Jayarava's Raves

The Sarvāstivāda School ostensibly forms part of the background against which the Prajñāpāramitā literature developed. Indeed many see the early Prajñāpāramitā texts as taking the time to refute certain Sarvāstivādin ideas. Nāgārjuna appears to be in a conversation with Sarvāstivādins. This suggestion of a conflict between Prajñāpāramitā and Sarvāstivāda is an important one for understanding the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. This is because, despite the received tradition about when it was composed, and despite various late sectarian commentaries, the Hṛdaya is largely made up of chunks of texts from the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra and thus has more in common with the outlook of early rather than late Prajñāpāramitā thought.

The Sarvāstivādins are also intrinsically interesting in that they seem to have been the dominant Buddhist school in India for a considerable length of time. There seem to be two main reasons we know less about them than we do about the Theravādins. Firstly their texts mainly only survive in Chinese translation and until relatively recently Westerners have not been very interested in these texts (possibly influenced by the linguistic demands of having to know at least Sanskrit, Pali and Classical Chinese in order to study the literature); or in fact interested only where Sanskrit "originals" are known to exist (Cf. Which Mahāyāna Texts?). Secondly, the focus has long been on Theravāda as representative of early Buddhism. But if any Buddhist school "represents" early Indian Buddhism it is the Sarvāstivāda.

A third reason we might not think of them as representative is that early Buddhist was eventually eclipsed first by Mahāyāna Buddhism (though very often on the basis of the Sarvāstivādin Vinaya) and then Tantrism. So that even where monks follow a rule based on the (Mūla)Sarvāstivāda Vinaya and study Abhidharma through commentaries on the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma (cf. Nietupski 2009), they don't identify themselves as Sarvāstivādins.

In her discussion of the Sarvāstivādin school Professor Collett Cox makes an interesting point about the name of the school. She says:

As encapsulated in the name 'Sarvāstivādin,' the Sarvāstivādins are characterized as maintaining that "everything exists" (sarvam asti). However, the simplicity of this ontological assertion contains the seeds of doctrinal divergence because the referent of the term 'everything' and the manner in which this "everything" is considered to "exist" must be specified. Certain early Abhidharma texts identify the term 'everything' in the declaration that "everything exists" as referring to the twelve sense spheres including the six sense organs and their corresponding object-fields. So also the *Mahāvibhāṣā, in a discussion of the twelve sense spheres, cites a sūtra passage in which the term everything' is defined by the Buddha as "precisely the twelve sense spheres from the form sense sphere (rūpāyatana) up to and including the factor sense sphere (dharmāyatana).

I want to make a short digression to point out that Buddhists very often use the word asti not as a verb (3rd person singular indicative) 'it exists' but as an action noun meaning 'existing, being'. Thus we don't need to syntactically derive sarvāsti in Sarvāstivāda from the sentence sarvam asti 'it all exists', with an awkward silence over why sarvam loses it's case ending; but can treat the word as a karmadhāraya compound sarva-asti'everything existing'.

The sūtra passage referred to in the Mahāvibhāṣā (Cox's asterisk means the Sanskrit title is reconstructed from Chinese) probably corresponds to the Pāli Sabba Sutta (SN 35.23). This sutta has a Chinese parallel from one of the two Saṃyuktāgama translations (T 99 #319, 91a24-b03) this one being attributed to the Mūlasarvāstivāda School. "T 99 is widely considered to have been translated in the period 435-443 CE from a Sanskrit Saṃyuktāgama brought to China from Sri Lanka." (Bucknell 2011). Since I see this as a seminal text, and as it seems directly related to the Sarvāstivāda School, I will present my rough translation of the Taisho Tripiṭaka version.

*Sarva Sūtra (Title not given in Chinese).

如是我聞。一時。佛住舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園。
Rú shì wǒ wén. Yī shí. Fú zhù shěwèiguó qíshù gěigūdúyuán.
Thus have I heard, one time, the Buddha was staying in Śravāsti (舍衛國) in the Jeta Grove of Anathapindada.

時。有生聞婆羅門往詣佛所。共相問訊。問訊已。退坐一面。
Shí. Yǒu Shēngwén póluómén wǎng yì fú suǒ. Gòng xiāng wèn xùn. Wèn xùn yǐ. Tuì zuò yī miàn.
Then, Jānussoṇī, the brahmin, approached the Buddha, exchanged greetings, and retreated to one side.

白佛言。瞿曇。所謂一切者。云何名一切。　
Bái fú yán. Qútán. Suǒwèi yīqiè zhě. Yún hé míng yīqiè.
He said to the Buddha, "Gautama, 'all' (一切 yīqiè = Skt. sarvaṃ) is said, what is 'all'?"

佛告婆羅門。一切者。謂十二入處。眼色．耳聲．鼻香．舌味．身觸．意法。是名一切。
Fú gào póluómén. Yīqiè zhě. Wèi shí èr rù chù. Yǎnsè. Ěr shēng. Bí xiāng. Shé wèi. Shēn chù. Yì fǎ. Shì míng yīqiè.
The buddha answered the Brahmin, "'All' is namely the 12 āyatanas: eye & form (colour), ear & sound, nose & smell, tongue & taste, body & touch, mind & dharmas. This is called 'all'.

若復說言此非一切。沙門瞿曇所說一切。
Ruò fù shuō yán cǐ fēi yīqiè. Shāmén Qútán suǒ shuō yīqiè.
Even if the words were said 'this is not all', Śrāmana Gauatama says this is 'all'.

我今捨。別立餘一切者。
Wǒ jīn shě. Bié lì yú yīqiè zhě.
I will explain the rejection. A different 'all' does not stand.

彼但有言說。問已不知。增其疑惑。所以者何。
Bǐ dàn yǒu yán shuō. Wèn yǐ bù zhī. Zēng qí yíhuò. Suǒ yǐ zhě hé.
He who speaks this. Asked, does not know. His doubts increase. So who and where?

非其境界故。
Fēi qí jìngjiè gù
Because this is not the proper domain (Skt. viṣaya 境界 jìngjiè )."

時。生聞婆羅門聞佛所說。歡喜隨喜奉行。
Shí. Shēngwén póluómén wén fú suǒ shuō. Huānxǐ suíxǐ fèngxíng.
Then, Jānussoṇī. the brahmin having heard the Buddha was delighted and rejoiced.

~o~

Compare the Pāli Text:

Sabba Sutta (S iv.15)

At Sāvatthi: I will teach you the whole, monks. Listen to this. What, monks, is the whole? The eye and forms, the ear and sounds, the nose and smells, the tongue and tastes, the body and touches, the mind and mental phenomena: this, monks, is called ‘the whole’. If anyone says ‘I reject this whole, I will declare another whole’ that would just be hot air. Questioned about it, they wouldn't be able to explain, and would become exasperated. Why is this? Because that, monks, is in the wrong location (avisaya).

~o~

Clearly there is very little different between these two, except in the nidāna or setting. But the existence of these texts begs the question why the Buddha might have wanted to define 'all', 'the whole', or 'everything' (all translations of Skt sarvam, Pāli sabbaṃ)? In fact the idiom is one that derives from Vedic literature. For example in Ṛgveda (RV 8.58.2):

éka evā́gnír bahudhā́ sámiddha
ékaḥ sū́ryo víśvam ánu prábhūtaḥ
ékaivóṣā́ḥ sárvam idáṃ ví bhāti
ékaṃ vā́ idáṃ ví babhūva sárvam

Only one fire kindles many times.
One sun is all penetrating.
Dawns as one, shine on all this.
From this one, unfolds the whole.

I've cited this verse previously in relation to the Fire Sermon. Another key text for understanding the idiom is Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad, for example:

brahma vā idam agra āsīt | tad ātmānam evāvet | ahaṃ brahmāsmīti | tasmāt tat sarvam abhavat | (BU 1.4.10)

At first there was only Brahman, and it only knew itself "I am Brahman". From that it became everything (sarvam).

So, sarvam means 'the created world'. Sometimes the idiom is idam sarvam meaning "this whole [world]". For the Ṛgveda it seems to mean Creation in a fairly literal sense. In BU sarvam begins to take on a more mystical sense, it is the manifest aspect of Brahman. And it is through identifying oneself with the world, i.e. with Brahman, that one attains (re)union with Brahman. And this may be why Buddhists called the meditation in which one identifies with all the beings in the world, brahmavihāra'the dwelling of Brahmā (or Brahman)'.

The Sarva Sūtra almost certainly reacting to the Vedic usage, sets all this aside. The whole from this point of view is the six senses and their objects. In another Pāḷi text, the Dvayam Sutta (SN 35.92) this same formula is referred to as "the pair" (dvayam). But it is not the objects or the senses per se that concern the sutta. The alternate term dvayam reminds us that the two together form the basis for the arising of sense-consciousness. The beginning and end of the interest of the text is the sense objects and sense organs. All experience begins with these, there is no other source of experience. It is through observing experience that we are liberated. Any speculation which lies outside of these, particularly any metaphysical speculation about the nature of the objects of the senses, is out of bounds (avisaya).

Cox (1995: 134 ff.) goes on to outline some of the arguments between Saṅghabhadra and Vasubandhu about the interpretation of this sūtra and the implications each drew from it. The story is far from simple. "The very sutra passage that defines the term 'everything' as the twelve sense spheres is cited by both Vasubandhu and Saṅghabhadra as scriptural justification for their divergent ontological positions." (1995: 134).

But one thing that the text does not say, in either Pāḷi or Chinese, is that the āyatanas "exist". They represent the whole of the Buddhist's field of interest and, citing the Kaccānagotta Sutta, we believe the early Buddhists were not interested in the issue of whether or not they exist. However since the phrase imasmin sati idam hoti "this existing, that exists" is so central to Buddhist we must allow that the sense object and sense organ cannot be non-existent if they are to act as conditions for the arising of viññāna and phassa etc. And this leads into a discussion about how the Sarvāstivāda got its name and its eponymous doctrine which will be covered in a forthcoming essay.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Bastow, David. (1995) 'The First Argument for Sarvāstivāda.' Asian Philosophy. 5(2): 109-125. txt online.

Bucknell, Roderick S. (2011) 'The historical relationship between the two Chinese Saṃyuktāgama translations.' Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal. 24: 35-70. pdf.

Cox, Collett. (1995) Disputed Dharmas Early Buddhist Theories on Existence: An Annotated Translation of the Section on Factors Dissociated from Thought from Sanghabhadra's Nyāyānusāra. Tokyo The International Institute for Buddhist Studies. pdf.

Nietupski, Paul K. (2009) 'Guṇaprabha’s Vinayasūtra Corpus: Texts and Contexts.'JIATS, no. 5 (December 2009), 19 pp.

In recent weeks I've become a bit more involved in a distributed discussion about the twin Buddhist doctrines of karma & rebirth. This has been in response to apologetics defending traditional articles of faith with respect to karma & rebirth.

Of course I have blogged about karma& rebirth (together and separately) quite often, mainly exploring the challenges that 400 years of empiricism raise for traditional belief. But one of the other topics I write about is the nature of religious belief and I have become increasingly aware that the discussion about karma & rebirth was in danger of becoming bogged down. It's all too easy to see the discussion as a contest between pejorative and polemical accounts of fideism and scientism. The two sides are already talking past each other.

So I began to explore a new tack. I was aware that the Buddhist tradition itself had a history of modifying these doctrines and some explorations of this have appeared as essays on this blog (see e.g. How the Doctrine of Karma Changes). I'd also been exploring some of the metaphysical problems in early Buddhism. I realised that it might be fruitful to dive into the history of Buddhism and develop this a bit more. I wrote an essay for our Order journal which can be found on my static website: Some Problems With Believing in Rebirth. In that essay I briefly outlined eight problems that people who believe in karma & rebirth ought to have thought about and tried to resolve. These problems are not reasons to disbelieve in karma & rebirth, but they are quite serious problems most of which have historically troubled Buddhists and resulted in doctrinal innovations.

In discussing karma & rebirth our frame of reference is usually quite narrow: for most of us circumscribed by what is available in our bookshops. As a result our discussion of the history of Buddhist karma & rebirth seems to me to be rather constrained. This essay will attempt to broaden it out a little. In addressing the problem of karma & rebirth I've tried to show that it is (at least) three sided:

1. Inconsistent Early Buddhist accounts.
2. Later Buddhist adaptations and innovations.
3. Knowledge from 400 years of empiricism.

Buddhists themselves found the earliest received versions of karma & rebirth unsatisfactory and changed them. Ignoring this aspect of Buddhism results in a lopsided discussion. The equivalent would be like discussing British history in terms of the Celts and the Industrial Revolution, but missing out the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. Importantly, the Pali suttas cannot solve the problems we encounter, because they (along with their counterparts in other scriptural languages) are the source of the problem as I will try to show.

cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi

One of the key issues related to karma & rebirth that unsettled Buddhists is what I call the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance: the ability for short lived mental processes to have consequences spanning multiple lifetimes. This problem has two main aspects:

Karma, according to the Buddha, is cetanā (AN 6.63) and cetanā is a short-lived mental event.
Pratītya-samutpāda requires that when the condition ceases the effect must also cease (imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati).

Thus, on face value karma cannot coexist with pratītya-samutpāda because it requires the possibility of an effect long after the cessation of the condition, usually with no effect in the intervening time - in other words the effect only arises long after the condition has ceased. Ancient Buddhists noticed this and the result was a raft of doctrinal innovations attempting to reconcile the two, usually by artificially prolonging the action of conditions long after they cease i.e. Buddhists adjusted pratītya-samutpāda to accommodate karma. Of the many responses, this essay will focus on the Sarvāstivāda.

The Sarvāstivāda School has a far better claim to be representative of early Indian Buddhism than does the Theravāda School. It dominated the North Indian Buddhist scene for several centuries while the Theravada School was relatively isolated in Sri Lanka: having little influence and being little influenced. The Theravādin Kathāvatthu, which is an account of the Vibhajyavādin's dispute with the mainstream of Buddhism, does not engage with the arguments found below (Bronkhorst 1989). There were of course other schools, but they all seem to have defined themselves at least to some extent in opposition to the Sarvāstivāda, or have subsequently been found to be part of the same movement (like the Sautrāntikas). We tend to ignore the Sarvāstivāda because of Mahāyāna polemics, and because their texts have yet to be translated into English. However, the Sarvāstivādins were very much alive to this problem and canny in their response to it.

With respect to the problem ofAction at a Temporal Distance, Dundee philosopher David Bastow (1995) believes that he has discovered the earliest argument for the existence of dharmas in the past, future and present - the characteristic idea that gave the Sarvāstivāda School its name. The argument is found the Vijñānakāya, a Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma text dated to perhaps 200 BCE and available only in Chinese translation.

One Citta at a time

Consider a mental moment of greed, a "greed citta". It is axiomatic (for all Buddhist schools) that there can be only one citta at a time, though it may be accompanied by mental factors (cetāsika) such as attention, volition and so on (each citta and cetāsika being a "dharma"). This imposes a temporal sequence on experience. Cittas arise one after another in sequence, each lasting a fraction of a second.

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti
imass' uppādā idaṃ uppajjati
imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti
imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati

Knowing that what we are experiencing is "greed", is itself a citta. So the knowledge that a citta was greed can only follow after the fact of the greed. Knowledge follows from experience. If we know we have experienced a greed citta then that greed citta cannot be non-existent, since, imasmin sati, idam hoti. Sati is a present participle from √as'to be' while hoti is a dialectical variant of bhavati from √bhū'to be, to become'. The phrase says "while this exists; this exists" (the pronoun in both cases is the deicticidam which is conventionally translated as 'this' and indicates something present to the speaker).

sense object + sense organ + sense discrimination = contact

It is also axiomatic in Buddhist psychology that for vijñāna to arise there must be a sense object (ālambana) and sense faculty (indriya). Thus the greed citta must "exist" in some form (imasmin sati). We don't need to get bogged down in defining in what way it exists, only to acknowledge that like any sense object it functions as a condition for vijñāna to arise, so it cannot be non-existent. And since the greed citta must sequentially precede the knowledge citta, the greed citta must exist (in some way) in the past. The same is true of all cittas.

Furthermore, it is essential to both Buddhist ethics and karma that a greed citta has future consequences. The classic pratītya-samutpāda formula informs us that if the condition has ceased then the effect ceases. The corollary is that if there is a future effect, then a future condition must exist. Thus, in our example, the greed citta must exist (in some form) in the future or it could not have future consequences. In order for karma to work as advertised the citta must potentially continue to exist over several lifetimes. The same is true of all cittas.

Thus, dharmas exist in all three times: present, past, and future.

To summarise: a citta "exists" (in some form) in the present, but in order for us to have knowledge of it, the citta must also "exist" (in some form) in the past; and in order for it to have consequences at a later time it must "exist" (in some form) in the future. Minimally "exist" means that it must at least be able to function as a condition for the arising of mano-vijñāna (i.e. as a dharma); it must be consistent with the imasmin sati formula. Thus, cittas (i.e. dharmas) exist in all three times: present, past, and future. And this, according to the Vijñānakāya, is what sarva-asti means.

This view, and developments of it, dominated the first phases of sectarian Buddhism in Indian from around the 2nd century BCE until it was replaced by the metaphysical speculations of the Yogacārins in about the 5th century CE. The sarva-asti view emerges from the application of standard Buddhist axioms to karma and, unlike the Yogacāra view, it does not introduce further speculation or further axioms. It is a plausible solution to the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance, certainly no less plausible than suggesting the existence of seeds in a storehouse. Thus, we should not dismiss the Sarvāstivāda view lightly. If we are going to dismiss it, then it ought not to be on the basis of further metaphysical speculation. More importantly, we ought to offer a better solution to the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Bastow, David. (1995) 'The First Argument for Sarvāstivāda.' Asian Philosophy 5(2):109-125. Text online.

Bronkhorst, Johannes. (1993) 'Kathāvatthu and Vijñānakāya'. Premier Colloque Étienne Lamotte. Bruxelles et Liège 24-27 septembre 1989). Université Catholique de Louvain: Institut Orientaliste Louvain-la-Neuve. 1993. Pp. 57-61)

image: wisegeek

It's widely thought that both the Perfection of Wisdom texts and the writings of the Madhyamaka School attack the Realist position taken by the Sarvāstivāda School. The difficulty we have at 2000 years remove is understanding how any Buddhist could adopt a Realist position in the first place. Surely the Middle Way would have ruled this out?

However, as I showed in my essay about Action at a Temporal Distance, early Buddhists inherited a major problem: pratītyasamutpāda and karma as outlined in the early Buddhist texts are inconsistent with each other. I showed that Buddhist schools modified the doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda to preserve the doctrine of karma more or less as it was. In the case of Sarvāstivāda, this solution required that dharmas be able to function as conditions -- tantamount to being real -- in all three times: present, future and past. But this was not the only influence pushing Sarvāstivādins towards Realism.

As with other early Buddhist schools, the Sarvāstivāda focus moved onto the Abhidharma project, with Abhidharma texts quickly attaining canonical status. Each of the surviving Abhidharma texts is distinct in it's content, if not in its overall project and methods. Thus Abhidharma is a product of sectarian Buddhist schools which often see each other as rivals.

The key task of the Abhidharma is to identify dharmas, to catalogue and describe them and to explore the dynamic relationships between them. Colette Cox, one of the leading writers on the Sarvāstivāda, calls these two functions: evaluative and descriptive (2004). Ābhidharmikas evaluated dharmas for their contribution to liberation and used the descriptive analysis of dharmas to deconstruct perceived structures and realities (particularly the self). Cox notes that this analysis became increasing fine grained and abstract. This in turn created the conditions for treating dharmas as real entities (dravya). This essay will explore this second Realist influence on early Buddhism, again focussing on the Sarvastivāda as representative of Indian Buddhism.

Taxonomies

Collette Cox (2004) sets out the process by which Sarvāstivādins grew into the idea of dharmas as real entities (especially 558-565). Since one of the main functions of the Abhidharma was to create a taxonomy it had to take the approach that all taxonomy projects must: it had to create categories, and criteria by which any dharma might fit into any category. The Sarvāstivādins concentrated on a method called "inclusion" (saṃgraha) in which for each dharma, they outlined what categories it fit into. Each dharma might fit into multiple categories, but it either fit or did not.

All taxonomic projects have to proceed in a particular way in order to create meaningful and useful categories. And one of the main features of such projects is well defined categories, "...invariable criteria are demanded as the basis of unambiguous classification" (Cox 59). Human beings think about the world using categories. Contemporary understanding of these categories shows them to be based on resemblance to a prototype that sits somewhere in the middle of the taxonomic hierarchy (Lakoff 1990). The edges of such categories are fuzzy and membership is by degrees.

Categories are an efficient way of dealing with large amounts of information and also to assessing the potential of a new entity or event by seeing it's similarity to familiar entities or events. And Lakoff argues that the categories we use are in part defined by how we interact with the members of the category - either physically or metaphorically (where the source domain for the metaphor is itself a physical interaction).

The categories used by Ābhidharmikas, by contrast, seem to have been hard edged and made up of simple, artificial binaries and trinaries. For example a dharma was either samskṛta or asamskṛta; either kuśala or akuśala; etc. A Buddhist needed to know kuśala from akuśala dharmas for the purposes of pursuing liberation (cf Cox's two functions above). Kuśala dharmas are to be cultivated and akuśala dharmas to be abandoned. Matrices (mātṛka) of binary and trinary categories are thought to have made up the earliest Abhidharma "texts". Lists were memorised by the mātṛkadhāra (the counter part of the sūtradhāra and vinayadhāra) and the whole structure of Abhidharma categories could be (re)constructed from such lists. The descriptive enterprise of deconstructing apparent entities, particularly the self, into constituent dharmas gave rise to an encyclopaedic attempt to list all possible dharmas and the possible relations between them. Categories multiplied until we get the lists of 85 dharmas in the Theravāda and 75 in the Sarvāstivāda Abhidharmas respectively.

Each school of early sectarian Buddhism took a slightly different approach to constructing categories, placing dharmas in them, and elaborating their relations. This suggests that the impetus itself is pre-sectarian and indeed we can see examples of Abhidharma style thinking in the early sūtras, as well as as a common core in early Abhidharma texts. However, the manifestations which survive as canonical texts and commentaries are a product of sectarian Buddhism.

A dharma fits into a particular category because it has a particular function or nature which is referred to as svabhāva. This term originally had no ontological implications. Initially svabhāva is simply what enables us to distinguish one dharma from another (Cox 561-2).

Dharmas

The early Buddhist worldview centred around the idea that experience is a flux of conditional processes, arising and passing away as our minds and sensory apparatus are impacted by objects, mental and physical. In this view a dharma was primarily the object of the mind sense (manas), though of course the word dharma is confusingly used in at least six main senses (see Dharma: Buddhist Terminology). But in relation to Buddhist thinking about experience, a dharma is a mental object. In this sense, perhaps, dharma comes closest to it etymological meaning of "support, foundation" - a dharma is the "objective" support process for a mental event to arise (i.e. for an experience to be conscious) when it interacts with the "subjective" perceiving processes.

The first step on the road to seeing dharmas as real seems to have been the fixed categories into which they were put.

As such we know that dharmas were all impermanent, unsatisfactory and insubstantial. I've already outlined the Sarvāstivādin argument for the "existence" of dharmas in the part and future as well as the present. Arguably one could maintain this kind of view without insisting that dharmas are absolutely real. The first step on the road to seeing dharmas as real seems to have been the fixed categories into which they were put. Whereas in the early Buddhist worldview everything was process, the introduction of fixed categories introduced an artificial reference point into the picture. A dharma was a member of a category in an absolute sense (pāramārthika) and thus a dharma had an identity (ātmabhāva) which was not contingent (Cox 560). It was not inevitable that Buddhists would come to think of their categories as territory rather than map, but it was a slippery slope.

We suffer a similar problem today. For example physicists who study the regularity and similarity of experience can produce highly sophisticated mathematical models which describe the motion of bodies at difference scales and they may or may not be naive realists who believe they are describing reality (in fact most distinguish the map from the territory). But a few tiers down, those doing undergraduate physics are more likely to be unsophisticated about the distinction and to be naive realists. I know this from experience, for as one reproduces the results of, say, Isaac Newton and derives the laws of motion from first principles, the compelling conclusion is that one is describing reality (no one who has not done this can really understand how compelling it is). Once the information goes through the hands of science journalists and into the general public, most of the potential sophistication is lost. Most of us are naive realists with respect to experience, even when we intellectually espouse various philosophies about ontology, in practice we feel ourselves to be in contact with reality.

It is all too easy for human categories to start to seem natural.

Sectarian Buddhist intellectuals were still pre-scientific and produced a variety of speculative views about the world of experience with varying degrees of realism and idealism. In such a milieu the critique of views was simply a clash of opinions. It is all too easy for human categories to start to seem natural, that is to be an aspect of the world rather than something we impose on the world to help us make sense of it.

Think of categories like large and small. These are defined on the basis of prototypes of various kinds of item. When we mention, say, 'dog' each of us has a prototype image of what a representative dog looks like. From this we know that great-danes are large dogs, and chihuahuas are small dogs. We don't usually stop to wonder why, or even pause to apply the label for extreme cases like these. To us it just seems natural. And so, mostly like, the Ābhidharmikas began to think of their artificial categories as natural and therefore real. They begin to blur the distinction between map and territory because the map is an internal, almost a priori construct, that transparently structures the way we interpret experience. Thus began the reification of dharmas by Ābhidharmikas.

Putting Dharmas Into Categories

Colette Cox, with respect to the Sarvāstivāda, and Noa Ronkin, with respect to the Theravāda, both argue that ontological thinking is not obvious well into the Abhidharma project - into what Cox calls the mid-period texts. However dharmas were thought to fit into categories by virtue of their svabhāva - which early on means their 'particular nature'. It is the svabhāva of the dharma that gives it a particular quality and/or function and allows us to categorise it. At first it is simply that we are able to perceive certain regularities in our experience and thus to conceive of different kinds of dharmas. There is something particular about the the experiences that we learn to recognise and give a name to.

By fixing the definition of categories one almost cannot avoid fixing the members of the category.

The problem is that when the category is fixed and hard-edged, then the quality which qualifies any item for membership in that category can also come to seem fixed. Just as categories that move around and are not fixed don't make for very useful taxonomies, it is also practically unhelpful if the members of the categories are able to move around at random. By fixing the definition of categories one almost cannot avoid fixing the members of the category. And thus the meaning of the word svabhāva drifts from 'particular nature' towards 'intrinsic existence' and dharmas start to become real entities (dravya).

Conclusion

It is the inherent dynamics of encyclopedic projects that, almost inevitably it seems, causes those who pursue such a project to first see their categories as real, and then to see the distinctions they make to fit objects into their categories as real, and in the Buddhist case to see the members of categories, i.e. dharmas, as real. despite the fact that the real/unreal distinction is specifically said to be unhelpful by early Buddhist texts. Be that as it may, the Abhidharma project has had a massive influence on Buddhism and leaves us with a legacy of ontological thought that frequently obscures the true intent of pratītyasamutpāda, i.e. explaining the arising and passing away of mental processes.

