Kielhorn, F. (Ed) The Vyākarṇa-mahābhāṣya of Patañjali. 3rd Ed. rev. by K. V. Abhyankar. Vol 1. 1962.

Ledi Sayadaw. (1978). ‘ The Niyama-Dipani: The Manual of Cosmic Order,’ in The Manuals of Buddhism, trans. Barua, B.M, Rhys Davids, C.A.F., & Nyana. Bangkok: Mahamakut Press (orig. publ. 1965). Online: http://mahajana.net/texts/kopia_lokalna/MANUAL04.html [includes Sayadaw's correspondence with Rhys Davids showing how her interpretation is dependent on his]

Subhūti. Revering and Relying Upon the Dharma: Sangharakshita's approach to Right View. 1st Published in Shabda. July, 2010. Online: sangharakshita.org

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Good and Evil

February 6, 2014, 11:57 pm

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Anubis weighs the soul of the deceased (left) against a feather representing the law (right).

A few weeks ago one of the blogs I read posed the question: If your god didn't care about right and wrong, would you still be good? The author went on to discuss some research that he thought addressed this question, though here I am more interested in the question itself. As Buddhists we might say that the question does not concern us because we don't believe in gods anyway. But for the purposes of this essay I'm going to treat karma as a god, a supernatural entity that does not have any human or anthropomorphic form, but which carries out precisely the same function as any god concerned with human morality.

Where Do Moral Gods Come From?

Briefly my theory of morality begins with hunter-gatherers living in Africa ca. 100,000 years ago. They lived in small, close knit bands that most likely rarely got above 150 members, or when they did, split into two or more new groups. The number 150, along with other numbers that emerge from studying natural group sizes for different types of human association, arose from Robin Dunbar's work on how neocortex size is correlated to group size in various animals (See Bibliography). 150 is the average number of close relationships that an average anatomically modern human being can keep track of. Groups both smaller and larger can and do form with varying degrees of intimacy. For example much larger groupings are possible when members are only called on simply to recognise the others. I suggest that below the "Dunbar Number" a group is easily able to keep track of each member and their behaviour. In particular small groups, living closely together have accurate knowledge of who is obeying groups norms and who is not. Above the Dunbar Number and group members begin to lose track of who is doing what, even though they probably still know who everyone is and a great deal about them.

Thomas Metzinger has argued, on the basis of his own out of body experiences, that it is entirely natural for humans to have a dualistic point of view on body and mind. Indeed he says that having had an out-of-body experience it's almost impossible not to become an "ontological dualist": that is to believe that consciousness is entirely separable from the body. Though to be clear Metzinger himself does not believe that consciousness leaves the body during the experience, but suggests that signals which convey information that contribute to the sense of self lose integration. The result being that we experience our visual point of view shifting away from our felt sense of embodiment. Experiments have shown that it is relatively simple to shift the point of view away from the body by confusing the senses in, for example, virtual reality environments. Out-of-body and similar 'mystical' experiences are fairly common and, in a pre-scientific world must have contributed to a worldview in which matter and spirit are seen as two different substances or realms (See also Metaphors and Materialism). Thus for most people, even many who don't believe in God, the idea of spirits and a spiritual realm seem quite natural.

Most hunter-gatherer societies seem to practice some form of animism. That is to say they see the world around them as a alive with non-corporeal life and/or they attribute sentience and intelligence to non-human living beings of both the animal and plant kingdom. One of the reasons for this may be the so-called Hyperactive Agency Detector that we all possess (see Barrett 2004). This function allows us to interpret agency, but it is tuned in such a way as to allow us to see agency where there is none. In the weather for example, or in the sun and moon. We also have a propensity to see patterns - this is a strong point for all mammals but is well developed in humans and some others. The most common patterns we see are faces, a phenomenon known as Pareidolia. Perception and interpretation of facial expressions is one of the most important skills we develop. The lack of this ability, as with some people who have Autism, can make social interaction very difficult. For a view on how Pareidolia might have affected the development of religion, see Guthrie (1995). Michael Witzel's (2012) work on comparative mythology shows that myths involving gods in human form, and a general view of the universe as alive and populated with sentience, or even the universe itself as sentient, were in place when the ancestors of all modern humans moved out of East Africa 65,000 years ago. So within the "group" we have to allow for a number of relationships with ancestors, gods, and other disembodied beings. I'm not sure what to call these relationships: super-social?

At some, as yet unknown, size threshold groups of humans begin to experience anxiety about the group norms. If there are too many breaches of the group norms, or too many people are not following them, then either the norms need to shift or the people need to be brought into line. Group norms have a strong survival value for hunter gather groups. They help the group to sustain its identity, ensure ease of communication, and effective collective actions. So when group norms are undermined there is reason to be anxious. However since group membership extends to the supernatural realm it might well seem obvious for group members to call on the non-corporeal members of their group, who are not bound to the world of matter or it's constraints, to keep and eye out for infractions and even to take corrective action.

In Witzel's theory even our oldest Pan-Gaean myths show influence from the shaman. The job of the shaman is to act as interpreter or translator between the two realms of matter and spirit. The shaman can cross the boundaries of the two realms and return with knowledge and messages. Similarly some spirits can have an effect in the world of matter. However neither is at home in the world of the other and the shaman is at peril in his or her journeys. The spirit cannot stay in the realm of matter, but can only visit for short periods. Similarly they can only weakly interact with matter (and not at all if a scientist happens to be observing).

It may come about that over time one particular spirit comes to be acknowledged as superior in their ability to observe and keep group members within acceptable norms. Perhaps they are then formally invested with this role and become an overseer god. With the rise of monotheism all the various functions of gods, including this one, were aggregated into a single cosmic father-figure who is at once creator, law maker, overseer and judge.

One of the main problems with this worldview is one that we still have today. People who are wicked (i.e. do not obey group norms) often seem to avoid any negative consequence. And similarly people who are good (i.e. obey group norms) often meet with considerable suffering and misfortune. This is patently unfair. And one solution to it is the story of judgement in the afterlife.

It's not known exactly when we started believing in an afterlife, but archaeologists begin to find grave goods intended for use in the afterlife around 45,000-40,000 years ago. This around the same time that cave art begins and modern humans began to move into Europe and the Chinese interior. Witzel proposes that the myths that characterise what he calls Laurasia began to be composed at this time also. Sadly Michael Witzel's book on myth does not really deal with the afterlife. But we can take Egyptian Anubis, who has the head of a jackal, as a representative of the afterlife judge. Anubis, like most judges, is impartial. He weighs the soul of the dead against the law and if it is lighter they go on to join Osiris in heaven, and if heavier they are devoured by a monster from a dark netherworld. Thus even if the wicked are seen to get away with murder in this life, the group can be confident that their norms will be upheld in the final analysis. All debts are paid. The universe has a moral order. This view of morality as accounting is one that George Lakoff has used to help describe the values of the political spectrum (See also: Moral Metaphors), but it adds to the overall picture of why an afterlife judgement might seem necessary.

The afterlife gods, such as Anubis, care about good and evil because we care about them. The gods of any particular society care about group norms in precisely the same way that that society cares about them. And they are a final arbiter of good and evil - impartial and impersonal. Underlying this quest for fairness seems to be the idea of the ordered universe - cosmos rather than chaos. Although humans often crave novelty, novelty is only good when seen against a backdrop of stability and sameness. The values of groups are conservative. The ideal for us would be an generally ordered universe into which a small amount of novelty regularly found it's way.

The question of whether the universe is ordered or not ordered continues to unsettle us today. It is a question at the heart of all the physical sciences. Unfortunately just when we think we've got everything sorted out and have decided that the universe is ordered in a particular way some novel information pops up to disrupt that sense of order. As yet we are still undecided on just what the nature of the universe is. We see regularities at many different levels that can be used to predict behaviour, but generally speaking these only work on one level. On the human level Newtonian mechanics adequately describes how bodies move. But the description breaks down at different levels: very much larger (since it doesn't take into account dark energy) or on very small scales (since it can't be reconciled with how very small bodies behave). But for our ancient ancestors there seems to have been no doubt that the universe was ordered and that "moral accounting" works and is effective.

There are some behaviours that are more or less universally frowned on amongst humans. Killing a member of one's own group is one example. But on the whole good and evil are locally defined. Killing members of other groups is almost always fine, though how we define our group has gradually been extended. As a society we include a very wide range of people under the umbrella of our laws, though most of the actual individuals are still pretty parochial. One of the major social issues for the UK is immigration from non-English speaking, and particularly non-Christian countries. Many ordinary English people struggle to see immigrants as part of their group. The term "integration" comes up again and again in public discourse. Some political parties make considerable political capital from exploiting this issue.

For most of the time our concerns are with the minutiae and trivia of daily life. Extreme breaches of the rules are shocking. More so in worldviews which announce that their rules are absolute and universal. A complete repudiation of the rules is sometimes referred to as "pure evil", though clearly in this view there can be no such thing as pure or impure evil.

Buddhist Morality in a Nutshell

For Buddhists the norms of good and evil are well defined in terms of both motivation and consequence. Where the motivation is attraction and grasping, or aversion and pushing away, the consequence will be evil. Where a consequence is unexpectedly evil we either look for an unconscious motivation, or an evil action in a past life (and here again we strike the problem of eternalism). The ideal Buddhist doesn't react with attraction or repulsion towards sensations. Thus they do not create any new karma, though sometimes even the awakened must still suffer the consequences of actions already performed, as we see in the case of Aṅgulimāla.

Karma as a moral god has undergone some changes over time. I'm attempting to get this aspect of my theory published at present and waiting to hear back from the journal editors. Karma starts off as an impartial force that ties consequences to be experienced with actions performed. Initially the consequences of actions could absolutely not be avoided, though they might be mitigated. Gradually Buddhists "discovered" that certain practices could help them sidestep karma, for example: confession (vidūṣanā); opposition (pratipakṣa); restoration (patyāpatti); and seeking refuge (āśraya) (Caturdharmaka Sūtra via the Śikṣāsamuccaya p.160). This ability to avoid the consequences of actions fundamentally changes the metaphysics of karma.

Conclusion

So this is an outline of the mechanics of how morality might work. In line with Owen Flanagan's use of the term, I'm starting to think of this approach as "Naturalism". This is a general theory that tries to account not only for Buddhist morality, but for all morality. It's a theory that could be tested in a variety of ways and makes certain predictions about the nature of morality and religion in human beings. And this brings us back to the initial question:

If your god didn't care about right and wrong, would you still be good?

What I hope this exposition shows is that the question is not a valid one. Our gods care about so-called right and wrong, about anything at all, only to the extent that we do. And this is also true for Buddhists. The non-anthropomorphic supernatural moral force (i.e. moral god) of Buddhism, karma, is primarily designed to ensure that Buddhists conform to Buddhist norms. Buddhist morality is incompletely yoked to the pursuit of altered states of consciousness that are transformative for the reason that a guilty conscience is a source of distraction. Concern with conformity to morality and etiquette--the latter dominates the life of most monastics for example--is at least equally important in most Buddhist traditions.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Barrett, J.L. (2004) Why Would Anyone Believe in God?Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992). 'Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates.' Journal of Human Evolution 22 (6): 469–493. doi:10.1016/0047-2484(92)90081-J

Dunbar, R.I.M. (1998) 'The Social Brain Hypothesis.' Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (5): 178–190. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1998)6:5%3C178::AID-EVAN5%3E3.0.CO;2-8/pdf

Guthrie,Stewart. (1995) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford University Press

Lakoff, George. (1995). Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html

Metzinger, Thomas. (2010). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. Basic Books.

Witzel, E. J. Michael. (2012) The Origins of the World's Mythologies. Oxford University Press.

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Niyama in the Sāṅkhyakārikā and Buddhaghosa's Commentaries.

February 14, 2014, 12:09 am

≫ Next: Commodification and the Buddhadharma

≪ Previous: Good and Evil

Rice Plant
via Wikimedia

This essay will briefly outline some ideas from the Sāṅkhyakārikā, the oldest extant Sāṅkhya text, and compare this with ideas expressed by Buddhaghosa in his commentary on the Mahāpadāna Sutta in the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī, and his Atthasālinī a commentary on the Dhammasaṅgaṇi, an Abhidhamma text. My translations of both of these texts can be found in Source Texts for the Five-fold Niyāma. We've seen that the word niyama means 'restriction' in śāstric Sanskrit (see Dharma-niyama in the Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya) and here I will reinforce this by showing how the Sāṅkhyakārikā uses the word, with a few notes on how this was taken up in the Yogasūtras attributed to Patañjali. In addition I will note certain similarities between the Sāṅkhya notion of causality and the way that Buddhaghosa uses the word niyama to highlight restrictions on the processes of causality.

The Sāṅkhyakārikā (SK) is a sūtra style text composed ca. 350-450 CE and attributed to Īśvarakṛṣṇa. In Indian literature sūtra style generally means it is aphoristic, terse, and generally requiring a good deal of unpacking. It is partly this general meaning of the word that makes scholars consider the Buddhist use of sūtra to translation Pāli sutta to be a hyper-Sanskritisation for sukta. In any case the SK outlines the darśana or philosophy of the Sāṅkhya school of Indian thought. It is non-Vedic (indeed it is critical of the Vedas) and concerned with soteriology. The basic Sāṅkhya view was adapted by Yoga schools (they added Īśvara or god to this originally nāstika darśana for example).

The characteristic idea of Sāṅkhya is a doctrine known as satkārya which states that the product of causation already exists in the cause. The Sāṅkhya world is analysed into a hierarchy of 24 elements or tattvas which are produced when unmanifest nature is disrupted by puruṣa (literally 'man' but here meaning something like 'soul'). What results is the manifest world (vyaktam). The 24 elements result from the interactions of three qualities: sattva 'purity', rajas 'passion', and tamas 'darkness'. Kārikā 12 of the SK gives us an outline of the three guṇas that uses the word niyama.

Here the three guṇas or qualities are each said to have a particular essence (ātmaka) and a purpose (artha).

prītyapṛitiviṣādātmakāḥ prakāśapravṛttiniyamārthāḥ |
anyo’anyābhibhavāśrayajananamithunavṛttiyaśca gunāḥ ||12||

The guṇas have the essence of pleasure, pain, and apathy; and the purpose of illumination, activity, and restriction;
And their functions with respect to each other are suppressing, supporting, producing, and forming pairs.

In particular the guṇa tamas or darkness has the purpose of niyama or restriction. Kārikā 13 adds that tamas is heavy (guru) and enveloping or enclosing (varaṇaka). The weight and restriction of tamas is implicitly contrasted in kārikā 12 with the pravṛtti 'activity, energy, restlessness' of rajas. In the Yogasūtras of Patañjali, which draw on Sāṅkhya thought, niyama takes on an applied meaning of a vow to be observed. Here I want to focus on how Īśvarakṛṣṇa uses niyama alongside adjectives like "heavy" and "enveloping". Incidentally one of the more popular commentaries on SK, by Gaudapada, comments here that "Tamas is adapted to restrain, i.e. is competent at fixation." (niyamārthaṃ tamaḥ sthitau samartham ity artha). Here sthiti 'fixing, stopping, halting' (from √sthā'to stand, to remain') is offered as a word with a similar sense (not quite a synonym): that which restricts the movement of X, causes X to stand still or be fixed. And this is the role of tamas which helps us to zero in on how the word niyama is used in śāstric Sanskrit.

This way of thinking may well have influenced Buddhaghosa when he composed the fivefold niyama not just in the sense of the word itself. Buddhaghosa seems to have some of the same concerns over the limitations of causality that we see in SK 9.

asad akaraṇād upādānagrahaṇāt sarvasambhavābhāvāt;
śaktasya śakyakaraṇāt kāraṇabhāvāc ca sat kāryam. ||9||

Because the non-existent cannot be made, because of the grasping of the material basis, and because not all possibilities exist;
Because the making is possible [only] of what is capable [to be made]; and because of existence in a cause, the product exists.

This is the fundamental statement of the Sāṅkhya idea of causality, satkāryavāda, i.e. that the effects already exist in the cause. No causation ex nihilo is possible, a substrate (upādāna) is necessary, things cannot arise haphazardly, things can only be produced by what is capable of producing them. Whether these reasons necessitate satkāryavāda is moot, but these are the supporting arguments given in SK.

How does this relate to Buddhaghosa? SK says sarvasambhavābhāvāt "because not all possibilities exist" which means that things cannot arise haphazardly; also śaktasya śakyakaraṇāt "because the making is possible [only] of what [the cause] is capable of" which means that a cause is only capable of producing that which it is capable of producing. The same restrictions apply in Buddhaghosa's schema of conditionality, which insists on a non-random and more-or-less inevitable relationship between cause and effect. For Buddhaghosa this restriction in a non-random process has the flavour of inevitability.

In his use of the word niyama, Buddhaghosa was most at pains to emphasise the inevitability of karmic retribution. The inevitable production of vedanā by karma is mirrored in the natural processes of plants coming to fruition and the arrival of the monsoon rains in season. For Buddhaghosa, the production of cognitions from sense contact was a perfectly analogous process. In his commentarial texts which employ the fivefold niyama, Buddhaghosa spends most time illuminating the process of karma and insisting on the inevitability of it. This is the focus of his use of the concept of niyama, it is what the commentaries insist on. The restriction on karma is that the fruits of actions must inevitably ripen. Later commentators using the fivefold niyama schema focus more on the production of cognitions.

We can see then that restriction and inevitability are two sides of the same coin. If a process can only unfold in a restricted way, then there is a certain inevitability to it. If one plants a rice seed then the restriction on cause and effect says that one a rice plant can grow from it. In other words it is inevitable that a rice plant comes from a rice seed. Buddhaghosa calls this bījaniyama - the restriction on seeds, or the inevitability of seeds. Of course elsewhere in the Buddhist world they began to treat actions as more literally creating seeds that are held in a receptacle (ālaya) in some part of the mind (vijñāna), but that is another story.

Buddhaghosa adds that the miracles accompanying the main events of the life of a Buddha are said to be of the same type of inevitability as these natural processes (dhammatā). They are things that inevitably happen when a Buddha is conceived, born, becomes awakened and dies. This he calls dhammaniyama.

So when Buddhaghosa reads: imasmin sati idaṃ hoti he does not see this an optional or contingent on any other fact. For Buddhaghosa there is a restriction on the way causation happens: when the condition is present (imasmin sati) then it is inevitable (niyama) that the conditioned must exist (idam hoti). This is particularly so in the case of the restriction on karma (kammaniyama). Having acted the results of the act follow one unerringly. To illustrate this point in the Sumaṅgalavilāsinī Buddhaghosa uses the Dhammapada verse 127.

Not in the sky, nor the middle of the ocean,
Nor in a mountain cave;
Though terrified there is nowhere on earth,
Where one might escape from an evil action.

Furthermore in the Atthasālinī niyama passage he expands on this using the commentarial back story to this same verse. In this text about one half is given over to the discussion of restrictions on karma, about one quarter to the restrictions on the processes of the mind, and one quarter to the rest. In both cases dhammaniyama solely refers to the miraculous events during the life of a Buddha.

At the very least, Īśvarakṛṣṇa, the author of the Sāṅkhyakārikā, and Buddhaghosa, author of the pañcavidha niyama, shared an interest in the limitations or restrictions which were observed in relation to causation. Neither man accepted that causation is random or completely unpredictable. On the contrary both see the universe as having an order to it that places limitations on how change occurs. Buddhaghosa's notion of utuniyama and bījaniyama would have been obvious to Īśvarakṛṣṇa. We too can see that if we plant rice we must get a rice plant and not an oak tree; and that the monsoon does not come at random, but at roughly the same time each year. The use of such analogies is widespread in Indian literature.

So if the universe has an order, and that order imposes restrictions on the functioning of causation, then is it not acceptable to speak of "orders of conditionality"? I still think this is not the case. Primarily because Buddhaghosa is at pains to describe a single type of restriction than manifests in five different ways. This is why Buddhaghosa, unlike modern exegetes, uses the singular "fivefold niyama" and not the plural "five niyamas". This is in contrast to the Yogasūtras of Patañjali (though the attribution is disputed and the date uncertain) which speak of pañca niyamāḥ'five niyamas'. (Sūtra 32). In the YS niyama is often translated as 'observance', but it means 'a restriction on behaviour'. The five restrictions are: cleanliness (śauca), contentment (santoṣa), austerity (tapas), study (svādhyāya), and devotion (praṇidhāna).

So, there are not five restrictions on causality, but only one. This one restriction can be observed in five different areas of experience (if we count the supernatural aspects of dhamma-niyama as experiential, which is moot). Because of this there is in fact no implied hierarchy in Buddhaghosa's fivefold schema and the number five is arbitrary. The schema is neither systematic nor comprehensive. Though Buddhaghosa himself placed differing emphasis on each of the five aspects, we can see that this emphasis was purely rhetorical. Buddhaghosa was addressing a particular set of problems when he employed this schema, not speculating about causation more generally. Later Pāli commentaries placed a different emphasis.

Of the five aspects of restricted causation the seed (bīja) and seasonal (utu) restrictions are obvious to anyone (the same restrictions occur to Īśvarakṛṣṇa). The action (karma) and mental (citta) restrictions are obvious enough to a person who is well versed in the metaphysics of karma and rebirth, and in the Buddhist account of cognition. Or perhaps one might argue that they become obvious to anyone willing to examine their experience using Buddhist practices. The dharmic restriction is just something we have to take Buddhaghosa's word for. It is a supernatural belief, and thus not amenable to empirical study. Though it might make an interesting foil to these people who pop up from time to time claiming to be "the second Buddha."* If the "10,000 world system" did not shake when you were born, then you are not a Buddha, because this is what inevitably happens. And maybe that was Buddhaghosa's point too?

~~oOo~~

* As a little aside, Liverpuddlian musical comedian Mitch Benn is currently touring a show called Mitch Benn is the 37th Beatle. An edited version is on BBC iPlayer [UK only] until 21 Feb. He counted up all the "5th Beatle" candidates and got to 36. Then added himself. I wonder how many "second Buddhas" there might have been so far?

↧

Commodification and the Buddhadharma

February 21, 2014, 12:00 am

≫ Next: Diamond Sutra: Connections to the Past

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image: moneysister

In the world of modern Buddhism there seems to be a growing concern about commodification of the Buddhadharma. I'm seeing more and more complaints about it from Buddhists. Commodification is a process in which something which is not usually considered to be bought and sold is transformed into a product with a monetary value. I have for instance argued that the re-packaging of our thoughts and emotions by websites like Facebook to help them sell advertising constitutes a commodification of the self. I argued that this was a bad thing. "Our online persona becomes like a soap opera that is processed and sold as entertainment and enriches those who facilitate the process, with little or no real benefit to us despite the hype." However when one looks more closely at the concerns one often sees that they are based in a Romantic picture of Buddhism and they generally ignore our history. Buddhist ignorance of Buddhist history is something to be really concerned about. We tend to believe the lovely stories about our chosen religion that are completely unrealistic. We don't see the problems that we face in the light of how earlier Buddhists faced them, we don't even see that they faced them. This makes us and our age seem much more different from the past than is the case.

The Romance of Buddhism.

In an interview in Tricycle Online Mu Soeng, said "Most people forget that they began practicing [sic] for the sake of liberation." Really? Because in twenty years of practising Buddhism I've rarely met anyone who confessed to begin practising for the sake of liberation. We usually have no idea what liberation is at the beginning. Of course some people are attracted by notions of transcendence, especially if they've taken hallucinogens, but most people I meet are simply looking for ways to suffer less or to live better (i.e. to make the most of saṁsāra). Liberation is a concept internal to Indian religions, it's not a concept we can understand prior to beginning to practice. Even the idea that, having become Buddhists, each one of us is striving for liberation is a Romantic conceit. Most of us are far too settled and comfortable to be taken seriously as genuinely seeking liberation. We seem loath to admit to this, but it is natural and entirely consistent with our history. It takes a particular personality and temperament to really take on the challenges involved and most of us are not up to it.

The idea that every Buddhist might be actively striving for liberation is one that has no history. The number of people genuinely striving for liberation has always been dwarfed by people of less inspiration and less commitment, who are none-the-less sincere in their support for the Three Jewels and their attempts to live good lives. Most of us are just hanging around with Buddhists and though quite pious in our own way, cannot realistically expect to be liberated.

I begin to wonder if this idea that we can all be liberated is in fact part of the commodification of Buddhism in the West: the selling of Buddhism as a cornucopia and universal panacea. Sure, in theory we can all be liberated, but in practice most of us won't be. We make our contribution in other ways - be it making donations, helping to organise a teaching centre, or even just being a positive presence in the community (or writing essays). Being a member of a vibrant and supportive community of people with a common goal and sense of purpose can make us a great deal happier. It will bring out the best in us and help actualise our potential, whatever our potential is. For Buddhism to thrive it is quite important to have such a community around the more serious practitioners in order to support and sustain them.

But most of us are people are towards the middle of the bell curve. This "we're all Buddha's" stuff is like saying "We're all capable of getting a PhD and should all be enrolled in a program and pursuing research". No one would take this idea seriously. Some people do very well to get a bachelors degree, while others do fine with a basic education.

So Buddhists say things like "Most people forget that they began practicing [sic] for the sake of liberation" and it keeps the punters on the hook (and this may not be conscious because we unconsciously pick up on what the people around us are saying and repeat it to reinforce our group membership). Buddhists worry about not practising enough or in the right way and they become consumers of what Buddhist "teachers" are selling: they buy books, attend expensive seminars and retreats, and mālās, and little vajras to wear around their necks, and get a tattoo of a mantra and so on. As long as they are not at ease with who they are, they keep spending money on more teachings, more initiations, and more paraphernalia. Burn more incense, light more candles. There's a kind of anxious piety about many Buddhists, linked to an exaggerated concern for authenticity. The anxiety that the "true teaching" will be lost in the crowd of "false teachings" is visible in every layer of Buddhist literature, but quite pronounced in the voices of Buddhist converts from societies which have been largely Christian for centuries. Heresy is a particular anxiety for Christians as they only have one shot at heaven and they've left their mark on our psyches. Maybe we're getting spillover from that.

The Mindfulness Heresy

One of the problem areas that has emerged recently are the so-called Mindfulness Based Therapies (MBT) spawned by John Kabat-Zinn's application of Buddhist awareness techniques to managing pain. One sees and hears a great deal of bitterness, resentment and/or contempt towards practitioners of MBT from supposedly tolerant and pacific Buddhists. But let's be clear, the reason we've heard of JKZ is because his approach to pain management was incredibly successful in helping people with with chronic pain. And as someone who suffers from chronic pain I have nothing but respect and admiration for JKZ.

There seem to be two main complaints about MBT. That it is incomplete; and that it commodifies the Buddha's teaching.

Some Buddhists imagine that MBT is being touted as an alternative to Buddhism (it isn't) and that MBT is positioning itself as a competitor to Buddhism (it isn't). When martial artists claim to use Buddhist principles and practices in order to better defeat opponents in combat, we Buddhists have not complained that they are trying to undermine Buddhism or steal our ideas. If anything most Buddhists seem attracted to the idea of a martial wing to our culture as the fascination with samurai persists. As Buddhists we apparently see ourselves as in possession of a (the) panacea that we must retain control over. And the popularity of MBT compared to tradition Buddhist teachings has threatened our control over the ideas and practices of Buddhism. MBT has escaped from the hegemony of Buddhist orthodoxy. This is something to laugh about. It's hilarious.

The apparent commodification of Buddhism by practitioners of MBT seems to be a more problematic issue. MBT is generally speaking quite expensive. In the UK it is much more expensive than a beginners meditation class. But not more expensive than other types of pain management or psychological therapy. The idea behind this complaint seems to be that Buddhists have always taught for free. But this is simply not true. At the very least, as is shown at some length in Reginald Ray's book Buddhist Saints in India, Buddhist teaching was part of a social contract in which laypeople agreed to provide for all of the material needs of the entire monastic and forest-dwelling community in return for pastoral care and instructions. I will say more about the funding of Buddhism below, but we need to be clear that sustaining a group of people who do no productive work requires resources to be diverted from the productive part of society. Buddhist teachers have always been supported. And historically this has lead to massive accumulations of wealth (and therefore power) in monastic communities.

So it seems to me that Buddhists complaining about the success of MBT is bizarre and laughable. But complain they do. Indeed the backlash against MBT may be growing if rumblings in the blogosphere are anything to go by.

Naïveté and Romanticism

This is not to say that consumerism is a good thing. Consumerism is not a good thing. But neither is it an entirely new thing. One of the problems Mu Soeng sees is the rise of the teacher who wants to be a teacher for the kudos. Becoming a Buddhist teacher is a source of social standing and charisma (in the sense of the ability to influence one's social group and perhaps beyond). It's a way for some people to climb the social ladder. But again this has always been true. There are Pali texts reflecting just this problem - bhikkhus who went forth because they got a better living as a monk than their previous life. In Japan in the late 8th century people were pretending to be Buddhist monks in order to avoid forced labour. People become Buddhists for all kinds of reasons; they become "teachers" for all kinds of reasons; they become followers for all kinds of reasons. Some followers are only satisfied by a charismatic and ambitious teacher, which is why such people are able to succeed.

The general assumption seems to be that the teacher-pupil relationship is an asymmetrical power relationship - that it is characterised mainly by the exertion of power by the teacher. Typically, for some reason, as followers we expect to give up responsibility for decision making to our guru, even when the main teaching is take responsibility for yourself. Most people seem to be hopelessly naive and puerile when it comes to the religious life. Many are looking for a parent substitute and easily slip into a subordinate, childlike state in the presence of their teacher. Traditional Buddhist teachers do seem to encourage this unfortunately, though I think many Asians have been tripped up by how puerile we Westerners really are.

At present the fashion is to blame the teacher when something goes wrong. I'm not quite sure where the ideology of asymmetric power relationships comes from, but it is stated as an absolute fact time and again in the various sex scandals. It seems to me to be incredibly unhelpful in sorting out the problems that ensue from abdication of responsibility to a parent substitute because it completely ignores that side of the problem. One positive thing one can say about theism, is that at least the parent substitute is an imaginary figure in the sky, rather than a human being. Imaginary friends seldom let us down in the way that humans are wont to do. It really is unfortunate when people prey on naivete. But how else are the naive going to grow up except through betrayal? Naivete is positively dangerous in adults. We see the disastrous results all around us.

It is only when we realise that our parents are not omniscient and omnipotent, that they make mistakes, that they are not always kind and good to us, that we begin to grow up. If we reject that transition and go looking for a guru to play God, then we should not be surprised by the behaviour of the gods. In fact if we read mythology we discover that Gods are often immoral in the extreme. Greek myth for example is often bowdlerised for consumption by children, but the adult versions show how capricious, unsentimental and amoral (not to say immoral) the gods can be. One subjugates oneself at one's own risk.

Historically Romanticism was a reaction to the perceived mechanistic worldview of the Enlightenment thinkers. In Nietzsche's terms the dominant paradigm had become decidedly Apollonian. Romantics embraced Dionysus partly as a way of disrupting that. Certainly Romanticism is valuable in the way that it revalorises nature and the environment. In the present day, however, I see Romanticism as encouraging escapism and naivete. It's all too easy for us to escape into the world of imagination these days and to fail to engage with the practical problems facing us: from the baleful influence of Neolibertarianism (with it's roots in a dehumanising Utilitarianism and Game Theory) to the increasingly urgent problem of climate change. These problems of the material world are too remote for those who see themselves as spiritual beings, floating above the turbulence and uninvolved. Rather like our idealised Buddha figures who float above the world on pretty flowers, depicted as eternal youths and damsels.

Disengagement is the besetting problem of the last few generations. Present day Britain is once again dominated by Victorian thinking because successive generations of have either bought into the Neolibertarian lie, or simply dropped out of political life (the term for such a person in Greek was "idiot" from idios'one's own'). The Romantic sees themselves as standing alone against an uncomprehending world. My own teacher has described the True Individual as characterised by "frequent aloneness". Romantics see the True Individuals as possessed of a refined soul in contrast to the gross materiality of the world. By contrast I argue that more than ever we need to see ourselves as inseparably interconnected with others and functioning better in groups than alone; and as rooted in the material world and willing to get our hands dirty to solve problems in the material world. What's worse is that Neolibertarians exploit the tendency to disconnect, encouraging and facilitating escapism while continuing to accumulate wealth and power.

The Funding of Buddhism

If the legends can be believed the first Buddhists were rather extreme ascetics by out standards. There were more extreme lifestyles available at the time, but these people lived on one meal a day which they begged at the doors of whatever settlement they were near, made their clothing from discarded rags, and wandered from place to place. But if they did live this way it doesn't seem to have lasted long. Wealthy patrons already feature in the earliest literature and many of them are very wealthy. Maybe having your generosity immortalised in a sutta was a bit like today's naming rights? Anāthapiṇḍika's Ārāma (garden) as the Pāḷi equivalent of the "O2" arena? Soon the incrowd and socialites of ancient India were donating many expensive gifts and large sums of money to Buddhist beggars. They went from being possessionless beggars in rags, to being substantial property and land owners in silk robes in a relatively short space of time. And they have remained in this position ever since. People donated over and above what was needed in to gain merit for a better rebirth. Why Buddhist monasteries accumulate wealth is open for discussion.

When Kūkai visited Changan, the imperial capital of China in 804-6 CE, there were some 90 Buddhist temples, alongside substantial buildings belonging to other religions. Some of these temples recorded huge donations (e.g. a billion copper coins) and were possessors of incalculable wealth. What's more they were involved in usury and owned productive land. And as ever they were not subject to the usual taxes. The imbalance was so great in China that, much like Britain in the 16th century, the Imperium, on the verge of bankruptcy, turned on the Buddhists and took all that wealth by force, sacking the monasteries. Having a large Buddhist establishment in your economic sphere is a vast drain on resources and history shows that supporting such a large unproductive sector frequently leads governments into economic difficulties. This may be why Zen monks ended up having to work for a living in Japan, where they had plenty of experience of wealthy and powerful monks interfering in government. In Tibet the monks solved this potential problem by becoming the de facto government and convincing peasants that a revered religious leader reincarnated time and time again to be their king. This produced an isolationist, stagnant, despotic feudalism that was largely disinterested in solving problems in the material world, while at the same time selling the story that they were engaged in saving all beings from suffering using supernatural means. The irony with Tibet is that had the Chinese not invaded we might still never have heard of Tibetan Buddhism.

One of the features of the work of Professor Gregory Schopen has been to show how ancient monasteries, to the extent that they have been excavated, were always involved in direct economic activity. From donating cash to monumental building programs to minting their own coins, all the evidence points to Buddhist monasteries as domains of power and wealth. The massive "university" at Nalanda was not built for free. We tend to forget that every building must be paid for. Land and bricks have to be bought, builders have to be paid and so on. All the evidence is that Buddhists were active in this sphere, though not productive. They simply accumulated wealth and property. And they still do. And what they offer in return is a little teaching, rituals to ward of misfortune, and the promise of a better rebirth for the donors. Buddhist monasteries have always been centres of wealth and power. Celibacy stops that wealth leaking away to children.

It's clear that a great deal of effort these days is going into producing Buddhist consumer goods: "Dharma" books, DVDs, paraphernalia, cushions, statues, apps; and Buddhist services: retreats, seminars, workshops, pilgrimages and initiations. This seems, historically speaking, to be business as usual. Running Buddhism and expanding it is not cheap and Buddhists have more or less always had to generate a huge amount of cash to fund it. Perhaps our culture of consumerism is more intense than before. Perhaps the average person is considerably more affluent than before. But the basic pattern of attracting donors to fund the maintenance and spread of Buddhism, involving the material support of a large unproductive clergy, as well as the accumulation of wealth and power by ruling elites, is nothing new. Commodification is the historical norm from the earliest textual and archaeological records. The Romantic idea of Buddhists living "pure" spiritual lives unconcerned with the material world is a story that has never been true in Buddhism history. Unproductive priests require the material support of their followers.

Conclusion

I was listening to the radio recently and someone said that one can tell the health of a religion by whether it is looking for converts or heretics. The implication was that looking for converts is a sign of health and looking for heretics a sign of ill-health. Clearly different parts of the Buddhist world are at different places on this spectrum. It's partly this that makes the reaction to MBT as a heresy alarming. But also it's another reminder that Buddhists don't really understand their own history and they don't understand economics. And isn't this because these are "material world" subjects that are considered to be below the spiritual aspirant who has renounced the world?

Isn't this another manifestation of the ontological dualism outlined in my essay, Metaphors and Materialism, this split in our minds between matter and spirit. Don't we, as Buddhists, long to belong to the world of spirit, free of the corruptions of matter? Aren't we simply disgusted by bodies, money, and sex? Don't we imagine ideal worlds in which we have bodies of light, all our wants fulfilled with no effort; where everyone loves each other but no one has sex? And isn't that really the problem we have with the supposedly new, but in fact ancient phenomenon of commodification and the practical application of our techniques? It spoils the illusion that we are part of something so spiritual that you can't buy it over the counter.

The production of food involves costs - it require input from the three factors of production: labour, capital and land. We would probably add a fourth factor these days: knowledge. These costs must be met or food production becomes unsustainable. So labour generates wages, capital generates profit, and land generates rent. What knowledge generates in compensation I don't know (my Marxist economics is a bit out of date!). If someone gives up their spare time to teach then maybe they can do so at little cost, except for the lost opportunities to do something else with that time (and the preparation time). But if someone gives up their working time to teach then we must provide them, one way or another with the means to survive or even to thrive. Since in the West we have no culture of supporting people in the traditional Buddhist manner, teachers must charge a fee or go get a job. And if they have a job they'll do a lot less teaching. We either have to create a culture in which ordinary Buddhists give up a substantial portion of their own income to support teachers (the tithe of old) or reconcile themselves to paying fees. History suggests that this has always been the case.

In any case, if we're going to have a discussion about commodification let's do it with some awareness of our own history and the politics of our day!