It may be that this is why the anti-Realist and anti-Idealist ideas epitomised in the Kaccānagotta Sutta feature in the first chapter of the Aṣṭasāhasrika Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra as well as in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamaka Kārikā. The early Prajñāpāramitā sūtras tackle Realism head on with an uncompromising anti-Realism. Where Sarvāstivādins proposed real dharmas, authors of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras said "no dharmas". The seem to have meant "no real dharmas", but the polemic is phrased in apparently nihilistic terms, presumably for rhetorical purposes. No dharmas. No arising. No ceasing. No pure dharmas. No defiled dharmas. And so on. This approach is sampled and remixed in the Heart Sutra.

However we should not look down on the Sarvāstivādins. No other Buddhist school did much better. Theravāda ontology is scarcely more tenable. The predominant Mahāyāna solution to the problem of action at a temporal distance (the Yogacāra ālayavijñāna) involved the invention of metaphysical entities that only disguised the problem. While the Abhidharma was very intellectually productive, it was ultimately a dead end in terms of practice and soteriology.

This essay started by arguing that understanding the Sarvāstivāda was important for seeing Prajñāpāramitā in context. However it also highlights that we are not yet able to say how Prajñāpāramitā deals with the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance. The solution widely adopted by Mahāyāna schools is from the Yogacāra, but there were several centuries between the composition of the Prajñāpāramitā and Yogacāra texts. Nāgārjuna's proposed solution is to treat the everything as an illusion (!) which seems an even less successful answer than the pudgala. I hope in the near future to explore if and how the early Prajñāpāramitā dealt with Action at a Temporal Distance.

We've always known that Buddhism splintered into sects and that the sects had different doctrines. I hope that this trilogy of essays on the Sarvāstivāda has shed some light on how and why sectarian Buddhist developed in the way it did. The early Buddhists were struggling to make sense of the legacy of confusion in the early texts.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Cox, Collett. (2004) 'From Category to Ontology: The Changing Role of Dharma in Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma.'Journal of Indian Philosophy 32: 543-597.

Lakoff, George (1990). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Ronkin, Noa. (2005) Early Buddhist Metaphysics. Routledge.

I've been thinking a lot about how a failure to understand science affects the arguments against materialism. In Buddhism we often make the argument that you cannot understand Buddhism unless you have practised it. By the same token we might argue that unless one has practised science one can hardly be expected to fully understand it. And as a result many people have naive and unsophisticated views about what science is.

If more people had a positive experience of discovering empirical laws for themselves in school that we might be having a very different discussion about religion and science right now. Unfortunately most of us learn science in large classes aimed at middling students, from average teachers who may or may not have become jaded by the grind of the job. In the end most of don't actually learn any science. But for me learning science was always a joy. I want to see if I can communicate something of this.

Take the humble substance, water. Water is remarkable stuff. We all know this. We might know that ⅔ of the earth is covered in it, and that our bodies are 80% water. We know that it's essential to life of earth, that in many ways it is the medium for life. Most scientists believe that life on earth must have started in water. The properties of water are:

Water is a liquid at standard temperature (20°C) and pressure (1 atmosphere).
Under STP it freezes, i.e. becomes a solid, at 0°C STP; and it boils, i.e. becomes a gas, at 100°C.
Water is an excellent solvent and able to dissolve most minerals.
Water is an electrical conductor and with even small impurities can be an excellent conductor.
Liquid water has a high-surface tension so that it forms relatively large drops.
Water is moderately chemically stable - it doesn't easily react with other chemicals.
Water ice can take as many as 15 different forms depending on the conditions.
Water vapour is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect.

The water molecule is represented by the chemical formula H₂O. This means that each water molecule contains one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms. The two hydrogen atoms attach to the oxygen on one side about 105° apart from each other. I look at the reasons for this shortly.

But how do we know all of this? Isn't it all just some theory? Well, no. It's not all "just theory". It certainly involves interpretive theory, but most of it is either from direct observation, or deductions from indirect observations. I'll try to explain how we know about the water molecule.

electrolysis

If we pass an electric current through water (a process called electrolysis), gas bubbles form at each of the electrodes and the amount of water is reduced. If we collect the gasses we can discover that they are oxygen and hydrogen. Hydrogen was isolated and characterised by Robert Boyle in 1671. Oxygen a century later by Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1772 (published in 1777). If we mix hydrogen and oxygen and provide a spark to kick things off, then in an explosive reaction they recombine to form water and nothing else. (I've done this and it is quite spectacular!) Boyle showed that any gas at a given temperature and pressure will occupy the same volume - this is an empirical law that holds true for all gases. When we electrolyse water we get twice as much hydrogen gas as oxygen gas. Hence we deduce that in water there is twice as much hydrogen as these is water. Hence the chemical formula: H₂O.

2 H₂ + O₂⇌ 2 H₂O

If we use pure water this is always true. Impurities do change the result slightly. But anyone can take a battery and two wires and pass electricity through water and see bubbles forming. And bubbles at one electrode will always behave like oxygen (for example will make a flame glow brighter) and bubbles at the other will always behave like hydrogen (react explosively with air), and there will always be twice as much hydrogen as oxygen. Always.

One of the important things to note is that water has properties as a compound that neither of it's component parts, oxygen and hydrogen, have or even hint at. That two gases would combine to form a liquid with entirely different physical and chemical properties is an important observation. With 20th centuries theories we not only understand this but have successfully predicted the properties of new elements and compounds.

emission spectra

If we heat these gases till they are incandescent and start giving off light (in the same way that a heated filament does) or pass an electric discharge through them (as in a fluorescent light bulb) then we examine the spectrum of the light given off we will find characteristic frequencies of light (called an emission spectrum). We all know what sodium vapour lamps look like - the characteristic bright yellow light comes from hot sodium atoms. In fact hot sodium atoms give off two precise wavelengths of visible light, both in the part of the electromagnetic spectrum we perceive as yellow. The colours of fireworks are produced in a similar way: certain metallic elements give off specific colours when hot: strontium, a deep red; cobalt, blue; copper, green and so on. Mixing a little strontium in the gunpowder makes the explosion glow red. So we can also test for hydrogen and oxygen by measuring the light that they give off. This is also how we know the composition of distance stars - characteristic frequencies tell us the kind of elements present, and relative brightness tells us the proportions.

The structure of the water molecule is deduced by combining information from many sources. For example we might look at the six-fold (hexagonal) symmetry of snow flakes. There's only a limited number of configurations of molecules that could produce this shape. Or we can take a crystal and shine X-rays through it and measure how the X-ray beam is scattered. Different kinds of crystal give characteristic scattering patterns. This was how Rosalind Franklin deduced that DNA must be a helix. (here is her original 1953 paper). In fact water-ice can form with 15 different crystal structures depending on the temperature and pressure when it forms. (See Ice: phases)

We can also deduce something important from what kinds of substances water will mix with and what it will dissolve. For example we know that water and alcohol mix completely and can only be separated out by distillation - which involves boiling the mixture. Ethyl alcohol boils at 78°C so it boils first and turns into a gas that drifts away from the liquid. However water will not mix with oily substances. Water will dissolve rock given time, but not wax.

NASA

There's a neat trick you can do that helps to explain this. We all know about static electricity. If you rub plastic with a natural fabric the difference in electrical properties causes a transfer of electrons and the build up of a static electrical charge. If you wear nylon clothing your whole body can build up a charge that discharges when you touch another person or a door handle (for example). If you charge up a balloon with a good amount of static by rubbing it on someone's clean dry hair (which is entertaining in it's own right) and bring it close to a stream of water, the stream will bend towards the balloon. It turns out that water is able to be attracted by an electric charge. But oils and fats are not.

CO2

If the water molecule were symmetrical it would not be able to be attracted by an electric charge. Carbon dioxide is symmetrical and not subject to static, which is why one ought to use a CO2 extinguisher on an electrical fire and not water (which conducts electricity). The conclusion we get from all of this is that water molecule must be asymmetrical, giving it a slightly negative charge at one end and a slightly positive charge at the other. Thus we can deduce that the two hydrogen atoms must both be on one side of the molecule. By looking at snowflakes and other ice-crystals and by measuring just how susceptible pure water is to electrical attraction we can get a pretty good idea of how asymmetrical the molecule is. The best estimate for the angle between the two hydrogen atoms is 104.5°.

We can get a better understanding of water by comparing similar compounds, especially those involving atoms nearby in the periodic table. For example might look at hydrogen compounds of carbon, nitrogen and fluorine on the same row, and sulphur in the row below. If we look at how each of these elements combine with hydrogen we find that carbon forms a compound CH₄, (methane); nitrogen forms NH₃ (ammonia) and fluorine forms FH (hydrogen fluoride). So there is a pattern here: 4, 3, 2, 1. Sulphur forms a compound H2S (hydrogen sulphide; aka rotten-egg gas), just as oxygen combined with hydrogen in a 2:1 ratio. In fact one of the reasons sulphur is in the same column of the periodic table is precisely because it forms H2S and not H3S or HS.

Clearly the naming conventions are a bit mixed - common names, legacy chemical names, and modern notations compete. If FH is called "hydrogen fluoride" despite the formula being FH "fluorine hydride". If they fit the pattern above H2O and H2S really ought to be OH2 (oxygen dihydride) and SH2 (sulphur dihydride) but they never are.

By comparing the physical properties of all these we get further insights. CH₄is a gas at room temperature, highly combustible in oxygen but otherwise quite chemically stable, and insoluble in water. NH₃is also a gas at room temperature, strongly reactive with other chemicals, and is highly soluble in water. FH boils at 19°C; it is highly water soluble forming hydrofluoric acid and extremely reactive (hydrofluoric acid is used for etching glass which is not touched by concentrated sulphuric or nitric acids).

Thus we can deduce that carbon with its fourfold symmetry forms a more stable molecule. And we known that carbon forms more kinds of compounds than any other element - it is the basis of organic chemistry.

If 4 objects surround a fifth symmetrically they occupy the points of a tetrahedron - the internal angle between each would be 120°. So as a first approximation we might expect NH₃to be a tetrahedron minus one point (or a three sided pyramid with N at one apex). Again, if the H atoms in NH₃ were evenly distributed around the Nitrogen we'd expect different properties (e.g. less soluble in water). For the two H atoms in a water molecule to be about 120° apart. In fact as I said they turn out to be 104.5°.

The mathematical models for atoms predict that each electron will have a distinctive energy. But also they will allow for pairs of electrons with different "spin" (an abstract physical property the consequences of which are observable in subtle experiments, but which would take a long time to describe). Hydrogen has only one electron and is highly reactive with almost anything that can accept an electron. Helium atoms with two electrons are very reluctant to form any chemical bonds. They occupy opposite ends of the first row of the periodic table. It turns out that if we add a third electron, as in lithium (Li) then we once again get a highly reactive atom. But atomic carbon with six (2 + 4) electrons is relatively stable and fluorine with nine (2 + 7) electrons is once again highly reactive and neon with 10 (2 + 8) electrons is almost completely inert.

The pattern is consistent with different types of orbitals for electrons. The first (s) orbital takes 2 electrons and is more or less spherical. The second (p) orbital takes 8 electrons, in 4 pairs. We can guess from the kinds of molecules they form (and the crystal structures of those molecules) that these orbitals form a tetrahedron. (In fact there is a difference between atomic and molecular electron orbitals, but we'll focus on the molecular orbitals). The shape of these orbits are relatively inflexible which is partly why water and ammonia are asymmetrical.

Wikimedia

In any case we now roughly know the shape of the water molecule and its electrical characteristics. And we can begin to relate these to some of its physical properties. For example the fact that water molecules are not symmetrical means that one end of the molecule as a slight negative charge and one end (the side with the two hydrogen atoms) has a small positive charge. This accounts for water's electrical conductivity. It also means that water molecules exert a weak attraction on each other - known as a "hydrogen bond" (indicated by a Greek delta δ in the picture). The positive ends of water molecules are attracted to the negative ends of others. This accounts for the surface tension of water. Water is very cohesive. In fact compared to similar liquids (methane, ammonia, or hydrogen sulphide as liquids) then water has a very high boiling point - indeed the other substances mentioned are all gases at room temperate. Ammonia NH₃ boils at -33°C and hydrogen sulphide H2S boils (becomes a gas) at -60°C! So H2S is very different indeed from H2O. In order to break the attraction between water molecules one has to use a great deal more energy than to break the attraction between hydrogen sulphide molecules which are more or less the same shape. This also means that weight for weight water can absorb a lot of heat, which makes it useful as a cooling fluid in a variety of settings.

With the dawn of the 20th century mathematical models of atoms began to become more sophisticated and were able not only to explain the behaviour of atoms and molecules, but to make predictions. One of which was that a molecule like water would have many different ways it could vibrate: rolling, tumbling, spinning on its one symmetrical axis, stretching bonds symmetrically and asymmetrically, flexing the two bonds. And many others. And each of these modes of vibration was calculated to have a specific energy. It turns out that the energies of these modes of vibration fall in the infra-red/microwave part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. By shining infra-red light through water, and sweeping the frequency we can see what frequencies get absorbed, corresponding to making the water molecule wiggle, and refine the theory with observations. (See also Water Absorption Spectrum).

vibrational modes of the water molecule.
click image to see animation.

Spinning water molecules is also the explanation for how microwave ovens work. The microwave was patented in 1945 by Raytheon, though in fact it was discovered by mistake when a scientist working on radar melted his chocolate with his equipment. Apparently the first food to be deliberately cooked in a microwave oven was pop-corn. Water molecules spin around at ~ 2.4GHz (in the microwave part of the spectrum). Light at that frequency is absorbed by water molecules and translated into spinning, which manifests as heat (at the molecular level heat is equivalent to the speed of motion). Thus by shining microwave frequency "light" at 2.4 GHz on anything which contains water (like food) we can make it heat up.

Bucky ball

The theory also explained in detail why certain molecules took certain shapes and why for example the fourfold symmetry of methane was a particular stable configuration. By comparing theory to observation for all of the elements we have developed a very sophisticated description of the chemical compounds we know about. But it also enables us to predict new chemical compounds and to understand how we might make them. Buckminster-fullerene, so-called "bucky-balls", a form of carbon molecule with 60 carbon atoms arranged in hollow sphere with a structure like the domes designed by Buckminster-Fuller (or like a football), were synthesised using this knowledge. This knowledge has also helped to explain the structure and function of complex molecules like cortisone, oestrogen and testosterone.

Quantum mechanics makes for an even more detailed description of molecule although with detail comes complexity. Some of the insights of quantum theory have helped in understanding the electrical behaviour of semiconductors and super-conductors. But to return to water.

The unusual ability of water to remain in the liquid state that make it the idea medium for life. Similarly the ability of water to dissolve a range of gases, minerals and many organic compounds (sugars, alcohols, amino-acids, etc) without changing them chemically, make it the ideal medium for mixing a huge range of different chemicals such as we see in living cells (compounds which number well into the tens of thousands).

This is only the briefest of surveys of what I remember from a few years of studying chemistry applied to a single, though important and interesting molecule. We now have detailed descriptions of all of the 96 naturally occurring elements, many of the artificially created elements, and millions of chemical compounds and reactions. These descriptions underpin most of the industrial processes that have made the developed world wealthy. If you're inside and you look around, the products of this knowledge will surround you: from the structural materials of your house, to the paints and other decorative elements.

Vanillin.
Wikimedia

In my 3rd year organic chemistry class we had two major practical tasks. In the first term we were handed a vial of white powder and asked to find out what it was using any means available to us. Using chemical and spectroscopic (scanning the stuff with infra-red light) and nuclear-magnetic resonance methods I determined that my unidentified white powder was vanillin, one the the two main compounds responsible for the smell and taste of vanilla. It could not be another compound. The evidence was completely specific. The conclusion was not the product of a narrative or a worldview. If anyone else had accurately tested it, at any time and place, they would have also have found vanillin.

Coumarin
Wikimedia

The second task was to synthesise a compound called coumarin from basic laboratory reagents. Coumarin and its many related organic compounds are partly responsible for the smell of freshly grass (there are others). So the first sign of success in the synthesis - which requires a number of separate stages of chemical reaction - was the pervading smell of freshly cut grass. As it happens coumarin is also a white powder and I took my product home to make my room smell nice. The smell of freshly cut grass pales after a while. And I was able to specify in great detail, exactly how and why the recipe worked.

So when people scoff at science I find it very peculiar. When people say it's just one narrative amongst many or than there is no objectivity in science, or (worse) that everything we know from science is subject to change, I can't help thinking that only a really ignorant person could say something like this. I've personally used all of the techniques mentioned above, done the practical experiments and derived the empirical laws. But I'm not the only one. Many people have done just the same and got exactly the same results. It really does work, and it really doesn't matter what you believe about the nature of the universe. If you look, this is what you'll find, but even if you don't look this is still how thing are!

(See also Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood).

I don't think anyone who has not done chemistry, had the practical insights into chemistry, at this level or beyond, can really understand what it's like.

~~oOo~~

Here is another account of water with prettier pictures: water.

It's very much part of the modern Buddhist landscape to read passionate polemics against materialism/physicalism or "scientism" or even rationalism. However these polemics typically come with philosophical baggage. All too often the anti-Materialist is a Vitalist; the anti-Scientist is a Fideist; and the anti-Rationalist is a Romantic. Which is to say that in the argument over what constitutes right-view many, far too many, Buddhists are not arguing for the Middle-Way, but are repeating 19th Century Western arguments over the perceived faults of the science of the day and, consciously or unconsciously, adopting philosophical positions that are also of doubtful compatibility with Buddhism.

I say 19th century advisedly. My colleagues often seem to be stuck in a time warp when it comes to science. One of my colleagues recently cited Schopenhauer as having "refuted materialism", but Schopenhauer's key work The World as Will and Representation was published in 1848, 11 years before Darwin's On the Origins of Species. He died in 1860. So what did he even know about modern Materialism? Almost nothing.

We now have some nascent critique of Romanticism in Western Buddhism with David McMahan's book The Making of Buddhist Modernism (which I would make required reading for all Western Buddhists) and Thanissaro's useful essay The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism. Very few Buddhist writers are openly Fideist (Dharmavidya being one recent exception) and we at least have a widely understood critique of blind faith, even if it's not something we all live by. So it seems to me that there is a gap around the issue of Vitalism and how it informs polemics against Materialism. In this essay I will begin to develop a critique of Vitalism specifically for Buddhists.

What is Vitalism?

Vitalism is a doctrine which argues that living things are distinguished from non-living things by a vital spark, an élan vital, life-force or living essence. The idea has a long history and is explicit in the works of some ancient Greek philosophers. In Indian terms this would equate to jīva'the life force' (from √jīv'to live').

If you've ever seen the corpse of a loved one, you'll probably have some sympathy for this view. For example seeing my father's corpse in 1990 led me to reflect that though the body was clearly his in every respect, that he himself seemed to be missing. Although even then I did not believe in a soul, the experience is still one that I find unsettling to recall. The Vitalist argues that what is missing is precisely the jīva.

Clearly the idea of a vital essence has much in common with a soul, though a vital spark might be less individualised and personalised. On the face of it, any view which endorses the idea of a jīva ought to be incompatible with Buddhism, but it is apparent that many Buddhists are also Vitalists.

Science and Vitalism

urea
Wikimedia

18th Century Vitalists argued that organic molecules associated with life would not be able to be synthesised from non-living matter. This hypothesis was disproved in 1828 when a German chemist, Friedrich Wöhler, reported that he had synthesised urea from cyanic acid and ammonia. Urea is a by-product of amino acid metabolism in mammals and a significant component of mammal excretions (birds excrete the related substance uric acid). It is the most common source of nitrogen in fertilisers for plants. Since 1828, virtually every molecule associated with living things has been synthesised in a laboratory from basic components.

Vitalist scientists once believed that one could prove the existence of this essence by weighing a body before and after it died. In the early 20th century this approach was put into practice by Dr Duncan MacDougall, though his results were inconclusive and his methods now look suspect. Dr MacDougall weighed his patients, bed and all, and the measurement error on his scales was sufficient to obliterate information at the level he claimed to be measuring. However neither Wöhler's discovery, nor any subsequent chemistry, nor MacDougall's failure completely destroyed the appeal of Vitalism, indeed in some circles it positively thrived.

Many scientists have been focussed on continuing to undermine vitalism. For instance In a talk to Royal Society in March 2014 Dr Christine Aicardi described Francis Crick, one of the co-discovers of the structure of DNA, as an "anti-vitalist activist". Early in his career Crick had identified three problems related to disputes between Vitalists and Materialists (or between ontological dualists and ontological monists):

The frontier between living and non-living
Consciousness and the mind/brain question
The origin of life.

Francis Crick

His first 27 years of scientific life (1949-1976) were spent at Cambridge exploring the first problem, where he helped to discover the structure of DNA and it's role in life and received the Nobel Prize. It's less well known, because his biographers down play it, but he spend the next 28 years (1976-2004) at the Salk Institute, San Diego helping to establish the scientific study of consciousness. In both places Crick joined the field at the beginning, when the mainstream attitude to them was frequently dismissive or even derogatory: molecular biology in the 1950's was seen as a quixotic discipline. Crick was instrumental in establishing both disciplines on a sound footing and getting the establishment to take it seriously.

It's even less well known that Crick briefly collaborated with Dr Leslie Orgel on the question of the origins of life. The two of them investigated the Panspermia theory that life arrived on earth from an extra-terrestrial source. But he decided to leave this area to Orgel. Aicardi argues that Crick's working life can be seen as vigorously pursuing an anti-Vitalist agenda and indeed as making a significant contribution to discrediting Vitalism, at least amongst scientists.

DNA

Francis Crick is a household name because his 1953 collaboration with James Watson, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin in determining the structure of the DNA molecule earned the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for Crick, Watson and Wilkins. Franklin died in 1958, aged only 37, and the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. DNA was suspected to be involved in heredity since it is concentrated in the cell nucleus, but with the structure solved it could be seen how it was involved. We now know that the DNA contains codes for making proteins that perform a variety of structural and functional roles in a living cell. DNA and its close relative RNA are responsible for carrying information about how to build cells in all life on earth.

Defining the structure of DNA was an extraordinary breakthrough in our understanding of life. From it we have come to understand a huge amount about the function of living cells and what distinguishes a living cell from a dead one. We can now manipulate DNA at will, transferring genes from one organism to another, creating new genes. Recently an entirely artificial chromosome was synthesised and shown to be functional in a living cell. Of course we still have much to learn, but the distance between living and dead organisms, once thought to be an unbridgeable gulf, is now just a short hop. What we've discovered however is that complexity occurs at every level we examine. A living cell has tens of thousands of different proteins all doing vital work, each protein is itself a marvel of complexity. The problem of reverse engineering such a complex system is formidable. Ascertaining the structure and function of single proteins is the kind of work for which scientists have received Nobel Prizes. However it would seem to be only a matter of time before perseverance results in entirely synthetic "living" organisms. As one scientist said recently: "the conceptual unification of biology with physics and chemistry is now underway." - Aeon.

But the Vitalist is loath to acknowledge the significance of these discoveries. They persist in the axiom that there is a fundamental difference between living matter and dead matter. So while the refutation of the basic propositions of Vitalism means is has been eliminated from the laboratory, it persists in the general population.

Presented with facts, Vitalists retreat into the unknown and base their truth claims on propositions that cannot be tested. This is also known as the God of the Gaps Argument. Whenever some advance in science means they are put to the test, and inevitably shown to be wrong, they simply retreat further into the unknown and make a different truth claim. As one prominent astrophysicist commented recently, the God of the Gaps argument suggests that "God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance..." (YouTube) The God of the Gaps Argument is generally considered to be a poor argument for God and bad Theology.

Since the idea of a jīva has been severely undermined by science, and since it was never very attractive to Buddhists in any case, the Buddhist Vitalist tends to focus on consciousness as the vital essence of living things. Traditionally Buddhists embrace a dualism between mind and body as expressed in nāma-rūpa or in rūpa versus the four 'mental' skandhas. The Salla Sutta refers to bodily (kāyika) and mental (cetasika) experiences. And since bodily transmigration is clearly out of the question, interest falls on the mind even though early Buddhist texts reject the idea that consciousness itself transmigrates.

Of course Buddhists argue against a direct transference and adopt the language of conditionality: the last moment of consciousness in one being gives rises to the first moment of consciousness in another. But how this is achieved is unknown. The idea is sketched out with metaphors, but the underlying reality the metaphors describe remains opaque and incomprehensible. The incomprehensibility allows for the Mind in the Gaps equivalent of the God of the Gaps argument.

Science and Consciousness

The question of what is meant by the word consciousness is itself a book length project. I've explored this question to some extent in previous essays: especially What is Consciousness Anyway? One of my colleagues once remonstrated with me quite vehemently that "the study of matter will never tell us anything about consciousness!" This is very similar to the Vitalist argument argument about chemistry. In the early 19th Century the speculations of Vitalists concluded that there must be some fundamental difference between living matter and dead matter. Scientists showed that there is only one kind of matter and it all obeys the same rules. We can speak of living and dead organisms, but not of living and dead matter. Matter is just matter, it is neither living nor dead. "Life" is a property that is apparent only at higher levels of complexity and organisation.

However the study of consciousness is still in its infancy compared with chemistry. Crick joined the Salk Institute in 1976 when the scientific study of consciousness was still seen as suspect, unscientific and even risible by the establishment. This kind of fact seems to be forgotten by those who argue that the only reason paranormal research is not taken seriously is the hostility of the establishment. What establishes a new field of study as bona fide is good science, replicable results and sound theories that make accurate predictions. The field of paranormal research has failed to do good science, and their theories make no accurate predictions. Indeed the paranormal field has been the victim of a number of high profile hoaxes: e.g. Project Alpha, crop circles, Uri Geller (still in business despite being exposed as a fraud!), the 100th monkey effect , and the Fox Sisters. In many cases the exposure of fraud has not deterred some believers from taking the supposedly paranormal effect as real. (See also my essay: On Credulity)

Crick on the other hand was instrumental in establishing two completely different fields about which the mainstream was doubtful, cynical and dismissive. Crick was able, in both cases, to produce results which forced the establishment to take notice. Another fine example of this is (my hero) Lynn Margulis, who fought for years against not only paradigmatic mainstream hostility, but also rampant sexism, to have Symbiogenesis accepted as a fact. It is now found in every biology textbook, but the original paper was rejected by fifteen academic journals. These days paranormal researchers publish in their own in-house journals and where the critique of the mainstream cannot reach them because when it does it generally debunks both their methods and conclusions. The 100th Monkey Hoax is one of the better examples of this.

To-date the scientific study of consciousness has largely focussed on the way that consciousness is altered by brain injuries and other insults to the integrity to the brain. Even at this early stage we know that an ontologically dualist explanation of consciousness seriously struggles to explain what we observe. Clearly consciousness is tightly correlated with brain activity with a good deal of function/location specificity. Chemicals and highly location specific brain injuries create predictable breakdowns in the functioning of the mind. As imaging techniques become more sophisticated we are also starting to get glimpses of brain activity associated with various tasks (though it is very much early days).

If, as the Vitalist often argues, consciousness is able to completely separate from the body (and by implication the brain) then why does brain damage inevitably negatively impact on consciousness? No explanation which calls for an absolute distinction between mind and brain can account for this phenomenon in a coherent way.

Brains

As with the chemistry of life it's useful to start small. So scientists study small organisms with only a few neurons into order to assess the roles of the various structures involved. For example the OpenWorm project has mapped all of the cells of a particular kind of microscopic nematode worm. This organism contains 302 neurons and 95 muscle cells. On this scale they are able to map every single cell and all of the connections between cells: the somatic nervous system (282 neurons) contains 6,393 chemical synapses, 890 gap junctions, and 1,410 neuromuscular junctions. Such a map is called a connectome. Studying the organism at this level will give us a much clearer picture of how a nervous system creates behaviour. Scientists boldly claim that the computer models of the organism themselves constitute artificial life-forms, and while the enthusiasm is understandable, this is probably overstating things a little.