~~oOo~~

Some views of Mindfulness etc. in no particular order

Why Mindfulness isn’t a Good Thing (…or New) The Naked Monk. (13 July 2013)
TIME's Beautiful, White, Blonde 'Mindfulness Revolution', Huffington Post (29 Jan 2014) though generally the Huff is a HUGE FAN.
Corporatist Spirituality. Richard K. Payne. (18 Feb 2014) See comments from me and RKP.
Protesters crash Google talk on corporate mindfulness at Wisdom 2.0 conference. Tricyle. (17 Feb 2014) Though note that the protest itself was not about Mindfulness, but "about Google and other Tech giants" forcing up rents in some areas of San Francisco. [Read the comments also]
Mineful Response and the Rise of Corporatist Spirituality. Speculative Non-Buddhism. (17 Feb 2014). SNB specialises in angry and reductio ad absurdum arguments.
The mindfulness business: Western capitalism is looking for inspiration in eastern mysticism. The Economist. 16 Nov 2013.
Beyond McMindfulness. Huff Post. 7 Jan 2013.
Enlightenment Engineer: Meditation and mindfulness are the new rage in Silicon Valley. And it’s not just about inner peace—it’s about getting ahead. Wired. (18 Jun 2013)

Mindfulness is Political: Viśvapāṇi and other posts on his blog. (ca. 20 Feb 2014). A bit of balance.

↧

Diamond Sutra: Connections to the Past

February 28, 2014, 12:40 am

≫ Next: The Death of a Child: Moral Particularism in Early Buddhism?

≪ Previous: Commodification and the Buddhadharma

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One of the unresolved discussions in Buddhist Studies is the relative date of the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā (Vaj). Conze placed it in the same period as the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya ca 350-500 CE calling this a "period of contraction" after the gradually expanding versions in 18,000, 25,000 and 100,000 lines. We now know that the Hṛdaya was composed quite a bit later, ca. 7th century according to Nattier. Japanese scholars have also argued for a much early date for Vaj, placing it a little before 8000 line Perfection of Wisdom text (these scholars were writing in Japanese and although their arguments are mentioned by many English language writers, I'm not aware that they have been reproduced in any detail in English). Thus it's quite likely that Conze's "period of contraction" is a mirage.

One of the interesting features of Vaj is the references to ideas and texts from early Buddhism. For example section 6 there is a reference to Alagaddūpama Sutta or a text very like it, i.e. to the simile of the raft and to dharmas and non-dharmas. The problem of what was meant by dhamma/adhamma in the Pali text was explored in The Simile of the Raft, with inconclusive results. There is no consensus on what is being referred to by dhamma/adhamma in this passage. As I pointed out, the Buddhadharma never ceases to be a refuge even for the liberated, so the suggestion that we abandon it post-liberation is not sensible. The reference is found in Vaj 6:

"If the aspirant has a perception of a fundamental object (dharma) they might grope towards really existing substance (ātma). They might grope for being (satva), for a soul (jīva) or a homunculus (pudgala)." Similarly if they have a perception of a non-object (adharma). This is a reference to the kolopamaṁ dharmaparyāyaṁ"the way of explaining the Dharma that is like a raft".

References to early texts dwindle as time goes on and thus might provide some clues to the relative age of Vaj. However some of the ideas were kept alive by being repeated in later texts so this may not be a direct reference. For example in the Schøyen Vaj manuscript (VajS), at the end of section 4 there is this sentence:

api tu khalu punaḥ subhūte evaṃ bodhisatvena dānamayaṃ puṇyakṛyāvastuṃ dānaṃ dātavyam.

Even so however, Subhūti, in this way, an aspirant should give a donation whose basis in good action (puṇyakriyāvastu) consists of generosity (dānamaya).

This sentence is not found in the other versions of the text, which are generally considered later. Here we also seem to have a backward glance. There are two interesting terms here.

puṇyakriyāvastu: from puṇya-kriyā‘a good action’; puṇyakriyā-vastu‘whose reality is a good action’, the ‘reality of a good action’. BHSD: “object or item of meritorious action” (though what does this mean?).
dāna-maya 'consisting of generosity'

Compare this with the Puññakiriyavatthu Sutta:

Tīṇimāni, bhikkhave, puññakiriyavatthūni. Katamāni tīṇi? Dānamayaṃ puññakiriyavatthu sīlamayaṃ puññakiriyavatthu, bhāvanāmayaṃ puññakiriyavatthu.(AN iv.241 ; Cf. DN iii.218; M ii.204).

"Bhikkhus, there are these three bases of meritorious activity. What three? The basis of meritorious action consisting in giving… virtuous behaviour… meditative development." (Bodhi's translation; p.1170)

There appears to be no Chinese equivalent of this text (none is listed by the Sutta Correspondance project). Here Bodhi interprets vatthu (Skt vastu) as "basis". This seems more likely.

The point of this passage seems to be that those who practice actions based on dānamaya and sīlamaya but not bhāvanāmaya can expect a rebirth in one of the deva realms, but it is implied that they do not attain liberation. At DN iii.94 the Buddha remarks that, “‘They don’t meditate now’ is the meaning of ‘brahmin student’”. (Na dānime jhāyantīti kho, vāseṭṭha, ‘ajjhāyakā ajjhāyakā’ tveva tatiyaṃ akkharaṃ upanibbattaṃ). The author is forming a pun by reading ajhāyakā (= ime na jhāyanti 'they don't meditate') ‘non-meditators’ for ajjhāyakā‘Brahmin students’.

MN 99, closely related to the Tevijjā Sutta (DN 13) in form and content, suggests that this was originally a critique of Brahmins.

Yeme, bho gotama, brāhmaṇā pañca dhamme paññapenti puññassa kiriyāya kusalassa ārādhanāya, cāgamettha brāhmaṇā dhammaṃ mahapphalataraṃ paññapenti puññassa kiriyāya kusalassa ārādhanāyā’ti (Mn ii.204).

“Gotama, of these five things declared by Brahmins for the making of merit (puññassa kiriyāya), for accomplishing what is good, they declare the greatest fruit derives from generosity (cāga).”

The critique is that no Brahmin can say from personal experience that the five things lead to merit. This may indicate that puṇya was being used in an anachronistic way to indicate good ritual actions -- i.e. making the appropriate sacrifices, at the appropriate time, as prescribed by Brahmanical ritual manuals -- rather than morally good actions. Thus dānamaya may originally have been a Brahmin concept that was criticised, then adopted and naturalised to Buddhism.

Now, we might make a case here for this being a reference to an early text. However this subject is expounded on at some length in the sixth chapter of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Aṣṭa). Here the three types of good action practised by everyone (sarvasattvā) are contrasted with a single type of good action characteristic of the aspirant: anumodanāpariṇāmanā-sahagataṃ puṇyakriyāvastu "good actions associated with bringing sympathetic joy to fruition". The term puṇyakriyāvastu is used about 40 times in this section. According to Conze the Vaj is a derivative of Aṣṭa and thus might be drawing on it for this teaching. But if the Japanese scholars are correct and Vaj in fact predates Aṣṭa, this inclusion might tell a different story. Indeed the treatment in Aṣṭa looks to be much more fully developed and to be incorporated fully into a Mahāyāna framework by the comparison with the puṇyakriyāvastu of the bodhisattva. By comparison in Vaj the reference refers to dānamaya as the best puṇyakriyāvastu for a bodhisattva which seems to present the idea in terms more similar to the Pāli texts than the Aṣṭa.

Taken in isolation this use of puṇyakriyāvastu seems to place VajS closer to the Pāli texts than to Aṣṭa. Which is not to say that we must now interpret one text as deriving from another. We need to keep in mind that the idea of puṇyakriyāvastu only occurs in this manuscript and not in the others. The presence of an extra line in this ms. which is not found in the later mss. just goes to show that there is no simple progression here, and Paul Harrison's comment about the lines not converging is right.

The situation is likely to be this: in a pre-sectarian Buddhist environment there was a loose tradition of preserving texts orally. It's quite possible that groups anthologised a few texts. Out of this relatively amorphous body of literature crystallised a number of written texts and collections. A project of standardisation occurred at some point, probably associated with King Asoka, which in all likelihood weeded out a great deal of material. Information was able to be transmitted at many different levels: individual phrases and passages; ideas; partial and whole texts. So even relative chronologies of texts might not be trustworthy - again, the Buddhist tradition is a braid not a tree.

However we can see the idea developing here. It starts out as a criticism of Brahmins who don't meditate. However as the Brahmanical practice of accumulating merit (for a good rebirth) is more fully assimilated and naturalised (so that it comes from ethical and not ritual action) then it finds a place in lists of Buddhist teachings. In VajS a fairly straightforward reference to this mature version of the teaching is made. In Aṣṭa another step has occurred taking the teaching into a Mahāyāna milieu. Though of course we are talking here about an edition of Aṣṭa which does not list variants and not of the whole of the extant Aṣṭa tradition. To really understand the situation we'd need to use a critical edition or revisit the extant manuscripts. On the face of it this passage argues for a older rather than younger Vaj, though as Nattier points out it seems to have been written in quite a different milieu to Aṣṭa and its descendants.

~~oOo~~

↧

The Death of a Child: Moral Particularism in Early Buddhism?

March 6, 2014, 11:56 pm

≫ Next: The Act of Truth in Relation to the Heart Sutra

≪ Previous: Diamond Sutra: Connections to the Past

Nepalese Boy: Herald Sun

One of the questions that have concerned philosophers throughout history is whether or not there are universal moral principles. Most Buddhists consider that the moral principles of Buddhism are universal. Moral training rules (śikṣāpada/sikkhāpada) and monastic etiquette (Vinaya) are some of the most characteristic features of Buddhism.

Although we generally see Buddhism as presenting general moral principles, in this essay I'm going to argue that there is at least an element of moral particularism in the Pāli texts. In the extreme this view says that morality is not about the application of moral principles and that, in fact, there are no universally applicable moral principles. Moral generalists argue that the same principles apply to the same situations all the time. A moral particularist denies this. For example we might say that because something is against the law that there is reason not to do it. But others will say that breaking the same law is a duty.

An interesting contemporary example is the case of Edward Snowden. Snowden was legally and contractually obliged to keep the secrets of the NSA secret. However because the NSA appeared to be breaking the law, and because he got no positive response through legally available channels, he decided that he must break the law and his contract. He stole documents, released them to the news media, and fled the country. For some people the ends do not justify the means. Snowden is simply a criminal who has broken the law and possibly harmed his country. Others see his broken promises as necessitated by the criminal activity of the NSA. Some people see moral rules as always applicable, while others see that each situation is unique.

Buddhist ethics are spelled out in stories. Most people find it easier to understand a moral principle if they can relate it to through seeing people interact, whether in life or in imagination. This may be the reason that the Jātakas became the main vehicle for teaching ethics in Theravāda Buddhism. Below I very briefly outline three stories in which the moral problem is the same in each case - coming to terms with the death of a child. If there are universally applicable moral principles then we would expect responses to similar situations to be similar. If there are no universally applicable moral principles then we would expect the responses to be different in each case.

Buddhists probably know the story of Kisā Gotamī and her dead baby. She takes the baby's corpse to the Buddha and asks his help for her "sick" baby. The Buddha says he can help, but only if Kisā can obtain some mustard seed from a house where no one has ever died. After traipsing around the town, Kisā cannot find a house where no one has died and comes to accept the fact that her baby has died, and that humans all die. The moral message is that death comes to all of us and not losing our heads when death takes our loved ones is an essential skill for a good life - because death always comes, and as one of my mentors once said, death is never convenient. The fact that Kisā is so attached to her child that she goes mad when it dies is not criticised.

By contrast in the Piyajātika Sutta (MN 87) the Buddha meets an unnamed man whose son has died and is beside himself. In Indian literature the unnamed person in examples like this is often called Devadatta: it's the equivalent of "Joe Bloggs". So that's what we'll call him. Devadatta is walking the streets, dishevelled and unhinged calling out "my only son, where are you?" The Buddha simply tells the man, "That's just how it is, those we love cause us all kinds of grief and misery" (Evameva gahapati, piyajātikā hi gahapati , soka-parideva-dukkha-domanass[a]-upāyāsā piyappabhavikā 'ti) and he leaves it at that. The Buddha goes on his way but the Devadatta thinks that the Buddha has got it all wrong. Like most people he thinks that the people we love, especially our children, are a source of happiness. Devadatta seeks solace with gamblers, who represent the worst aspects of society, and they quickly confirm his view that the Buddha has it all wrong. King Pasenadi hears about the exchange and is rather disconcerted by this apparent callousness in the face of death. Pasenadi inquires of his wife, Queen Mallikā, whether the story is true and when she confirms it they discuss the implications together. In a set piece discussion, then deduce that those we love really are a source of all kinds of misery and that it is marvellous how insightful the Buddha is. In the end the shock of the initial rejection, which so strongly contrasts with the Buddha's reaction to Kisā Gotamī, is worked out to some extent, but the story remains unsettling to anyone who loves someone and does not want them to die.

The third story is generally also well known, but not for the particular aspect I will highlight here. I've covered it in writing about the saccakiriyā or "truth act" and it involves the Buddha intervening in the difficult, potentially fatal birth of a child, by giving Aṅgulimāla a magic spell to recite. Here the almost fatalistic acceptance of death is seen in a new light. In this story the magic of the saccakriyāor truth act is used to ensure mother and baby don't die in childbirth. The Buddha intervenes to prevent their death. The implication here is that their death was unsettling to Aṅgulimāla and the Buddha simply enabled him to do something about it.

So here we have three distinct attitudes to the death of a child:

gentle coxing towards the acceptance of the universality of death;
fatalistic acceptance that love implies attachment and that attachment brings suffering;
the use of taboo means (i.e. magic) to avoid the death of mother and child.

Now clearly these stories are not precisely the same. The comparison between the cases of Kisā and Devadatta is striking. In one the Buddha is portrayed as kind and compassionate. He takes time and effort to help Kisā to understand. Devadatta however is simply left with the barest of factual accounts: "C'est la vie" (Evameva). We suspect that the case of Devadatta was inexpertly composed to provide a frame for the discussion between Pasenadi and Mallikā. It provides them with the stimulus to consider the consequences of familial love and attachment in a way that is far more sympathetic than the frame story. But because the story is canonical we must consider that at some point some early Buddhists thought this a plausible enough depiction of the Buddha dealing with a distraught grieving father to compose and preserve it. On the face of it the Buddha fails to help Devadatta and appears rather callous.

Of course death is inevitable. For any self-aware living being this knowledge is terrible. As living beings we desire continued life above all things. So the irresistible force of life meets the immovable object of death and, in the cases of Kisā and Devadatta, the result is madness. In one case the madness is cured and in the other it is not. But in the case of Aṅgulimāla the prospect of death is put off by the use of magic. Buddhist texts are rather ambivalent about magic. Some miracles are performed by the Buddha and form an important aspect of his hagiographies: the so-called "twin miracles" or the conversion of the Kassapa brothers at Uruvela are two examples. And yet in other places the monks are forbidden to use magic, and in another the Buddha denies rumours that he is (simply) a wizard.

My point here is that there does not seem to be a moral principle which applies in each case. Sometimes one can use magic and other times not, with no discernible pattern, Sometimes the Buddha takes extraordinary care of a grieving parent and other times he simply says "C'est la vie". These stories taken together seem represent at least some level of moral particularism. We can deduce from these stories that early Buddhists did not see behaviour simply in terms of general moral principles, but allowed for different responses to seemingly similar situations depending on factors which are not preserved in the stories themselves.

~~oOo~~

A very good introduction to the subject of moral particularism can be found in this interview with Jonathan Dancy on Philosophy Bites. [Thanks to Dhīvan for pointing this out].

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The Act of Truth in Relation to the Heart Sutra

November 1, 2013, 1:44 am

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I've now mentioned the saccakiriyā (Skt. *satyakriyā) or 'act of truth' several times in relation to the Heart Sutra and its protective function. The text itself claims that the efficacy of prajñāpāramitā comes from samyaktva and amithyātva, i.e. from truth and non-falseness or from rightness and non-wrongness. It has long been my intention to write something on the saccakiriyā for this blog, because I think it sheds important light on the ancient Buddhist worldview that is hidden from modern Buddhists of all stripes. In this essay I'll provide an outline of the saccakiriyā and try to show how it might inform the Heart Sutra in particular and Buddhist sūtras in general.

There have been a number of articles on saccakiriyā over the years, though mostly they are quite old now. They cover the subject in some breadth and depth, but I have never been entirely satisfied with their account of the saccakiriyā because, on the one hand, the key authors describe the saccakiriyā as 'Hindu' when they mostly use Buddhist sources; and, on the other hand, they try hard to link it with Vedic attitudes to truth without finally acknowledging that the saccakiriyā is primarily a Buddhist phenomenon that has no Vedic counterpart.

The Power of Truth

In his 声字実相義 Shō ji jissō gi [= The Meanings of Sound, Word, and Reality], Kūkai quotes a passage from the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā that, for him, shows that the speech of the Buddha, i.e. mantra, has five characteristics: "it is true, real, tells things as they are, does not deceive, and is consistent"(Hakeda 241). The Chinese version, produced by Kumārajīva (T 8.235) in 403 CE, reads:

如來是真語者、實語者、如語者、不誑語者、不異語者。(0750b27-28)
Rúlái shì zhēn yǔ zhě, shí yǔ zhě, rú yǔ zhě, bù kuáng yǔ zhě, bù yì yǔ zhě.
The Tathāgata is a speaker of reality, a speaker of truth, a speaker of things as they are, an honest speaker, and not a deceitful speaker.

The passage in Vaidya's Sanskrit is more or less identical (Vaidya 1961: 81. Section 14f):

bhūtavādī subhūte tathāgataḥ, satyavādī tathāvādī ananyathāvādī tathāgataḥ, na vitathavādī tathāgataḥ ||
Subhūti, the Tathāgata is a speaker of reality, a speaker of truth, a speaker of things as they are, an honest speaker, and not a misleading speaker.

Here 語 means 'speech' (Skt vāda) and 語者 means 'a speaker' and corresponds to Sanskrit vādin. A vādin (masculine nominative singular: vādī) is someone who speaks a particular way, a professor, or someone who holds a particular view or ideology. We find the same term at the end of sectarian names like Theravādin (the ideology of the elders) or Sarvāstivādin (the ideology of ultimate existence).

Combined with this we firstly have 真 zhēn and 實 shí which were discussed in a previous essay in relation to samyaktvāmithyātvāt and yathabhūta-jñānadarśana. They mean 'real' and 'true' respectively and here correspond to bhūta and satya respectively. Next comes 如 rú, where 如 rú corresponds to tathā 'thus', which is related to tathātā'thusness'. The word tathā is a compound of tad (the stem form of the neuter third-person pronoun 'it, that') with the modal suffix -thā which as a particle means 'so, thus, accordingly'. Note the same Chinese character appears in the epithet 如來 rúlái i.e. tathāgata. Then 不誑 bù kuáng. The basic meaning of 誑 kuáng is deceit, and 不 bù is, like Sanskrit a-, a negative particle, so 不誑 means 'not deceitful' or 'honest', corresponding to ananyathā (i.e. an-anya-thā 'non-other-wise' from anya'other'). Lastly 不異 bù yì where 異 yì means 'different, weird, other' [as in other than true] and 不異 corresponds to na vitatha which derives from vi + tathā (and thus means 'not-not-thus' i.e. na vitathā = tathā).

The five qualities are: bhūta (real), satya (true), tathā (thus), ananyathā (un-false), na vitatha (not incorrect). It's debatable whether there is any real distinction here as these terms are all synonyms. Buddhist texts initially seem to list synonyms for emphasis, only to have later exegetes tease out distinct meanings for each synonym.

We again see here the distinction between truth and non-falsehood: both qualities are important to Buddhists. Of course what is true is ipso facto not false, but Buddhists value both sides of the equation. This distinction was made in an earlier essay contrasting satya and mṛṣā discussed alongside samyaktva and mithāyatva. Here what is false is not-true (vi-tathā) or other than true (anya-thā), and what is true (bhūta, satya, tathā, ) is also not-false (na anyathā) and not-not-true (na vitathā).

This is how Kūkai understood the efficacy of mantra. Mantra is potent because it is the direct speech of the Dharmakāya, which is truth itself. Indeed the Chinese/Japanese translation of mantra is 真言 (Jap. shin gon; Chin. zhēn yán) 'true words' which in Sanskrit would be bhūtavācana. However there is a general principle here as well. Buddhavācana is powerful because it contains the speech (vācana) of the Buddha which is always true (bhūta, satya, tathā etc). Words in Buddhist texts are considered by Buddhists to be true in the sense that they align with the nature of reality (though here I would substitute "experience" for "reality"), and this is what the term samyañc (Pāli sammā) is getting at. Thus we say samyag-dṛṣti means 'right-view'. A view that is samyañc conforms to the way things are (or how experience is), and seeing clearly how things are causes us to alter our behaviour to 'go with' (samyañc) instead of 'going against' (mithyā) this vision. In the first instance it may well involve getting your facts 'right', but right-view reorients the viewer, it changes our gestalt, and our relationship to sensory experience and to the experience of selfhood. The difference might be likened to a sailor in a storm who is being buffeted by huge waves and turns their boat to head into waves. Side-on, the waves constantly threat to roll the boat over, from the rear they threaten to 'poop' the boat (i.e. over-flow the rear of the boat and cause it to founder), but heading into the waves a small, but well-designed boat can survive even the huge waves of a storm on the open ocean.

Thus reciting a Buddhist scripture is always a multi-layered experience for a believer. At one level they simply rehearse the teachings in order to learn and remember them. At another level the words begin to guide their gaze towards the nature of experience, and perhaps help to gain glimpses of that nature. On yet another level they participate in the true nature of experience, because they enunciate the truth of the nature of all experiences (which importantly includes the experience of selfhood). Such words are Holy, a word which comes from Old English and means 'healthy, whole, inviolable'. It was adopted as a translation of Biblical Latin sanctus hence the connection also to 'sacred'. The saccakiriyā is a special case of this Holiness.

The Truth Act or Saccakiriyā

In brief, the textual examples saccakiriyā (an extensive list of examples is found in Burlingham 1917) involve stating aloud something which is is true about oneself (usually a virtue that one possesses or exemplifies) and making a request on the basis of this truth that something in the world changes. The change that is accomplished is almost always secular, or in Buddhist terms is not aimed at the goal of awakening. The saccakiriyā typically aims at using truth to gain mastery over nature and/or one's fate.

Most authorities follow Burlingame (1917) in placing the locus classicus in the Milindapañha (See Horner 1963: Vol.1, p.166ff). This post-canonical text has the most extensive explanation of the way a saccakiriyā functions and what can be achieved by it (the list includes rain-making, extinguishing fires, and detoxifying poison). In the Milindapañha Nāgasena uses a variety of traditional stories to illustrate the workings for the King. For example the Jātaka story of King Sivi, who gives his eyes to a beggar but is presented with divine eyes (dibbacakkhu) by Indra as a reward for his selflessness. Nāgasena says:

Yathā, mahārāja, ye keci sattā saccamanugāyanti 'mahāmegho pavassatū'ti, tesaṃ saha saccamanugītena mahāmegho pavassati, api nu kho, mahārāja, atthi ākāse vassahetu sannicito 'yena hetunā mahāmegho pavassatī'ti? 'Na hi, bhante, saccaṃ yeva tattha hetu bhavati mahato meghassa pavassanāyā'ti. 'Evameva kho, mahārāja, natthi tassa pakatihetu, saccaṃ yevettha vatthu bhavati dibbacakkhussa uppādāyāti.'

Just as, your Majesty, some adept* recites a truth [then says] 'let the clouds shed their rain' and by that recital the clouds shed their rain. So, Majesty, is there a cause for rain already existent in the sky that causes the rain? No, Bhante, the truth itself is the cause for the cloud shedding its rain. Just so, Majesty, there is no ordinary cause (pakatihetu) for that, the truth itself (saccam yeva) is the ground (vatthu)...

*CST has sattā but the PTS edition has siddha which fits the context better. Cf Horner (1963: 168 n.3).

There are saccakiriyā's in the Nikāyas and of all of them I think Aṅgulimāla deserves close attention. Aṅgulimāla is a wonderfully ambivalent figure. The mass-murdered who becomes an arahant. The arahant who is confronted by his own unripened evil karma. And in this aspect of his narrative the speaker of truth who has to carefully consider just what is true in order to help someone in distress.

Returning one day from his alms round Aṅgulimāla sees a women having a difficult childbirth (itthiṃ mūḷhagabbhaṃ vighātagabbhaṃ. MN ii.102). On reporting this to the Buddha, he is instructed to go back to her and say:

'yatohaṃ, bhagini, jātiyā jāto nābhijānāmi sañcicca pāṇaṃ jīvitā voropetā, tena saccena sotthi te hotu, sotthi gabbhassā'ti

"Noble woman, since my birth I am not aware of ever having intentionally deprived a living being of life, by this truth may you and your baby be well."

Apparently the Buddha has forgotten that he is speaking to a mass murderer and Aṅgulimāla has to point out that he has indeed harmed many beings. The Buddha amends the statement to:

'yatohaṃ, bhagini, ariyāya jātiyā jāto, nābhijānāmi sañcicca pāṇaṃ jīvitā voropetā, tena saccena sotthi te hotu, sotthi gabbhassā'ti.

"Noble woman, since my aryan birth I am not aware of ever having intentionally deprived a living being of life, by this truth may you and your baby be well."

Authorities are divided on whether 'from my noble birth' (ariyāya jātiyā) represents Aṅgulimāla's ordination or becoming an arahant, though I think the latter must be intended. In any case he goes to the woman and says this, and all was well with the woman and her birth/fetus was well. (Atha khvāssā itthiyā sotthi ahosi, sotthi gabbhassa). The word 'well' is Pāli sotthi, equivalent to Sanskrit svasti (compare the svastikasymbol) which comes from the phrase su asti'it is good'. Svasti refers to good luck, fortune or auspices. It is fundamentally a superstitious concept. It is concerned with maṅgala or luck, and the people who relied on such means were sometimes referred to by the Buddha as maṅgalikā 'superstitious' (e.g. Cullavagga, Vin V.129, 140). Of course it is said that bhikkhus ought not to be maṅgalikā, but the story of Aṅgulimāla shows the Buddha encouraging Aṅgulimāla to use magic to create good fortune. On the other hand we can see Buddhists attempting to redefine the concept of maṅgala in terms of the values and abstract ideals of Buddhism in the Mahāmaṅgala Sutta of the Suttanipāta (Sn 258-269). So at best the early Buddhist texts are ambivalent about magic, sometimes seeming to want to suppress or downplay it, sometimes trying to redefine it, and other times openly embracing it. It is significant that in the Buddhist parts of Sri Lanka, the Aṅgulimāla will be chanted for mothers in childbirth for their protection. The protective function of suttas is an important aspect of the history of Buddhist ideas.

As we know many Mahāyāna Sūtras spend considerable time saying that reciting or copying the sūtra brings practically infinite benefits to the pious. Indeed in some cases there is so much of this extolling of reciting and copying that it seems as though this is the whole message of the text - just copy the words saying "copy me" and you will be protected from misfortune (like a bizarre chain letter). Some also contain more explicit references to saccakiriya though in slightly different terms (see below).

The key words that make a saccakiriyā are 'by this truth' (tena saccena) or 'by this truth-speaking' (etena saccavajjena). This is accompanied by a verb in the imperative, a command essentially. The saccakiriyā is used for a variety of recorded purposes including: healing, rescuing, over-coming obstacles, and protection. It is a also apparently used for showing off, as when Binudmatī, a prostitute, demonstrates to Asoka that she can use a saccakiriyā to make the river Ganges flow backwards in the Milindapañha. Her saccakiriyā depends on her even-handedness with those who pay for her services. She acknowledges no differences in those who can afford her price. There is a subtext here which seems to have been lost of previous commentators. Failing to make social distinctions based on class is an implicit criticism of the hierarchical social order of the Vedics. Like the Buddha himself, Bindumatī does not acknowledge the hierarchy imposed on India by Brahmins. And it is precisely in rejecting caste that Bindumatī, portrayed as a rather lowly and despised figure, aligns herself with reality and gains the power to make the Ganges flow backwards. The miracle is dependent on the Buddhist rejection of caste, and the fact of Bindumatī being a prostitute is probably a rhetoric slap in the face to Brahmins.

The Perfection of Wisdom tradition also contains truth acts. For example in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā (Skt. Vaidya 1960: 189-190; trans Conze 1973: 228-9) and the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras (Skt. Kimura 5:3; trans. Conze 1975: 433), the bodhisattva is able to use the saccakiriya to test a prediction (vyākṛta) to Buddhahood delivered to him in a dream. If he takes a stand on the truth (satyādhiṣṭhāna) and is able to, for example, extinguish a fire in a town by speaking the truth truthfully (tena satyena satyavacanena), then he can be sure of eventual Buddhahood. If however the fire continues to consume the town then he must have some residual karma (karmopacitaṃ) blocking his progress. The bodhisattva is also able to exorcise ghosts in the same way (this episode follows on from the previous one in both Aṣṭa and Pañcavimśati). This is one of many continuities with pre-sectarian Buddhist thought that is found in Prajñāpāramitā texts. (For other Mahāyāna references and relationship to mantra see Chisho).

Studies of the Saccakiriyā

Burlingame had already identified that many of the saccakiriyās in his catalogue relied on virtue for their efficacy. The saccakiriyā often relies on truthfully stating that one possesses a virtue, as in the case of Aṅgulimāla. However he struggles to fit all of his examples into this frame work. Bindumatī for example is deliberately portrayed as lacking in virtues (she is a thief, a cheat etc), though from a Buddhist point of view rejecting caste distinctions is a virtue! Burlingame also notes one or two non-Buddhist sources: one in the Mahābhārata and one in the Rāmayāna where stories cross-over Jātaka stories. Had Burlingame distinguished Buddhism from Hinduism he might have pondered how a story could appear in both traditions and explored the provenance. However he did not. Given that the great majority of saccakiriyā Buddhist the most likely scenario is that they are a Buddhist form that was carried over into the Epics along with a few other fragments of Buddhist narrative.

Unfortunately the next scholar to take a major interest in saccakiriyā, W. Norman Brown (1940), also crudely conflates Buddhism and Hinduism. His main idea is that saccakiriyā can be understood as an extension of the Vedic focus on ṛta (cosmic order) and satya (truth) which are at times almost synonymous. This argument is hampered by his failure to find a single credible example of a saccakiriyā of the Buddhist type in the Ṛgveda. The Sanskrit equivalent of Pāli word saccakiriyā, i.e. satyakṛiyā, is not found in any Sanskrit text. If the idea is Vedic then, as he says, it must be "well concealed" (42). However note that even in Buddhist Sanskrit texts the word becomes satyādhiṣṭhāna Brown's main contribution is to highlight common features which had escaped Burlingame thus giving a common basis for all saccakiriyā. To do this he invokes the idea of socio-religious duty (dharma) which is so central to Hinduism. Here we have cause for dissatisfaction since dharma as "duty" is never particularly important in Buddhism. Virtue (sīla), purity (suddha) and merit (puññā) are all far the more important concepts with respect to obligations imposed by the religious life. Brown's citation of a passage of the Bhagavadgīta which states that "it's better to do one's own duty badly than to do the duty of another well" is completely at odds with the spirit and the letter of Buddhism. Technically Buddhist monks walk away from class (varṇa) and caste (jāti) and all the associated notions of duty when they are ordained (cf comments on Bindumatī above). Brown takes two more bites at the saccakiriyā apple in 1968 and 1972 but he never manages to distinguish Buddhism from Hinduism and thus does not explain saccakiriyā in Buddhist terms even though the vast majority of his texts are Buddhist.

However Brown's error contains some truth and points us in the right direction. According to any social code of conduct Aṅgulimāla's mass murder is reprehensible. And when he joined the saṅgha he repudiated his dharma in the sense of social duty in the Vedic or Brahmanical use of the term. He cannot be said to meet Brown's criteria of fulfilling his duty in any sense. But in becoming an arahant he has aligned (samyañc) himself with dharma in the Buddhist sense. Thus Aṅgulimāla's ability to use a saccakiriyā only makes sense within a Buddhist framework and specifically does not make sense in a Hindu or Brahmanical framework.

George Thompson (1998) takes up the theme saccakiriyā in light of Pragmatics (an application of Philosophical Pragmatism to language). Thompson goes as far as to say that the saccakiriyā is "a central Vedic institution" (125) despite still failing to find a single straightforward example of a saccakiriyā in a Vedic text. Thompson's approach to Brown's analysis is hampered because he only cites the last of Brown's three articles on this subject, the importance of the first article cited above is thus lost. Thompson's analysis of saccakiriyā is in the Pragmatic terms of J. L. Austin and his interpreter John Searle. There are certainly argues for this approach. As a performative or "illocutionary" speech act, the saccakiriyā is at least taken seriously by Thompson. However his approach remains reductive and never really comes to grip with the magical aspect of saccakiriyā. Though the Pragmatic approach is more interesting than, say, the Semantic approach of the late Frits Staal, in the end it does not give us insights into the Indian Buddhist mind. We may come to understand saccakiriyā in Pragmatic terms, but the people who composed the texts did not think in these terms, so it does not shed light on the emic understanding of saccakiriyā, i,e, on the worldview of ancient Buddhists who used magic (On emic/etic see this explanation).

Of course my own application of Glucklich's work to understanding Buddhist magic, and mantra in particular, suffers to some extent from the etic/emic problem. Glucklich's framework is etic. However, as I hope I have shown, the crucial concept of interdependence is also part of the Buddhist worldview and thus Glucklich's approach enables us to build bridges that make for understanding in emic terms without a commitment to the emic worldview.

Thompson, like many recent scholars of Buddhist mantra (e.g. Lopez 1990), makes reference to the series of essays presented in a volume called Mantra edited by Harvey Alper (1989). There is no doubt that the essays in this book are fascinating and they open up new ways of thinking about the Vedic approach to mantra, especially by employing Pragmatic paradigms (though Staal is highly critical of the Pragmatic approach in his contribution to the volume). If they mention Buddhist mantra they do so only in passing and Buddhist mantra seems to be an entirely different topic which employs an entirely different paradigm. So we not only have the problem of an approach which is determinedly etic, but one which ignores Buddhism as a distinct tradition. The same applies to Jan Gonda's oft cited 1963 classic The Indian Mantra. It is a highly useful and insightful study of mantra in the Vedic/Hindu context, that almost entirely leaves Buddhist mantra aside. So little effort has gone into the study of Buddhist mantra on Buddhist terms that there is precious little research to refer to. In my opinion the best guide to Buddhist mantra is the works of Kūkai translated by Yoshito Hakeda in Kūkai: Major Works. Referring to this book we can see that the understanding of mantra in the Buddhist milieu went in entirely different directions from the Vedic/Hindu milieu. A thorough study of Buddhist mantra in Buddhist terms is an urgent desideratum for Buddhist studies. My own book Visible Mantra only scratches the surface.

This is an all too brief overview of this often overlooked magical tradition within Buddhism. I think this framework of truth-magic is integral to understanding the value and power of the sūtra and especially the dhāraṇī within the sūtra. As almost every work which discusses the Heart Sutra will remind the reader, this text is chanted daily in monasteries, temples and shrine-rooms across the Mahāyāna Buddhist world. The text is also studied and commentaries continue to be produced from a variety of worldviews and viewpoints. One of the things that fascinates me is that the Sanskrit text has been established for so long and yet has received so little critical attention. Nattier makes some comments, almost apostrophes, regarding the Sanskrit, but the most popular Mahāyāna Buddhist text has not been studied in anything like enough depth. Recent important contributions From Lopez, Nattier and Silk have made little impact in the world of Buddhist practice.

Saccakiriyā as Magic

One last task remains, which is to tie the saccakiriyā in with Glucklich's views on magic. In Indic languages the root sat means both true and real. Thus to say that an utterance is satya (Pāli sacca) 'truth' is also to state that it is reality and not merely as a reference, but reality itself. Similarly for words like bhūta and tathā. In Indian one knew that the eyes were not always trustworthy, so the ears were the gateway to reality: hence Buddhists are śravakāḥ'hearers' and the learned are described as 'śrutavat''possessing what was heard'. Hence also the sūtras begin evaṁ maya śrutam... In the Buddhist worldview (spanning the Pāli nikāyas, Milindapaña and the main Sanskrit Prajñapāramitā texts), words that conform (samyañc) to reality have the power to invoke real-world changes. The underlying metaphysic here is that what is real on one level is real on every level and there are connections (bandhu) between levels (despite my earlier comments this worldview comes from the Vedic milieu). In Glucklich's terms if we have lost the sense of interconnectedness that is vital to our well being, then we can restore it by partaking in some aspect of the real on another level. Because of universal interconnectedness we can access macro or cosmic interconnectedness via micro or local interconnectedness, with the right attitude. In this view reciting a sūtra, dhāraṇī or mantra does precisely that.

In the saccakiriyā one states a truth or reality, or in fact one states that one is oneself in harmony (samyañc) with truth (satya), in order to restore order external to oneself. And this has often been the main use of the Heart Sutra. Legend tells us that Xuanzang, for example, recited the text to ward off evil spirits while crossing the Gobi desert. Certainly a feature of Mahāyāna Buddhism in East Asia has been the belief that chanting sutras is a valid response to misfortune whether personal or national. Japan was (and still is) highly vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, floods, and fires (in towns built from wood). One Japanese Emperor effectively bankrupted the early Japanese economy in a frenzy of temple building and sponsoring of monks to chant texts in his response to repeated calamity.

Chanting texts for protection seems to date from very early in Buddhist history. The parrita ceremony is mentioned in Milindapañha and continues down to the present, and most Mahāyāna texts promise protection to anyone who propagates them. And interestingly this has a direct parallel in the medieval monasteries of Christian Europe. The cycles of daily prayers were central to the existence of the monks, and these were kept up to try to ensure the wellbeing of king and country.

The saccakiriyā allows one individual who is samyañc (in tune) with respect to the nature of experience, to restore samyañc for another who is mithyā (at odds) with respect to the nature of experience.