Partial Human Connectome

Since the structural units of the nematode are more or less the same as the structural units of a human brain - the difference is in the complexity of our brains - modelling the nematode's nervous system ought to give us insights into our own brains. The effects of scale are bound to introduce differences however - our brains have 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections. The emergent properties of systems this complex are impossible to predict.

Similar work is being done at a variety of levels. Larger scale maps of the human connectome are now emerging and recently a new technique for preparing brain tissue has revealed a 1:1 scale map of every neuron and synapse in a mouse brain (watch the video!). Meanwhile the Blue Brain Project is simulating individual cortical columns (as seen on TED) millions of which make up our neo-cortex.

However the Vitalist can dismiss all of this with one sweep of the hand because for them studying the brain will not reveal anything about subjective consciousness. Vitalists also argue that we'll never know what it is like to experience the world from someone else's point of view. I don't accept this for a simple reason that was evident to early Buddhists as well. Most of us are highly skilled at modelling emotional states using empathy - we do not simply guess what another person is feeling, we actually have the same experience as they do. How do we know it's the same? We communicate about what the experience is like and there are aspects of experience that are universal. A skilled story teller can make their audience laugh, cry, boil up in anger or cringe in fear. This could not happen if inner-states were truly unique. The fact is that we do know what it's like to have a point of view which is not our own. Some of us a better at it than others, but the ability is available to some extent to all social animals.

Conclusion

It's more than a century since any scientist took Vitalism seriously. It's not a theory that makes accurate predictions and has been shown to be inaccurate in many ways and on many occasions. However Vitalism still has its appeal outside the laboratory, especially with religious people. It appeals to that part of us that is disturbed by the idea of our own death, an area of particular concern to religion. The idea that human beings, often over and above other kinds of life, contain a vital spark, an essence, a jīva that not only animates us in this life, but which survives our physical death and makes an afterlife possible is an enticing prospect. If at the same time we are ontological dualists, with a predisposition to reject the impure material world then some kind of pure animating spirit is almost a requirement. The attraction of Vitalism is obvious. But the life ought to have gone out of Vitalism by now. It has been refuted time and again. Vitalism is like a philosophical zombie, suffering from partial death syndrome.

Vitalism, like other non-materialist doctrines, survives and prospers by appeals to the unknown and unknowable. The truth claims of Vitalists by necessity lie just outside the province of scientific knowledge, where-ever the boundary happens to lie. The fact that Vitalism is found to be flatly wrong whenever the frontiers of knowledge advance is of no concern to anyone who can retreat into the unknown. Despite the fact that Vitalism has repeated been proved an inaccurate worldview, Vitalists still claim it cannot be proved wrong. Thus Vitalism is more in the realm of theology than science these days.

For Buddhists the attraction is not so much in physical Vitalism - the distinction between living and dead matter; as in psychological Vitalism - the interest is in sentience and in how that can be transferred (along with habits and memories) from one being to another. Explaining this is usually at least implicitly Vitalist - the metaphor of one fire kindling another is explicitly Vitalist. This view can easily come to the point of arguing that consciousness is what animates the living being.

~~oOo~~

The next essay in this series on Vitalism will look more closely at the transition from dead to living.

In discussing Vitalism and science I mentioned the threshold between living and dead matter. I've already written at some length about the idea of life after death. I've argued that we need to consider Buddhist afterlife beliefs in the context of other afterlife beliefs and to see the structural similarities that make it very similar to other afterlife believes. I've also discussed the problem of transmitting information from one like to another and how pratītyasamutpāda was modified to try to preserve the Buddhist doctrine of karma.

In this essay I want to explore the threshold between death and life, and particularly in this direction, more closely. It seems to me that our perception cannot help but be biased on this subject because of the way we experience life and death. I also want to touch on the state of the field of abiogensis, the study of how living cells might have been created from a combination of non-living components. Of we still don't have all the answers to this question, but we haven't been looking for very long, just a few decades. For most of human history we believed that God, in one form or another, animated dead matter to make living things. Note that the issue of an interim state (antarabhāva) between death and life will be dealt with in a forthcoming essay.

The Quick and the Dead

Our usual perspective on the distinction between living and dead matter arises out of seeing living beings die. Often if we're with someone who dies and it's calm enough to make observations, we will see that they simply breathe out and never breath in - they expire. Perhaps this is why life is associated with the breath? With no more in-breath the functions of life swiftly stop. I will deal with the issue of the breath and vitalism in a separate essay.

We do not directly witness a "new life" starting in the sense of conception or embryos developing and until very recently did not even know about gendered gametes fusing for form a new zygote. Certainly most of us never see so-called "dead" matter turn into "living" matter since it happens out of sight. We eat food in the form of once living but now dead living things, but we don't see the process of how that "dead" matter is incorporated into our living bodies. We don't see iron being encapsulated in a haem and becoming haemoglobin and transporting oxygen around our bloodstream We might even understand that this does happen, but we never witness it.

Any explanation for life must not only account for large scale beings like humans, but also for microscopic life and even for single celled organisms. The amoeba is clearly a living thing. If matter can enter and leave a living organism continually without ever affecting the status of the organism vis-à-vis' living, then we can explain this in two ways.

On one hand we might say that as a cell absorbs, say, a molecule of oxygen that has been transported in the blood by haemoglobin, that individual molecule is endowed with jīva, becomes alive, and participates in the collective life of the being. But this sounds a little implausible since oxygen does the same chemistry outside living cells. If every molecule has it's own nano-jīva or some infinitesimal portion of a cosmic jīva then all matter is alive (to some extent). And if all matter is alive then the transition of a living being from alive to dead is just a matter of perspective, since the matter doesn't die when the person dies. The idea of a single life force, splinters into billions of trillions of tiny life forces that add up to a living being. The question is how we would distinguish jīva from ordinary physical energy. Here jīva and energy both do something similar, i.e. animate matter. The argument here is that individual molecules or even subatomic particles must have some animating force. Even so, since matter can appear dead we're still left wondering what is different between a handful of clay and a mouse. We haven't solved the problem of the distinction between life and death at all.

On the other hand we can see life as a property of the cell and see the matter, which comes and goes, as just a building block or a container for a singular jīva. This view is compatible with Vitalism and (more or less) Materialism. But it does mean there is no real distinction between living matter and dead matter; there's just matter and the distinction only applies to larger conglomerations of matter. For the vitalism something non-material (i.e. not made of matter) is added to the cell to make it live whereas to the materialist what is added is energy in various forms particularly heat and stored in chemical bonds.

Either way it seems that matter itself cannot be alive or dead. Matter is just matter. There's no such thing as living matter and dead matter. However there living organisms and dead organisms. So life is not a property of matter per se, but only of organisms. Though of course organisms are complex structures built of matter.

We used to imagine that something must enter the body at conception in order to make it living. But microscopy has showed that even before conception the zygote is a fully living thing. Sperm are produced as living things in a male's testes. Eggs are living in the ovaries of females from before birth. In the reproductive cycle there is never a time when a cell is produced dead and becomes alive. New living cells are formed from dividing old living cells. All of our cells are from lineages of cell division stretching back at least 3.5 billion years old. So if we never really go from being dead to being alive then what role could a jīva play?

The only time we really need a life force to explain anything is 3.5 billion years ago when the first living organisms came to life.

Abiogensis

Our perspective on the threshold between life and death is almost exclusively focused on the transition from life to death because the transition the other way is invisible to us in every day life. However scientists have been able to "see" into this domain in new ways in the last century so - the field is called abiogensis meaning "originating from the non-living".

image: Duke

The classic experiment that kicked off this field recreated our best guess of the physical and chemical conditions in the earth's atmosphere 3.5 billion years ago. The Miller-Urey Experiment (1953) created a closed system containing a mixture of gases made up of water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The gases were subjected to a continuous electrical spark intended to imitate lightening. The experiment ran for a week and at the end it was discovered that a rich variety of organic molecules had been spontaneously synthesised. The products included many molecules essential to life including amino-acids that make up proteins.

Many subsequent variations of this experiment have been conducted and showed that by fine tuning the conditions almost all the molecules required for life might have spontaneously occurred on early Earth. New theories about the conditions on early earth have provided new avenues of exploration. In addition, analysis of meteorites has shown that they frequently contain organic compounds as well and may have seeded some of the important molecules to the "primordial soup".

It's no longer beyond the scope of imagination for all of the required elements of life to have assembled spontaneously. Enclosed membranes made of lipids form under the right conditions; RNA molecules self-replicate and even noticeably evolve; amino acids occur in asteroids and meteors. It's only the last step that remains unknown. Just as quantum mechanics has broken down the barriers between physics and chemistry, the study of molecular biology is breaking down the distinction between chemistry and biology.

Life as a New Kind of Stability.

We've known for a long time that high energy systems are unstable and tend to find ways to shed energy and achieve greater stability. We understand this process as increasing the entropy in the system. Entropy can also be understood in terms of order: a highly ordered state has less entropy. With no external inputs systems tend to lower energy, less order, i.e. higher entropy states. So a drop of coloured dye in a container of water will diffuse until it is randomly distributed through out. A hot object will radiate heat until it matches the ambient temperature around it. If we add energy to a solid it will become a liquid then a gas (decreasing order) and vice versa.

Addy Pross, Professor of Chemistry at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, has suggested that living systems attain a new kind of stability that is different to the thermodynamic stability of minimal entropy states (Aeon Magazine). Over time the entropy of the universe increases. But living organisms bucks this trend. Living things at the molecular level is both high energy and highly ordered, indeed living things continually absorb energy rather than shedding it. In terms of thermodynamics living things ought to be unstable and short-lived. But living things are remarkably stable in thermodynamic terms. Pross calls this dynamic kinetic stability.

Pross argues that this dynamic kinetic stability is a feature of self-replicating molecular systems. For example, given the right conditions RNA molecules spontaneously self-replicate. But not always perfectly. All self-replicators will tend to exponential growth, but some variations replicate faster than others. The faster variants will come to dominate a system. A system of two RNA replicators which catalyse each other is even more stable.

Thus there seem to be two kinds of system stability: "one based on probabilities and energy, the other on exponentially driven self-replication." Mathematical of both kinds of system are relatively simple. Pross concludes:

"This distinction does not trace the dividing line between living and dead matter precisely – but it does explain it, and many of the other riddles of life into the bargain."

The approach is explored in more depth and the state of the field of systems chemistry is reviewed in Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2014) - see below.

Conclusion

In trying to think about the distinction between life and death most of us are hampered by only having access to knowledge of the transition in one direction: living to dead. I would argue that even the conception process which involves the joining of two already living gamete-cells is rather abstract for most people. The bio-chemistry which describes the movement of matter into and out of living systems is opaque to non-scientists. Thus most of us are ill-equipped to understand the distinctions between living and dead organisms. Certainly many Vitalists still seek to frame the discussion in terms of living and dead matter despite this being anachronistic and inapplicable.

The science of abiogensis is far from providing a complete description of the systems that might have existed as precursors to living cells. The first serious attempts to recreate the conditions for living systems date only from the 1950s. It's easy to forget that it's only a few decades since such investigations began. It is relatively early days for this field and some significant progress has been made and there is no reason to believe that at some point a plausible set of starting conditions and pathways will not emerge. As Ruiz-Mirazo et al. conclude:

"Although chemistry operating on the prebiotic Earth must have been extraordinarily complex and heterogeneous, we believe it is not impossible to understand. A number of concepts and methodologies, developed over the past 30 years, are now mature enough to ensure a brilliant future for such an old and challenging endeavor of human beings: getting to know about their ancient origins from inert chemical matter."

The most important conclusion however is that there is no need to posit a life force which animates "dead matter". This aspect of Vitalism is entirely discredited.

~~oOo~~

See also

Attwater, James & Holliger, Philipp. 'A synthetic approach to abiogenesis.' Nature Methods 11, 495–498 (2014) doi:10.1038/nmeth.2893

Ruiz-Mirazo, Kepa; Briones, Carlos; and Escosura, Andrés de la. 'Prebiotic Systems Chemistry: New Perspectives for the Origins of Life.' Chemical Reviews.

Pross, Addy. 'Life’s restlessness.'Aeon Magazine.

This essays follows on from 'Vitalism: The Philosophy That Wouldn't Die.' (23 May 2014).
The next essay in this series will look at the concept of "spirituality".

I've been arguing against using the word spiritual in relation to Buddhism for a while now. My contention is that the word has all the wrong connotations for Buddhism, we don't believe that humans have spirits, do we? One of the frequent counter-arguments is that spiritual simply doesn't mean what I say it does. In what I consider one of the most important essays I've written (Metaphors and Materialism) I identify the word spiritual with a tradition of ontological dualism and now I would link it another in the form of Vitalism. So is this fair?

Ancient Indian Buddhists had a practice of adding prestigious adjectives to names. It's still goes on today. VIPs, especially religious VIPs affix śrī to their names, sometimes more than once, e.g. Sri Sathya Sai Baba, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Sri Sri Sri Nirmalanandanatha Swamiji.

In early Buddhist texts one common prestige word, curiously, was brahman: brahmavihāra, brahmacarin, etc. It's curious because it's a word which can only have come from the Vedic context and derives it's meaning from Brahmanism. It refers to the cosmic essence with which the theologically minded Brahmin hopes to merge at death (a new idea introduced by the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad). Alongside brahman was ārya 'noble'. Before long Buddhist started to prefer ārya. Avalokiteśavara becomes Āryāvalokiteśvara; Tāra becomes Āryatāra. The Prajñāpāmitāhṛdaya becomes then Āryaprajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. And so on. And we know that mature tantra substituted vajra: vajraguru, Vajrasattva, vajra-everything. Nowadays the adjective is spiritual: spiritual tradition, spiritual community, spiritual practices, spiritual teachers, spiritual experiences, and spiritual awakenings.

The key adjective in all cases is used to mark out a conceptual space. It is not merely linguistic, does not merely rely on denotation, but also defines social and political roles and relationships. A spiritual teacher is a very particular type of teacher for example, with a very particular relationship to a student and a particular kind of role in an organisation.

In this and two subsequent essays I will try to excavate around this word spiritual to see how it became the religious prestige word of the moment. My argument is that just as the Dalai Lama has adopted the ecclesiastical title of a Pope, i.e. His Holiness, the word spiritual is one we Buddhists have adopted from Christianity and because of this it comes with all the connotations and entailments of the Christian world view. However the word spiritual had already begun to be used independently of the church when Buddhism started to become popular, particularly in spiritualist circles: the space defined by spiritual was already contested allowing us to stake a claim in it.

Part I, this essay, will begin with the etymology of the word, showing how the word draws on various words for 'breath' as a metonym for 'life' and is intimately tied up with Judeo-Christian ideas on the animation of inanimate matter (which I've already shown to be an anachronistic view). I'll show that 'life's breath' is very common way of understanding life in the pre-modern world, but is ultimately based on misunderstandings about how the world works and in particular how the human body works.

Part II will look at the word in terms of frames as described by George Lakoff and try to analyse the web of images and ideas invoked by the word. Part II will critique the applicability of these frames to the Buddhist project.

Having looked at how the word is used Part III will shift the focus onto who uses the word. Influenced by Michel Foucault Part III will look at the power relations implicit in the domain marked out by spiritual, or what we might call the politics of spirituality.

Etymology

Our usage of the word "spiritual" is tied up with translations of the Christian Bible, especially Genesis and the story of the creation of Man:

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7, King James Bible (Bible Hub)

Here, breathed and breath of life are distant translations of Hebrew words: way·yip·paḥ and niš·maṯ ḥay·yîm respectively. (Note that "God" here as elsewhere is ’ĕlōhîm which is the plural of El'God'). (Bible Hub) In Biblical Greek "breath of life" was translated pnoín zoís from pneuma 'breath' and zōēs 'life'. Biblical Latin at first translated the pneuma part with words derived from anima, which also derived from a root meaning 'to blow, to breath' and is also equivalent to Greek psykhē (meaning something like animating essence) which itself comes from a from PIE root *bhes- 'to blow, to breathe'. In Augustan times translators settled on the Latin spiraculum vitae from spīritus 'to breathe' and vita'life' (from vivare'to live' and cognate with Sanskrit jīva). After being animated Adam is described as animam viventem'a living soul'.

The word spīritus has a range of meanings:

'a breathing (respiration, and of the wind), breath; breath of a god,'hence 'inspiration; breath of life,'hence 'life'; also 'disposition, character; high spirit, vigor, courage; pride, arrogance.'

Of course we also find spīritus sanctus'the Holy Spirit' playing an important role in Christianity. Spīritus derives from a Latin verb spirare'breathe'. It can be further related back to a Proto-Indo-European verbal root: *(s)peis- "to blow, to fizz". If we start from the root and work forwards we find it at the base of a relatively restricted range of English words. The Indo-European Lexicon lists 'fart, fizz, fizzle' all via Germanic and 'spirit' via Latin.

Words derived from the Latin spīritus begin to appear in English in about the 13-14th century and may either have come more or less directly from ecclesiastical Latin or via Norman French. This period coincides with mature Middle-English as the language of most of England, representing the final merging of Norman French vocabulary into Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to produce a single language. It left English with a rich vocabulary for many domains, for example (see also table below):

breath (Old English bræð), quick
inspire, expire etc. (French)
spirit; anima (Latin)
pneumatic, pneumonia; psyche (Greek)

The noun spirit first meant 'animating or vital principle in man and animals' and derives from a French usage meaning 'soul'. Compare the modern French esprit. Online Etymology Dictionary. Thus we see that from the beginning spirit in English is a metonym for spiraculum vitae 'the breath of life', that which makes us animam viventem'a living soul'. Our word spiritual is an adjective deriving from spīritus and primarily meaning 'of or concerning the spirit'. Spiritual is also used in the sense of 'pertaining to the church'.

There are several subsidiary senses of 'spirit' that help to shed light on what the word meant in Medieval times. From about 1400 spirit began to mean ghost - the disembodied spirit of a dead person; often in the sense of a spirit that has not (yet) ended up in either heaven or hell. The word ghost comes from PIE *gheis- "to be excited, amazed, frightened" (c.f. German geist). From about 1500 the word was used to suggest "a nature, character". This line of connotation developed so that spirit as 'essential character' appears by the 1680's and becomes common in the 1800s. Thus I can write in the spirit of Enlightenment scholarship or comment on the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times). The sense of 'divine, related to god' is attested in the 14th century. When we say someone is "spirited" we mean they are lively, energetic, courageous. This sense is attested from 1590, though Milton uses it to mean "possessed by a spirit."OEtD

This takes us close to the crux. For pre-modern people the difference between living and dead matter was breath. I think we've come such a long way that it's difficult to get our heads around this nowadays. What God did in creating Adam was gather up some dead matter, some dust, and "breathe life into it"; he animated it - indeed he inspired Adam. The metaphor is BREATH IS LIFE. Breathing is the activity par excellence of living beings. This metaphor is quite widespread in the ancient world.

The Life's Breath

In pre-scientific times to live was to breath; and die was to stop breathing. However, the ancients came to a very different understanding than we have today. We now know that when the diaphragm muscles contract it draws air into the lungs where oxygen molecules cross the membranes to enter the bloodstream and be captured by haemoglobin molecules for transportation around the body. At the same time carbon-dioxide crosses the membrane in the other direction so that our our breath contains less oxygen and more carbon-dioxide than our in breath. In the mitochondria of our cells oxygen takes part in creating an energy transfer molecule, adenosine-triphosphate (ATP) and is converted to CO₂ in the process.

In ancient India by contrast the arrow of causation between the bodily movements of breathing and the air entering the body was reversed. For them the movements of the air element (vāyudhātu) caused all bodily movements, particularly the movements associated with breathing and not the other way around. Vāyu takes in the movements created by the wind (leaves rustling in trees), the movement of the bodies limbs, and the movements associated with breathing. Vāyu in the body is called āna'breath' and comes in various forms indicated by the prefixes: apa, ud, pra, vi, and sam. We have:

apāna 'down-breath' (aka fart; Monier-Williams resorts to Latin at this point: ventris crepitus);
udāna'up-breath' the breath involved in speech;
prāṇa 'fore-breath', but used in the sense 'breath of life';
vyāna'diffused-breath' (spread throughout the body);
samāna'complete-breath' (?) circulates around the naval and essential for digestion (though digestion itself is a kind of fire, the food must move through the body);

The Buddhist practice of āna-apāna-sati (Skt ānāpānasmṛti) involves watching the in and out breaths (though note the connotation of apāna in Sanskrit!).

In China we find a similar idea in 氣 qì (Japanese pronunciation ki) The Chinese etymology is blowing 气 qì (may have been a man blowing) on rice 米 mǐ. (Another more in-depth interpretation via Language and Meaning). The character has a wide range of meanings: "air, gas, the atmosphere, weather; breath, spirit, morale; bearing, manner; smells, odours; to be angry, anger; provoke, annoy." In our context means 'vital energy'. It is this energy which gives the martial artists their control and power and which the acupuncturist believes they are manipulating.

It's possible that the Sanskrit reflexive pronoun ātman'myself; the body; soul') may derive from either √an'breath' or √at'move' though this is unclear. The Proto-Indo European Lexicon puts ātman alongside a very small group of Germanic words (e.g. Old Saxon āðom'breath, vapour') that may derive from a form such as ēt-mén-. Monier-Williams links ātman to Greek ἀυτμή (= autmē) 'breath'. However these etymological connections look tenuous and ēt-mén- is too complex to be a root. So what is the primitive? (PIE) ēt-> (Skt) at> (Grk) aut > (Old Saxon) āð'breath'?It's not entirely clear what lexicographers had in mind here. We might see ātman as √at-man 'animate' where the -man suffix forms neuter action nouns, e.g. karman (< √kṛ), dharman (< √dhṛ), though why has the root vowel been lengthened in ātman? This would link ātman to the PIE root *at- 'to go' which gives Latin annum (dental plus nasal gives rise to a double nasal) and Germanic aþnam 'years'. I don't see how we can derive ātman from √an and there are no suggestive PIE forms either. Clearly there is considerable overlap in the semantic field, especially when we consider that movement is product of vāyu, but the etymology here is ambiguous at best.

Thus spirit, and many related words and concepts are references ultimately to the spiraculum vitae or the élan vital of ancient Vitalist views on the nature of living things.

Conclusion

Despite being demonstrably mistaken with respect to human anatomy some people still take ancient views of what animates the body as accurate and relevant. There is nothing wrong with doing yoga, daiji or any of the other ancient techniques which purport to manage or manipulate the breath qua life-force. Most are beneficial in some way and thus may be recommended. However, while breathing and respiration is certainly essential to sustaining life, the view that breath, as an entity, animates the body is demonstrably false.

The view that breath causes the bodily movements and not the other way around is also demonstrably false. Ancient Vitalist views of bodily processes are false. If we are genuinely concerned with reality and want our views to align with reality, then we must reject these ancient Vitalist views, at least in the terms they present themselves.

The history of our word spiritual is inextricably tied up with ancient Vitalist views. In the next essay I will look more closely at what it means in the present day using a method drawn from Lakoff's analysis of language. I will try to show that modern usage is still tied up with Vitalism and will argue that this ought to make us think twice about identifying Buddhism as a "spiritual tradition".

~~oOo~~

The linguistic domain of the "breath of life"

PIE	Greek	Latin	Sanskrit	Old English	Modern
aiu̯ (life)		aevus (aeon) vivus?	āyu		aye, age, world
*ane- (breathe)	anemos	anima	āna, prāṇa, udāna etc	eðian	animal
*bhes- (blow, breathe)	psykhē				psyche, psychosis,
*gweie- (live)	bio (one’s life) zōēs (animal life)	vivare	jīva	cwic	quick zoo
*gwhre-?(scent, smell)				bræð	breath
*gwhren? (diaphragm,mind, soul)		phrenia			frantic -phrenia
*gheis- (shock)			√hiṃs (harm)	geist	ghost, aghast
*pneu- (breath)	pneuma			fnora (sneeze)	snore, apnea
*(s)peis- (breathe)		spīritus, spirare			fart, spirit

English Words related to spirit:

aspire, conspire, dispirit, expire, inspire, perspire, respire, spiracle, sprightly, sprite, transpire.

Breath and Spirit in Arabic

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~~

In order to better understand the word spiritual I want to try to look at it in terms of frames. George Lakoff defines framesas "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." (2004, p. xv). Frames unconsciously structure of our thoughts, our intentions, and our memories. We each have thousands of frames. We develop them partly through exploring our physical environment and partly through interacting with our social environment. So my frames will be similar to yours to the extent that our physical and social environments are similar. The resulting structures are encoded in physical structures in the brain.

Words are defined with respect to frames. A word like "mother" doesn't just just refer to the woman who gave birth to us, but invokes the frames of all the attributes we associate with all mothers and mothering: birth, nurture, fertility, gestation and so on. But the particular associations are based on social conventions. When we use a word we automatically invoke frames associated with it.

"Don't think of an elephant"

Most people can't see or hear this statement and help thinking of an elephant and associated images and ideas. The words we use in a discussion or debate are not neutral. Because of frames. There is an ongoing discussion over how to define Buddhism which is largely concerned with marketing. Typically the argument is quite one dimensional.

Buddhism is a religion and thus offers solutions to traditional religious problems, i.e. "Where did we come from?" or "What happens after we die?" or "Why is life unfair?"
Buddhism is a philosophy and concerned with traditional philosophical questions, i.e. "What is there?" or "What can we know about what is there?" or "What should we do in hypothetical situations?"
Buddhism is a way of life and concerned largely with moral questions, i.e. "How should we live?"

Frames also make it possible to sum up arguments in slogans. And it's against this background that I want to look at the word spiritual. What would it mean, for example, to say that Buddhism is a form of spirituality.

I've shown that spiritualis historically rooted in the Vitalist idea of the 'breath of life'. However, it's safe to say that spiritual invokes a large number of frames, of which 'breath of life' is now relatively unimportant. So if we say that we are spiritual beings, living spiritual lives, doing spiritual practices, from a spiritual tradition, in order to have spiritual experiences that culminate in a spiritual awakening, just what are we saying? What frames do we invoke? Obviously we can't deal with every detail of thousands of frames, so I want to cover some of the main ones.

Wholeness

In an exchange with me on one of his blogs Bhikkhu Sujato recently expressed the view that for him "spirituality" referred to wholeness and integration for example. I think that this frame comes from thinking of human beings as having three parts: body, mind, and soul. (Hence the bookshop classification). Soul, or spirit, completes the trilogy. The Catholic Encyclopedia argues this heretical tri-partite view of the human being is partly due to a clarification of the distinction between psychē and pneuma by St Paul:

"Body and soul come by natural generation; spirit is given to the regenerate Christian alone. Thus, the "newness of life", of which St. Paul speaks, was conceived by some as a superadded entity, a kind of oversoul sublimating the "natural man" into a higher species." (Catholic Encyclopedia sv Soul)

This is related, I think, to the Pentecost, which was originally a Jewish harvest festival. In the Book of Acts the followers of Jesus are assembled for the Pentecost Festival when something miraculous happens and in the famous line:

"And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."Acts 2:4. (Bible Hub)

Here the New Testament Greek word translated as both "Ghost" and "Spirit" is pneuma (see previous essay for the etymology). People with bodies and souls were completed by the descent of pneuma into them. In this day and age where the two basic divisions of the person are mind and body, many people feel that something is missing. They feel that we are more than either mind or body, more than a combination of the two. And what is missing is spirit and part of the spiritual province. This feeling comes about because of a conviction about the truth of Vitalism.