I think Brown and Thompson are right in detecting a relationship with Vedic metaphysics here, but the form of expressing that ability to exploit samyañc when a protagonist says etena saccavajjena... hotu 'by [the power of] this truth-speaking... may it be!' to change reality is simply not found in Vedic contexts. The saccakiriyā allows one individual who is samyañc (in tune) with respect to the nature of experience, to restore samyañc for another who is mithyā (at odds) with respect to the nature of experience. This is what Aṅgulimālā does, for example. In many Jātaka stories featuring a saccakiriyā, the restoration of samyañc often allows a protagonist to complete their task in the face of some obstacle. Thus the saccakiriyā throws light on the importance of the distinction between samyañc and mithyā which is at the heart of the Eightfold path. And note that, though the eightfold path as a substantial existing entity is denied in the Heart Sutra, the quality of samyaktva/amithyātva is affirmed. As far as I can tell no one uses a saccakiriyā in order to break out of saṃsāra. The magic is primarily a secular cultural phenomenon which has been incorporated into the Buddhist mix because it is part of the milieu in which Buddhist writers lived. The parallel is modern Buddhist writers incorporating the attitudes and jargon of psychotherapy into their descriptions and expositions. However in the Prajñāpārmitā literature the bodhisattva can use the saccakiriyā to test their progress towards bodhi.

We might also see this principle at work in other contexts. When we practice transferring our merit (pariṇāmanā) for example. The more we are samyañc, the more merit (puṇya) we have. And being samyañc we are able to have a positive influence. Giving our merit away only makes us more samyañc. Similarly to the extent that our kalyāna-mitras are samyañc they influence us to be less mithyā.

Conclusion

So this is the saccakiriyā or truth act. In some ways this is an obscure branch of Buddhist lore that may seem to have little relevance to modern Buddhism. Though plenty of Buddhists are credulous about magic in a broader context, it is generally excised from modern accounts of Buddhism so that superstition and magic are never seen as central to modern Buddhism. So we should not be surprised to find no mention of it in popular introductions to Buddhism or in the curriculums of modern Buddhist schools. However, it might interest my fellow Triratna practitioners to know that, though we never speak openly of it, we regularly recite a saccakiriyā in our version of the Tiratana Vandana (also widely used in the Theravāda)

N'atthi me saraṇaṃ aññaṁ
Buddho me saraṇaṃ varaṁ
Etena saccavajjena
Hotu me jayamaṅgalaṁ

There is no other refuge for me.
The Buddha is the best refuge for me.
By this truth-speaking,
May I have victory and good fortune!

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Alper, Harvey., Ed. (1989) Mantra. State University of New York Press.

Brown, W. Norman. (1940) 'The Basis for the Hindu Act of Truth.' The Review of Religion, V. 36-45.
Brown, W. Norman. (1968) 'The Metaphysics of the Truth Act (*Satyakriyā).'Melanges d'Indianisme a la Memoir de Louis Renou. Paris 170-177.
Brown, W. Norman. (1972) 'Duty as Truth in Ancient India.'Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. 116(3): 252-268.
Burlingame, Eugene Watson. (1917) 'The Act of Truth (Saccakiriya): A Hindu Spell and its Employment as a Psychic Motif in Hindu Fiction.' Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28: 429-467.
Chisho Mamoru Namai. On Mantranaya [sic]. http://ibc.ac.th/faqing/node/46

Conze, Edward (1973). The Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines and its Verse Summary. San Francisco: City Lights.

Conze, Edward. (1975). The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom: With the Divisions of the Abhisamayālaṅkāra. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass: 1990.

Gonda, J. (1963). The Indian Mantra. Oriens (Leiden). 16, p.244-297.

Hakeda, Y.S. (1972) Kūkai : major works : translated and with an account of his life and a study of his thought. New York : Columbia University Press.

Lopez, Donald S. (1990) 'Inscribing the Bodhisattva's Speech: On the Heart Sūtra's Mantra.'History of Religions. 29(4): 351-372.

Takayasu Kimura: Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā V. Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 1992. http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_5u.htm

Thompson, George. (1998) 'On Truth-acts in Vedic'. Indo-Iranian Journal. 41: 125-153.

Vaidya, P. L. (1960) Aṣṭasāhasrika Prajñāpāramitā. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute, 1960. http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/bsu049_u.htm

Vaidya, P.L. (1961) Mahāyāna-sūtra-saṃgrahaḥ, Part 1. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute.

↧

Nonsense and Nonsensibility

March 14, 2014, 2:36 am

≫ Next: Ethics and Nonself in relation to the Khandhas.

≪ Previous: The Act of Truth in Relation to the Heart Sutra

The Red Queen shook her head. "You may call it `nonsense' if you like," she said, "but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary !"

At the end of my essay on negation in the Vajracchedikā I asked a question:

When Conze insists that the Perfection of Wisdom "had resorted to the enunciation of plain contradictions as a means of expressing the inexpressible" (cited by Jones 220) what exactly is he doing?

I've already partially answered this question in my essay On Credulity, where I wrote: "People want to believe... People apparently don't want to believe in science which they see as prosaic, mundane, and uninspiring. Accurate, but cold, grey, dull and limited. Whereas magic is exciting and has infinite possibility."

If we need any proof that magic is attractive we need only cite the worldwide Harry Potter phenomenon that made J K Rowling one of the richest people in the world. And her books are a drop in the ocean of fiction in which magic operates. Even mainstream literature cannot help but engage with the wish for magic to be real, with magical realism being a very popular genre. Of course the vast majority of us make the distinction between a fictional world in which magic is operational and a factual world in which it is not. But we are attracted to the world where magic operates. The attraction is fairly easy to understand. Magic enables us to take shortcuts and to take control of our fate to a greater extent than most of us ever experience. The same can be said of super-heroes, cartoon characters and fictional heroes. In a world where most of us are at the mercy of various faceless bureaucracies and our choices are arbitrary constrained in ways we either don't understand or don't consent to, we dream of being more powerful. Or we dream of escape to a better world.

Buddhists play into this attraction also. Buddhists holds out the possibility of solving all of our problems, not by addressing them head on, but by indirectly transforming our minds so that our problems no longer seem like problems. By identifying a single, seemingly simple cause for all problems, like say 'desire', and offering a simple (if arduous) way of dealing with desire, Buddhists taps into our desire to be free from afflictions and troubles, to escape our tribulations (this special case of desire even has a special name: dhammacanda). Alternatively Buddhists sometimes offer us an easy way to a perfect world where all the hard work of Awakening is made easy.

What are we to make of the idea that some Buddhist texts and masters set out to deliberately confuse us in order to paralyse that part of our mind which is logical so that another, illogical, part of our mind can come to the fore and liberate us from desire? Conze is particularly fond of this idea that unmitigated paradox is part of the method of Buddhism. In my review of Paul Harrison's approach to the Vajracchedikā (a locus classicus of paradox) I tried to show that paradox was not intended by the author of the sūtra. I also mentioned in passing that neither Harrison nor the other translator whose work I cited, Richard Jones, believed that the use of negation was intended to be paradoxical. I've made the same point with respect to the Heart Sutra.

There must be distinct advantages to a paradoxical approach to understanding since it is so popular and relatively long lived. The interpretation of the Vajracchedikā as presenting an apparent paradox is, for example, important to Zen Buddhists. Consideration of paradoxes in the form of the koan is also an important Zen practice. There is a strong theme amongst Modernist Buddhists that reason is the enemy of liberation. There are relatively few of us (European) Enlightenment oriented Buddhists compared to Romanticism oriented Buddhists.

There is a shadow side to this paradoxical approach that I think can be detected in comments by Conze and others. If on the face of it Buddhism is paradoxical and confusing, then it is only the adept who can make sense of it. Conze clearly believed himself to be such an adept. In his commentaries on the Vajracchedikā and Heart Sutra he makes several references to his inability to adequately convey in words the truth of the texts he is commenting on, but hints that it is entirely clear to himself what they are getting at. Such a paradox creates a hierarchy within the community - those who "know" and those who don't. Those who know cannot say exactly what they know, since it is not something that defies reason and cannot be put into words; and they cannot say exactly how they know, since it can only be communicated with paradoxes. Many of us are perfectly willing to buy into such a situation. We want to believe that there is a special (i.e. magical) knowledge that some 'masters' possess. Mostly we simply shine in their presence and obtain indirect kudos from being closer to the inner-circle. All too often we find that the emperor has no clothes on and wants to go to bed with us! But being the kind of social animals we are, we crave being part of the inner circle so much that we don't mind if it means spouting nonsense.

Now in Conze's case there is another dimension because he was a particular kind of character in a particular kind of environment. By this I mean that he was a gifted academic who did not suffer fools gladly and, as his memoirs make plain, he thought many of his colleagues were fools. Conze had been a staunch opponent of National Socialism in Germany, joining the Communist Party in reaction to the Nazis and authoring several communist tracts. One can easily imagine the rhetoric of Marx appealing to his Romantic leanings. Eventually Conze emigrated to England. But in England he was subject to considerable racism. His neighbours several times denounced him to the authorities as a spy and, when no action was taken against him, they set fire to the wood where he lived in a caravan. His English academic colleagues were no more welcoming. At Oxford they refused to recognise his German doctorate and insisted on calling him Mr Conze. Conze being a man convinced of his own superiority to the average man, and indeed to the average Oxford Don, must have found this painful. Later on he found that his history as a communist barred him from accepting job offers from US universities, and strictly limited the amount of time he could spend in the USA (which I think he found more congenial than stuffy England where prejudice against Germans has still not completely abated even now).

I suspect, though I can by no means prove this, that in the Perfection of Wisdom texts Conze found not only an engaging project but one in which he could find a measure of revenge against the establishment. By denying the possibility of a purely intellectual understanding of the texts Conze was fully in agreement with arch-Romantic D T Suzuki with whom he had a strong connection. It also meant that he could routinely exclude most of his colleagues from access to the Truth of these texts. He was industrious enough to dominate the field despite being rather slap-dash in his approach to editing Sanskrit texts and idiosyncratic as a translator - the phrase Buddhist Hybrid English might have been invented for his translations and his work is singled out in the article in which the term was coined (Griffiths 1981). Conze was as much concerned to exclude the plodding intellectuals of Oxford and the common man as he was to elucidate the texts for the cognoscenti. In his introduction to the Vajracchedikā translation his notes conclude:

"Spiritual discernment cannot, however, be conveyed by written instructions. It presupposes certain qualities of character, a certain direction of the will, and certain habits of behaviour. Where those are present, the intellectual information will come to life, and flare up into a blaze of light. Where they are not, boredom will result, and everything will appear too difficult. The reader will soon know which category he belongs to." (Buddhist Wisdom Books, p.20)

The implication here is that Conze too knows which category he belongs to. Indeed the qualities he praises -- character, will and habits of behaviour -- are as much drawn from his aristocratic German upbringing as they are from Buddhism. He has no compunction in dividing his readership, or indeed the world, into superior and inferior people. And he had little or no time for the latter. Elsewhere he says "Prajñāpāramitā Buddhism is not a religion suitable for the brainless". Conze saw himself at the nucleus of the group of people interested in Prajñāpāramitā and he disdained those who were not at least part of the inner-circle, the boundaries of which he himself helped to define.

So one of the functions of paradoxical religious literature is to divide the world into those who know and those who don't. Religions generally speaking have an inner circle of adepts who 'know' and grow concentric rings of those who have progressively less understanding of the Truth. One of the first things the new convert must do is absorb and master the use of religious jargon and appreciate the hierarchy of those in the know. Buddhists are particularly fond of finding new meanings for old words and dropping Indian terms into conversations. It can take years to become familiar with all the intricacies of the lists and lists of lists. Mastery of the jargon allows the convert to join the incrowd. There is this cultic aspect to all Buddhist groups.

It is strange, therefore, that the early Buddhists did not seem to feel the need to communicate in riddles. The criteria that bodhi must be experienced is still there, but the authors of the methods and doctrines associated with attempting to re-create that experience strive for clarity. It is not that the early Buddhists were completely rational and logical, clearly they were not. But they did not, so far as we know, set out to confuse the intellect or denounce reason. Indeed the Pali texts seem to praise clear thinking and learning as very useful on the path. Understanding is praised. The post-canonical work Milindapañha is all about sorting out confusion and clarifying apparent contradictions. And I confess that this quality is what draws me to early Buddhist texts ahead of any others.

However suspicion of the inner circle appears to have developed fairly early on, as critiques of arahants are an important aspect of Mahāyāna Buddhism. If someone is an arahant they have had the same experience as the Buddha. Originally no real distinction between buddha and arahant was made, except that the teacher tended to be revered as a teacher is in India. How bad must things have got if arahant came to be seen as a lesser goal for those of inferior capabilities? How many charlatans must have falsely claimed that title and abused the position that came with it? And of course we find the distinction being hardened as time goes on with the outright dismissal of anyone not eager to join the inner circle of the Mahāyāna (be it Prajñāpāramitā, Ekayāna or whatever). The idea of "higher teachings" or that Mahāyāna teachings are inherently superior are still to be found amongst Buddhists (just log into the Buddhist thread on Reddit for examples).

Of course we hope that somewhere in all that confusion that some of the adepts have had the kind of experiences we seek to have. That someone somewhere is released from that which plagues us, or that someone has in some way lived up to the hype. And that somehow they can communicate that experience to us in a way that will whisk us to nirvāṇa without passing Go. But as far as I can see there is no substitute for decades of practice. The Buddhists I admire are the ones who have been tempered by years of intense practice. In the end there is no substitute for hard work and perseverance. I might be accused of being a Protestant for taking this line, and perhaps that is true. I certainly grew up in a broadly Protestant environment. However, life e
xperience suggest to me that perseverance is amongst the most important human qualities.

A lot of nonsense is talked about Buddhism. To me we have lost something essential if we give in to the notion that our religion doesn't need to make sense. Once we become tolerant of nonsense, then we stop being discerning when it comes to the distinction between sense and nonsense. If we are presented with information, or a "teaching" that doesn't make sense on face value, then we ought to keep asking questions until the idea dies a natural death or we find a way to make sense of it. For example, I find that having taken on Sue Hamilton's idea that the Buddha was always talking about experience, that many paradoxes are resolved.

~~oOo~~

Griffiths. Paul J. (1981) ‘Buddhist Hybrid English: Some Notes on Philology and Hermeneutics for Buddhologists.’ Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 4(2): 17-32.

↧

Ethics and Nonself in relation to the Khandhas.

March 21, 2014, 12:47 am

≫ Next: Extending the River Metaphor for Evolution

≪ Previous: Nonsense and Nonsensibility

image via theconsciousprocess

Back in January 2014 I wrote an essay exploring the idea that there were irreconcilable pluralities in Buddhist metaphysics. In that essay I focussed on the poor fit between Buddhist ethics and the doctrine of pratītya-samutpāda. And I said that "On the face of it this problem ought to have produced a crisis in Buddhist philosophy, though to the best of my knowledge it never has." I no longer believe that it did not create a crisis in Buddhist philosophy, in fact on further reflection we can see a number of high profile responses to just this problem.

One example is found in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakā Kārikā where he has noticed the problem of what I call "action at a temporal distance".

tiṣṭhaty ā pākakālāc cet karma tan nityatām iyāt /
niruddhaṃ cen niruddhaṃ sat kiṃ phalaṃ janayiṣyati // MMK 17.6 //

If the action remains until the time of maturation, then it would be eternal
If it ceases, being ceased, how does it produce a fruit?

Nagarjuna's answer insists on the metaphysics of emptiness which has the same disconnect from moral imperatives that I've already described.

Having finished my essay on the disconnect between ethics and dependent arising I serendipitously found a passage in the Majjhima Nikāya which asks almost the same question as I had been asking. In the Mahāpuṇṇama Sutta (The Great Discourse on a Fullmoon) a certain monk asks a serious of question about the pañc'upānānakhandha or five masses of fuel (aka the five aggregates of clinging).

The answers add up to an exposition on how to meditate on the khandhas. We learn that the khandhas are rooted in desire. And that the desires take many forms related to how the khandhas might be arranged in the future. The khandhas are defined in a circularity: any kind of form is rūpakhandha, etc. Then we discover that the four elements (mahābhūta) are the condition for rūpakhandha; that contact is the condition for vedanākhandha, saññākhandha and saṅkhārākhandha; and that nāmarūpa is the condition for viññānakhandha.

Crucially sakkāyadiṭṭhi, literally the view that there is a true (sat) substance (kāya), though more often translated as 'personality view', comes about when we relate to the khandhas in terms of attā or 'myself'. With respect to each of the khandhas we may experience pleasure and joy; but we must remember that each khandhas is impermanent, unsatisfactory and insubstantial; and "escaping" from each comes about when we do not feel desire in relation to it, which in this context seems to relate to anxieties about future existence. In order to remove all tendencies towards thinking in terms of a substantial self, including "I making" (ahaṃkāra), "mine making" (mamaṃkāra) and "the tendency to opinions" (mānānusayā), one must not relate to the khandha in terms of etaṃ mama, esohamasmi, eso me attā'this is mine, I am this, this is my self'.

Although the order does not match up we can deduce that the two sets of three are related:

ahaṁkāra leads to the thought eso ahaṃ asmi'I am this'.
mamaṁkāra leads to the thought etaṁ mama'this is mine'.
mānānusayā leads to the thought eso me attā'this is my self'.

Now having heard this it occurs to a certain monk (presumably the same certain monk though the pronouns are unclear) who says:

iti kira, bho, rūpaṃ anattā, vedanā anattā, saññā anattā, saṅkhārā anattā, viññāṇaṃ anattā; anattakatāni kammāni katham attānaṃ phusissantī'ti? (MN iii.19 = SN iii.82)

It has been said, Sir, that form is without self, sensation is without self, apperception is without self, volition is without self, discernment is without self: which self will be affected by actions performed by a non-self?

We don't know the background of this monk, but we do know that he can't be a Brahmin, because it is explicit in Brahmanical beliefs about the ātman that it is not affected in any way by worldly actions and such a question would not occur to a Brahmin. More likely he is a Jain. In any case this question is similar to the one I raised about morality. If there is no self, then who is affected by actions? Although it breaks protocol to ask this, it's important to see that it rests on an understanding of moral imperatives. The question suggests that the whole system is too abstract to be a motivation to good behaviour.

Unfortunately the answer supplied in the text does not address the question directly, though it does give us an indirect hint about the author of the text. The Buddha is (apparently) concerned that some idiot (or perhaps the monk himself; again the pronouns here are quite confusing) might see the question as a conceited attempt by a contemptible man to usurp his place as teacher (the terms are quite gross). It seems to me that such a paranoid response is far from characteristic of Gotama in the Pāli literature. He is usually supremely confident of his place in the world. Next he has the monks rehearse the same teaching in a slightly different way. It is simply emphasised that what is impermanent, unsatisfactory and insubstantial cannot be one's self, and that the khandhas are all characterised by impermanence, unsatisfactoriness and insubstantiality.

There is a tautology involved in the last of these because although I'm translating it as "insubstantial" the word is anattā. Of course what is anattā is not attā, this is simply what the word anattā means. The Buddha simply says that what is not the self cannot be the self. Which is clumsy of the author.

While the bhikkhus were delighted and satisfied by these words, we have reason for dissatisfaction. It's clear enough what is intended here. We have the the outline of a meditation practice involving reflection on the khandhas. If one is thinking in terms of khandhas, then this is how one ought to think about them. But how does this translate into other areas of Buddhist thought? Particularly ethics? And why is ethics so often taught in terms of a sense of self that is substantial and stable over lifetimes (as in Jātaka stories)? Even if it is a metaphor, why is it a helpful metaphor? Why is there no answer?

What our interlocutor was doing was trying to shift the discussion. He was saying that if this is what the sense of self is about, then how does karma work? If there is no self then who experiences the consequences of actions? We've already see that the question of "who suffers" (ko vediyati) is an "unsuitable" or even "unhealthy" question (no kallo pañho SN ii.13). The Buddha simply emphasises phassapaccayā vedanā, vedanāpaccayā taṇhā'sensations arise from the condition of contact; contact from the condition of greed.' This is how we teach metaphysics, but it's not how we teach ethics.

The Buddha's answer suggests that whoever composed this discourse felt quite uncomfortable about the shift and was unable to answer it. He could only repeat himself. In the Pali texts people who ask the kinds of question I'm asking here are given a hard time. They are rebuked and chided. So far I've found no patient explanation of how everything fits together, just the answer that it's an unsuitable question. This appears to be the approach of modern writers on Buddhism as well. But if we are at all interested in the notion of Buddhism as a single system of thought stemming from a single mind then a major disconnect like this ought to be important and interesting.

One solution I proposed was that the attempts to see or outline unity in these teachings might be a cultural artefact for us. We have a predisposition to see everything in big bang terms, i.e. in terms of a singularity from which all the diversity we currently see must have developed from zero diversity in the past. It's a kind of parallax error, like the illusion of train-tracks converging in the distance. We have embodied this conceptual error in the tree metaphor which depicts evolution as a linear process with binary branches that always diverge and never converge. Except that everywhere we look at evolution we do see convergences. Our very cells are the result of the convergence of at least three kinds of bacteria that all contributed to the structure of eukaryote cells in varying ways and some of which, like mitochondria, retain their identity billions of years later. This process is now known as Symbiogenesis and was established by Lynn Margulis.

Similarly there is clear evidence that Buddhism is not the result of a single man having thoughts over the course of his lifetime, but is instead the result of a culture or even a complex of interrelated cultures imperfectly assimilating and syncretising a variety of elements. This does not rule out an historical Buddha, but it does mean that we must attempt to see him in context.

In discussing this disconnection between theory and practice with my friend Śākyakumāra he came up with an interesting analogy. We might think about the distinction between describing what someone does when they drive a car, and the idealised instruction we give to new drivers. There is a single goal, a single activity, but two view points. What we are describing above is the practice one does after cultivating samādhi or at least samatha, while the basic teaching on ethics focusses on mechanics. When we are driving and turn a corner, we do not think, now I'm turning the steering wheel which transmits a rotary action through a rack & pinion and causes the wheels to turn in a different plane (rolling the steering wheel causes the vehicle to yaw), or about braking and shifting gears and the other mechanical tasks involved. One simply does the action, and very often one's attention is elsewhere watching the road, ensuring we are on the correct route, scanning for dangers, etc. But when learning to drive one's attention is divided between coordinating limbs, consciously working the machinery, and scanning the environment (which is why most of us first drive a car in an empty car-park). It is essential to be clear which is the brake and which the accelerator and when to use each, and at first this must be done consciously.

In this view the teaching on ethics is purely pragmatic. It need not be perfectly philosophically integrated with other aspects of the Buddhist worldview because the intention is merely to get a practitioner up to speed on how to approach practice. Once they are practising effectively the question of how to behave is less of an issue since mindfulness and empathy become the best guides to how we treat other people. Unfortunately we have a tendency to mystify these qualities and put them on a pedestal where they seem out of reach. But every human being has mindfulness and empathy in abundance. Being social animals we are evolved to treat our peers and colleagues well under most circumstances. One of the main reasons we might not is that we are brutalised by living unnatural lifestyles in large, over-crowded, industrialised, urban societies. Evolution works over 10,000s of generations, whereas we have utterly changed our living environments in a matter of 10,000 years resulting in a certain amount of confusion.

We are usually taught that Buddhism is a smoothly integrated whole, but that is an illusion created by pedagogues. Once one moves out of the spotlight of ideas that teachers wish to highlight (for whatever reason) one almost immediately encounters matter which does not fit whatever paradigm one is working with. I suggest that ethics remained a separate department that was never fully integrated into Buddhism. This statement may elicit surprise from many who see ethics as central to Buddhism, but in Unresolvable Plurality in Buddhist Metaphysics I tried to show why this might be so. In that essay I concluded:

"In the face of the plurality of doctrine, usually the best we can do is select a subset of the teachings that hang together and gloss over the discontinuities. A dense and complex jargon combined with an anti-intellectual discourse helps us to obfuscate such problems. Even those who study the texts more directly are doing so through cultural and historical lens that predispose them to see unity and continuity and to gloss over evidence of the opposite."

I find it difficult to take in the vast sweep of Buddhist ideas across time and space. It's a vast and complex field of study. Most of us can only take in a small part of it. Most Buddhists are probably happy with their little subset of comfort and/or inspiration. Exploration is within strict limits defined by confirmation bias (which recall is a feature of reason and not a bug). Texts are authoritative to the extent they confirm our views and are myth/legend/metaphor/interpolations to the extent that they disconfirm our views. We're easily disconcerted, much like the author of the Mahāpuṇṇama Sutta and all too willing to plaster over any cracks that appear. But to me the cracks are the interesting part.

One of the advantages of study is that it helps to identify where we are comfortable and where we are uncomfortable. It can help identify assumptions and presumptions. The kinds of disconnects I'm identifying are hard to see because they are cracks that previous generations have plastered over. They're mostly unwelcome because they force us to consider that our religion is less than perfect and that is an uncomfortable feeling. But the truth is important if sometimes unpalatable and discomfort is the starting point of the Buddhist religion.

~~oOo~~

↧

Extending the River Metaphor for Evolution

March 28, 2014, 12:33 am

≫ Next: Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism

≪ Previous: Ethics and Nonself in relation to the Khandhas.

The case for abandoning the tree metaphor for evolution is one that has support from the field of evolution itself. In previous essays I've proposed the braided river model as providing a richer picture and vocabulary for evolution, both in species and in ideas and cultural functions like religion. In this essay I want to look at the actual features of the River Ganges along it's path and see how these might enrich metaphors for evolution.

The imagery of rivers features strongly in the history of Indo-European languages. And Indian literature is full of references to and metaphors drawn from rivers. I've argued for example that the important contrast between samyañc and mithyā make most sense in relation to a river bed very like the ones seen in the images below. One follows the stream, bending with it (sam-y-añc) or one tries to cut across and fight one's way forward (mith-yā).

If we look at the image above, it shows only the major rivers associated with the Ganges Basin. The hydrological cycle has a number of main features in this view. Firstly the catchment area extends both north (into the Himalayas) and south (the Vindhya Range). The Ganges accepts tributaries along almost it's entire length. Catchment basins give rise to numerous small streams. These streams combine into larger streams, and these into rivers and larger rivers (and this fact is used metaphorically the Pāli Canon: e.g. AN i.243. ii.140, v.114; SN v.396; and also in the Chinese Madhyāgama 43-54).

If we stand on the Maṇikarṇikā Ghāṭ in Varanasi and look out on the Ganges River we see a classic large river contained by two banks, though of course during the monsoons it often breaks it's banks. Most of us have probably seen it in tourist season after the temperatures have dropped a bit, the rains have stopped and the river is well behaved. And seeing this clearly defined waterway we think "Ganges River". Even an entity defined by change and process can still have a valid identity if that change takes placed within well defined boundaries.

What we don't see at that point are the numerous tributaries which combine (braid) together to form this river. And in particular we don't see that where the Ganges meets the Yamuna River near Allahabad that the Yamuna is the larger of the two. It's quite visibly larger on satellite photos (below):

In fact the Yamuna contributes nearly 60% of the flow at the confluence (that's a ratio of 3:2). Thus the resulting river ought to be called the Yamuna. However for historical reasons it is called the Ganges. This point of confluence used to define the eastern edge of the āryavarta or the homeland of the Brahmins. Up until just before the time of the Buddha, anywhere east of this point was considered barbaric and foreign by the mainstream Brahmins. The early Upaniṣads document the tensions between āryavarta and eastern Brahmins (Signe Cohen) and there are scattered references to distinctive "western Brahmins" in the Pāli Canon (e.g. S iv.312). Indeed the distinction appears to be current during the period the Pāli Canon was composed since there are scattered references to Western Brahmins who have distinctive habits.

Another feature we see is that the Ganges has wandered around the plain leaving behind distinctive oxbow lakes and sinusoidal shaped dry river beds which are clearly seen in satellite photos (below).

We know that some developments in Buddhism simply dried up, and some continued to exist cut off from the mainstream. Similarly with human evolution - Homo habilis, for example, did not survive into the present. At times small pockets of human species survived for a time in isolation, e.g. H. floresiensis which predates modern humans, but whose remains have been found with stone tools dated to only 13,000 years ago, which is well into the era of H. sapiens. H. neanderthalensis had significant periods of cross-over with H. sapiens in Europe and Asia where they appear to have shared genes (hybridised), though this did not happen in Africa. And so on.

The feature I have already highlighted is the braided stream typical of the mature plains river. We can see this on the Ganges as it passes Patna (below). The river is still accepting tributaries, but it is also diverging into separate (major) streams and re-converging. In the image below the large Son River enters from below left, with the city of Patna mainly to the left of the confluence. The Gandak River converges from above left.

The final stretch of the Ganges sees it combine with the Brahmaputra River (marked with a circle) but then fan out into a massive delta as it reaches the Bay of Bengal.

The combined rivers continue to flow past the ocean-land boundary depositing banks of sediment that are coloured light blue in this image because they represent shallow water. In the map one can also see the ancient course of the combined river carved into what is now the continental shelf, from when sea levels were very much lower (when for example our ancestors were on their way from Africa to Australia ca. 65 kya to 45 kya).

The present mainstream view sees evolution as being much like the delta region - a single source fans out into multiple streams producing present day variety. The present tree model has no roots, but it also over-simplifies the trunk. The trouble is that this is how history looks when viewed from any point and one is focussed on a single issue. The complexity of the Iron Age for example might be traced back to the discovery of Iron. But then iron working extended previous metal working techniques, and had to be accompanied by advances in kiln technology (since iron requires much higher temperatures), which most likely affect the production of pottery and created an industry for coke making. At best historians of various kinds (and I include evolutionary theorists in this rubric for this purpose) might see several contributing factors to any particular event or phenomena, when in fact everything is deeply and multiply interconnected.

What symbiogenesis and hybridisation tell us about evolution is that it is not a simple system of linear development with binary divergence, but a complex dynamic system including convergence, with symbiosis and hybridisation as the norm rather than the exception. Almost every tree has an associated mycorrhizal fungus symbiont that keeps it alive; without their symbiotic gut bacteria larger animals could not survive. The individual is simply a community seen from sufficient distance to blur the details.

It's long been a given in academia that Buddhism as far as we know it is the product of a community of people, or indeed the products of interacting communities more or less members of the Buddhist umbrella. I've tried to extend this by arguing that the community in question has roots in Iran, and has interacted with local communities of a wide variety of types - speaking languages from at least four major groups: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and TibetoBurman. Despite differences these communities probably shared regional cultural traits such as a belief in a rebirth eschatology, and regional linguistic traits such as retroflex consonants.

In the history of Buddhism one convergence event stands out almost more than any other. This was the 6th century synthesis we call Tantra. In this renewal of Indian religion the various streams of Indian thought and practice were combined, probably at least partly in response to the socio-political chaos of the collapse of the Gupta Empire (Ronald Davidson). In Tantra we find much of Buddhism at the time synthesised with Vedic theory and ritual, shamanistic practices, and yoga etc to create an entirely new approach to life and liberation.

~~oOo~~

↧

Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism

April 4, 2014, 12:59 am

≫ Next: Pulling Wings Off Fairies

≪ Previous: Extending the River Metaphor for Evolution

The Four Humours
image via Musings on the 18th C

In a recent exchange in comments on Dhīvan's blog, Two Meanings of Karma, he drew my attention to the Sīvaka Sutta. This sutta says that kamma is only one of eight causes of experience and introduces the term pubbe-kata-hetu "caused by former actions", which is discussed below. Related suttas help to flesh out what is meant by the term and place important limits on the doctrine of karma.

The early Buddhists were critical of the view that everything we experience is a result of past actions because it is a form of determinism that eliminates meaningful moral choices. As such this teaching touches on the subject so dear to Western moral philosophers, i.e. free will. I begin with my translation of the Sīvaka Sutta and a discussion of the main terms and ideas and then contrast it with the Titthāyatanādi Sutta (AN 3.61) with passing reference to the Devadaha Sutta (MN 101).

Sīvaka Sutta SN 36.21 (iv.230)

One time the Bhagavan was staying in Rajgir in the Squirrel Sanctuary Bamboo Grove. Then the ascetic Moḷiya-Sīvako approached the Bhagavan and greeted him. When they have exchanged pleasentaries he sat to one side. And sitting on one side he asked:

Mr Gotama, what would you say to the toilers and priests whose ideology is "whatever a person experiences (paṭisamvedeti), whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neither, is all caused by past actions (pubbekatahetu)"?

[The Bhagavan replied], Sīvaka, some experiences arise from the rising of bile (pitta); [this fact] one can personally know and [it] is considered true by [people in] the world. In this case, Sīvaka, those toilers and priests who claim that "whatever a person experiences is all caused by past actions" are wrong (micchā). They overshoot what is personally known and what is considered true by [people in] the world.

Sīvaka, some experiences arise from the rising of phlegm (semha)...
Sīvaka, some experiences arise from the rising of winds (vāta)...
Sīvaka, some experiences arise from interactions of the humours (sannipātika)...
Sīvaka, some experiences are produced by changes in the season (utu-pariṇāma)...
Sīvaka, some experiences are produced by adverse circumstances (visama-parihāra)...
Sīvaka, some experiences arise from physical injury (opakkamikānipi)...

Sīvaka, some experiences are also produced by the ripening of actions (kammavipāka); [this fact] one can personally know and [it] is considered true by [people in] the world. In this case, Sīvaka, those toilers and priests who claim that "whatever a person experiences is all caused by past actions" are wrong (micchā). They overshoot what is personally known and what is considered true by [people in] the world.

That said, Moḷiya Sāika said this to the Bhagavan: "Awesome, Mr Gotama, that's awesome. Please remember me as an upāsaka who has gone for refuge for life.

Bile, phlegm, and wind.
The humours, and the seasons,
Adversity, injury,
And ripening of actions as eighth.

.~o~.

Comments on Sīvaka Sutta

Firstly for enthusiasts of the punctuation problem related to the standard Buddhist sutta opening "evaṃ mayā sutaṃ..." note the opening of this sutta "One time the Bhagavan was staying in Rajgir" (Ekaṃ samayaṃ bhagavā rājagahe viharati). If we care about such things this shows that "evaṃ mayā sutam" is one syntactic unit and "ekaṃ samayam... viharati" is another. In fact to my mind this is the obvious way to read the Pāḷi. A qualifier like ekaṃ samayaṃ is far more likely to appear before a verb or participle than after it. Reading ekaṃ samayaṃ as going with sutaṃ looks like special pleading. If we were going to punctuate evaṃ mayā sutaṃ ekaṃ samayaṃ... we'd mark a new clause with a punctuation mark after sutaṃ. Which is to say that it is not:

"Thus I heard at one time, the Buddha was staying in Rajgir";

but

"Thus I heard, at one the Buddha was staying in Rajgir".

Secondly the name Moḷiya-Sīvaka is quite interesting. In How Buddhism Began (p.135-164; esp. 151-4) Richard Gombrich proposed that we take Aṅgulimala to be a Śaiva doing extreme antinomian practices. Now the name Sīvaka is probably from siva 'auspicious, fortunate' with the suffix -ka (causing the lengthening of the initial vowel) and thus on face value means 'one who is auspicious'. In which case the name would be synonymous with svāstika. The Pāli is equivalent to Sanskrit śiva, which is also the name of a god: Śiva. Pāli sīvaka might well be Sanskrit śaivaka, "one who belongs to Śiva". Thus we might read Moḷiya-Sīvaka as 'a top-knotted Śiva devotee'. The Dictionary of Pāli Names has nothing to settle it either way, though the name is not common: in addition to our Sīvaka we find just one yakkha (DN iii.205; SN i.211); one physician who was Ānanda in a previous life (J iv.412); and two theras (Thag vs.14 & vss.183-4), one of whom lives in Rajgir.

"Experiences" (present participle, not nominal plural) translates paṭisaṃvedeti. Here what one experiences is obviously vedanā and is characterised (as vedanā always is) as sukha, dukkha, or adukkhamasukha. Both paṭisaṃvedeti and vedanā come from the root √vid'to know'. From this root we also get veda'the knowledge'; vedanā'the known', i.e. what becomes known to us, what we actually experience. Also in this passage: vedayita'felt, experienced'; in the plural 'experiences'; such events are veditabba is 'to be known; knowable'. This cluster of terms is part of what makes "feelings" an unsatisfactory translation of vedanā. What we are talking about is that which we become aware of due to the activity of all our senses, including the mind. "Feelings" is far too narrow.

Pubbekatahetu is a three-part compound: hetu = cause, kata = past participle of √kṛ'to do, to make' and pubbe'before, formerly'. The compound is a bahuvrīhi meaning 'whose cause is what was done before'. There is a related term pubbekatakāraṇa which we find in a commentarial passage on AN 3.61 where it is also glossed as "Experiencing with actions formerly performed as the only condition" (pubbekatakammapaccayeneva paṭisaṃvedeti).

Visama-parihāra is an odd word. Bodhi translates 'careless behaviour', Thanissaro "adverse behavior", though PED suggests 'being attacked by adversities'. Parihāra is from pari√hṛ'to attend, shelter, protect; carry about; move around; conceal; set out, take up, propose'. PED takes it to mean 'surrounding' in the figurative sense. Visama is literally 'uneven, unequal, unharmonious'. Figuratively in a moral sense, 'lawless, wrong'; and 'odd, peculiar.' Buddhaghosa glosses: "Produced by adverse circumstances" means carrying a heavy load, pounding cement etc, or snakes, mosquitoes or falling in a pit, etc for one wandering at the wrong time. "Visamaparihārajānīti mahābhāravahanasudhākoṭṭanādito vā avelāya carantassa sappaḍaṃsakūpapātādito vā visamaparihārato jātāni." (SA iii.81) Thanks to Dhīvan for helping me with this passage. I think his translation of visama-parihāra as 'adverse circumstances' is better than either Bodhi or Thanissaro and I have adopted it.