Wholeness might have another sense that derives from psychoanalysis. We all know that rather than having a single "will" we are in fact usually in a state of conflicting desires and urges that battle for our attention and often move us in unexpected directions (what Harold Bloom has mockingly called "the Hamlet Complex"). At worst we suffer from what early psychologists conceived of as schizo-phrenia'a divided mind' (schizo is from Greek skhizein'to split'). In the psychoanalytic view we integrate our disparate inner parts by gaining knowledge of our own unconscious. This is achieved indirectly through analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue, associations and so on; or directly (in psychodynamic approaches) through introspection and confessional reporting of thoughts and emotions. Our unconscious is revealed through analysis of patterns over the long term.

Some Buddhists argue that meditation achieves this psychological goal of resolving psychological tensions without the need for introspection or analysis. However in the Buddhist process, outlined in the Spiral Path, integration (samādhi) precedes knowledge (jñāna) rather than the other way around.

Buddhists also divide the person up into parts: body, speech and mind; five skandhas, six elements. And we mostly do this to try to show that we are simply the sum of our parts. Unlike Christians who believe that we are more than the sum of our parts because we have an immaterial, immortal soul. Thus "wholeness" for Buddhists ought to have something of an empty ring to it. Yes, it is good to be a whole person, with our faculties intact and our will undivided, but there is nothing beyond that, nothing more. As the Buddha says to Bāhiya: "in the seen, only the seen". Some take this to be a reference to the Upaniṣadic teaching about the ātman as the seer behind the seeing as found in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. As always Buddhists are keen to deny any kind of metaphysical self or soul.

Higher

Sujato also says: “Religion promises us a higher way of being, a way that is in alignment with a sense of the highest good.” This frame is linked with the metaphor GOOD IS UP/BAD IS DOWN, which itself has a number of entailments that I've already explored at some length with respect to religious language in my essay Metaphors and Materialism. This spatial metaphor is perhaps the most important in the context of spirit and spirituality.

If "ways of being" and "goods" can be higher and lower, then there is a hierarchy of being and goodness. Christians, following influence from Neoplatonism, refer to this hierarchy as the Great Chain of Being. Pure being is entirely immaterial, the realm of pure spirit, in later Buddhism the dharmakāya. Because it is a frame, we know transparently and unconsciously, that spirit, being immaterial is not weighed down by the earth, it naturally floats up (the Jains invoke precisely this metaphor in their version of the soul). Good spirits go UP to heaven to be with the Sky Father (in Biblical Greek 'Heaven' is ouranus = Ancient Greek Uranus, the Sky Father and husband of Gaia, the Earth Mother).

The association of highest good with the highest way of being is important. In the Great Chain of Being, God is at the pinnacle: the highest being is infinitely good. In Buddhist cosmology the highest state of being is an absolute disconnection from the worlds in which one can be reborn, even the pleasant ones. One cannot say anything about the state of being of a Tathāgata after death; the post-mortem Tathāgata defies the very categories of being and non-being and even the most refined gods, in states of beings almost off the scale, cannot compare.

Kūkai had a great deal of difficulty getting his 9th century Māhāyānika colleagues to believe that the dharmakāya teaches, because in their view the dharmakāya is absolutely abstract and disconnected from realms of rebirth. This reality, lying beyond any kind of knowledge, is sometimes referred to using terminology drawn from German Idealist philosophy, such as "the Absolute," or "the Transcendental" (with capitals and the definite article). Later Buddhist philosophy swings between a transcendent ultimate reality and an immanent realisation of reality (though early Buddhism is not concerned with reality at all).

In this view it's axiomatic that rebirth is bad. Rebirth is what we are seeking to escape from. This means that the world one is born into cannot have any absolute value. All that seems valuable about the world is simply a product of our ignorance. The best things a spiritual person can do is renounce the world and focus on religious practices that temporarily take one higher in pursuit of a permanently higher state of being. As with many of forms of mind/body dualism, this detachment from the world does make us rather ineffective in the world. At a time when we see the environment being destroyed for example and need to mobilise feelings of engagement, Buddhism councils disengagement. Despite this some Buddhists are engaged in social and environmental projects. But this is a new departure for Buddhism, a product of Buddhist Modernism, and more Modernist than Buddhist. And given the consequences of disengagement it must be seen as a highly positive move, albeit not fully integrated yet.

Deeper

The vertical spatial metaphor can work in another way. Above ground HIGHER IS MORE, but below ground DEEPER IS MORE/SHALLOWER IS LESS. Verticality is with reference to the (flat) surface of the earth. Early Buddhists used reductive analysis, i.e. they went deeper, to end the rumour of ātman and to show that human beings are simply the sum of their parts, though this includes physical (kāyika) and mental (cetasika) parts. There is no soul, spirit or anything resembling them lurking inside us as other religions would have us believe. Reflection on the skandhas is probably the representative practice for deconstructing satkāyadṛṣṭi (the idea of a true substance, aka 'personality view'), but the foundations of recollection (satipaṭṭhāna) or recollection of the elements (dhātvanusati) perform a similar function.

Deeper also invokes psychoanalytic ideas. After Freud we understand that much of our thought goes on in an unconscious realm. We may delve into our own unconscious with difficulty, but at times shine light on it's workings in order to gain in-sight. In those areas of knowledge where a literal spirit was not entirely credible, this dark inner-world began to take it's place. Of course the fact that we have inner-lives was not lost on the pre-Freudian world. Harold Bloom has made much of the fact that Freud read Shakespeare incessantly and appeared to be jealous of the Bard's greater insights into the Human psyche, especially in the story of Hamlet (See the Freud Chapter in The Western Canon). But recall that the word psyche itself meant something like 'soul'. C. G. Jung also chose words from this domain, i.e. anima/animus in his account of our inner life.

Michael Witzel has shown that Jung's ideas about a collective unconscious are less good at explaining common themes in myth than the idea that story telling is much older and more conservative than we thought possible. Widely dispersed people have the same stories because once they lived closer together and shared a common storyline. In Witzel's mythological scheme the "Laurasian" story arc involves a first generation of humans who are heroic and perform miraculous deeds aimed at benefiting human-kind rather than the gods. Again Prometheus is the archetype.

Freud, Romanticism and burgeoning Spiritualism (see below) made common cause. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell reminded us that the new Western story of a dark inner realm visited to gain truths that set us free or make us whole, was tapping into the re-occurring myth epitomised by Orpheus who defies the gods by journeying to Hades realm to reclaim his wife. We are intended to equate the psychological unconscious with the mythic underworld, and process of psycho. The implication being that we will find treasures in dark aspects of our own minds. Thus in psychoanalysis Vitalism found another dark corner in which it could continue to exist. Introspection became one of the chief tools gaining access to this "underworld". The Romantic hero explores their own depths like Orpheus seeking Eurydice.

By the time Westerners dropped their early prejudices against heathen religion and came into more substantial contact with Buddhism, some Buddhists had come to a similar belief about their inner self. This theme is more apposite in the USA since it was there that Zen took root. In Europe Theravāda Buddhism, with it's strong emphasis on anattā, was influential earlier and for longer. Zen can be problematic because it embraces tathāgatagarbha doctrine and in English expresses it in terms like "Original Mind" or "True Self" (with capitals). Without the sophisticated critique of tathāgatagarbha that is contained in Madhyamaka thought, and lacking in popular presentations of Zen (the kind that people dip rather than take seriously), it is easy to tip over into Vitalism without the help of psychoanalysis. The two combined make it almost inevitable.

Sacred

The word spiritual also invokes the idea of sacredness, though these days "sacred" is a rather degraded idea despite attempts to rehabilitate it. Nothing is sacred any more. That said, for many people the loss of a sense of sacredness is a serious problem and they are busy trying to install Sacredness 2.0™. Very often the target domain for modern sacredness is "nature". Not the "red in tooth and claw" nature, but the more tranquil nature typically associated with the English countryside (a giant landscaped garden). Not wilderness, which can easily kill the unwary, but the tame versions of nature that are non-threatening and easily accessible. Old trees are sacred. Certain hills. Stone henge and other archaeological sites that are presumed to have been religious in nature are rebooted as modern sacred sites, even though no one really knows what makes them sacred.

We're not quite sure what sacredness means, but the tribal people our ancestors colonised put a lot of store by it. Our word taboo comes from the Pacific Islands (tapu in Māori). A tapu is a restriction placed on a person, place or object that prevents every day interactions and allows only specialised ritual interactions. Similarly sacredness puts the labelled thing outside the grasping of Utilitarianism and this can only be a good thing. The value associated with sacredness is nothing to do with money or utility. It's important in this banal age to be reminded that some things cannot be valued in economic terms. Often it is not nature per se that we value, but how we feel when we are in a natural as opposed to an artificial setting.

The sacred designation, if plausible, can help to protect "natural resources" (an economic term) from exploitation and destruction. Given the destructive effects of large scale industrialisation on the environment across the planet, it might not be a bad idea to extend the sense of sacredness to all living things. However invoking the sacred via the word "spiritual" is problematic because of the other associations, particularly with organised religion and paranormal hoaxes. By confusing sacredness, in terms of non-utilitarian values, with spirituality, we in fact make it a little more difficult to defend those values.

For Buddhists the world accessible to the senses is not sacred. It's not until we get fed-up with the world and turn away from it that we are liberated. Thus for Buddhists something is sacred only to the extent that it points, and leads, away from the world. A stupa,for example, might be a sacred monument, but only because it reminds us of the Buddha who transcended the world. At the level of popular religion or superstition Buddhism is happy to acknowledge that sacred sites have some value, but they are not seen as a true refuge. We see this sentiment expressed for example in Dhammapada (188-189)

Many people seek refuge from fear;
In mountains, forests, gardens, trees and shrines

This is not a secure refuge, not the ultimate refuge;
Going to this refuge, they aren't delivered from all misery.

Nature is not sacred in early Buddhist thought. So, as with engaged Buddhism, what we seem to be seeing is a new departure. A necessary, but quite a radical departure.

Spiritualism

Spiritualism is a complex of ideas that particularly involve interacting with the spirits of the dead in the afterlife. The movement owes a great deal to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) which communicate his visions of the afterlife. In turn his version of the afterlife seems to owe a great deal to Dante. In fact Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost, especially via art inspired by them, are two of the most influential religious works in the Western World.

Unfortunately spiritualism has always been rife with hoaxes. Early and prominent hoaxers were the Fox sisters who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead, but one of them later confessed to having faked it. However, like the admission of the crop-circle hoaxers, the repeated exposure of fakery and fraud does not dampen enthusiasm for spiritualism. We want to believe that the dead are still with us, and not simply metaphorically.

Most of mediumship depends on a technique called cold reading. This skill can be extremely effective and yet entirely fake. One modern master of the technique is Derren Brown, who openly acknowledges that he is using cold reading techniques, but is able to seemingly evince information that he could not have access to except through psychic powers. It's possible to be entirely convincing to even a sceptical audience. (See e.g. this video explaining cold reading). Brown's performance in Messiah is a remarkable display of how to dupe an audience.

One spin off from Spiritualism and its interaction with Eastern religion is the phenomenon of past life regression and mundane memories of past lives. Ancient Buddhist texts suggest that if we develop certain psychic powers through spending a lot of time in the fourth dhyāna, we ought to be able to remember past lives. This ability to remember past lives gradually declines in importance over time in Buddhist texts and is hardly mentioned in Mahāyāna texts. I've dealt with this aspect of spirituality in an earlier essay: Rebirth and the Scientific Method. So I won't dwell on it here. The Skeptic's Dictionary response to "research" into this field is a useful counterpoint. One very important point for Buddhists is that all this past-life research confirms the Hindu view of reincarnation, not the Buddhist view of rebirth. So we ought to be marshalling all our criticisms of it, not embracing it. It's spiritual in the best sense of the word, i.e. concerned with spirits and eternal souls.

The success of Spiritualism, despite the exposure of so many frauds, forms part of the background against which modern Buddhists assess the relevance of Buddhist ideas. Modern Buddhists are almost all converts from Christian societies, even if the converts themselves were not Christian. Beliefs like rebirth and universal fairness (karma), subtle bodies, and the life's breath (prāṇa) are easy to assimilate if we already believe in ghosts, communication with the spirits of the dead and the other phenomena associated with Spiritualism. In fact for some people it's almost as if the Enlightenment never happened.

Mystical

Certain relatively uncommon experiences are referred to as spiritual or mystical. These include so-called out-of-body experiences, or near death experiences and other experiences that seem to point to a clear mind/body dualism or more precisely to a consciousness that is able to exist independently of the body. This taps into the idea of the spirit as distinct from the body and thus points to a strong version of mind/body duality. Thomas Metzinger has decisively showed, in The Ego Tunnel,

that the out-of-body experience is not what it seems. In fact a better explanation can be found in the way that the brain constructs our sense of self and how that process can breakdown. I've also dealt with this in Origin of the Idea of the Soul.

Another kind of experience often associated with meditation is important (though also associated with potent hallucinogens like LSD). It seems to have two poles. At one pole the subject-object distinction breaks down and leaves one with a sense of nothingness or no-thing-ness. In the traditional Hindu description there is just saccidānanda'being, consciousness and bliss'. One is entirely disconnected from the world of sense experience, from mental activity as normally understood. There is no sense of self, nor of being located in space or time and thus no other, no world. In Buddhist terms experiences of this kind are referred to as the arūpa or formless dhyānas. At the other pole the subject-object distinction breaks down leaving one feeling connected to everything. One feels that one is the universe, that there are no distinctions between self and other. Again there is no sense of self, but one feels located everywhere in time and space, one feels one is the world. and the world is oneself. It is the feeling that "all is one". Both of these seem to have a profound impact on the person experiencing them and can radically alter one's perspective on everyday waking experience.

Almost inevitably the person who has this experience believes there is "more". More to life; more than meets the eye; "more than is dreamt of in your philosophy". And the "more" is spiritual. It can also be associated with the idea of a transcendental, ineffable reality. This hard-to-reach reality is higher, better, deeper, etc than everyday life. In fact compared to reality, everyday life is hardly worth living. Some people get a glimpse of this kind of experience and spend the rest of their lives trying to get back to there. This kind of story is high reminiscent of the story of the Holy Grail, particularly as it is outlined by Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in The Grail Legend

. Often what Buddhists seek is the Holy Grail, the transformative experience that will leave them in a state of grace.

Visions of "higher" beings are also sought-after mystical experiences, especially if they are accompanied by a sense that the vision is more real than reality. Often visions are of human figures, anthropomorphisms of values we hold dear, or saints. Usually visions are culturally specific. Hindu's see Śiva, Viṣṇu or Kāli or one of the 33 million other deities; Christians see Christ, Mary or angels; Buddhists see Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. And so on. It's not unusual for Western convert Buddhists to see visions of Christ, simply because they grew up Christian and our culture is saturated with images of a Westernised Christ. We notice this with imagery, visions and icons take on the regional characteristics of the people they appear to. Monastics have often used extreme techniques to achieve such visions: starvation, sleep deprivation, extremes of heat and cold, flesh wounds (from self-flagellation) that become infected, and other painful austerities. Meditative techniques are a more humane way of approaching having a mystical experience, but still require considerable dedication to repetition and duration of practice.

What is interesting about mystical experiences is that the individual phenomena can now be reproduced in the laboratory using a variety of techniques that physically affect the brain (be it accidental damage, surgery, drugs or electro-magnetic stimulation). Thus the arrow of causality points from brain to experience. There is no doubt that the experiences are significant to those who have them, but also little doubt that the significance is imposed on the experience by the experiencer. Mystical experiences are not what they seem. On face value they are what the mystics have always said they are; but we can look beyond the face value now. And we see that the value we place on such experiences is a human value. And this is not to say that the experiences are not valuable or transformative. But they do not always mean what they are said to mean in a pre-scientific worldview.

Another caveat on discussing such experiences is that they are difficult to distinguish from hallucinations. An hallucination is when someone sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels things that don't exist outside their mind, but which nonetheless have a vivid realness about them and are mistaken for things which do exist. Hallucinations and spiritual experiences have very different valuations, but how we determine which is which may be entirely context dependent.

In 2009 the Pew Research Group reported at about half of all Americans had had a "religious or mystical experience. This is more than double the number recorded in a 1976 Gallup Poll. In their analysis the bulk of the increase seems to come from Christians and those who regularly attend religious services, with as many of 70% of some evangelicals claiming some kind of experience and a clear correlation with frequency of attendance at a religious service. The level is also fairly high (30%) amongst unaffiliated religious people (SNBR?). About 18% of people with no religious inclinations report experiences of this time.

Mystical experiences are much more likely amongst people who expect to have them: people with strong religious beliefs, who regularly participate in religious activities. But even non-religious people appear to have mystical or religious experiences fairly commonly (one in five adults).

Conclusion

In an essay like this, one can only touch on the main points of a complex argument. Clearly the frames that help to define the word spiritual are many and varied. Each of us works with thousands of frames. We can see that some of the main frames activated by the word spiritual involve a Vitalist worldview or mind/body dualism. There is a possible defence against this charge which is similar to the one that sparked this analysis. One may argue that even when, for example, the higher frame is invoked (along with the various associated metaphors like GOOD IS HIGHER) that one is not intending to invoke religious ideas from Christianity. However we don't have a lot of control over the frames we use. Frames structure our thoughts, but do so unconsciously. And even if we ourselves use words with more than average deliberation (and as a writer let me assure you that this is much more difficult than it might appear) we have no control over what happens in the minds of our readers/listeners.

The question of whether Buddhism is or is not a religion is moot, though if it is not a religion then what is it? The idea that Buddhism is spiritual or concerned with spirit is just wrong. Most of the main frames invoked by spiritual just don't fit very well if at all. In some cases, as in the revaluing of nature are helpful and in other cases not so much.

When Nixon went on TV and said "I am not a crook" it was probably the first time most people thought of him in terms of being a crook. But from that time on, most people thought of Nixon as a crook. For the group of people who believe that Buddhism is not a religion, the statement "Buddhism is not a religion" only reinforces the Buddhism/religion connection in the minds of hearers because the word invokes the frame. As "spiritual but not religious" simply reinforces the connection between spiritual and religion. The desire to contradict an argument in yes/no terms is strong, but if one wants to define Buddhism in a certain way, then one can only use words that are consistent with that definition else the message is mixed.

People who invoke spiritual when referring to Buddhism probably do so because it's familiar. It taps into centuries of religious ideology. I see it rationalised in a variety of ways. But my view is that the choice of words lends advantages to certain sections of society. The next essay will shift the focus from how the word is used to who uses the word; the politics of spirituality. Who wins by linking Buddhism to the various spiritual frames? Who loses?

~~oOo~~

George Lakoff on frames and framing.

(1990) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
(1995) Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust. Online: http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html
(2003) Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]
(2004) Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.

Caged or Fleeced?
from right-wing journal The Spectator,
arguing for more individualism.

So far we've looked only at what the word spiritual means and what frames it is associated with. In other words we've been focussed on the conceptual space delimited by attaching the adjective spiritual to various nouns and verbs. Now we need to think about who is using the adjective to make their nouns and verbs special. And how those people operate within the conceptual space. In other words we need to look at the politics of spiritual. As a first step this essay will outline a view of contemporary Western politics in which modern ideas of identity play an active role in shaping individuals into subjects. This leads into a consideration of the impact of Romanticism on the political landscape and Foucault's view of the subject as a construct whose purpose is subjugation.

Politically spiritual is tied up with notions of authority, and authority is an expression of power. The essay will argue that spirituality is concerned with channelling power in religious communities. In the Buddhist context we take on to surveil and police our own inner life as a service to the community, and as long as we are seen to be doing so, the community repays us in belonging.

Apologies, but this essay is long. I hope not too long that people won't read it, but I can't see how to split my treatment of spritual into any more parts. And in any case I want to move on to other subjects. So to begin with we need to look at the modern idea of selfhood and identity and to see how it is shaped by the discourses of power which have dominated the Western World for some centuries now.

The Modern Self.

"... history is read narcissistically to reconfirm one's present sense of identity and any potentially disruptive awareness of alterity is suppressed."- Lois McNay. Foucault: A Critical Introduction. (p89)

Individualism is one of the guiding lights of modern Western Society. Philosophically it seems to stem from 18th century Utilitarianism and the associated attitudes of Mercantilism. It is epitomised in the trade-fuelled Libertarian governments of the 18th and 19th centuries and more recently in the Neolibertarian governments (conservative and progressive) that have dominated the Western world since at least the 1970s. It's the mentality that, for example, enslaved Indian peasants to grow opium and then went to war with China to make certain of continued profits by ensuring that Chinese peasants consumed the dangerous drug. These days the East India Company has been replaced by the IMF and World Bank, but the bottom line is still profit.

Present-day individualism benefits the rich and powerful in two main ways. Firstly by telling everyone to pursue their own good (their own desires) it divides the population and prevents effective opposition to Neolibertarian aims of creating the perfect conditions for businessmen to become rich and powerful. Secondly it justifies the means used by businessmen to become more rich and more powerful (e.g. political economies based on mythological "market forces"; use of ultra-cheap labour abroad; evasion of taxes; etc.). Individualism gives the illusion of freedom. We are more free to choose our religion in the West than at perhaps any time in history. We have greater choice of breakfast cereals or TV channels too. But we are enslaved to an economic system that regards us as units of production, that characterises every human being as perfectly self-centred, manipulative and ruthless in pursuit of their own best interests. From the point of view of those in power, the religion of the masses and their breakfast cereal have the same value, or at least the same kind of value.

The more we exercise our individual choice, the more society fragments. And the more society fragments the less effective we are as a collective. We out-number the rich and powerful by at least 100 to 1. So we could stop them if we wanted to, just by acting in concert. We've seen a number of successful revolutions in the last few decades where the people simply gathered and demanded change in sufficient numbers that they could not be ignored. Former Soviet Eastern Europe went this way. But because we feel free we don't resist our slavery. "Spiritual but not religious" is one of the most exquisite examples of this pseudo-freedom. We have complete freedom of religious belief because it has no longer has any economic implications. We are encouraged to have our own individualised religion, partly because organised religion is what bound communities together for centuries (perhaps forever). If being spiritual was a real threat to profits, it would be illegal. Where collective action is perceived as a threat, as ironically it is in communist China, then religion is tightly controlled and rouge groups persecuted.

Meanwhile we work hard for minimum wage and 2 or 3 weeks of holiday a year, in a world of absolutely astounding productivity and unimaginable wealth. And yet we never have enough. This is a deeply rooted feature of Merchantilism: the poor only work hard enough to meet their needs, so the rich make it almost impossible for them to meet their needs, despite vast surpluses and enormous waste. Think, for example, of all the food going to waste! Estimates in the UK are that 30% of food produced is wasted. All that wasted food helps to keep food prices high, while those who grow it over-supply and cannot earn a living on the prices they get. House prices (in the UK at least) are kept artificially high to hoover up any extra wealth we might accrue. The point at which we might feel we have enough, and might thus stop working so hard, is kept out of our reach.

Merchantilism is predicated on everyone working as hard as they can all the time in the knowledge that worn out workers can easily be replaced. When you accept payment for work, you are expected to give everything you have in return, however low the wage. Of course the system is imperfect, but measurement techniques have become ever more intrusive in recent decades. In addition one of the main messages of the school system is conformity: "do as authority tells you". Schools are able to enact and enforce arbitrary rules such as dress codes and to exclude pupils from eduction is they refuse to conform. In Britain school children routinely wear ties (I still find this shocking). University education is gradually changing for the worst as well, becoming more and more oriented to the demands of Merchantilism.

In addition, government policy consistently encourages high unemployment levels (unemployment is an invention of the Merchantilist system) in order to keep wages down. And while real wages continue to fall, executive salaries rise exponentially. An executive may earn more in a single year than the average employee earns in a lifetime. Of course governments regularly promise full-employment, but they simply cannot afford anything like it. Without high unemployment wages would sky-rocket and severely impact profit. In addition we are constantly encouraged to want more, to buy more by the representatives of companies than make things we don't even need. Thus the goal is always moving, and the game is rigged so that we could never reach it if it was. And yet few of us consider quitting the game. Most of us are not equipped to function outside of society, even the outcasts depend on society.

Many of the gains won by a century of concerted action by labour unions have been eroded or completely lost. The adversarial relationship between labour and capital led to excesses where labour was able to seize power. The UK seems to be firmly on the road back to Dickensian relationship between capital and labour in which all power in the relationship is held by capitalists. Only this time the capitalists are vastly more wealthy than they were in Dickens's time. Wealth has certainly been destroyed by the repeated economic crises since 1973, but the 1% are wealthier than ever.

Most Western states have implemented some kind of "safety net" that were initially conceived of as offsetting the damaging social effects of Merchantilism. The impulse behind the welfare state grew out of humanitarian urges of the late Victorian period and a recognition of the hardship caused by industrialisation and the unemployment that was built into the economy to keep wages low. But in the UK it has grown into a vast control mechanism. The economy is structured so that whole sections of society must rely on welfare payments - which are called benefits. The benefit being the up side of an economy which can simply shut down the industries that provided employment for whole towns and industries, creating long-term, generational unemployment for which the poor are blamed. To take the state pound nowadays is to invite the state to surveil and scrutinise one's life to a degree that would make Catholic priests envious. The state can for example, examine one's bank accounts and engages in regular interrogation of recipients and draconian examinations of "fitness". Despite endemic unemployment the unemployed are seen as morally reprehensible. Taking money from the state is seen in moral terms as incurring a debt, especially by conservatives (the reasoning behind the "moral accounting" metaphor is explored by George Lakoff in Metaphor, Morality, and Politics).

For an alternate view on the modern self see Adam Curtis's documentary The Century of the Self. Curtis explores Freudianism in relation to the rise of democracy. Democracy is seen as releasing the primitive Id of the masses producing the horrors of WWI. The irrational masses required control via the manipulation of their unconscious via propaganda (rebranded as "public relations").

But it's not only the unemployed who are tempted with "benefits". Housing is now so expensive in the UK that a clear majority of new claimants of Housing Benefit (a welfare payment provided specifically for housing costs) are in work. Housing Benefit is a £17 billion annual subsidy to landlords to allow them continue to gouge unreasonable profits from the market and to restrict the supply of housing to keep prices high. At the same time British society promotes the ideal of home-ownership as the acme of individual identity. The agony the average British wage earner is going through is exquisite, and many of them are convinced it is because of bogus reasons such as immigration.

Meanwhile the media don't just sell us things we don't need. Apart tax payer funded broadcasting, all media is paid for by advertising, including most internet content. The media has a vested interest in shaping our behaviour towards consumerism, towards views which promote the goals of Merchantilism. The media began employing psychologists to make their presentations more effective back in the 1920s. (See the Adam Curtis documentary for an account of this). They use subtle techniques to "nudge" our behaviour in a direction that is good for business. For them it was a problem that social conventions were against women smoking for example. So Edward Bernays cooked up a publicity stunt which linked smoking to the suffragette movement and painted cigarettes as "torches of freedom". Great result. Women felt more free by becoming addicted to a harmful poison, and began to die in their millions from tobacco related illnesses. Again the illusion of freedom disguises the reality of bondage.

This is not a conspiracy theory. I don't think that dark cabals are meeting behind closed doors to arrange it. I think its a dynamic of civilisation, an emergent property of the kind of social system we have based on a huge number of factors. And for the most part it's happening in the open. Governments are open about their beliefs and about their methods. The media are less open, but investigations like Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (a book and a film) have left us in no doubt about how they operate.

So individual identity in modern times is shaped to fit into this worldview, not simply Vitalist and Dualist, but Utilitarian, Merchantilist and (pseudo) Libertarian. Spirituality is no threat to this because it is focussed on the spirit and the immaterial and leaves the body emeshed in the world and subject to market forces.

The Curse of Romanticism

If we look more closely at the referrants of "spiritual" we see a considerable overlap with the concerns of Romanticism. A concern with the immaterial over the material; with the unseen over the seen; with nature over culture; with experience over reason; with eternal life, even eternal childhood conceived of terms of in spontaneity and innocence, over death and the loss of naivete. The material world is less interesting than the afterlife; human beings less interesting than spirits (the higher and less material the better). According to French mystic, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The goal of the spiritual is escape from the material world where we inevitably die and, in the Indian worldview, die repeatedly. We escape (even if only in imagination) the material, relative, contingent world—i.e. saṃsāra—for an immaterial (outside space and time), absolute, eternal world—i.e. nirvāṇa. And when someone like Nāgārjuna tries to point out that the dichotomy is meaningless, we simply invent some new transcendental escape route: e.g. the dharmakāya.

By the beginning of the 20th century most Westerners were politically aware enough to have good reason to distrust authority figures, both spiritual and secular. The wealthy and powerful collude against the poor and oppressed to keep them divided, poor and oppressed. This was made easier by the rise of the middle-class, the administrators and facilitators of the rich and powerful, aspirational with respect to security and comfort and instilled with aristocratic contempt for working people. The popularity of Romanticism also worked to the advantage of business people. A few drug-addled, spoiled brats from the upper-classes who wrote sentimental poetry that made individualism seem desirable for the masses. The kind of freedom from responsibility or the need to work for a living, the kind of freedom that only comes with inherited wealth and privilege, became a thing for everyone to aspire to. Partly as a result of this, people have drowned their awareness in intoxicants and particularly the middle-classes have Romanticised this as a kind of freedom, though as before it leaves their bodies in bondage to profit. After a weekend "on the lash" as the Brits so eloquently call it, Monday morning means a return to bondage. Or after a lifetime of bondage we retire to freedom in old age. Except old age has been consistently redefined to make it less accessible.

At it's worst the hippy movement encouraged everyone, though in effect mainly the newly wealthy middle-class progeny of the post-war baby-boom, to disengage from politics and society. Like their Romantic heroes, the baby-boomers were sexually promiscuous, leading to a huge upsurge in sexually transmitted diseases. They were intoxicated, leading to drug and alcohol addiction with massive impact on families and society, and many new cases of psychosis and early death. And they were free of social conventions which boiled down to political disengagement, allowing conservatives to set the social and political agenda by exploiting the subsequent breakdown in the value of collectivity. Conservatives simply acted in concert and over-whelmed the divided progressives.

After decades of letting conservative business interests set the public agenda, we've got to the point where even the Left implement Neolibertarian economic policies. Sometimes the Left are even more assiduous in pursuing these policies, because they are trying to prove themselves on terms set by conservatives.

Romanticism might have started off as a necessary correction to the mechanistic views of scientists flushed with success as the beginning of the Victorian Era. But it has simply become another way in which we play into the hands of those who would economically enslave us. SBNR is the perfect religious view for a Neoliberal ideology. The political disengagement that typically goes along with individualistic spirituality is perfect for the powerful. Escapism relieves the frustration and tedium of modern work, leaving us resigned to wasting our best years for men who earn more in a year than we will in a lifetime. Contemporary spirituality is escapism. By focussing on the immaterial it denies the value of the material, and this plays into the hands of those who control the material world. We end up fighting Māra's battle for him.

Foucault

Michel Foucault argued that to be a subject is to be subjected - thus providing an important counter-weight to Romanticism. The self we identify with is, in fact, mostly shaped by external forces. Reflecting on my own life I see that my self-view has been shaped by many institutions: schools, church, medical clinics, hospitals, government departments, workplaces, unions, clubs, secret societies, professional associations, the news/entertainment media; by people playing their own social roles: family, in-laws, friends, peers, colleagues, romantic and sexual partners; by people playing various official roles such as doctor, psychiatrist, teacher, priest, politician, police, lawyer, accountant, psychologist, guru; by abstract institutions such as time, wealth, money, wages, taxes, property; by abstract issues such as gender politics, sexual politics, national and international politics, national identity, post-colonialism, multiculturalism; by the fact that I emigrated twelve years ago and had to retrain in many of these areas and add class awareness. The list goes on and on. My personal input into who I am is rather minimal. Virtually every I feel myself to be is inherited or imposed on me rather than emerging out of my being. Sure, my basic psychology is broadly speaking nature; but my identity is almost pure nurture.

Almost all of these institutions aim to subject, to subjugate, me through shaping my subjectivity so that I subjugate myself. That is, for me to see myself as naturally subject to the limits, controls and definitions of society. For me to unthinkingly obey prohibitions and taboos. The constant threat is that failure to conform redefines the transgressor as other. And for the other the rules are different, less optimal, less conducive to well being, often harsh. To be other is to be sanctioned and excluded. The veneer of civilisation on how we treat others is very thin indeed. One sees all this play out in simpler forms in primate societies. It's well worth reading Jane Goodall's book In the Shadow of Man, in order to get a sense of how human society is an extension of basic primate society. The fundamentals are all similar.

Our very subjectivity is a construct which we have built in concert with society from birth. Forget the metaphysics of self, we don't even understand the politics of self. And Buddhism also plays it part in creating an acceptable subjectivity. We use "precepts" as a way of reminding other Buddhists about what is acceptable behaviour: we surveil and police each other. We emphasise that a Buddhist must take on to be ethical, rather than allow ethics to be imposed on us (with explicit comparisons to other ethical systems). When we criticise each other, it is often not for the act itself, but for the failure of self-control, the failure to conform. We explicitly invite others to subject themselves to Buddhist values which we extol as the most sublime set of moral values ever enunciated. Who would not want to subject themselves to sublime taboos, especially when part of the narrative is that no evil thought goes unpunished? Buddhism channels the power inherent in social groups in a particular kind of way, with particular kinds of narratives. It is not exempt or outside this social dynamic, despite all the transcendental narratives, Buddhist humans and still just humans.

Buddhism uses carrots to make obedience seem attractive, and sticks to make disobedience seem frightful. Just like every other primate group. This is how primate groups ensure collective survival. But it is open to exploitation. Even amongst chimps, as the story of monstrous Frodo of Gombe Stream suggests. Frodo used his size and aggression to cow the Gombe stream group and to terrorise neighbouring groups. The usual social controls, often operating through the "person" of the alpha-female, failed with Frodo.

Along with conceptions of subjectivity which are aimed at controlling individuals, Foucault points out the role of institutions which institutionalise social forms of control. We are shaped, but imperfectly and so society creates conditions in which it can exert control over any stray desires and urges that pop up. Religion is a partly a formalisation of certain social controls, aimed at subjecting and controlling the tribe. This has clear survival value. For Buddhists this manifests as belief in karma and enforcing of precepts. Karma is, like God Almighty, a supernatural surveillance agency that knows whether you've been bad or good. Karma makes the Panopticon seem an amateurish fumble. Be good or go to hell, has always been religion's trump card.

Today we don't see ourselves as dependent on friends and neighbours. We see them as accessories, as optional. The average person has just enough individual wealth, and is so steeped in the rhetoric of individualism that they are convinced they can go it alone, or at least with their mate and children in tow. Communities are bound by mutual need. If we assume that we don't need anyone, then we are not part of the community. And divided we are conquered by the more powerful. These days they make our captivity pretty comfortable, and a lot of the time we can forget we live in bondage. We lap up the narratives of virtuality—virtual friends, virtual pets, virtual communities—without seeming to notice that they are virtually useless compared to the real thing.

Authorities and Adepts

Despite rampant individualism, we cannot override the fact that we are a social species. We arrange our society in a uniquely human way, but still retain some features in common with other primates. And I think this insight may point to a weakness in Foucault's attempts to problematise society. We can't really live without it. Which is why we accept virtuality as ersatz society.

Many of us accept authority figures (alpha-individuals) and feel more secure having one around. In effect we like someone to tell us how to be individualistic, like teenagers who dress alike to symbolise their rebellion against conformity. Some of us prefer to try to unseat authority figures whether in an attempt at wresting actual power from them (pretty rare) or in a kind of impotent passive rage against authority generally (pretty common). Some of us have an ideology which is against authority figures on principle, like eternal teenagers. There's a lot of pressure on us to be neotonous, to remain childish because, like children, people with childish ideologies are easy to manipulate. A surprising number of Buddhists seem to be against any authority figure and any form of collectivity.

Every domain has it's authorities and adepts. And the spiritual domain is no exception. Spiritual long referred to that which pertained to the church. 200 years ago adding the adjective spiritual to nouns and verbs was how the Church marked out its demesne. In that tradition becoming an authority in the church was relatively arduous. Priests were often the only educated people in their milieu. The great universities were founded to educate priests during the so-called Dark Ages. However with the modern decline of the power of the church to impose standards and the rise of religious alternatives (particularly the freelance gurus of India), the adjective spiritual has been co-opted by non-church groups. The demesne of spiritual and all it's power and resources is now hotly contested. Anyone can become a spiritual authority or a spiritual adept with no effort or qualification. The demesne is haunted by frauds and hoaxes, but this seems not to slow down the commerce in all things spiritual.

In Buddhism we have a great deal of anxiety over authenticity and authority. We see a lot of ink spilt over whether our scriptures are authentic while modern scholarship, including my own, is constantly casting doubts. If the texts are authentic, then just what authentically are they? Similarly Buddhists enunciate lineages at great length in the hope that this guarantees the authoritativeness of authorities. However, Sangharakshita has shown that lineage is no guarantee of anything: see Forty-Three Years Ago.

This is not a new priority, but visible at all stages of Buddhist literature. The question of who is a spiritual authority and who is a spiritual adept, and just what that entitles them to say and do are constantly under review. It's always difficult to tell. (See How To Spot an Arahant). And of course Western Buddhism has been more or less constantly dealing with the problem of authority figures who defy norms and break rules. It is notable that commentators seem to fall back on Judeo-Christian notions of justice when this happens. A crisis of behaviour almost always becomes a crisis of faith and the faith we grew up with very often shapes our opinions more than our convert beliefs.

Even the individualist tends to have a "spiritual teacher" someone who is both spiritual themselves in some exemplary fashion and who who is an expert in spiritual practice and thus able to oversee the practice of others. This relationship may be personal or be at arm's length through books and videos. And we may hedge our bets by picking and choosing from spiritual teachers of various kinds. But we still look to someone to define what is spiritual: what we should believe, and what we should do about it. And this gives those who play the role of teacher considerable power. Indeed with direct disciples who abdicate personal authority and decision making to a guru, the problem is even more acute. It's interested that despite early flirtations with spiritual masters, we now tend to follow teachers instead. The obedience implicit in the disciple/master relationship doesn't sit well with individualism and has been famously disastrous on a number of occasions. Being a celibate teacher in a sexually promiscuous society seems to be an especially fraught situation.

I've already touched on the Foucaldian critique of the inner self as envisaged by the Enlightenment. My take on this is that the Enlightenment self, characterised especially by rationality, is a feature of Neolibertarianism via its Utilitarian roots. Utilitarianism is caught up in the Victorian over-emphasis on a particular kind of rationality. We see it in the "rational choice" models of economics, which let the developed world's economies fall into a major recession with (almost) no warning in 2008. I've been critical of this view of rationality in my writing e.g. Reasoning and Beliefs; or Facts and Feelings. Foucault's study of the fate of the irrational person in post-Enlightenment society traces the ascendency of this view. and particularly examines the power exercised over those who seem to be unreasonable or irrational. We can contrast this with the Romanticisation of spirit and the self in reaction to an overly mechanical view of the universe.

The political side of spiritual can be seen in this light: that it represents an exertion of power to control the individual, and that individual consents to be controlled. By obeying norms we find belonging. Belonging is essential to the well-being of human beings, and has always provided one of the strongest levers against the individual: conform or be excluded. In a hunter-gatherer society conformity conveys benefits that outweigh the costs, but in a settled society (with cities etc) the dynamic is far more complex.

In Libertarian ideology this is turned on it's head. In the Libertarian view no benefit can outweigh the cost of conformity. The Neolibertarian ideology is one adopted by the 1% of rich and powerful. It says that everyone is free to make a profit. The fine print however is pure Mercantilism: the person only has value to the extent that they contribute to profit making. Self-employment is fine, even admirable, but unemployment is immoral. In this ideology arguing for more taxation on profit is irrational since it interferes with profit making; in the jargon it's anti-business. The purest form of profit making is the effortless increase in wealth obtained from owning land that goes up in value due to external factors. Profit without effort. It's almost a religion in the UK and almost completely exempt from taxation (compared to wages and profits). To some extent the individualism of SBNR partakes of this ideology. Let no one interfere with my spirituality. Magazines are full of ads promising spiritual attainment with no effort. And there is a spiritual 1% living in relative luxury on the proceeds of this economy.

Attempts to break out of this thought control often take the form of what we in the Triratna Order call therapeutic blasphemy, where one deliberately breaks taboos, such as prohibitions against blasphemy, in order to loosen the grip of a lifetime of conditioning in Christian values. Sangharakshita used this example of positive blasphemy in his 1978 essay Buddhism and Blasphemy (Reprinted in The Priceless Jewel [pdf], 1978), written in response to conviction of the editor and publishers of the Gay News for "blasphemous libel" in 1977 (see BBC summary of the case). The use of antinomian and transgressive practices in Buddhist tantra dating from perhaps the 8th century onwards appears to have a similar purpose.

One might think that Buddhism at least would inform a better kind of government, that countries where Buddhism is the state religion would tend to exemplify Buddhist values. However, the opposite is more often true.

Buddhist Politics

Think for a moment about the forms of government associated with nominally Buddhist countries. Traditional Asian Kingdoms and Empires have been, like their Occidental counterparts, harshly repressive, imperialistic, racist and rigidly hierarchical. There is nothing particularly attractive about the forms of government that have developed in the Buddhist world.

Today the three main Theravāda countries, Sri Lanka, Burma, and Thailand, are all run by authoritarian, repressive governments. Either military governments as in Burma, or militaristic. Thailand declared martial law last month.

Mahāyāna countries have not produced more compassionate forms of government on the whole: China, North Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Tibet. Bhutan might be the only exception, but the peasants there really are brainwashed into seeing their royal family as deities to whom they owe fealty, obedience and obeisance. A form of political control once employed by the Tibetans as well. There's nothing particularly admirable about virtually enslaving the peasant population in order to support a huge number of unproductive men. A system that produced a major shortage of marriageable men, and yet such poverty than brothers often clubbed together to share one wife. Of course one cannot condone the Chinese invasion of Tibet on those grounds. The brutal repression of the Tibetans and the widespread destruction of their culture has been heartbreaking. But pre-invasion Tibet is Romanticised by Westerners (this is the theme of Don Lopez's Prisoners of Shangrila which is worth reading).

For those who hope to implement Buddhist control of Western countries the question is this: based on which historical precedent do you see religious government of our countries as a good thing? Churchill did say

"Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

The governments of nominally Buddhist countries are amongst the most repressive in the world, no matter what period in history we look at. In fact Buddhism makes for poor politics precisely because it is traditionally disengaged. And the engaged part of engaged-Buddhism is coming from external sources. A Green government might be a good thing, but one that values the natural world would mostly likely be better than any form of Buddhist government. No one who denies the reality of people or suffering should have access to power over people.

Conclusion

We'll probably never get rid of spiritual in Buddhist circles, certainly not on my say so. Religious people use the religious jargon of the day, just as the authors of the early Buddhist texts used Brahmanical and Jain jargon. Some times the re-purposing of a word works out, sometimes not. Brāhmaṇa retained its Vedic meaning and caste associations despite attempts to assimilate it, while karman or dharman became naturalised and have now even been Anglicised. The argument over whether or not Buddhism is a religion, or a philosophy, or a spiritual tradition, or whatever, goes on.

And old habits die hard. Spiritual is a word we use partly as a lure, a familiar term for those who are dissatisfied with ordinary life. "Mundane life sucks? Try our all new/old spiritual life, guaranteed 25% more satisfying! We're so confident that you don't get your money back." Spiritual is a handle on what we do that outsiders can grasp and given the jargon laden claptrap some of us come out with, something familiar comes as a relief. It provides what Frank Zappa used to call Conceptual Continuity.

But all of this goes on in an economy of power. Spiritual discourses aim to shape a particular kind of subject for a particular kind of purpose. And the explicit purpose, spiritual liberation, may mislead us into thinking that by taking on the discourses of spirituality we are becoming more free. In fact very few people achieve liberation and most of us are in bondage. Unfortunately the politics of the day is easily able to exploit the myth of liberation to better enslave us. Power exploits our naive dualism and over-concern with the mental or immaterial, to enslave our bodies.

To some extent we suffer from "the world that has been pulled over our eyes to distract us from the truth." This line from The Matrix draws on Gnostic ideas about the world. In fact the rampant escapism of spirituality does make it easier to create compliant, obedient subjects who work hard to create obscene profits for the 1%. Like the middle-classes who facilitated Merchantilism, the cadre of disciples channel power within communities.

But it's not the end of the world. There are benefits to being religious and a member of a religious organisation. Buddhism's lessons on life are actually pretty helpful a lot of the time. The practices are worth pursuing in their own right. It's just that ideally we'd all think about our lives a bit more. And especially reflect on where our views come from.

~~oOo~~

"Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsym-pathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

cosmicorigins.com

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the great memes of science fiction and as our lives come to resemble scifi stories ever more, we can't help by speculate what an AI will be like. Hollywood aside seem to imagine that AIs will be more or less like us because we aim to make them like us. And as part of that we will make them with affection for, or at least obedience to us. Asimov's Laws of Robotics are the most well known expression of this. And even if they end up turning against us, it will be for understandable reasons.

Extra-terrestrial aliens on the other hand will be incomprehensible. "It's like Jim, but not at we know it." We're not even sure that we'll recognise alien life when we see it. Not even sure that we have a definition of life that will cover aliens. It goes without saying that aliens will behave in unpredictable ways and will almost certainly be hostile to humanity. We won't understand them minds or bodies and we will survive only by accident (War of the Worlds, Alien) or through Promethean cunning (Footfall, Independence Day). Aliens will surprise us, baffle us, and confuse us (though hidden in this narrative is a projection of fears both rational and irrational).

In this essay I will argue that we have this backwards: in fact AI will be incomprehensible to us, while aliens will be hauntingly familiar. This essay started off as a thought experiment I was conducting about aliens and a comment on a newspaper story on AI. Since then it's become a bit more topical as a computer program known as a chatbot was trumpeted as having "passed the Turing Test for the first time". This turned out to be a rather inflated version of events. In reality a chatbot largely failed to convince the majority of people that it was a person despite a minor cheat that lowered the bar. The chatbot was presented as a foreigner with poor English and was still mostly unconvincing.

But here's the thing. Why do we expect AI to be able to imitate a human being? What points of reference would a computer program ever have to enable it to do so?

Robots Will Never Be Like Us.

There are some fundamental errors in the way that AI people think about intelligence that will begin to put limits on their progress if they haven't already. The main one being that they don't see that human consciousness is embodied. Current AI models tacitly subscribe to a strong form of Cartesian mind/body dualism: they believe that they can create a mind without a body. There's now a good deal of research to show that our minds are not separable from our bodies. I've probably cited four names more than any other when considering consciousness: George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Antonio Damasio, and Thomas Metzinger. What these thinkers collectively show is that our minds are very much tied to our bodies. Our abstract thoughts are voiced using on metaphors drawn from how we physically interact with the world. Their way of understanding consciousness posits the modelling of our physical states as the basis for simple consciousness. How does a disembodied mind do that? We can only suppose that it cannot.

One may argue that a robot body is like a human body. And that an embodied robot might be able to build a mind that is like ours through it's robot body. But the robot is not using it's brain primarily to sustain homoeostasis mainly because it does not rely on homoeostasis for continued existence. But even other mammals don't have minds like ours. Because of shared evolutionary history we might share some basic physiological responses to gross stimuli that are good adaptations for survival, but their thoughts are very different because their bodies and particularly their sensory apparatus are different. An arboreal creature is just not going to structure their world the way a plains dweller or an aquatic animal does. Is there any reason to suppose that a dolphin constructs the same kind of world as we do? And if not then what about a mind with no body at all? Maybe we could communicate with dolphin with difficulty and a great deal of imagination on out part. But with a machine? It will be "Shaka, when the walls fell." For the uninitiated this is a reference to a classic of first-contact scifi story. The aliens in question communicate in metaphors drawn exclusively from their own mythology, making them incomprehensible to outsiders, except Picard and his crew of course (there is a long, very nerdy article about this on The Atlantic Website). Compare Dan Everett's story of learning to communicate with the Pirahã people of Amazonia in his book Don't Sleep There Are Snakes.

Although Alan Turing was a mathematical genius he was not a genius of psychology. And he made a fundamental error in his Turing Test in my opinion. Our Theory of Mind is tuned to assume that other minds are like ours. If we can conceive any kind of mind independent of us, then we assume that it is like us. This has survival value, but it also means we invent anthropomorphic gods, for example. A machine mind is not going to be at all like us, but that doesn't stop us unconsciously projecting human qualities onto it. Hypersensitive Agency Detection (as described by Justin L Barrett) is likely to mean that even if a machine does pass the Turing Test then we will have over estimated the extent to which it is an agent.

The Turing Test is thus a flawed model for evaluating another mind because of limitations in our equipment for assessing other minds. The Turing Test assumes that all humans are good judges of intelligence, but we aren't. We are the beings who see faces everywhere, and can get caught up in the lives of soap opera characters and treat rain clouds as intentional agents. We are the people who already suspect that GIGO computers have minds of their own because they breakdown in incomprehensible ways at inconvenient times and that looks like agency to us! (Is there a good time for a computer to break?). The fact that any inanimate object can seem like an intentional agent to us, disqualifies us as judges of the Turing Test.

AI's, even those with robot bodies, will sense themselves and the world in ways that will always fundamentally different to us. We learn about cause and effect from the experience of bringing our limbs under conscious control, by grabbing and pushing objects. We learn about the physical parameters of our universe the same way. Will a robot really understand in the same way? Even if we set them up to learn heuristically through electronic senses and a computer simulation of a brain, they will learn about the world in a way that is entirely different to the way we learned about it. They will never experience the world as we do. AIs will always be alien to us.

All life on the planet is the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Good luck simulating that in a way that is not detectable as a simulation. At present we can't even convincingly simulate a single celled organism. Life is incredibly complex as this 1:1 million scale model of a synapse (right) demonstrates.

Aliens Will Be Just Like Us.

Scifi stories like to make aliens as alien as possible, usually by making them irrational and unpredictable (though this is usually underlain by a more comprehensible premise - see below).

In fact we live in a universe with limitations: 96 naturally occurring elements, with predictable chemistry; four fundamental forces; and so on. Yes, there might we weird quantum stuff going on, but in bodies made of septillions (10²³) of atoms we'd never know about it without incredibly sophisticated technology. On the human scale we live in a more or less Newtonian universe.

Life as we know it involves exploiting energy gradients and using chemical reactions to move stuff where it wouldn't go on its own. While the gaps in our knowledge still technically allow for vitalistic readings of nature, it does remove the limitations imposed on life by chemistry: elements have strictly limited behaviour the basics of which can be studied and understood in a few years. It takes a few more years to understand all the ways that chemistry can be exploited, and we'll never exhausted all of the possibilities of combining atoms in novel ways. But the possibilities are comprehensible and new combinations have predictable behaviour. Many new drugs are now modelled on computers as a first step.

So the materials and tools available to solve problems, and in fact most of the problems themselves, are the same everywhere in the universe. A spaceship is likely to be made of metals. Ceramics is another option, but they require even higher temperatures to produced and tend to be brittle. Ceramics sophisticated enough to do the job suggest a sophisticated metal-working culture in the background. Metal technology is so much easier to develop. Iron is one of the most versatile and abundant metals: other mid-periodic table metallic elements (aluminium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, etc) make a huge variety of chemical combinations, but for pure metal and useful alloys, iron is king. Iron alloys give the combination of chemical stability, strength to weight ratio, ductility, and melting point to make a space ship. So our aliens are most likely going to come from a planet with abundant metals, probably iron, and their space ship is going to make extensive use of metals. The metals aliens use will be completely pervious to our analytical techniques.

Now in the early stages of working iron one needs a fairly robust body: one has to work a bellows, wield tongs and hammer, and generally be pretty strong. That puts a lower limit on the kind of body that an alien will have, though strength of gravity on the alien planet will vary this parameter. Very gracile or very small aliens probably wouldn't make it into space because they could not have got through the blacksmithing phase to more sophisticated metal working techniques. A metal working culture also means an ability to work together over long periods of time for quite abstract goals like the creation of alloys composed of metals extracted from ores buried in the ground. Thus our aliens will be social animals by necessity. Simple herd animals lack the kind of initiative that it takes to develop tools, so they won't be as social as cows or horses. Too little social organisation and the complex tasks of mining and smelting enough metal would be impossible. So no solitary predators in space either.

The big problem with any budding space program is getting off the ground. Gravity and the possibilities of converting energy put more practical limitations on the possibilities. Since chemical reactions are going to be the main source of energy and these are fixed, gravity will be the limiting factor. The mass of the payload has to be not too large to be to costly or just too heavy, and it must be large enough to fit a being in (a being at least the size of a blacksmith). If the gravity of a n alien planet was much higher than ours it would make getting into space impractical - advanced technology might theoretically overcome this, but with technology one usually works through stages. No early stage means no later stages. If the gravity of a planet was much lower than ours then the density would make large concentrations of metals unlikely. It would be easier to get into space, but without the materials available to make it possible and sustainable. Also the planet would struggle to hold enough atmosphere to make it long-term liveable (like Mars). So alien visitors are going to come from a planet similar to ours and will have solved similar engineering problems with similar materials.

Scifi writers and enthusiasts have imagined all kinds of other possibilities. Silicon creatures were a favourite for a while. Silicon (Si) sits immediately below carbon in the periodic table and has similar chemistry: it forms molecules with a similar fourfold symmetry. I've made the silicon analogue (SiH₄) of methane (CH₄) in a lab: it's highly unstable and burns quickly in the presence of oxygen or any other moderately strong oxidising agent (and such agents are pretty common). The potential for life using chemical reactions in a silicon substrate is many orders of magnitude less flexible than that based on carbon and would of necessity require the absolute elimination of oxygen and other oxidising agents from the chemical environment. Silicon tends to oxidise to silicon-dioxide SiO₂ and then become extremely inert. Breaking down silicon-dioxide requires heating to melting point (2,300°C) in the presence of a powerful reducing agent, like pure carbon. In fact silicon-dioxide, or silica, is one of the most common substances on earth partly because silicon and oxygen themselves are so common. The ratio of these two is related to the fusion processes that precede a supernova and again are dictated by physics. Where there is silicon, there will be oxygen in large amounts and they will form sand, not bugs. CO₂ is also quite inert, but much easier to break apart, which is lucky for us as plants do this to create sugars and oxygen.