The main point is that the view that everything we experience is a result of past karma is in fact wrong (micchā). I've pointed this out before and drawn attention to the Devadaha Sutta (MN 101) as another text which refutes this view. There it is attributed to Nigaṇṭhas who we usually take to be the Jains.

Titthāyatanādi Sutta

The idea of pubbekatahetu is also criticised in the Titthāyatanādi Sutta AN 3.61 (i.173) where it is one of three sectarian heresies (tīṇimāni titthāyatanāni). Faced with such a claim as "everything that one experiences is due to past actions" the Buddha questions his opponent about the reasons for unethical behaviour (the dasa kusala-kammapatha; known in the Triratna Order as that "the ten precepts").

In some sense this is a question of free will. The idea that everything we experience is due to past action is a form of determinism. The Buddha's critique points out that if we accept a form of determinism then we have no motivation in regard to moral moral choices in the present, and thus the possibility of liberation is lost.

Pubbekataṃ kho pana, bhikkhave, sārato paccāgacchataṃ na hoti chando vā vāyāmo vā idaṃ vā karaṇīyaṃ idaṃ vā akaraṇīyanti. Iti karaṇīyākaraṇīye kho pana saccato thetato anupalabbhiyamāne muṭṭhassatīnaṃ anārakkhānaṃ viharataṃ na hoti paccattaṃ sahadhammiko samaṇavādo.

However, bhikkus, for those falling back on former action (pubbekata) as the essence it is not a motivation for, not an effort towards, distinguishing between right and wrong. As a result of right and wrong not being truly and reliably ascertained, there is dwelling forgetfully and vulnerably. [Former action] is not, on its own, the doctrine of the samaṇa who is Buddhist.

Of the three other translations I consulted (Bodhi, Thanissaro, and Piya Tan) I disagree with all of them as to how to render the last sentence. All translate samaṇavādo in the sense of 'call oneself a samaṇa'.

Samaṇa-vāda is a nominal compound in the nominative. PED sv. vāda has "2. what is said, reputation, attribute, characteristic." PED cites Sn 859 for this reading, and one Jātaka reference. The final pāda of Sn 859 reads tasmā vādesu nejati. The Niddesa glosses vādesu here as ‘criticisms, blame, reproaches, not getting any renown, not being praised’. Though the SnA has "On that account he is not cowed because of criticisms" (taṃ kāraṇā nindāvacanesu na kampati) and K R Norman seems to follow this interpretation in his translation : "therefore he is not agitated in [the midst of] their accusations". (p 107 & 338-9). But the this also fits with the context. It seems to me that PED is probably correct to include this second sense of vāda in SnA, since that is how the commentator understood it, but wrong to attribute it to Sn. It's a commentarial usage not a sutta usage. As far as I can see there is no parallel usage in Sanskrit.

I had some discussion with Dhīvan on this and he pointed out: "Looking at the comm., it’s clear that the translators are following what it says but putting it into clearer English.

na hoti paccattaṃ sahadhammiko samaṇavādo: for you beings or other beings thinking, ‘I am an ascetic’, individually the reasonable characteristic of an ascetic isn’t, doesn’t succeed. For though there are ascetics whose reason is only past action, also there are non-ascetics whose reason is only past action. ‘Reasonable’ (sakāraṇa) means having a reason. (AA ii.272)

So Buddhaghosa’s argument is that the ascetics who claim that what is experienced is caused by past action are not really ascetics because non-ascetics also believe this, it’s not a right view that will get you anywhere, so it’s hardly a good view for a so-called ascetic.

Thus we can see where the other translations are coming from. My feeling, however, is that we should always make a strenuous effort to translate the text and at the very least include it as a footnote, before adopting the commentarial gloss. Buddhaghosa's view is not that of early Buddhism, but that of 5th century Theravāda scholasticism. Sometimes it's helpful and sometimes not. Here I disagree with him. His reading is one that requires us to treat rather too many words as meaning something other than their obvious meaning.

Na hoti samaṇavādo would be an entirely straight forward sentence meaning, 'It is not the doctrine of a samaṇa' [with an emphasis by putting the verb first]. Sahadhammiko is in the same case as, and thus goes with, samaṇavādo. Piya Tan says it is an adverb 'with justice' and Bodhi also translates as an adverb, 'legitimately'. This appears to be based on the commentarial gloss: sakāraṇa (above). However as an adverb it ought to be in the accusative, not the nominative. By contrast paccattaṃ is a neuter accusative used adverbially (individually). So, sahadhammiko simply cannot be an adverb, it can only be in apposition with samaṇavādo. The commentarial gloss is mistaken and misleads those who follow it. Here I take sahadhammiko in the obvious (and dictionary) meaning of 'one who shares a dhamma' or a 'co-religionist', i.e. from our point of view, another Buddhist. And the idea that everything we experience is due to past action is a not the doctrine of a samaṇa who is Buddhist. Indeed, as above, it is the doctrine of a samaṇa who is a follower of Nigaṇṭha Nāgaputta, which is to say, a Jain. So sahadhammiko samaṇavādo must mean 'the samaṇa doctrine which is co-religionist' (as I understand it sahadhammiko specifically qualifies vādo). In more elegant English, "the doctrine of the samaṇa who is Buddhist."

One of the problems here is the switch from plural to singular. Bodhi, for example, translates as though the whole as plural. But I think in "na hoti paccattaṃ sahadhammiko samaṇavādo" we have a completely separate sentence in the singular with an implied 'it' as agent. And the obvious candidate for 'it' is pubbekata'former action'. Thus the sentence means "[Former action] is not, on its own, the doctrine of the samaṇa who is Buddhist."

The problem here then, is saying, as the Jains do, that experience is based on former actions alone. Notwithstanding this, as I pointed out in my 2009 essay, many Tibetans insist on a pubbekatahetu doctrine. For example Tai Situpa has said :

"Now, this way, everything is karma. Only one thing that is not karma that is the Buddha nature and the enlightenment."

Or Ringu Tulku Rinpoche cited on the Rigpa Wiki:

Strictly speaking, therefore, from a Buddhist point of view, you cannot say that there is anything in our ordinary experience that is not somehow a result of our karma.

These same teachers argue that their view is not deterministic and that a particular calamity cannot be viewed as a punishment for some particular act. However, the Dalai Lama, for example (and I have heard Robina Courtin of the FPMT say the same), believes that the Chinese invasion of Tibet was because the present occupants of Tibet had accumulated bad karma in past lives (See this personal account of a discussion the DL for example).

I happen to think that the early Buddhist view is more coherent and less a result of blind faith in a supernatural force, but the really interesting thing is that once again we see that the metaphysics of a basic Buddhist doctrine changed. I say once again because I have already written about another way that karma changes from being inevitable, if mitigable, to being entirely avoidable through the use of mantras. Over the centuries the doctrine of karma has been modified to suit the needs of Buddhists. Perhaps the two changes are related. After all a hardening of views towards everything being a result of karma would probably make the ability to avoid the consequences of karma seem more attractive. Perhaps the change to everything being the result of karma required a let out so that it was not absolutely deterministic?

Niyama & Naturalism.

The commentarial teaching of the "fivefold restriction" (pañcavidha niyama) is sometimes cited as another example of how karma is not the only type of causation in our lives. This is mainly due to a modernist interpretation promulgated by Ledi Sayadaw and Mrs Rhys Davids in the 1930s, and Sangharakshita's development of their ideas in the 1960s and 2010s. (For the history of the idea see Dhīvan's essays and published article).

In Pāli, we don't have "five niyamas" but one fivefold niyama which is five applications of one principle of conditionality. The doctrine seems to aim at naturalising Buddhists ideas about three subjective or supernatural processes: cognition (citta); the functioning of karma; and the miracles associated with a buddha (dhamma-niyama). This done by likening them to observable processes in nature. So we have bījaniyama which describes rice seeds becoming rice plants and producing rice grains; and utuniyama, the fact that trees flower and fruit together in the appropriate season. These are limitations or restrictions (niyama) on how natural events unfold that can be observed by everyone in nature and they form the model of understanding unseen processes.

To some extent the Buddhist model of cognition is a result of introspection by yogis, but we can only ever observe our own cognitive process and never someone else's (at least this limitation clearly applies in Iron Age India). However Buddhists felt confident in providing a generalised description of cognition all the same. Similarly the process of karma is unseen and supernatural - it operates behind the scenes and cannot be understood in it's specifics. Karma, the idea that good and evil deeds have appropriate consequences for the appropriate person, is an article of faith. The various miracles accompanying the life history of a Buddha are also supernatural and by the time the niyama doctrine is composed they occurred centuries in the past.

The argument is that the limitations on the natural, seen processes of seeds and seasons, apply also to the unseen and supernatural. Clearly the analogy of karma with the process of planting seeds and reaping grain was one that appealed to the Indian mind, because a more literal version of this same analogy became the main Mahāyāna view of karma. The seeds were even provided with a storage pit in the from of the alayavijñāna.

The point about karma here is not that it is only one of many types of conditionality, but another example of the one type. It is a "natural" process characterised by inevitability, by results which are appropriate to the cause, and by ripening in due season.The idea that not everything is a result of karma is fine. As above it is definitely part of the early Buddhist view on karma. It's just that this is not the point of the niyama.

Conclusion

So the basic Buddhist teaching is that experiences are not all dictated by karma. A variety of causes and conditions including health, seasonal changes, and just plain luck can be invoked. The view that everything we experience being the result of karma is specifically criticised as deterministic. Such a view leaves us unable to make moral choices which is why early Buddhism rejects it. Buddhist soteriology requires that we have a measure of freedom to choose between right and wrong. However, according to this basic teaching, karma does determine which realm we will be born in. And one of the characteristics of the manussaloka or human realm, is that humans have sense objects, sense organs, and the potential for sense consciousness. Thus as human beings we experience vedanā every moment of our waking lives. And how we respond to vedanā is karma.

~~oOo~~

Pulling Wings Off Fairies

April 11, 2014, 12:42 am

≫ Next: Thinking Like a Buddhist about Karma & Rebirth

≪ Previous: Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism

Galileo

On 7 January 1610 Galileo began a series of observations of Jupiter through his new telescope. He lived in a world in which people in Europe believed the earth was at the centre of a perfectly spherical universe, created by God ca 4004 BC. In this idealised view all the moving bodies of the heavens were perfect spheres moving in perfect circles around the earth. This view was synthesis of Christian theology, Platonic philosophy and Ptolemaic astronomy. What we might call the "Hellenic legacy" since all three sets of ideas were originally written in Greek.

On that night in 1610 Galileo saw four points of light in a line close to Jupiter. They were not visible to the naked eye, but relatively bright in the telescope. He continued to observe these new heavenly bodies and noted that they appeared to move against the back drop of stars similar to the way planets move. Then on 10 January one of them disappeared! And he correctly deduced that it must have disappeared behind Jupiter and that the four points of light were in orbit around Jupiter. He had discovered what we now call the Galilean moons of Jupiter.

A short time later he turned his telescope on the moon. Now the moon was thought to be a perfect sphere with a perfectly smooth surface. How they accounted for the visible patterns I'm not sure. But Galileo was able to deduce from shadows cast by prominences associated with what we now know to be craters, that the surface was from far from smooth.

The importance of these observations some 400 years ago cannot be overstated. They were cracks of imperfection appearing in the perfect world. If bodies were in orbit around Jupiter then the model of everything in orbit around the earth was refuted. If the moon was not a perfect sphere the whole universe might be imperfect. At the very least God's representatives on earth were wrong about the universe. The whole of Europe, and through it the world, was shaken by this simple act of observing. It's almost impossible for those of us who live now to understand the seismic shift that occurred. And of course Galileo was far from diplomatic in confronting Church leaders with these observations. He provoked an angry response and was not forgiven for almost four centuries in 1992 (long after the Church accepted the facts of his observation). Galileo was a man who pulled the wings off fairies to the horror of the Peter Pan's in the Vatican.

Enlightenment

There is something about this conflict and not only because it has played out time and again. Supernatural, superstitious, and fantastic ideas were undermined time and again by repeated observation and deduction. Galileo and a few of his contemporaries were the thin end of a wedge that cracked open the perfect world and then shattered it. Momentum grew into the Enlightenment during which time everything that could be observed was observed. (Our translation of bodhi as "Enlightenment" is a conscious attempt at alignment of Buddhism with the European Enlightenment by 19th century scholars).

Hooke's Micrographia.
Bodleian Library

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, usually known simply as "The Royal Society" was founded in 1660. In 1665 Robert Hooke published Micrographia: or, Some physiological descrip-tions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses. Hooke showed how how various creatures and things looked when viewed through one of the first microscopes. Worlds beyond the human scale began to open up in both directions.

Newton published Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. We still make use of his mathematics today. But Newton's observations had a major implication that is often overlooked. Heavenly bodies had to obey the same physical laws as earth-bound bodies. Newton was the first to propose a universal physical law that had its basis in observation. In effect he unified heaven and earth.

Although we think of Darwin as epoch making, he came some 200 years after Bacon, Hooke, Newton, Leibniz, and other great natural philosophers. By the time Darwin came along the djinn was well and truly out of the bottle. But Darwin's (and the almost always forgotten but equally creditable Alfred Russell Wallace's) work was in it's own way a seismological event. What they all did, in fact all they did, was to observe the world and pay attention to the way it actually worked rather than working from pure speculation. The balance of responsibility for understanding the world shifted decisively from abstract philosophy and theology towards natural philosophy (what we now call "science").

European abstract philosophy had imagined a perfectly ordered world. Of course this appealed to Christian theologians who worked this into their accounts of God's Creation. The dream of an ordered world is important everywhere - it's evident in Indian religions as well, including Buddhism. It is the one of the central themes of all the world's mythologies. A huge effort over tens of thousands of years has gone into creating stories about the order of the world. Things happen for reasons. Unfairness will be balanced out at some point. Death, the greatest unfairness, will be compensated for by an afterlife. Out of this impetus come the idealised stories of perfect worlds created by perfect gods. Of course to some extent these stories highlight regularities in the natural world: the path of the sun, moon, and stars; the seasons; generations and so on.

Natural philosophy changed all this. The imperfections of the religious account of the universe was shown to be "not even false", but pure fantasy. The main strength of natural philosophy was that anyone could look for themselves and see it. No intermediaries, no priests are required. I've seen the Galilean moons of Jupiter through a small telescope, though not had the patience to watch them over a period of time. While on retreat in Spain in 2005, however I did watch the Planet Venus over about four months during which time it moved in relation to the background stars and even went retrograde (changing it's direction of motion). It's all there for anyone to see. In my science classes in secondary school and university I've reproduced most of the observations of those pioneering natural philosophers. I've seen what they saw.

Facts and facts

There were of course some who resisted that change. In fact according to a recent survey about 10% of Britons prefer Young Earth Creationism to evolution, while only 25% are confident Darwinian evolution is "definitely true" and another 25% think it's "probably true." Half of Briton's don't believe in evolution at all (Guardian). We live in a highly pluralistic society.

Some people I know sincerely believe that when they die their "consciousness" will hang around their dead body for up to 49 days (as per the Tibetan Book of the Dead) and will be able to sense what is going on - i.e. to be aware of how people are reacting, what they are saying, and how their remains are being treated. Likewise they believe that living people are be able to "sense" the presence of the deceased and empathise with their emotional state. Then the deceased will be reborn as another being (mostly we presume human).

On the other hand my Mother believes that God created the world; that Jesus died for our sins; that God loves everyone and that there is a plan for everything that happens (and she's witnessed some pretty horrendous stuff). When she dies her soul will ascend up to heaven, and now that she's a Catholic she presumably believes in a bodily resurrection at some point as well.

Neither belief is something that anyone can base on observation. We might have experiences around corpses that we interpret as a presence, or we might have a sense of love amidst horror, but someone with a different belief system is free to interpret these subjective experiences in different ways. And not everyone has these kinds of experiences.

When Galileo observed points of light moving he interpreted them as "moons". Why is this different? Because even those with different belief systems could make the same observation, and unless they insisted on some irrational interpretation they would be forced to conclude that Jupiter has satellites. The moons of Jupiter are independent of the observer. They are objective facts. The spirit of a dead person as a phenomenon is apparently dependent on the belief system of the observer, and thus not an objective fact. Over the years experience has shown that if the potential observer of a super-natural phenomenon is a scientist then the effect is much less likely to be observed. This alone is telling. When the belief system of the observer determines whether or not they are able to observe the phenomenon then that is an entirely different order to the Galilean moons.

Now some will argue for what might be called a subjective fact. This would be a fact based on something that only the individual subject has observed. But we have another word for subjective experiences that cannot be confirmed by other people: hallucination. Wikipedia has a nice definition:

"A hallucination is a perception in the absence of apparent stimulus that has qualities of real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and located in external objective space."

Most of supernatural belief appears to be based on interpretation of experiences in which the stimulus is not apparent. As Thomas Metzinger said of his out of body experiences:

For anyone who actually had [an out-of-body experience] it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist afterwards. In all their realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence, these phenomenal experiences almost inevitably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and body. (The Ego Tunnel p.78)

But we note that Metzinger himself was eventually persuaded against this compelling dualistic explanation. Careful observation of the phenomena he experienced and comparing notes with other neuro-scientists showed that the experience was not in fact consistent with a truly disembodied consciousness. And the insights into the nature of our sense of self that follow from his exploration are more fascinating, to my mind, than any supernatural phenomenon.

It's important to distinguish looking for a naturalistic, objective explanation of an experience and the dismissal of it as a fantasy. Such experiences can be utterly compelling and deeply meaningful for those who have them. It's not stupid to believe in God or karma or whatever. There are many factors in our make up that make it such beliefs plausible. Justin Barrett argues, in his book Why Would Anyone Believe in God?, that we believe because it is entirely natural to believe. Note that he does not argue that it is correct or sensible, only natural. But it is rational given the kinds of judgements our minds make. So just attacking belief or mocking it are unhelpful.

If we publicly attack someone's belief system, if we start pulling wings of fairies, then we're being rude at best. Belief is not a simple matter. It's often the result of deep conviction. My understanding is that belief is very much tied into our system of values. When we attack someone's beliefs, we attack their values, or at least that is how they experience the attack. Aggression, I know from personal experience, diminishes the likelihood of communication. We may even choose to be rude to people on purpose to make them averse to us. Or may think that shock tactics will jolt someone out of their complacency. But on the whole I find this does not work. Shock most people and they respond with sharp aversion. Aggression is good for defending boundaries, but not for bridging them. On the other hand walking around any city in the world shows how people respond to being surrounded by strangers. We cannot be open to every possible encounter and it is often necessary to erect barriers to preserve one's sanity.

Shifts in World View

Now this situation is complicated, especially in the USA, though keeping in mind that even in the home of Charles Darwin only about half the population accept Evolution on the evidence they're aware of. Fundamentalist Christians are vocally and vehemently protesting that their version of the what the world is like, based on a literal reading of an English translation of the Bible, ought to be at least on the same level as a description of the world that is independent of belief. They want everyone to learn about Creationism on the same level as Evolution.