One of the other main memes is beings of "pure energy", which are of course beings of pure fantasy. Again we have the Cartesian idea of disembodied consciousness at play. Just because we can imagine it, does not make it possible. But even if we accept that the term "pure energy" is meaningful, the problem is entropy. It is the large scale chemical structures of living organisms that prevent the energy held in the system from dissipating out into the universe. The structures of living things, particularly cells, hold matter and energy together against the demands of the laws of thermodynamics. That's partly what makes life interesting. "Pure energy" is free to dissipate and thus could not form the structures that make life interesting.

When NASA scientists were trying to design experiments to detect life on Mars for the Viking mission, they invited James Lovelock to advise them. He realised that one didn't even need to leave home. All one needed to so was measure the composition of gases in a planet's atmosphere, which one could do with a telescope and a spectrometer. If life is going to be recognisable, then it will do what it does here on earth: shift the composition of gases away from the thermodynamic and chemical equilibrium. In our case the levels of atmospheric oxygen require constant replenishment to stay so high. It's a dead give away! And the atmosphere of Mars is at thermal and chemical equilibrium. Nothing is perturbing it from below. Of course NASA went to Mars anyway, and went back, hoping to find vestigial life or fossilised signs of life that had died out. But the atmosphere tells us everything we need to know.

The Nerdist

So where are all the aliens visitors? (This question is known as the Fermi Paradox after the Enrico Fermi who first asked it). Recall that as far as we know the limit of the speed of light invariably applies to macro objects like spacecraft - yes, theoretically, tachyons are possible, but you can't build a spacecraft out of them! Recently some physicists have been exploring an idea that would allow us to warp space and travel faster than light, but it involves "exotic" matter than no one has ever seen and is unlikely to exist. Aliens are going to have to travel at sub-light speeds. And this would take subjective decades. And because of Relativity time passes slower on a fast moving object, centuries would pass on their home planet. Physics is a harsh mistress.

These are some of the limitations that have occurred to me. There are others. What this points to are a very limited set of circumstances in which an alien species could take to space and come to visit us. The more likely an alien is to get into space, the more like us they are likely to be. The universality of physics and the similarity of the problems that need solving would inevitably lead to parallelism in evolution, just as it has done on earth.

Who is More Like Us?

Unlike scifi, the technology that allows us to meet aliens will be strictly limited by physics. There will be no magic action at a distance on the macro scale (though, yes, individual subatomic particles can subvert this); there will be no time travel, no faster than light travel; no materials impervious to analysis; no cloaking devices, no matter transporters, and no handheld disintegrators. Getting into space involves a set of problems that are common to any being on any planet that will support life, and there are a limited set of solutions to those problems. Any being that evolves to be capable of solving those problems will be somewhat familiar to us. Aliens will mostly be comprehensible and recognisable, and do things on more or less the same scale that we do. As boring as that sounds, or perhaps as frightening depending on your view of humanity.

And AI will forever be a simulation that might seem like us superficially, but won't be anything like us fundamentally. When we imagine that machine intelligences will be like us, we are telling the Pinocchio story (and believing it). This tells us more about our own minds, than it does about the minds of our creations. If only we would realise that we're looking in a mirror and not through a window. All these budding creators of disembodied consciousness ought to read Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly. Of course many other dystopic or even apocalyptic stories have been created around this theme, some of my favourite science fiction movies revolve around what goes wrong when machines become sentient. But Shelly set the standard before computers were even conceived of; even before Charles Babbage invented his Difference Engine. She grasped many of the essential problems involved in creating life and in dealing with otherness (she was arguably a lot more insightful than her ne'er-do-well husband).

Lurking in the background of the story of AI is always some version of Vitalism: the idea that matter is animated by some élan vital which exists apart from it; mind apart from body; spirit as opposed to matter. This is the dualism that haunts virtually everyone I know. And we seem to believe that if we manage to inject this vital spirit into a machine that the substrate will be inconsequential, that matter itself is of no consequence (which is why silicon might look viable despite it's extremely limited chemistry; or a computer might seem a viable place for consciousness to exist). It is the spirit that makes all the difference. AI researchers are effectively saying that they can simulate the presence of spirit in matter with no reference to the body's role in our living being. And this is bunk. It's not simply a matter of animating dead matter, because matter is not dead in the way that Vitalists think it is; and nor is life consistent with spirit in the way they think it is.

The fact that such Vitalist myths and Cartesian Duality still haunt modern attempts at knowledge gathering (and AI is nothing if not modern) let alone modern religions, suggests that the need for an ongoing critique. And it means there is still a role for philosophers in society despite what Stephen Hawking and some scientists say (see also Sean Carroll's essay "Physicists Should Stop Saying Silly Things about Philosophy"). If we can fall into such elementary fallacies at the high-end of science then scientists ought to be employing philosophers on their teams to dig out their unspoken assumptions and expose their fallacious thinking.

~~oOo~~

What could this possibly be?

There's an old story from India that seems to crop up everywhere. In Buddhist literature it is found in the Udāna (Paṭhamanānātitthiya sutta) and possibly elsewhere. The story goes, that a group of men blind from birth (jaccandhā) were rounded up and asked to participate in an experiment. They are told "this is an elephant" (‘ediso, jaccandhā, hatthī’ti) and allowed to touch part of it. Then asked to describe "an elephant" they assert that it is either like a pot (the blind man who felt the elephants' head), a winnowing basket (ear), a ploughshare (tusk), a plough (trunk), a granary (body), a pillar (foot), a mortar (back), a pestle (tail) or a brush (tip of the tail).

The parable is supposed to illustrate a principle something like "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". It says that we get a hold of part of something and claim to know everything, but we're like the blind men who don't see the big picture. The parable ends there, but it has to because the story would fall apart if it didn't. A while ago I noticed that a physicist, whose blog I read, had this as his Twitter profile bio:

If the blind dudes just talked to each other, they would figure out it was an elephant before too long. @seanmcarroll

I bloody love this! I'm so sick of smug religious platitudes and I really love it when someone slam dunks one. Sean is responding to the way the story is typically told, in which the blind men have to identify an unknown animal. But as I say in the Buddhist version the "blind dudes" are told "this is an elephant" and have to describe it. The difference is not crucial.

Part of the reason I love Sean's comment is that I stood right next to an elephant when I was in India in 2004. It was on the road near Kushinagar, where the Buddha is supposed to have died. Elephants are big, smelly animals. If you got a lot of people crowding around an elephant to touch it, the thing would fidget at the least, and probably shuffle it's feet. As a herbivore an elephant not only eats a lot, but it shits a lot. Many times a day. Chances are it dropped a big load of dung while being examined. Maybe it grumbled in low tones. The elephant's handler would have kept up the constant patter of the mahout: an elephant will do as it's told, but it needs a lot of reminding not to just wander off in search of food. And if you'd grown up in India in the time of the texts you'd know exactly what an elephant was like: sight or no sight. No conferring necessary.

And this is the problem with so many of these smug little parables. We who tell or read these stories are supposed to be much cleverer than those people who are in the cross hairs. But the story itself is... (shall we say) unsophisticated. How naive do we have to be to take this tripe seriously?

Even so, Sean Carroll has put his finger on something very important about knowledge that is all too often left completely out of philosophical accounts. We don't live in perpetual isolation from other people. We communicate with them incessantly. A blind man is not of necessity unable to communicate because they can't see.

In the story the elephant is standing still, it makes no sound, has no smell and the blind men get one touch and no chances to confer, and seem to have been kept in isolation for their whole lives. How is this reasonable? It is a poor story designed to make a presupposition sound plausible. Why does everyone nod sagely when they hear this rubbish? Why do they congratulate themselves on not being like the stupid men in the story? The story is self-defeating - it displays the very attitude it is supposed to guard against. To a scientist it's a ludicrous scenario. Scientists work by comparing their observations and coming up with a theory which will explain them all. If the blind men were scientists they'd want to compare notes, to repeat the experiment with another animal and see what happened. If they were presented with various animals at random could they identify which were elephants? And so on.

The Tennis Match.

When I read philosophers of mind talking about subjectivity, I find myself experiencing cognitive dissonance. Of course we can argue about the ontological status of the objects behind our experiences: do they exist, do other people exist? But take the case of a tennis match before a crowd of some 10,000 people. What we observe is that heads turn to follow the ball. They do not turn at random, they do not turn in an uncoordinated way. 10,000 people's heads turn in unison, at the same time, at the same speed, and they do so without any connection between the people. Are those 10,000 people really having a completely different experience? Would they really struggle to describe why they where turning their head to follow the ball?

True each person would have had a unique perspective on the ball, but there is a considerable overlap. Different people might have supported different players. Some might be elated that their player won, or dejected that their player lost. Does the fact that they had different emotional responses to the experience of watching a ball get batted back and forth mean that they saw an entirely different event? Surely it does not.

If we go to a concert with like-minded friends, afterwards we can talk coherently about what we've seen and experienced during the show. We don't usually find that we heard Arvo Pärt while our friends heard Metallica. We hear the same music. We might have noticed different nuances. My friend might have noticed an out of tune French Horn, while I was oblivious. Our attention to the details will depend on many factors, but we see and hear the same performance and can talk coherently about it afterwards. If my friend found a particular passage moving and they describe that to me, I may well have responded differently, but I can relate to my friends account with empathy. Or I might have been moved but not understood why and when my friend articulates their experience I will suddenly experience understanding and know exactly what they mean.

If I go to a comedy film and find myself laughing along with a few hundred other people am I truly cut off from them in my own little bubble? Robin Dunbar (of the Dunbar Numbers fame) has shown that we are 30x more likely to laugh at a film when we are with four people than if we are alone. Laughter is very often a shared experience. Dunbar hypotheses that shared laughter is a sublimation of primate grooming behaviour. Physical grooming in the large group sizes that human beings live in (facilitated by our large neocortex/brain ratio) would take up too much time, so we laughter, dance and sing together which has a similar physiological effect to physical grooming. See Dunbar's new book Human Evolution (highly recommended).

Thus is seems to me that characterising each person as being in an impenetrable bubble is not accurate. For a social animal like a human being, a good part of our experience is shared.

Private Experience vs Public Knowledge

It's sometimes said that our subjective experience is entirely private. But I don't think the examples above would be possible if this were true. So am I now a proponent of morphogenic fields? No! We know about the emotional state of another person through various cues that that other uses to broadcast their state: facial expression, posture, tone of voice, direction of gaze, etc. And we take these cues and use them to build an internal model - if I were to make my own face and body take on the configuration of the other persons face and body, how would that feel? And this is surprisingly accurate. Indeed we very often go one step further and adopt the posture of the other in solidarity. Less dominant individuals will adopt the body language of dominant individuals, and so on.

Human beings are capable of mentalising to a much greater extent than other animals. So for example Shakespeare wrote a story in which he has us believe that Iago convinces Othello that he (Iago) believes that the love Desdemona feels for Roderigo is mutual (and we the audience can understand the first person perspective of each character and how they see all the others). We understand our own minds from a first person perspective. We and many other animals are aware that other individuals also have a first person perspective that is just like ours. This is second order mentalising. But we humans can take this inference to a whole new level. On average humans can manage fifth order mentalising: for example we (1) might think that he (2) thinks that she (3) thinks that they (4) believe the proponent (5) is a liar. But in order to write such a story the author must be able to stretch to at least one extra order, they must be able to put themselves in our shoes as we take in the story. This is part of why Shakespeare is a remarkable writer, he has an extraordinary ability to see other points of view. The best story tellers place us inside the head of another human being and allow us to experience the world from their point of view. It's a remarkable gift!

We can easily comprehend the inner world of another person, especially if their identity is shaped by the same cultural factors as ours, but even with humans of very different cultures to a large degree. The capacity is not present in very young children but develops by about age 5. When the capacity does not develop, as in Aspergers Syndrome, it can be very painful to know that other people have inner lives but not to have easy access to them. It can be a source of considerable anxiety. Which is not to say that people who cannot assess the inner states of other person don't have inner lives themselves. They do.

One of the interesting features of the Buddhist tradition is that it seems to be understood that knowledge follows from experience. Far from being ineffable for example, the Spiral Path texts suggest that from the experience of liberation (vimutti) comes the knowledge of liberation (vimuttiñāna). I've noted in the past that Richard Gombrich makes this distinction also. The experience itself might be ineffable, but having had that experience we can say what it is like to have had it. We can say a lot about how the experience changed us, about how we feel about other things now we've had that experience. And this is why early Buddhist texts are full of descriptions of what it is like to have had the experience of bodhi.

In a recent talk at the University of Cambridge philosopher John Searle made an interesting distinction between ontology and epistemology (Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology). He said:

"The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemologically objective science of that domain".

So conscious experience is ontologically subjective. Our first person perspective is internal to our own mind. By contrast molecules, mountains and tectonic plates are ontologically objective, they undoubtedly exist independently of our minds. If I say "Van Gogh is a better painter than Gauguin" that is an epistemologically subjective statement. It's something I think I know, but it is an aesthetic judgement that others may disagree with. However if I say "Van Gogh died in France", then this is epistemologically objective - it's knowledge that is external to me, something that everyone knows and there is no disagreement over.

Searle says that the argument that we can never study the mind scientifically is mixing up ontology and epistemology. This is a fallacy of ambiguity. We regularly use our ontological subjectivity to create a class of phenomena about which we can then make statements that are epistemology objective. There are many examples of this kind of phenomenon. Searle gives the examples of money, property, government, and cocktail parties.

Computation (2+2=4) is another ontologically subjective phenomenon about which we can make epistemologically objective statements. If I have two bananas and you give me two more, then objectively I have four bananas. As a written statement this is epistemologically objective, despite the fact that as a mental operation perceiving bananas, counting and addition are entirely subjective. Despite the subjective nature of these mental operations, there is no barrier to you having objective knowledge of what's just happened in my mind.

Searle uses the example of a falling object. If you drop a pen onto the floor it follows a path which defines a mathematical function: d = ½gt² (where g = the acceleration due to gravity, t = time and d = distance). But nature does not do computation. The pen is simply a mass that travels through space. And close to the earth space is bent by the mass of the earth (the pen's mass also bends space, but not nearly as much because the effect is proportional to the quantity and density of matter). The effect looks just like a force of attraction. And that effect is described by the equation given above. But the universe doesn't calculate the distance. Calculation, computation, is purely subjective. Never-the-less the statement d = ½gt² gives us objective knowledge (it allows us to subjectively make objectively accurate predictions), it's independent of our point of view.

Thus, according to Searle, the argument that the subjectivity of consciousness precludes any objective knowledge of it, is simply a logical fallacy that stems from confusing ontology and epistemology. And this means that consciousness is not ineffable in the way that some Buddhists argue that it is.

I would add to this that it's now possible, through stimulating individual neurons to provoke experiences. We discovered this during surgery on the brain. In some forms of brain surgery the patient remains conscious. If a tumour is in a delicate place the surgeon may want the patient to report what happens when a particular part of the brain is stimulated so as to avoid damaging a crucial function. What patients report under these conditions is entirely dependent on which part of the brain is being stimulated, at times which particular neuron: the results can be memories, sensory hallucinations (the illusion of sensory stimulation coming from direct neuron stimulation), motor activity, and so on. One could spend hours trawling through the search results of the search "awake during brain surgery". It's fascinating.

Conclusion

We need to think critically about parables that smack of platitude. Are they telling us something important, or are they, as in the case of the elephant and the blind man, simply religious propaganda that in fact blind us to greater truths? The whole arena of discussion about consciousness is fraught with difficulty. If Searle is right then there is widespread confusion over epistemology and ontology (which is one of the problems that plagues Buddhist philosophy too). Thinking clearly under these conditions can be exceedingly difficult.

It's true that an elephant, like any complex object of the senses, is a beast of many parts. It does have a ear like a winnowing basket, tusks like ploughshares, a trunk like a plough, a body like a granary, a leg/foot like a pillar, a back like a mortar, a tail like a pestle, and the tip of its tail is like a brush. Ears, tusks, trunk, legs, body, and tail all contribute to the animal we call "elephant". If we know what an elephant looks like we know we're looking at one from the slightest clue. Hence the picture accompanying this essay. I don't expect any of my readers to have any difficulty in identifying the elephant in the picture from its legs alone, even if they've never seen a real elephant.

We need not be like the blind men in the story and remain ignorant. We don't live in isolated bubbles. If we just compare notes on experience we come to a collective understanding. Even if there were plausibly a dozen people blind from birth in Sāvathī and even if plausibly they had never before had any experience of an elephant, the conversation they had would have revealed the bigger picture. In a sense this is what is implied by Mercier & Sperber's account of reasoning: reasoning is something we do together and on our own we're rather poor at it (see An Argumentative Theory of Reason). There's no a priori reason why we cannot compare notes, share knowledge and come to a greater understanding. And even if the domain is subjective, by comparing notes we do know that there are similarities which allow us to gain objective knowledge of that subjective domain.

I know some people like to play up the differences and discontinuities, but that story on its own is incomplete and partial. It's the kind of thing the elephant story warns us about. We always only have partial knowledge. Claims to full or ultimate knowledge are far more likely to come from religieux than scientists. Yes, experience is subjective, but this does not mean we can have no objective knowledge about experience. We can and do have partial objective knowledge about experience - else I could not expect anyone to read these words and find them meaningful. To my mind, religious stories like the elephant parable just get in the way of understanding.

~~oOo~~

Soon after I became involved in the Triratna Movement (the FWBO as was) in 1994, I remember speaking to one of the Dharmacārins about my experience with my father's corpse three years earlier (I mentioned this in my earlier essay on the Life's Breath). In response to my observation that "there was something missing" from Dad's corpse, he replied that what was missing was "consciousness". In retrospect its not at all clear what he meant by that. However, like many of my (now) colleagues in the Order he was particularly influenced by the Tibetan Book of the Dead or Bardo Tödröl (TBOTD). The TBOTD is openly Vitalist and it is "consciousness" that makes the passage through the bardo. Consciousness is in scare-quotes because I'm not entire sure what is meant and going on early Buddhist ideas it cannot be vijñāna, even though I suspect that it's vijñāna that is meant. In all early Buddhist models vijñāna is an event rather than an entity.

Vitalism and the Interim State.

In the story of the TBOTD, one's "consciousness" leaves the body, hangs around for a bit and then goes through a series of "experiences" (the bardo of becoming) before either being liberated or being reborn in one of the realms of rebirth. Experiences also has to go in scare quotes because the standard Buddhist model of cognition contact relies on the āyatanas and these rely on the nāmarūpa. Nāmarūpa is widely understood to mean a human body equipped with sensory faculties and a mind.

In the bardo between death and life, which can last 49 days, the consciousness appears to have identity and faculties, it is a being, an entity in every respect, except that it lacks a material body. Thus the book is not only Vitalist, but eternalist as well. I suspect that the popularity of the TBOTD is that it forms an interface for the Vitalist views we inherited from Christianity (the idea that each person has a soul that survives death) and the Buddhist view of no-self which is so often interpreted to mean that "there is no self".

Nor are Tibetans the only Buddhists who accept an antarabhāva - an interval between death and rebirth (literally, an in-between or interim state; a liminal existence). Even some Theravādins find the idea attractive even though Theravāda orthodoxy rejects any interim between death and rebirth. See for example Sujato's exploration of the in-between state, where he says:

"From this we can conclude that the Buddha, following ideas current in his time – for Vacchagotta was a non-Buddhist wanderer (paribbājaka) – accepted that there was some kind of interval between one life and the next. "

Sujato relies on a self-published study of early Buddhist texts by Piya Tan: 'Is Rebirth Immediate? A study of Canonical Sources.' Tan, a prolific translator and commentator working outside mainstream ecclesiastical and academic establishments, takes the sparse textual nods towards an interim state and combines it with Vitalist accounts of so-called out-of-body (OBE) and near-death experiences (NDE) to find confirmation of the reality an interim state. Here we see the dangers of uncritical emic approaches to religion. Tan has an explicitly and uncritically Vitalist view and thus, with all due respect, the fact that he finds a Vitalist reading of NDE and OBE convincing is not a reason to accept his conclusion. On the contrary it ought to make us suspicious.

We can set aside the Vitalist reading of out-of-body experiences (OBE). They are dealt with in detail by Thomas Metzinger in his book The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self.Adopting a Vitalist interpretation of such experiences does not account for the phenomenology of OBEs. Metzinger provides a thorough, often first-person, account of OBE's. He highlights faults in Vitalist interpretations, while his Representationalist account provides a deeper understanding of both the phenomena and the mechanisms involved. The fact that Metzinger is able to apply his theory to induce the experience (and variations on it) in a laboratory (where he works with neuroscientist Olaf Blanke) suggests that his is the better explanation by quite a wide margin. The OBE is best understood as a breakdown in the integration of the streams of information that go to make up our first person perspective - the felt sense of self, becomes disconnected from the visual sense of self, and we make sense of how this feels by saying that we float above our body. There is no doubt that the experience is genuine, vivid and compelling. But the Vitalist explanation doesn't do as good a job as the Representationalist explanation.

The mechanisms of near death experiences (NDE) are hotly debated, as is the definition of "death". There is almost no evidence of what is actually happening physically during the experience and the fact is that only about 10% of people whose hearts stop report such experiences. In all likelihood a combination of physical factors such as anoxia contribute to the NDE. As with other mystical experiences the interpretation depends on the outlook of the interpreter. People of various religions claim that near-death experiences confirm their religious beliefs suggesting that the interpretation of the experience by the person having it is culturally determined. The parallel with OBE suggests we should be looking to neurophysiology for an explanation.

Tan also cites Ian Stevenson. I've dealt with the flaws in the methods of one of Stevenson's colleagues, Dr Jim Tucker (in Rebirth and the Scientific Method), and the Skeptic's Dictionary provides a succinct critique of Stevenson himself. I think Buddhists ought to think twice about citing Dr Stevenson et al because what they seem to show the same being reincarnating again and again in the different bodies. In other words, Stevenson's work supports the idea of an ātman inhabiting different bodies. I'm surprised that so few Buddhists seem able to get beyond the fallacies and biases and assess this work critically from a Buddhist point of view. When religieux cite science as proof of their supernatural beliefs we should always be deeply suspicious. Science inevitably disproves supernatural beliefs. Which is part of what makes Naturalism so compelling as a worldview.

Which brings us to the few hints at an anatarabhāva in the Pāḷi suttas. Some of the references are dubious at best. The infamous reference to the gandhabba in the Mahātaṇhasaṅkhaya Sutta (M 38) and the Assalāyana Sutta (M 93) is open to all kinds of interpretations. No one really knows what it means. Tan translates as "being-to-be-born" but we have no idea why or how the word would mean that. My own opinion is that gandhabba here is an early typo for gabbha (Skt garbha) meaning "embryo", but the truth is that no one knows. Only a Vitalist would read it as "being-to-be-born" and we would class this as a form of eternalism similar to the pudgalavāda. However later in his text Tan equates gandhabba with sambhavesī which is, as he says, a rare future active participle meaning 'to/will be born'. For example in the Karanīya Metta Sutta we find the line:

Bhūtā va sambhavesī va, sabbasattā bhavantu sukhitattā.
born or will be born, may all beings have happiness.

But there's no need here to propose that sambhavesī means or even implies "in an interim state" unless we already believe that this is what it means. The clear intention here is beings who were born in the past (alive and dead) and beings which will be born in the future. There's nothing spooky about this. I don't have to believe in an interim state, or any afterlife belief, to think that human beings will be born in the future. And yet Tan concludes: "As such, sambhavesī here clearly refers to the intermediate being." No, that is not clear.

More interesting is the Kutūhalasāla Sutta (S 44.9). In Tan's translation of the final paragraph Vacchagotta (of the unanswered questions fame) asks about what fuels (upādāna) a being (satto) between bodies (kāya). The answer is:

“Vaccha, when a being has laid down this body, but is not yet been reborn in another body, it is fuelled by craving, I say. For, Vaccha, at that time, craving is the fuel.”

We know that Vacchagotta is a Brahmin, from his surname if nothing else, and anyway his question is framed in Brahmanical terms (what happens between bodies?). Interestingly the Buddha here also answers him in Brahmanical terms, but gives it a Buddhist kink: between bodies "a being" is based on/fuelled by craving. In the very next, well known, sutta (Ānanda Sutta SN 44.10) Vaccha asks about the self (attan) and whether it exists or not and does not receive an answer. Leaving both him and Ānanda puzzled. What the Kutūhalasāla Sutta represents is a partially digested lump of Brahmin theology with a touch of skilful means. It's inconsistent with the sutta that follows it and with many other suttas. How we deal with inconsistencies is important. The first step is acknowledge that it is an inconsistency, which neither Tan nor Sujato seem to do. Then we have to explain the inconsistency as an inconsistency, not as a standalone feature. Context is important.

What does this mean in practice? The general view in Buddhist texts is that vijñāna is an event that arises on the basis of sense object (ālambana) and sense faculty (indriya); but the models of dependent arising argue that sense faculties arise in dependence on nāma-rūpa, i.e. on the basis of a physical body endowed with mental faculties. To the best of my knowledge no parallel description occurs of the process in the interim state. Certainly craving fuels the process of becoming, so if someone were unshiftably wedded to their views (and Vacchagotta represents this type) then the only thing to do is introduce a Buddhist moral undertone. If someone, like Vacchagotta, believes in disembodied consciousness existing in an interim state and won't be talked out of it, then the best we can do is try to make them see that any existence in saṃsāra is based on craving. The idea that the Buddha always shares his interlocutors views, even when he uses their language, is doubtful. In the Tevijjā Sutta (DN 13) the Buddha claims to know God, God's kingdom and the way to God's kingdom, but he's talking to Brahmins who understand a religious life in these terms. Also other parts of the text are clearly satirical.

Next in his text, Tan tries to get at what a "non-returner" is. Tan cites an argument by Peter Harvey that concludes that "The antarāparinibbāyī must thus be one who attains nibbāna after death and before any rebirth." But these rather abstruse beings, like the Paccekabuddha, are the product of abstract theology rather than being based on experience. Later Theravādin Ābhidhammikas allow no space between cuticitta and paṭisandhi citta. They seem to have rejected the theology inherent in the idea of existence in an interim state, and I imagine they did so because it completely mucks up their unbroken sequence of cittas. Since cittas arising are dependent on nāmarūpa and the interim state demands that we remove rūpa from the equation for a period. Unfortunately the five khandhas are all required for there to be experience. And rūpa refers to a body endowed with senses. So we might accept Tan's view here, but it involves embracing a contradiction that the Theravāda tradition itself later rejected. The non-returner is a hypothetical being invented for the same of completeness of a taxonomy, not because they are observed in the wild.

There are one or two other points in the discussion, but we've got the gist. The Paḷi text readings which supposedly support the idea of an antarabhāva are all rather vague and open to other interpretations. Tan and Sujato happen to chose a Vitalist reading from amongst the possibilities and we suspect that it's because that is what they expect to find. But even if we stipulated the Vitalist reading and ignored the internal contradictions, this would leave us with many unanswered questions: what is this interim state? Where is it? Clearly it is not one of the six realms of rebirth. So one is not reborn in the interim state. and we wonder just what is in the interim state? Why is it not more explicitly dealt with in texts? Why did the Theravāda orthodoxy reject the idea even while other early Buddhist schools embraced it?

I want to be clear that I like both Piya Tan and Sujato and I admire the translation work of Tan. His personal contribution is outstanding. My disagreement with him is focussed on this specific matter of history and doctrine. As far as I can see there is no necessity for an interim state in the Buddhist afterlife. The interim state only complicates an already difficult picture. Why would Buddhists introduce this extra step? The interim state is terrible theology. If anything it makes it karma and rebirth even less workable and less plausible. And this begs the question: why even have an interim state?

Origins for the Interim State?

One answer might be that it derives from the Vedic antarikṣa (= Pāḷi antalikkha). Buddhist cosmology evolved from parodies of Vedic cosmology (and the sense of satire was replaced by credulous acceptance by humourless bhikṣus). In Vedic cosmology (and eschatology) there are three realms: earth (bhumi), heaven (svargaloka) and between them the sky or in-between realm (antarikṣa). Going to the afterlife involved your soul travelling through the antarikṣa in the form of smoke from the funeral pyre and up into heaven. Similarly when one expired in heaven and fell back to earth, sometimes as rain, they fell through the antarikṣa to get back. The Pāli verb cavati 'to fall' metaphorically means 'to die' and in Buddhist texts is often used of devas who fall from the devaloka. Translating devā cavanti 'the gods die' is one of the first exercises in Warder's Introduction to Pali. The Vedic afterlife required each person to traverse the antarikṣa in an immaterial state (as smoke). And this sounds like nothing so much as the Buddhist antarabhāva. The ending -bhāva is often slightly ambiguous but seems to mean 'state' or 'state of being'. If one were in the Vedic antarikṣa, suspended between earth and heaven, then one would be described (temporarily) as antarabhāva. Since we know that Buddhist cosmology is broadly an adaptation of Vedic cosmology it would make sense if Buddhists included the idea of the antarikṣa as well, and we do see the idea of the "sky" in the Pāli equivalent: antalikkha.

Perhaps even more plausible is a relation to the accounts of the afterlife in the Purāṇas. These texts were mostly composed in common era, but are thought to rely on older oral traditions. In the Purāṇic account, after death the departed (preta: literally 'gone before' deriving from pra√i) exists in a subtle form in an interim state for ten or twelve days. The pretas must be fed through performing food sacrifices, where again the fire transforms material food into an immaterial form (smoke) than can be consumed by pretas. Having been sustained in this interim state for the required time, the preta was reborn in heaven (svargaloka). This afterlife mythology is almost certainly the source of the Buddhist pretaloka. Our starving hungry-ghosts, sustained by craving (taṇhupādāna), unable to eat ordinary food, are a caricature of this mainstream Hindu afterlife story. Thus it is not fanciful to suppose that the same myth might also be the source of the interim state idea. As Naomi Appleton recently blogged:

"... the pretas are a unique rebirth state in Buddhist terms, in that they cannot seem to benefit themselves, but they can benefit greatly from merit transferred to them by humans. It has long been recognized that this is linked to their association with the liminal state between death and the ritual feeding of the dead in the Brahmanical Hindu calendar; the latter ritual, which involves the offering of rice-balls to the deceased, allows the departed one to go onwards to the realm of the ancestors." (Pretas and the śrāddha rite: Matthew Sayers’ Feeding the Dead)

Thus it may be that some Buddhists believe in the interim state because it is a legacy of the Vedic cosmology which was adopted and adapted by pre-sectarian Buddhists. My understanding is that this Vedic myth was not meant to be taken seriously, but that parody became mistaken for truth. And we know how often stories from the satirical newspaper The Onion get taken seriously and picked up by the media.

Vitalism and Eternalism

The vast majority of humans since about 100,000 years ago seem to have believed in an afterlife. Burials obviously constructed with continued existence after death in mind appear around this time (and perhaps 30,000 years earlier for Neanderthals). Any belief in continued personal existence after death is by definition an eternalist view. So most people who ever lived and had any kind of view about it have been eternalists. True nihilism is in fact rare. Even now I suspect most people who believe in a "one and only life", wish it would go on forever. This was for example the position of physicist Sean Carroll in arguing against the proposition that "death is not final" in a recent debate.

Vitalism is eternalist. The life essence, or jīva, precedes our present life and will continue to exist after our death, whether the jīva is part of something larger, or specific to us. If something is not arising and passing away on the basis of conditions, then it is eternalist in the Buddhist view. Nāgārjuna makes this argument against the Sarvāstivāda solution to the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance. If a dharma does not cease when it's conditions cease then it is, by (Buddhist) definition, eternal. (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Chp 17)

So Vitalism is certainly compatible with the medieval (14th Century) Tibetan Buddhism of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But generally speaking Buddhists have tried to disrupt this fundamental eternalism that pervades human culture and specifically rejected any notion of jīva.

Philosophically there are two problems with eternalism. Buddhists identified that all experience is impermanent, and that unhappiness comes from treating it as graspable or sustainable. The worldview most people have is one in which we unconsciously believe that if we can just continually repeat pleasurable experiences, or make one kind of pleasant experience last forever, then that is ultimate happiness. Thus most traditions of Heaven depict it as a place of constant and unending pleasure (and by contrast Hell is constant and unending pain). Paradise is a pleasure that never ends. This idea influenced how Mahāyāna Buddhists imagined the Pure Land as well. But early Buddhists realised that this is a fundamentally wrong view of how experience is. In fact experience is constantly changing — arising and passing away — and thus constantly frustrating our expectations of it. Hence the second characteristic of all experiences is duḥkha - dissatisfaction, disappointment, dysphoria, unhappiness, misery. And dissatisfaction is important because it can lead to disenchantment and that can lead to disentanglement which is equivalent to liberation.

The second problem (often seen as the main problem by Buddhists) is with our orientation to the world. Consciousness endows us with a first person perspective, and this perspective is maintained on the basis of particular kinds of experiences. We identify with certain aspects of the first person perspective as "I", "me", or "mine". However the first person perspective is an experience and thus subject to the limitations on all experiences. This also creates conditions for unhappiness because we divide the world up in terms of me/them and mine/theirs. Immoral actions are associated with this kind of self-centredness. Of course humans are social so in fact we have circles that are involved in our sense of self. Our close friends and family are often as much "us" as we ourselves are. This is more true in some cultures than others, but always true to some extent. The boundaries between me, and the inner them and the outer them are sometimes difficult to define precisely, but we do have a different set of behaviours in relation to the extent to which we empathise with each. And the vast majority of people are outside our circles. Humans, like other territorial animals, often treat outsiders and trespassers very badly indeed.

The third characteristic of all experience is that it is anātman or essence-less, self-less, lacking in substance, insubstantial. There's nothing substantial no essence to identify with. And thus at this basic level Buddhism ought to be incompatible with any kind of Vitalism. But this is not always a happy thought and, so, many Buddhists do embrace vitalism, even Theravādins.

Conclusion

The really fundamental problem that all self-conscious living beings face is that one the one hand we want to continue to live (life at all levels is characterised by activities aimed at persistence of life; at maintaining homoeostasis); and on the other hand, as self-aware beings, we are aware of our own eventual (or even impending) death. Holding on to life in the face of inevitable death is a great source of pain.

While life itself is incredibly robust, 3.5 billion years of unbroken continuity and counting, a living being is a tenuous thing. In the Buddha's day infant mortality would have been high. If the monsoon's failed thousands of people would have died from starvation. Disease would have taken most people before the age of 40. A simple thorn in the foot could mean death from septicaemia. Snakes still kill 10,000 people a year in India. Tigers and other large predators were common before the jungle was cleared. There were no labour laws. Most children would have worked. Education was the preserve of a privileged few. Burgeoning caste rules meant escaping the life you were born into was very difficult, unless one renounced the world and became an ascetic, though that was also a difficult life.

Vitalism, with it's intimations of life beyond death and a pure essence that is untouched by worldly sorrows, clearly meets a need or it would not continue to be ubiquitous, even amongst those who follow the Buddha and ought to know better. But it's extremely unlikely to be true. If there is an animating entity, substance, or force, then we have yet to see any sign of it, and our best models of how things work don't require one in order to be accurate. The substance dualism that accompanies Vitalism is just not a very good theory by any standards.

Life is what it is. Experience is what it is. Seeing them for what they are, is enough. Speculation about the afterlife or our existence after death, or about a vital essence (ātman, jīva, pudgala, or bhāva), is superfluous and counter-productive. Or so the Buddha is supposed to have said.

~~oOo~~

This essay is a follow up to one I wrote in 2010 called Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat. It might be worth refreshing your memory of that one first. Plus I've continued to add notes since writing the original article. The subject of Buddhism and quantum mechanics keeps coming up. Quantum mechanics seems to draw Buddhists like moths to a flame. Of particular interest seems to be the observer effect that Schrödinger used to critique the Copenhagen interpretation. Google "Buddhism Quantum Mechanics and the Observer Effect" and you'll get a raft of webpages talking about how observers interact with the physical world. They say things like:

"Basically, what quantum theory says is that fundamental particles are empty of inherent existence and exist in an undefined state of potentialities. They have no inherent existence from their own side and do not become 'real' until a mind interacts with them and gives them meaning. Whenever and wherever there is no mind there is no meaning and no reality. This is a similar conclusion to the Mahayana Buddhist teachings on sunyata."Buddhism and Quantum Physics.

This is not quantum mechanics or Buddhism either. It's Idealism combined with the strong form of the anthropic principle. It's very misleading. Buddhism is talking about mental events and quantum mechanics about subatomic particles. At best the relationship is metaphorical, because subatomic particles don't behave like mental states and vice versa! In this blog post I will explore what the observer effect is and why it has very little or nothing to do with consciousness and also why it does not support Idealism.

I have to confess there is a great deal that I don't understand about quantum mechanics, not least of which is the maths involved. No one likes to admit they are ignorant, but I know that I don't understand this stuff to any great degree. I know that most of the Buddhists writing about it don't understand it either. I just wish they'd admit it.

Basics

Mass of the electron

~ 0.00000000
00000000000
00000000000
0910938291
kg

In this essay I'll focus on the electron. Electrons have reasonably well defined properties and are all, so far as we can tell, identical. For example electrons have mass of approximately 9.10938291 × 10^-31 kilograms. This is literally an unimaginably small number. As far as the human imagination is concerned this is zero. Protons have almost 2,000 times more mass than electrons and that's still an unimaginably small amount. Clearly there is some measurement uncertainty in this figure, we can only measure it as accurately as our experimental design and measurement device allow, but it's precise to an extremely fine degree. Similarly, electrons have an electric charge of approximately −1.602×10⁻¹⁹ coulombs, or a billionth of a billionth of the current that comes out of your wall socket.

Most relevant to our topic, an electron has an intrinsic angular momentum of either +½ or -½. Electrons seem to behave as though they spin on their axis, though in fact there is no classical phenomenon which the "spin" of an electron is exactly like. Seen from above the angular momentum of a clockwise spinning top points up, and for an anticlockwise spin it points down. So conventionally we speak of spin up and spin down.

Classical objects (roughly speaking, objects perceptible by our unaided senses) obey the classical laws of physics. A spinning top is a classical object. As it spins it has momentum: it will keep moving unless a force acts on it. Since it experiences friction as it spins it gradually and smoothly slows down, shedding kinetic energy as heat and sound. Even the solar system is gradually slowing down, the rotation of the earth is gradually slowing down. However, an electron just 'spins'. Always. Without ever slowing down. I presume that even at absolute zero, an electron has spin. Additionally, though a spinning top tends to orient itself, the axis of spin need not be in any particular direction, and can even wobble around. So the 'spin' of an electron here is a metaphor for an incomprehensible underlying reality.

Curiously if you rotate an electron with spin ½ through 360° then you would expect that the angular momentum would be the same, but it is in fact -½. To get back to spin ½ we have to rotate the electron through a total of 720°. Again there is no physical analogy that can explain this, no real process to compare it to. And this is partly why the great genius Paul Dirac said: "The fundamental laws of nature control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies." (Principles of Quantum Mechanics. 4th Ed. 1958).

If a spinning top had an electrical charge it would generate a magnetic field. This is more or less how an electric engine or generator works. Moving electric charges produce magnetic fields and moving magnetic fields induce electric currents. Electrons, having an electric charge do produce a magnetic field as they 'spin'. However looking at the electron as a classical spinning object with electric charge causes some problems. It turns out that in order to generate the measured magnetic field an object the size of an electron, considered as a classical object, would have to spin so fast that a point on its surface would be going several times faster than the speed of light. And the answer to the problem in fact turns out to be that the electron does not seem to have a size. This is deeply counter-intuitive. To have mass but no size suggests infinite density. I'm not even sure how the physicists deal with this problem.

We're starting to see that a single electron does not obey the classical mechanics (aka the "laws of physics") and this is where quantum mechanics comes in. Quantum mechanics is a series of equations which describe the behaviour of sub-atomic particles, like the electron. They were the first physical laws to be derived theoretically rather than through observation, but on the whole they do describe the behaviour of sub-atomic particles (though there are still competitors waiting in the wings - see article on bouncing oil drops at the end of the essay).

In the quantum world there are restrictions on everything: every quantity is a multiple of some constant with no in-between values (hence quantum). Transitioning between quantum states is instantaneous and discontinuous. For an electron there are just two possible spin states (i.e. two states of angular momentum): spin up and spin down. An electron can be made to flip states, but the action is instantaneous with no transition and no in-between states. Something one never observes in the macro world.

In my description of water I noted that electrons move around an atomic nucleus in well defined orbitals or shells. In hydrogen for example the single electron occupies the s shell which is spherical. Helium has two electrons in the s shell. Now Linus Pauli discovered that if two electrons are in the same orbital then they must have opposite spin (called the Pauli Exclusion Principle). The next shell, p, can accommodate 8 electrons, but they in fact occupy four separate orbits that each accommodate 2 electrons of opposite spin.

Schrödinger

This quality of spin is an important one because it was this quality that Schrödinger was referring to in his famous thought experiment. A consequence, an unbelievable consequence from Schrödinger's point of view, of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was that an electron could be either spin up or spin down and we wouldn't know which until we measured its angular momentum. Niels Bohr argued that before being measured the spin state would effectively be a super-position of both states. Schrödinger's example of the cat was intended to show that the conclusion was untenable because the idea of an object being in two states at once was ridiculous. As it happens the Copenhagen Interpretation won the argument and now advocates use Schrödinger's complaint to illustrate the point about super-position.

It's the spookiness of this metaphor that seems to attract Buddhists. They latched onto this idea of the necessity for the "observer" to break the symmetry of superposition and force the electron to take up one spin state or the other, because it looked like the Idealist end of the Yogacāra spectrum of thought in which objects are brought into existence by an observing mind. That Yogacāra is inherently Idealistic is hotly disputed by scholars, but for many Buddhists what cittamātra means is that only mind exists and as one Idealist Buddhist put it to me recently:

"I agree with Schopenhauer - objects only exist for subjects. Without a subject who brings to the picture, a sense of relatedness, some proportion, a point of view, there are no objects whatever." (Dharmawheel.net)

Tying Buddhist Idealism into Western Idealism is a popular pastime amongst Western Buddhists and Schopenhauer is a favourite exponent of this kind of thing. But just because an 18th century philosopher thought this or that about the universe tells us nothing. The fatal flaw is that this kind of Idealistic ontology has no possible supporting epistemology - there's no way to gain this knowledge about the nature of objects from a Buddhist point of view. In this view we have no way to know what happens to objects when we stop observing them, because we are not observing them! It's simply a theological position. And as I said in the post on ineffability we can easily infer that it's not true simply by comparing notes. Those who fail to compare notes come to ridiculous conclusions that are hard to shift. One of the logical consequences of this anthropocentric Idealism, a variant of the Anthropic Principle, is the the entire universe goes out of existence and then comes back into existence when we blink our eyes. And if you believe that you'll believe anything.

There's rub...

Part of the problem with employing the words of science without understanding them is that one makes silly mistakes. So for example when we say the mind of the observer is involved in determining the physical state of the electron, this is simply a mistaken understanding of what is meant by "observer". No electron has ever been seen by a human being. We need to be very careful about what we mean by "observe" and "observer". As physicist Sean Carroll says re "the observer":

"It doesn't need to be a 'conscious' observer or anything else that might get Deepak Chopra excited; we just mean a macroscopic measuring apparatus. It could be a living person, but it could just as well be a video camera or even the air in a room." [Emphasis added]

Schrödinger's observer, like Schrödinger's cat, is a metaphor. Given that no one can actually see an electron and 'spin' is only a notional quality with no classical analogue, how would we go about measuring the spin-state of an electron, one way or the other? Remembering that a single electron takes up more or less no space and weighs as close to nothing as makes hardly any difference. Usually we deal with electrons in amounts like billions of trillions and in such numbers they collectively behave classically. It is possible to assemble a set up that will shoot out one electron in a known direction every so often, but they travel near the speed of light. If your detector is 1m away from the emitter then it takes about a billionth of a second to get there. And since they're all identical there's no way to find our electron afterwards. So good luck observing an electron with your senses and comprehending it in your mind!

Actually it is possible to trap individual electrons, but as I think will be clear, the interaction needed to so do, involving magnetic fields, make them useless for testing the observer effect. However, thankfully it's not very difficult to measure spin-states in practice. We just need to construct a macroscopic measuring apparatus known as the Stern-Gerlach experiment.

In the Stern-Gerlach experiment a beam of electrons is passed between two magnets like those shown right (we'll ignore the shapes). The path of electrons with spin up is bent up as they pass through the magnets, electrons with spin down will bend down. So we then know the spin of the electron. We can measure the numbers that are bent each way by using an electron detector. And what we find is two very small spots - the up-spin electrons all hit the same upper spot, and the down-spin electrons all hit the same lower spot. There are never any in-between and any blur we see is due to fluctuations in the experimental set up itself, not in the electrons. At this level of sensitivity the tiny fluctuations caused by Brownian motion become noisy enough to drown out any signal. The amount by which the electron is deflected is related to it's mass and magnetic moment.

Now assuming we can use this to measure the spin of individual electrons what is going on here? An electron leaves the emitter and travels for a billionth of a second in an indeterminate spin state before passing through the apparatus and hitting a detector. An electron detector might be a loop of wire with an ammeter on it. As the electron hits the wire a very small, but measurable current flows (this is more or less how an old-fashioned vacuum tube works). Or we use a device like a TV screen that emits light when hit by a fast-moving electron and a photo-detector to record the light. As an electron travels through the apparatus and interacts with the magnetic field, it takes one or the other spin-state and enters one or other detector. It's the interaction of the electron with the experiment, with the macroscopic measuring apparatus, that forces it to adopt one or other spin and it does so at random.

And where in all of this is the "mind of the observer"? In fact the "observer" here, the experimental apparatus, has no mind. Why do we think of a person observing things and influencing them? It's because we understand Schrödinger's metaphor (man watching box) but we have no idea what underlying reality is being described. But this is a dangerous illusion.

The mistake that almost every Buddhist makes is to assume that because they understand the metaphor of Schrödinger's cat, they understand the underlying reality. This problem pervades Buddhist thinking. In the case of quantum mechanics no one understand the underlying reality, not even the people who understand the fiendish maths that predict the behaviour of particles. The reality of the quantum world is literally unimaginable, even when the theories make accurate predictions.

In fact when scientists talk about "observing" a subatomic particle (something with unimaginably small vital statistics) they really mean causing it to interact with something in a way that can be amplified and signal to us humans, on a scale we can comprehend, that something or other has happened. So all this stuff about consciousness and the observer effect in quantum mechanics is bunk. It's based on a reified metaphor and a false analogy.

The false analogy is with the observer effect in anthropology. When an anthropologist studies a culture they cannot help but see through cultural lenses. And they also change the behaviour of the people they study by being there. Famously teenage Samoan girls told Margaret Mead a bunch of lies about their sexual habits which for them was a huge joke, but wrecked the anthropologist's reputation. (Her work was debunked by Derek Freeman after she died, though his book Margaret Mead and Samoa set off a heated debate in the field of anthropology). Another variation on this is seen in the Hawthorne Effect which describes how workers modify their behaviour in response to conditions, especially whether or not they are being observed by management.

Observing humans does
change their behaviour.

There is also some contamination from post-modern literary criticism which emphasised the role of the reader in the "creation" of the text and called into question the very possibility of objectivity. Amongst the influential contributions to this discourse was Edward Said's work on so-called Orientalism which sought to show that Western views of Asia were constructs that were often only loosely related to Asia itself and were more revealing of the prejudices of Western scholars than of Asian culture and custom. At the same time the very idea of objectivity was called into question in the sciences, though this critique consistently failed to take into account the collective nature of scientific enquiry. The metaphors of quantum mechanics were conflated with these other issues and for many poorly informed people came to represent the nature of the problem of objectivity and subjectivity.

Quantum Nonsense.

Buddhists who know a little about quantum mechanics and a little bit about litcrit or anthropology are apt to fall into error. The temptation is to think that because we understand one or two metaphors or allegories that we understand the whole field. Almost no one does. Richard Feynman, another genius, was more bold:

"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." (The Character of Physical Law, 1965).

And if he didn't understand it, then probably no one could. The map is not the territory. And we Buddhists are not even using quality topographical maps. We're mostly using the cheesy, massively oversimplified, tourist maps that are given away for free in Hotel lobbies, all covered in advertising.

Too many Buddhists see in quantum mechanics a confirmation of their Idealism: the idea that there is no reality independent of the observer. I hope I've shown that such claims have misunderstood the word "observer" in Schrödinger's complaint. The conclusion drawn from quantum theory by many Buddhists, that the world only exists as and when we perceive it, is simply wrong. Indeed one of the consequences of quantum mechanics is that there must be an observer independent reality. (See Sheldon Goldstein, Department of Mathematics, Rutgers University: Quantum Theory Without Observers; and also links below).

This problem pervades Buddhist doctrine. It is full of empty metaphors. Karma is described almost entirely of such empty metaphors for example. However unlike in physics, Buddhist metaphors are not linked to mathematical models that make accurate predictions. Karma is linked to moral theories that are intended to ensure compliance with Buddhist behavioural norms. In other words Buddhist metaphors are set to prescriptive purposes, whereas physics metaphors attempt to be descriptive. This is a fundamental different between religion and science.

I doubt quantum-nonsense will ever go away. Too many people are desperate to consume what purveyors of quantum-nonsense are selling and not equipped to make a good judgement, or unwise in whose judgements they rely on. If our teachers are also non-scientists hungry for some quantum-nonsense too, then we are in deep trouble. Buddhists have the unfortunate habit of seeking and finding confirmation of their views everywhere they look. The most trivial or banal coincidence of wording becomes a hidden "Dharma teaching". Buddhists Tweeters endlessly repeat platitudes as though they were profound. Buddhist bloggers give over inordinate amounts of space to celebrity Buddhists as though having someone famous adopt Buddhism makes the world a better place. It's all so tedious. Next thing you know we'll be knocking on doors asking people if they have accepted the Buddha into their lives.

The fact is that science is not proving what Buddhists have known all along. It is doing the opposite. Science is tearing apart the articles of faith of Buddhism; leaving karma, rebirth, heaven & hell, and dependent arising as a Theory of Everything, in tatters. It's only blind faith and massive bias that prevents people from seeing this. We have a lot of work to do if Buddhism is going to survive this collision with modernity. Presuming of course that we do not fall back into another dark age, and looking at nominally Buddhist countries like Tibet, Korea, Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand that possibility seems all too likely.

~~oOo~~

Some real Quantum Physics:

Quantum Frontiers. Blog
Electron Spin and the Stern-Gerlach Experiment.
If you want to do the opposite and measure something without observing it, that is also possible. Start with Sean Carroll's blog on Quantum Interrogation.
The quote from Sean Carroll above is from: Why the Many-Worlds Formulation of Quantum Mechanics Is Probably Correct.
There is an interesting alternative to Copenhagen in Wired Magazine. Oil droplets travelling over vibrating surfaces show how a particle + pilot wave model might work. It reproduces classic experiments like double-slit with less spookiness. Very intriguing, but the maths is pre-nascent as yet and it's all about the predictions a theory makes via mathematics.

Thai Buddha Amulet
for warding off evil spirits

I started writing this essay before my series on Vitalism and it got overtaken by that project and so comes a little too long after the publication of the article which sparked it. Sometimes a break for digestion is useful however. One of the fascinating aspects of Buddhism in the present is how Buddhists are negotiating the collision with modernity. In a way modernity is too vague a phrase. It refers to what is happening how, but it also suggests the changes in European society and its colonies that have been happening for centuries. Galileo observed the moons of Jupiter in 1610 establishing Scientific Rationalism (or Naturalism) as a transformative force. Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses which led to the formation of the Protestant movement in 1517. Romanticism by contrast emerges only in the 19th century. For a while we seemed to have transcended modernity and become post-modern, but the death of modernity was much overstated and modernity seems to be reasserting itself.

In an interview in Tricycle Magazine, titled Losing Our religion Professor Robert Sharf expresses considerable reservations about Modernism. I'm not in agreement with most of the views expressed in the interview. I'm not convinced by his arguments against "Buddhist Modernism", as he calls it. We're certainly not losing our religion as Buddhism continues to gain ground in the West, and also often unnoticed by Westerners, in India where millions of Dr Ambedkar's followers have formally converted to our religion. But we are in danger of demonising innovations within our religion and stifling the changes that modernity necessitates.

Sharf has that unfortunate tendency of Americans to think of American Buddhism as Western Buddhism ignoring the rest of the Western world. So his archetypal modernist is D.T. Suzuki (1870-1966), a figure who was hugely influential in America from the 1950s onwards. The weakness of a US-centric, even Zen-centric, view of Western Buddhism become apparent in some of Sharf's complaints about "Western Buddhism" since they clearly do not apply more generally.

Buddhist Modernism.

The term "Buddhist Modernism" is a problematic one. It gives priority to Modernism and suggests that the contribution from Buddhism is a minority. It seems to say that although I call myself a Buddhist, I am in fact merely a modernist who flirts with Buddhism. This is not fair to Buddhists. Modernist Buddhism would be much more like what we actually do. The Tricycle introduction tells us that Buddhist Modernism is:

"a relatively recent movement that selectively places those elements that are consistent with modern sensibilities at the core of the tradition and dismisses all else."

This is a caricature and a rather cynical one at that. Is it even a movement per se, or is it just Westerners getting interested in Buddhism in all it's varieties? Modernist Buddhism takes in the entire span of Western engagement with Buddhism: from 19th century Sri Lankan so-called Protestant Buddhism, the Pali Text Society, the first European to become a Theravāda bhikkhu, and Edwin Arnold's poetic adaptation of the Lalitavistara Sutra (a best seller in it's day); via 20th Century events such as the founding of the Buddhist Society in London, mass conversion of Ambedkarites in India, and the Triratna Buddhist Order; through to 21st Century breakaway groups like the Secular Buddhist Association, politically active bhikkhus in Burma and renegade Theravāda Bhikkhus ordaining women in Australia. The American scene is a bit over-rated by Americans. Modernist Buddhism begins when people living in the modern world (around the world) begin actively engaging with Buddhism.