If someone has started an argument, especially one that would so drastically affect how we educate children, then it's only fair that everyone gets to have a say and that everyone argues to the best of their ability. Once it becomes a high stakes debate, pointing out the weaknesses and flaws in the argument of the opposition is part of the process. If religious people are quietly and harmlessly getting on with their lives, then we ought to leave them to it. If they want to control public life, then a debate is necessary.

On the whole the moments that have changed my worldview, changed my life, have been encountering new information that contradicted my beliefs in a relatively neutral setting, often reading a book in or from a library, experiencing the resultant cognitive dissonance, and deciding to learn more about the subject on my own. It takes time and leisure to weight things up and consider the implications.

A shift in worldview is non-trivial. I can't make someone reconsider their views just by bombarding them with facts. Why are their so many climate change deniers? Partly because the facts have been presented in a confused and confusing way. The media, thriving on conflict, has given far too much air time to a small group of contrarians. The climate change message also partly fails because climate change activists have just bombarded people with a mass of facts disconnected from any attempt to connect with people on an emotional level. They try to drill facts into us, try to scare us. Climate change are expressing their own values and all too often appear to express contempt for any other values. And that is never effective.

If I stand on a street corner shouting out what I believe to be facts that have terrible implications (my views on politicians for example), then I will never convince anyone of anything, particularly not here in the UK! One does see street preachers doing this. It converts no one. But the going through the ordeal, being willing to experience the humiliation of being ignored at best or being abused by the public, is a signal to others that one's faith has high value. Research has shown that such sacrifices strengthen the faith of the faithful (see Martyrs Maketh the Religion). One could say exactly the same for Richard Dawkins' approach to arguing with religious people. It's an exercise is appealing to militant atheists, not a genuine attempt at dialogue or conversion. And of course militant atheists lap it up. Buddhist texts are often like this also - full of appeals to the faith of the faithful. I've discussed this in an essay called Martyrs Maketh the Religion (2010).

Conclusion

There is a clear and important distinction between knowledge and belief. More and more of us are placing our reliance on knowledge as opposed to belief largely because one is a demonstrably better guide to life than the other. But the issue is complicated. What counts as valid knowledge is and always has been disputed. Knowledge is a negotiated communal domain.

What Galileo and his successors did was establish ways of validating knowledge that went beyond the usual means of discussion about what seemed likely with the best arguer becoming the authority. They collectively established the possibility of independent, objective facts and the value of them. Philosophers still tend to see everything from an individualist point of view - knowledge in this view is inevitably subjective. But in fact we, humans, are communities. And for this reason we can establish objective truths: Jupiter has four large moons (and many smaller ones) and they are in elliptical orbits around Jupiter. There is no rational or reasonable objection to this. It's not my opinion or Galileo's, it is the observation of everyone who has taken the time to look. And it does not depend on a belief in Newtonian mechanics (the discovery predates Newton!).

It is 400 years since Galileo discovered that philosophers and priests had simply made up their accounts of the world and were wrong about it. In that 400 years more and more of the unseen world has become seeable. And in every case so far where a proposition can be tested, the abstract philosophers and priests have been shown to be wrong.

However, being in possession of knowledge is not sufficient. How we communicate knowledge is at least, if not more, important. Truth presented badly fails to be accepted (evolution and climate change being two important examples). Pulling wings off fairies is counter productive. Falsehood presented well may well become the accepted "wisdom". I've repeatedly argued that we judge the salience of facts by how we feel about them. Thus people may be understandably reluctant to believe the awful truth. We must try to find a way to connect with people before trying to change their minds. Sometimes, as a last resort, confrontation may be necessary. But people aren't persuaded by ridicule. On the contrary being willing to accept loss rather than inflicting it (i.e. martyrdom), is more likely to persuade people.

On the other hand we can also understand some of the frustration of natural philosophers. Having spent the last 400 years showing that priests are wrong about every testable proposition, we might wonder why anyone still listens to priests at all. Despite the fact that the unseen domain has consistently shrunk, it remains and while it remains priests (and those who pretend to the knowledge traditionally associated with priests) can claim to be experts on it.

And of course there are enduring imaginative stories about what might exist in an unseen domain so that it seems to be a larger domain than it actually is. If we believe in an afterlife for example, the then the unseen domain seems infinitely larger than the seen. Some people remain far from convinced that an accurate view of the universe is even desirable. Magical thinking, faith in God and all kinds of supernatural views still seem more attractive to many people. It has been four centuries since Galileo's observations, but this is a legacy stretching back at least 65,000 years so it might take a while yet before we sort it out.

~~oOo~~

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Thinking Like a Buddhist about Karma & Rebirth

April 17, 2014, 11:11 pm

≫ Next: Sarvāstivāda and the Chinese Sarva Sūtra

≪ Previous: Pulling Wings Off Fairies

One of the things that most strikes me about discussions with Buddhists is how seldom they seem to think like Buddhists. All too often Buddhists merely unthinkingly assert Buddhist doctrines and do so in a way that seems to me to contradict the very doctrines that are being asserted.

Buddhists very often seem to be deeply resistant to the consequences of "everything changes" to the point where the history of Buddhist ideas is largely hidden from most modern Buddhists. And nominal Buddhists seem to unconsciously think in modernist terms: one begins to see why David McMahan called his book Buddhist Modernism and not Modernist Buddhism!

In my last essay I outlined some contrasts between objective and subjective as understood in our cultural milieu. However had I been arguing from a purely Buddhist point of view I would not have used the terms objective and subjective at all. So what would it look like to think like a Buddhist in relation to a current issue in discussions with Buddhists?

karma & rebirth

One of the lively issues for Buddhists in the modern world is rebirth. With Scientific rationalism beginning to bite, apologetics for karma & rebirth are becoming common, e.g. Thanissaro, Śākya Indrajala, Bodhi, Sangharakshita, and Vessantara's resent essays Some Problems with Not Believing in Rebirth& More on Rebirth.

My point of view is that there is a triangular dilemma:

On one side we have Buddhists saying that belief in karma & rebirth are essential to being a Buddhist. On this view karma & rebirth "make sense".
On the second side we have the mostly hidden history of Buddhists struggling to make sense of the received tradition and constantly altering doctrines or inventing new ones. The received tradition has in fact never made complete sense to Buddhists.
And on the third side we have scientific discoveries that make any kind of afterlife seem deeply implausible; and stories about a "moral universe" seem like wish-fulfilment fantasies.

For the most part we approach this problem on its own terms. We try to decide what constitutes evidence; assess which evidence is salient to the problem; weigh up the salient evidence and make a decision about what seems most plausible; and call that "truth". That act of deciding what is true is belief. Each stage of this process is complex. Indeed each stage is a decision making process in itself. So getting to a clearly enunciated belief involves a series of interrelated decisions. Almost none of this complex process is conscious. Even our most deliberate conclusions rest on a vast raft of unconscious assumptions. On the whole the way we approach this problem is the way that we approach any problem: it is a mix of standard human problem solving strategies; specific tactics associated with the culture we grew up in; and a veneer of Buddhist training.

Discussions about karma & rebirth are particularly polarised. Belief plays a central role in our approach to Buddhist soteriology (contrary to our own narratives about the absence of 'blind faith' in Buddhism). Some argue that not believing in karma & rebirth has weighty consequences - it renders our soteriology meaningless. If we are not reborn then what is the point of Buddhism which aims to free us from the rounds of rebirth? If we just die and that's it, then buddhahood which takes so very many lifetimes to achieve becomes unattainable.

For many Buddhists the belief in a moral universe, a fair world, is an article of faith. But the world, life, is demonstrably unfair: bad things happen to good people; bad actions regularly go unpunished. The solution, almost universally adopted in human cultures, is to have a post-mortem reckoning. Life clearly is not fair, but the afterlife is fair. Thus in denying an afterlife many people, many Buddhists, feel we are condemning them to an unfair world, and unfair life. And this thought is intolerable. It does not make sense to anyone who believes that the universe ought to be fair.

For many traditionalists the issue is so profound that they insist that denying karma & rebirth means that one cannot be a Buddhist. And for a zealous Buddhist, not being a Buddhist is a terrible thing. To exclude a fellow Buddhist from the fraternity of Buddhism is about as violent as Buddhists usually get. "You are not one of us" is about as horrible a fate as most Western Buddhists can imagine.

Some colleagues have made sustained attacks against what they variously call materialism, physicalism and scientism. Such views, they argue, go beyond what is knowable. To many people the idea that by studying matter we can learn about the subjectivity of consciousness is anathema. Like Indrajala many are explicitly ontological dualists. Nothing we learn about matter can inform us on the subject of spirit (See Metaphors and Materialism). In this argument karma & rebirth get tucked under the umbrella of subjectivism and are thus freed from the restraints placed on them by materialism. Nothing need be measured, because the subjective cannot be measured. They frame the discussion about karma & rebirth as a polar choice between fideism and scientism and make it clear that scientism is entirely counter to the values of Buddhism as they understand it (again "you are not one of us").

More recently I have become interested in the history of the ideas of karma & rebirth. I'm working on a paper which proposes a partial history of karma. In an article for the Triratna Order I outlined eight problems with rebirth: Some Problems With Believing in Rebirth.pdf. I pay particular attention to the fact that, as far as we know, no Buddhist sect took the tradition on its own terms. Not even the Theravādins accepted the Pāḷi sutta version of karma & rebirth on face value. The history of these ideas is largely hidden, in part for the same of simplicity I suppose, but I begin to wonder if we Buddhists actively suppress our history where it might undermine our certainly.

I've already mentioned some of the problems with karma & rebirth in my blogs about them: e.g. the disconnect between ethics and metaphysics (see also Does Karma Break the Rules?). I've been arguing for the implausibility of any afterlife for a few years now. Across a number of essays on this blog I have spelled out the kind of evidence that carries weight for me. I've also tried to show why some of the other evidence ought not to carry weight. I've tried to show why we should not take the Pāḷi canon literally for example, why testimony cannot always be trusted, and why subjectivism is a philosophical dead end.

That said, I'm happy to acknowledge that rejecting karma & rebirth has major consequences for Buddhism, and that a lot of thought will have to go into understanding whether the resulting worldview can even be considered Buddhist. I'd like to participate in that discussion, which I find more interesting than apologetics or blind faith in tradition.

But none of this is thinking like a Buddhist. Indeed most of the time I'm writing more as an historian of ideas, with a background in the sciences, than as a Buddhist. If we really wanted to get down to it, what would a Buddhist approach to this question be like? What, in short, would the Buddha make of this? What follows is my attempt to put aside modernism and analyse the problem from the point of view that I think pervades the early Buddhist texts, but which is picked up on by Prajñāpāramitā literature and to some extent by Nāgārjuna.

What is Belief Like?

First off I would argue that the content of this debate is largely irrelevant if we're thinking like Buddhists. Whether we believe in rebirth or don't believe in rebirth is not that important. I'll qualify this a little. The content of our beliefs are not important so long as they do not get in the way of the kind of inquiry I'm about to outline.

What is belief? Or better, how do we know that we hold a belief about a subject. Say someone asks us "What do you believe about karma & rebirth?" Leaving aside the content of the belief, how do we even know that we have a belief? What is the phenomenology that accompanies the generic statement "I believe..."?

Broadly speaking we know what we believe because on introspection there is a combination of thoughts and emotions. And these occur along with a special kind of thoughts that we call "memories"; specifically memories of similar moments of introspection, either on this question or related questions. A belief is a combination of thoughts and emotions, linked through time by memories.

Various different states are possible. Various kinds of thoughts, with various content. Various combinations and strengths of emotions. Various memories. And the sum of this is how we know what we believe and how strongly we feel about that belief. This is what belief boils down to: some thoughts and emotions and memories.

And what is really important about these thoughts and emotions and memories is not the specifics of their content; not that we have this thought and not that thought; this emotion and not that emotion. If we take any one aspect of this complex of what would traditionally be called cittas or dharmas we notice that it has certain characteristics in common with all the other aspects. The main thing is that it doesn't last very long. One second we're feeling certain about karma & rebirth, the next we're noticing something about the person asking the question, then scanning the environment, back to our interlocutor, check in on the belief, formulate a verbal response, evaluate the mental state of the other through facial expression and posture, scan the environment, notice the time, re-confirm the feelings associated with the belief... and so on. Each moment of cognition lasting a short time, and each being held in a way that can be framed as whole or at least a gestalt, in which "we" are self-aware and communicating with another being who seems to be self-aware in the same way as us; all discreet moments but seemingly continuous through time.

This whole or gestalt is "the world" or loka we inhabit. It is our world (though not the world). For the most part the details are lost and we take the whole to be real. And we experience it all from a first person perspective. Though all worlds overlap to a greater or lesser extent.

Acting Like a Buddhist.

Thinking like a Buddhist entails deconstructing this gestalt. It involves cultivating disbelief. Getting lost in a film or dramatic performance involves the suspension of disbelief so that we can get caught up in the show and experience it as though it is real. Buddhists argue that we are caught up in the show of our loka and this makes us unhappy because our expectations are not in line with the nature of the loka qua performance. So we must try to regain our sense of disbelief in the gestalt. Many Buddhist texts involve deconstructing the first person perspective. They do this in a way that is tuned to the times they were composed in (mostly Iron Age India). We might do it a little differently these days. But breaking down this whirlwind of sensations is what we're trying to do.

In order to do this Buddhists have proposed a method. Indeed we might say that thinking like a Buddhist is less important than acting like one. The first part of the method involves calming down. By restraining our sensory input, restricting what comes in through the gates of the senses, we reduce (in modern parlance) our level of arousal. Moderns are mostly massively over-stimulated. We need to get the hindrances to samādhi under control and (as a direct result) develop a sense of joy or well being (pāmojja). Then we use specific practices to do two things: firstly to enhance that sense of well being and our sense of being interconnected with everyone (the two are virtually synonymous); and secondly to focus on smaller and smaller aspects of experience and by doing so bring on, by stages, a deeply serene absorption or samādhi - a word which more literally means 'integration'. It is from the point of samādhi that the examination of the nature of experience can begin in earnest - the attempt to "see through" (vi-passana) the play of experience.

In this sense thinking like a Buddhist means setting up the conditions to reflect deeply on the matter in hand: not the content of thoughts but on the process of having thoughts; not on the emotion that is moving us around at any given moment, but on the process of having an emotion. Reflection is not something to be done at random or while still caught up in the tsunami of sensations washing over us. If we don't make an attempt to get to higher ground, we'll just be caught up in the wash. This is why renunciation has usually been valued in Buddhism.

Of course many variations on this procedure exist after more than twenty centuries of thinking about experience this way - Buddhism has a hidden history of development, innovation and diversification. Only a few of the methods that have been tried remain popular, and new approaches are being invented all the time. The common thread is the focus on seeing experience itself for what it is; though all too often we phrase this in terms of trying to understand the nature of reality (something the Buddha didn't do to the best of my knowledge).

That said some Buddhists apparently disagree with this. Dharmavidya has recently argued, along the lines Shinran, for example, that effort makes no difference and that all that is required for liberation is faith. It's much harder to see this as part of the mainstream Buddhist project. It would appear to be a kind of belief that gets in the way of making an effort to examine experience in a way that unlocks it. It appears to require the kind of intervention that is specifically defined as impossible by early Buddhist texts (which was the point of my article about King Ajātasatthu). Some Tantrikas also disagree with this kind of view, though renunciation is still included in some form in Tantric practice - there is always a perfunctory stage of renunciation in Tantric sadhānas for example. Having attained bodhicitta one need not bother about ordinary human responses and can get on with antinomian practices.

In this view, if we believe in karma & rebirth and all that that entails, or if we do not, it does not change the task facing us. We still have to stand aside from the experience and analyse it. Even if we don't experience belief as impermanent, or especially when we don't, we need to make a effort to see that it is. In this sense having some doctrinal axioms like "all experiences are impermanent" is useful. We might introspect and find that our belief seems extraordinarily strong. We cannot imagine not believing in karma & rebirth. It totally makes sense to us on every level that we can think of to examine. But the belief itself is still just an experience. It's so easy to get caught up in the strength of the belief and the implications of that, but the acute observer will note the arising of that feeling and its passing.

Experience is always coming into existence (or awareness) and always passing out again. Moment to moment. In relation to this the content of the experience -- the pleasant/unpleasant -- is a minor consideration. Just as waves don't make any difference to the salty taste of the ocean. No doubt there are waves and they are important in their own way, if the subject is coastal erosion for example. But in the Buddhist view what's important is seeing through the fascination with our world and seeing it for what it is. One cannot effectively do this while caught up in strong beliefs about how the world is.

And if I don't believe in karma & rebirth but believe in something else, then that too is just an experience. It does not change the task. It does not change the approach to the task. All it changes is how we conceptualise the ultimate outcome of the task. And for the most part the task is still the same: one is still trying to cultivate disbelief in the framework which makes belief seem to plausible.

How important is the particular conceptualisation of the ultimate outcome of Buddhism? Does it matter that if we deny repeated deaths that the word "deathless" ceases to have any meaning? People who believe in rebirth see life as extending over a much longer period than people who don't. When Kūkai arrived back in Japan from China in 806, his slogan "awakening in this very life!" confused the hell out of almost everyone, because they believed that awakening took three incalculable lifetimes.

The time scale might be a significant aspect of belief. If our goal is life times away in the future and we're chipping away at a mountain by rubbing it once with a silk clothe once a century (a metaphor for awakening drawn from the Mahāyāna) then we won't be in a hurry. There's no call for a sense of urgency. If we are already 40 and can expect 30 to 40 more years of life at best, then the sense of urgency might amount to a counter-productive panic. If we think we'll get a second chance at awakening in the next life then we know we can get away with cutting corners this time around. This may be why some texts describe the chances of getting another human life as similar to those of a turtle swimming in the great ocean popping his head up once a year to breath and managing to put his head through a ring that is floating around on the ocean at random. If our chance of a second chance is infinitesimally small, that might also motivate us. On the other hand if out chance of liberation is infinitesimally small then we may decide it's not worth it. So beliefs are not totally unimportant because they affect our motivation to engage in the important task.

Conclusion

So that is my version of what thinking like a Buddhist would look like. The argument about karma & rebirth looks a bit silly in this view. Even if we win the karma & rebirth argument, one way or the other, so what? We're still caught up in experience; still drunk on sense pleasures. We're still disappointed by experience: pleasures that stop and pains that won't. There is a certain amount of pleasure in winning an argument. But like all pleasurable experiences, it doesn't last. We either have to find a new argument to win, or dine out on nostalgia. After a while it all just gets boring. If we're not resigned to a boring life we might look for more frequent or more intense stimulation. Become an internet troll, take up extreme sports, or whatever. But no one ever reaches contentment by going down that road.

Thinking like a Buddhist puts metaphysical speculation firmly off to one side. Thinking like a Buddhist, one simply does not get involved in such arguments. The wise don't get involved in disputes, as the scripture says. So the people we end up arguing with are not usually the wise. We think about problems not as Buddhists, but as philosophers of one kind or another. As though treating belief as a zero-sum game makes it meaningful. If in fact one does win the belief game and prove one's belief is "true" that is probably a long-run loss because it makes one less likely to examine the experience of holding a view. It means one is more intoxicated, rather than less.

~~oOo~~

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