The complaint that Modernist Buddhism is based on a true observation, though others criticise Modernist Buddhists for being too eclectic. Seen in context this complaint tells us nothing whatsoever. All Buddhist movements throughout history have "reduce[d] Buddhism to a simple set of propositions and practices". Partly because the whole is incoherent and partly because there's too much of it to be practically useful anyway, increasingly so as time went on and the Canon of Buddhist writing inexorably expanded. We're all interested in subsets, and disinterested beyond that subset, and this has always been true. Partitioning is the only way to make Buddhism manageable and practical. We're all selective, we're all dealing in simplification. Even the complicated Tibetan forms of Buddhist doctrine are simplifications and in practice most Tibetan Buddhists focus on a subset of their own teachings - usually based on popular commentaries which synthesise and simplify rather than the too-voluminous source texts they managed to preserve. Buddhists are selective. So are scholars of Buddhism. So what?

Sharf may well have coined the term "Buddhist Modernism" in his 1995 article for Numen: 'Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience.' His argument in this now dated paper is that contemporary commentators have "greatly exaggerated the role of experience in the history of Buddhism". Contextualised, this point is uncontroversial and even passé. We know that for most of Buddhist history the majority of Buddhists, and even the majority of Buddhist monks, have not meditated. Thus in Buddhism as a cultural phenomenon meditative experience has played only a small role. The problem for Sharf is that modern Buddhism emphasises meditation. Something he resists explaining in positive terms and apparently see as a distortion. I find this attitude incomprehensible.

Throughout Buddhist history meditation has been seen as essential for liberation. It's just that a lot of the time most people, and all lay people, were convinced that liberation was impossible for them (or indeed anyone). For instance when Kūkai returned to Japan from China in 806 bringing Tantric Buddhist meditative rituals (sādhana) for the first time, he confronted a Buddhist establishment that not only did not meditate (chanting texts was about as close as they got), but which believed liberation to require three incalculable aeons of assiduous practice. Thus for any given person, liberation was always infinitely far off. Kūkai countered this with his slogan "Attaining Buddhahood in this very life" (sokushin jōbutsu) and he met with initial confusion. But he went on to establish the practice of Tantric meditative rituals at the heart of elite Japanese society in a way that lasted for 400 years, until it too was replaced by a reform movement, Zen, which also stressed meditative experience.

The vast majority of Buddhists have always been outside the monastery walls and no society ever seems to have expected lay Buddhists to do much, other than materially support monks. Thus, throughout the history of Buddhism the majority of people who we might identify, even nominally, as Buddhist, have been non-meditators. But reform movements throughout Buddhist history have almost always been about re-emphasising the personal practice of meditation and often involved something of a cult of personality based around one gifted meditator. The major exception being Pure Land Buddhism. Buddhism as a cultural phenomenon has not always emphasised the pursuit of liberation, but where liberation is a concern, with the sole exception of Pure Land Buddhism, it is intimately connected with meditation. Of course meditation requires a context of ethical and devotional practice as we see in most Buddhist groups.

I note that Sharf seems unaware of the UKs largest Buddhism movements (Trirtana, Soka Gakkai, and NKT), none of which emphasise meditation at the cost of other contextualising practices (SG don't meditate so far as I'm aware). Triratna see meditation as indispensable, but in the context of developing the other "spiritual faculties" as well through devotional practices, study and reflection, the arts, social engagement and even environmental activism. Nor do I see this one-sidedness, for example, in Shambala in the USA (I have a friend involved in Cleveland, OH and know people who've spent time living at Gampo Abbey). So, who is it that is advocating meditation and nothing else, and why are they getting more attention than those much larger and more successful groups that constitute the mainstream of Western Buddhism (at least in the UK and as far as I can tell in Europe too)?

It seems to me that Sharf's focus is on the wrong aspects of history. He is asking the wrong questions. Instead of complaining that historically Buddhist societies have not emphasised meditation generally, he ought to be taking the time to investigate why this age is one in which liberation again seems possible, and how it relates to previous cultures where this has been true: such as early Heian or early Medieval (1200-1400) Japan; Tang China and Tibet, 1st century Gāndhāra and so on.

Unprecedented Social Change.

Modern Buddhism, like many reform movements before it, insists that liberation is a reasonable goal for everyone and that therefore everyone ought to take up the practices aimed attaining liberation, in particular meditation. Another aspect of this has been a Protestant-like rejection of the religious institution of monasticism. Just as with Christianity this is largely based on perceptions of corruption and hypocrisy amongst the priestly elite. Sangharakshita's trenchant polemics against the monastic Sangha are as good a representative of this sensibility as any, and he saw the institution from the inside. See for example:

The Meaning of Orthodoxy In Buddhism: A Protest. (1987)
Forty-three Years Ago. (1993)
Was the Buddha a Bhikkhu? (1994)

His account of the life of Dharmapala (1980) is also revealing of the habits of Theravāda monks (at least in the mid 20th Century). Like European Protestants of the 16th century, modern day Protestants are sick of the flabby corruption of the priests. Some of this mistrust is also directed at academics despite their role as translators and interpreters of history. Of course there are now Modernist reform movements within the monastic Sangha and many admirable bhikṣu(ṇi)s (Ānandajoti, Anālayo, Bodhi, Hui Feng, Pema Chödrön, Robina Courtin, Sujato and Thanissaro come to mind).

Although Sharf's academic complaint is against other academics who over-emphasise experience he seems to have generalised this to include Buddhists who do so. Compare the work of Dr Sue Hamilton which has decisively shown that the primary concern of early Buddhist ideas about liberation were tied up with the nature of experience. It's not only moderns who are concerned with experience. Ābhidharmikas of many varieties went into great depth cataloguing experience and trying to understand the mechanics of it. My reading of the early Perfection of Wisdom texts is that they share this preoccupation. The constant return to experience goes alongside interest in meditation in reform movements. Meditation is nothing more or less than the examination of the nature of experience.

Sharf seems to consider that Modernist adaptations of Buddhism are not legitimate because he does not see the historical precedents for them. As though precedent was the only form of legitimisation. Apart from the fact that there are historical precedents for interest in meditation everywhere we look, we have to ask where he does find relevant historical precedents for Buddhism's encounter with modernity that might inform alternate responses? As far as I understand modernity in the West it is unprecedented anywhere in history. The sheer scale and pace of technological, social and political change we are currently experiencing is unprecedented and we have been saying this for at least a century and a half. Arguing that precedent is the only form of legitimation in times of unprecedented events means that no adaptation to modernity will ever be legitimate. But clearly adaptation is required. And clearly buddhism has adapted to circumstance and culture time and time again. There is that kind of precedent.

Ronald Davidson has outlined what seem to be the social and political changes that resulted in the only other event in Buddhist history that might even come close to Modernism - the Tantric synthesis of the 6th century. Davidson describes how the collapse of civil society as a result of Huna attacks on the Gupta Empire resulted in a chaotic situation. Law and Order on the wider scale broke down. Trade routes became untenable. Certain regions became too dangerous to live in, causing large scale migrations. The reach of civil order shrank and withdrew behind city walls, leaving the countryside exposed to banditry. In the resulting milieu a new religious sensibility was required and did in fact develop. As society broke down, religion compensated by bringing together disparate elements and synthesising them into an entirely new approach to liberation that we call Tantra.

In the face of unprecedented challenges Buddhism was always going to need to come up with unprecedented responses. However Sharf seems to be resistant to the changes that are emerging. So, what is wrong with modernity?

Critiquing Modernism

Sharf urges "a willingness to enter into dialogue with what is historically past and culturally foreign." This is itself a Modernist attitude. Buddhists have ever been reluctant to see themselves as historically conditioned or to acknowledge the culturally foreign. Innovations are almost inevitably attributed to the Buddha (or to the most impressive historical figure to whom they can plausibly be attributed), and assimilation of non-Buddhist ideas - such as when a Bodhisatva named Avalokita-svara absorbs some of Śiva's attributes (e.g. blue throat) and iconography and becomes Avalokita-īśvara - are never acknowledged but presented as a fait accompli.

The Rhys Davids were very influential at the beginning of the modern engagement with Buddhism in the 1870s and 1880s and seem to get lost in the American versions of modern Buddhist history (Which apparently begins with Suzuki's visit to San Francisco). It is because of RDs that we translate bodhi as "enlightenment" for example. The RDs and some of their contemporaries were consciously trying to align European Buddhism with the European Enlightenment; and the Buddha with (British) figures like Newton, Hume, and Berkeley. They lived in the immediate Post-Darwinian era and saw Christianity in crisis, but could not imagine life without religion. They saw Buddhism as a "rational religion" that might replace superstitious Christianity. And this was half a century before Suzuki began to influence American Buddhist thought in the 1950s. The Pali Text Society was founded in the UK in 1881. The Buddhist Society in 1924. Suzuki seems to have been influenced by his training under German-American theologian Paul Carus. Carus himself is described as "He was a key figure in the introduction of Buddhism, to the West" (where again for "West" we have to read "America"). Suzuki is important in America, no doubt, but he was influenced by Carus and others, presumably his Theosophist wife Beatrice (who doesn't rate a separate Wikipedia article or any mention in Tricycle and seems to be absent from history as women often are). Even in American the roots of Buddhism go back to the 1850s: see Buddhism in America.

The idea that Buddhist Modernism is necessarily ontologically dualistic is partial at best. More and more Buddhist modernists embrace ontological monism as the most likely situation. I've been arguing against mind/body dualism for years and regularly get accused of being a Materialist for that reason. I've written an extended critique of Vitalism which is one of the most important varieties of dualism. However the idea that duality is foreign to Buddhism is also misleading. Just look at the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is deeply dualistic. The interim state (Skt. anatarabhāva = Tib. bardo) between death and new life is widely accepted in Buddhism. Just read any Jātaka story for another form of dualism - they clearly depict souls transmigrating and retaining their identities. All the disembodied spirits that haunt our stories also suggest ontological dualism. Buddhism is full of it! And the standard Buddhist critique of dualism is not an outright denial, but a hedge which allows a disembodied consciousness to arise when the conditions are right, even in the interim state (which is neither here nor there).

Early Buddhists appear to accept, or at the very least not to offer any challenge to, the idea of an external, observer independent reality. They're just not interested in it because the content of experience is of only minor interest in the bid to understand the mechanisms of experience. Which specific object happens to be stimulating desire at present is of no particular interest. Sense objects are a requirement for experience, but never the focus of investigation. What version of Buddhist epistemology is Sharf working with?

In answer to the question "But to get back to your point, what gets lost when primacy is given to individual spiritual experience?", Sharf's response is that "The sangha gets lost! The community gets lost." If the Sangha has been lost in Modernist Buddhism then someone ought to tell the various large Sanghas that span the Western World. We in the Triratna Sangha must have missed that memo because our sangha is growing and getting quite large now. Indeed some of the problems we are wrestling with are due to an overly large sangha. In particular how do we maintain consensus decision making in an Order of 2000+ members who are distributed around the world and have no common language (many of our members are monoglot in their mother tongue). How do we cultivate that sense of involvement in something that transcends the local situation? In contradiction to what Sharf says we're very much alive to the third jewel! Even the very Modernist Secular Buddhist Association is clearly trying to build a Sangha.

I'm not sure of the details of the situation in America is, but my impression is that, even in the home of libertarianism, sanghas are flourishing, even though a few people chose to operate outside of sanghas (and even they tend to habitually haunt online forums as ersatz communities). I simply see no evidence whatsoever that an emphasis on spiritual experience has led to sangha being "lost".

Seeing Modernism in a Positive Light

What are we to make of these scholars who decree that Modernist Buddhism is not a legitimate adaptation of Buddhism to the present? Are these the same kind of thinkers who once saw Tantra as a "degeneration" of pure Buddhism? On one hand it is useful to identify how we Modernists are responding to Buddhism and the state of the world. But on the other if all our innovations are seen as illegitimate then Buddhism may as well be dead right now.

In fact my reading of Robert Sharf's criticisms of American Buddhism is that they are hardly different from generalised liberal criticisms of American culture: viz, Individualism at the expense of society; engineering at the expense of architecture (literally and metaphorically); and a confusion of values leading to relativism and hedonism. Sharf sounds like he might be just a(nother) liberal academic complaining "O tempora o mores". In general terms, sure, I find Utilitarianism ugly as an ideal and ugly in terms of the results it produces. I deplore Neolibertarianism and its effects on society. But the vast majority of Buddhists are also against those values, primarily because of other streams of Modernity especially Romanticism. As much as I dislike Romanticism, it is at least opposed to Utilitarianism! And the majority of Buddhists I know give expression to these values in how they live, even when they live what might be relatively conventional lives. Radicals are always few in number and require the support of followers.

Must we join Sharf in seeing Modernist Buddhism or even Buddhist Modernism in negative terms? Protestant Buddhism, like Protestant Christianity, was and is a progressive movement. It criticised corrupt and bloated (often state controlled) ecclesiastical power bases. In a place like Sri Lanka where the term was coined, protest was an absolute necessity (though arguably that pendulum has swung too far). The Sri Lankan monastic sangha was, and not for the first time, moribund and merely formalistic. The extreme conservatism of the monastic establishment in South East Asia is also obvious. Witness the response to Western bhikkhus ordaining women. They were kicked out of their organisation. Certainly we must protest against such practices as institutionalised sexism. If we are not Protestants in this respect, then we are part of the problem.

On the other hand the bhikkhu sangha in Sri Lanka is once again infected with Nationalism and politically active monks who don't meditate, but use hate speech and call for violence against Tamils and anyone else who opposes their ideas of racial and religious purity. Sri Lanka is struggling against a powerful fascism inspired by Buddhist monks. That's the downside of collectivity, of sangha divorced from a personal commitment to the religious ideals of Buddhism. Without the personal engagement with practices like meditation, a group may well drift into this kind of quasi-madness. The advantage of the Protestant-like personal engagement is that each person feels they can be held accountable for their actions and not simply go along with the crowd.

Scientific Rationalism meant the end of being ruled by superstition (or at least the beginning of the end). That's clearly a good thing. Charles Darwin's daughter, Ann, died at least in part from the Water Treatment, based on four humours theory, that she was subjected to when desperately ill. She probably had tuberculosis and would have been cured by antibiotics had she lived a century later. That is progress. Reconciling Buddhism entirely with scientific rationalism is obviously going to be slow and painful, and perhaps eternally incomplete, but I think we're making progress on that front also.

Why cannot we be proud of being Modern Buddhists, proud of the changes we are making and excited about the new 21st Century Buddhism? I certainly am. I love it. Although we're seeing a burgeoning of conservative apologetics for good old-fashioned Buddhism, we're also seeing a continuing stream of innovations and exploration of potential new avenues for Buddhism. The UK now has a mindfulness class for MPs and senior civil servants in parliament. This may well be the most significant event in the last 500 years of Buddhism, since historically Buddhism only takes root when adopted by the social elite.

I welcome open discussion of the role of Modernism in our Buddhism and wish to see the critiques developed further, so that we're more aware of the cultural influences we operate under. I'm appreciative of McMahan's efforts in this direction. And for instance of Thanissaro's critique of Romanticism. But I compare McMahan's descriptive approach with the conservative, prescriptive approach of Sharf and I find the latter much less attractive. The fact that McMahan does not seem to have a vested interest is an interesting observation on the perils of emic scholars - people of a conservative religion, studying their own religion, tend to come to conservative conclusions.

It's my belief at this time that conservatism with respect to Buddhism will be deeply counter-productive. Conservative Buddhists are obsessed with authenticity, authority and legitimation. And this leads to the view that if we don't already have it, it's not worth having. Conservative Buddhists seem to see science as a kind of fad that we'll grow out of; and innovations like mindfulness therapies as dangerous threats to the authority of Buddhism (when in fact it's more like a threat to conservative power-bases within existing hierarchies). And this too seems counter-productive to me.

I am a Modernist. I was born in 1966, how could I be anything else? Even growing up in small town New Zealand we had Modernism. Like all cultural phenomena, Modernism has its pros and cons. We can't afford to be one eyed about it. I'm also a Buddhist. If my studies have shown me one thing it's that Buddhism changes. We Buddhists change with the times. We always have. Sometimes the changes have amounted to upheaval. We regroup, refocus, and re-invent ourselves.

~~oOo~~

In the texts of early Buddhism we find several kinds or modes of morality. One of which is mainly aimed at being a good community member and one of which is aimed at preparation for meditation. In this essays I will outline the main approaches to Buddhist ethics that I see in the Pāḷi suttas. This line of reasoning first occurred to me in responding to a comment on my essay: Ethics and Nonself in relation to the Khandhas. (21 Mar 2014). I also argue that this variety of approaches to ethics argues against a single origin for Buddhism. As with other areas, Buddhist ethics is composite with some aspects not being completely integrated.

Being Good.

This is the aspect of ethics that most of us are familiar with. The representative set of precepts is known as the pañcasīlāni or just pañcasīla. In this formula we undertake to refrain from certain actions: killing, taking the not given, sexual misconduct, lying, and intoxication. When I've written essays on these topics (see links), they generated many comments and often sharply polarised responses!

In the Triratna Order we follow a related set of precepts traditionally known as the dasa-kusala-kamma-patha or 'the path of the ten good actions'. In this set of precepts we undertake to refrain from killing, taking the not given, sexual misconduct, lying, slander, harsh speech, divisive speech, covetousness, ill will, and confusion. And we also undertake to cultivate the opposites of each of these.

One of my colleagues has just published a book which she titled It's Not About Being Good. But I'm afraid I disagree. These precepts are about being good, where good is defined in Buddhist cultural terms which, I argue, can be traced back to the Śākya tribe. The Śramaṇa religious cultures synthesised Zoroastrian (via the Śākyas), Vedic, autochthonic animistic and shamanistic ideas to produce a new set of moral values and rules that transcended the local community and situation. These rules are largely about getting on with people and creating a harmonious community, i.e. norms of behaviour for a community that have become formalised and normalised.

In my article on the possible origins of some aspects of Buddhism in Iran I cited the fact that in the region only Zoroastrians and Buddhists have a morality which applies to acts of body, speech and mind. And in both cases it is acts of body, speech and mind that determine one's afterlife destination. In Zoroastrianism there were only two possibilities, Heaven and Hell; while Buddhism came to see many possible rebirth destinations (gati) of five or six kinds (loka) contrasted with nirvāṇa which meant the end of being reborn altogether (a feature of Buddhism repudiated 500 years later by Mahāyānavādins who couldn't bear the thought of the Buddha leaving them behind). Buddhist morality is probably based on Zoroastrian morality and was transmitted to the Central Ganges Valley by migrating peoples including the Śākya tribe.

We might therefore see this kind of social-norm morality as simply the morality of the Śākya tribe writ large. This is how the Śākyas treated each other and expected to be treated, and with the influence of Zoroastrianism and the experience of migration it's possible they already saw their values as universal. This should not be seen as an attempt to trivialise Buddhist ethics. Clearly community was very important to the early Buddhists and a whole genre of texts, the Vinaya, was created with the intention of regulating the monastic community to try to create a harmonious and positive community. And the way examples are given it's clear that the community was often far from harmonious.

This code was then used to transform the Theory of Karma. The earliest versions of karma occur in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad where it probably still refers to ritual actions. However there was a right way and a wrong way to perform the rituals necessitating at least two afterlife destinations. With the application of ethics to karma—a process Richard Gombrich calls ethicisation—the Śākyas created a unique combination of morality, eschatology and soteriology, which all revolved around the intentional behaviour of the individual. The key statement of this principle occurs just once in the Pāli texts (AN 6.63) but it is picked up by Nāgārjuna in his Mūlamadhyamaka-kārikā (chp 17) a s representative view. The statement is cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi cetayitvā kammaṃ karoti – kāyena vācāya manasā. "Intention is what I call an action, monks. Having intended one acts with body, speech or mind." (See also Action and Intention)

We say that the precepts are part of the three fold path, i.e. śīla, samādhi, and prajñā or ethics, meditation and wisdom. And it is true that the five precepts are referred to as sīla. However the precepts call themselves sikkhapāda 'training steps'. And note that the dasa-kuasala-kamma-patha don't include the word sīla either.

Preparation for Meditation.

A friend and I were discussing Ayya Khema's approach to meditation recently. My friend mentioned her admonition that if you want to meditate you need to get out of the hindrances and stay out. And this brought to mind something I quoted from Ayya Khema in my article about the Spiral Path texts for the Western Buddhist Review. That for meditation to be possible it was necessary to experience some pāmojja. The two statements amount to much the same thing: pāmojja is the state of no (gross) hindrances.

One of the discoveries that came out of surveying the Pāli and Chinese texts on the Spiral Path was that as a whole they present the threefold path as a series of progressive stages, illustrated by the image of rain filling smaller streams which fill larger streams, smaller rivers and larger rives until larger rivers fill up the ocean. This fact had been obscured in books about the Spiral Path by both Sangharakshita (1967) and Ayya Khema (1999) because they focussed on the Upanissā Sutta. In that sutta the sīla section of the path is replaced with just two steps dukkha and saddhā as a result of a rather clumsy attempt to link the two forms of dependent arising. As my article showed getting from dukkha to saddhā is not simple - typically commentators introduce three sub-steps to get from one to the other. This isn't clear until one looks at all the other texts which share a similar structure (eg. AN 10.1-5, AN 11.1-5, for a complete list see my 2012 article). Generally speaking saddhā arises on the basis of hearing the Dharma, and seems to precede sīla in the texts that include it.

The Spiral Path texts describe a path. That path has three sections with two junctions. The first section is sīla leading to the liminal experience of pāmojja. Pāmojja ushers us into the second stage, samādhi or meditation (the word literally means 'integration'). Samādhi is one of the steps on the path with various other steps leading up to it. My conjecture is that each of the single words on the Spiral Path represent one of the four rūpajhanas. The junction between meditation and the next stage of wisdom is "knowledge and vision of things as they are" (yathābhūta-ñānadassana). With knowledge and vision we can see sense experience for what it is, we become fed up (nibbidā) with it, turn away (virāga) from it and experience liberation (vimokkha) and the knowledge of liberation.

But the sīla section of the Spiral Path is entirely unlike the precepts. Each text has a different selection from a series of related terms. Some of them, including the Pāli DN2 and many of the Chinese versions in the Madhyāgama, include the whole list. That list is:

sati, sampajanñña, yoniso-manasikāra, hiri, ottapa, saṃvara, and indriyesu gutta-dvāratā.

mindfulness, awareness, wise attention, shame, scruple, restraint, and guarding the gates of the senses.

I mentioned that saddhā is included in this list at times. In fact saddhā might be said to be the junction between non-participation and practising ethics. Typically saddhā arises when someone listens to a Dhamma discourse by the Buddha. On the basis of this faith one begins to practice sīla.

If we look at these terms we can immediately see that they represent something very different from the precepts. This really isn't about being good. This set of terms, with the possible exception of hiri & ottapa, is all about preparation for meditation: for getting out of the hindrances and staying out of them. And there is almost no overlap with sets like the five precepts (pañcasīlāni). One might argue that the "mind precepts" from the dasakuasala-kammapatha do overlap with these. However the kammapatha are general and the Spiral Path ethics are specific. The former are about the commitment to managing one's own mental states, and the latter constitutes a program for achieving that goal.

Hiri and ottapa are about one's own knowledge of what constitutes ethics and being cognizant of the opinions of respected group members. In truth they could be relevant in either of the two contexts I'm outlining here. But the fact is that they are associated with the Spiral Path so that may incline us to see them as natural to this context. One of the things we must constantly do is catch our minds wandering off and returning them to the object of meditation. It is hiri which facilitates this. And if our own sense of appropriateness fails us we can always imagine explaining to our teacher how we spent our meditation.

So there are these two very different approaches to ethics in early Buddhist texts: one for community life, and one for meditation. I don't recall seeing this distinction made before and I'm certainly aware of presentations that confuse the two modes. But there is at least one more aspect to Buddhist ethics, the quest for a good rebirth.

A Good Destination.

It's difficult to know exactly where to place this approach to ethics. It might not even be ethics, but it is an aspect of karma so it is at least related. This approach to ethics is as condition for a better rebirth and ensuring the livelihood of renunciants. It involves cultivating puṇya through good ritual acts such as generosity to renunciants. It seems to relate to the idea of rebirth in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.

Puṇya (Pāḷi puñña) is a term drawn from Vedic ritualism but the practice of supporting renunciants seems to have been a widespread practice in Indian in the Iron Age. Puṇya is contrasted with pāpa and pāpa seems to straightforwardly mean "evil". So puṇya is the opposite of evil, or "good", though we often translate it as "merit". I suppose it is merit in the sense that if you collect enough of it, then you merit a good rebirth. A bit like Buddhist loyalty points. A surplus of puṇya leads to a good rebirth destination (suggati).

With the ethicisation of karma getting to a good rebirth destination becomes an ethical issue. At best supporting renunciants might be seen as cultivating generosity which is one of the qualities one cultivates to be a good community members. As Reggie Ray has shown in Buddhist Saints the various lifestyles of Iron Age Ganges culture (householder, settled monastic and forest renunciant) all relied on each other in a variety of ways.

Buddhists took the Vedic notion of puṇya and married it to sīla so that puṇya comes to be seen as having soteriological value (though this change may well have happened in pre-Buddhist Vedic milieu as well). However they were care to limit the possibilities of merit to sotāpanna or stream entry. As Thanissaro says in his Study Guide on Merit:

"For all the rewards of meritorious action, however, the concluding section serves as a reminder that the pursuit of happiness ultimately leads beyond the pursuit of merit."

And that said almost the quotes on puṇya evinced by Thanissaro promise a good rebirth destination as the primary result of cultivating merit.

Conclusion

Thus we have these various modes of ethical practice evident in early Buddhist texts and persisting (though without an explicit distinction) into the present: being a good community member, preparation for meditation, obtaining a good rebirth. It may be that Buddhaghosa anticipated this distinction. Buddhaghosa cites a traditional classification of sīla in the Visuddhimagga which makes almost the same distinction I am making here. "What is virtue?" he asks and quotes the Paṭisambhidā (a commentarial text included in the Khuddaka Nikāya) as responding:

cetanā sīlaṃ, cetasikaṃ sīlaṃ, saṃvaro sīlaṃ, avītikkamo sīla

virtue as volition, virtue as mental concomitant, virtue as restraint, and virtue as non-transgression.

I'm following Ñāṇamoḷi's translation of sīla as 'virtue' in his translation of the Visuddhimagga (p.7). My first category might be seen to take in virtue as non-transgression; while my second category takes in virtue as volition, virtue as mental concomitant and virtue as restraint. Being a good community member is a matter of conforming to the norms of the community; while preparation for meditation means actively working on hindrances in an effort to eliminate them from one's mind, even if only temporarily. However, my reading of Buddhaghosa is that he doesn't see these different types of virtue as aimed at different goals. He doesn't quite acknowledge that being a good community member is a good in itself. However, the observation that there are different modes of ethics is not original.

I haven't said much about the Vinaya in this essay. This is deliberate. I'm mostly interested in the suttas (I've been called a Sautrāntika for this reason). The Vinaya is certainly an expression of the moral principles found in the precepts, but primarily concerned with the minutiae of how to encode values as rules and then enforce them in a large and disparate community which has to live within a wider community that is not bound by the same values or rules. I've written about the law making process in an essay called: The Mad Monk and the Process of Making the Vinaya. The Vinaya is important in the history of Buddhist ideas, and I would say significant in the world's development of legal codes since it records the processes by which laws were made and enforced. But it was only ever intended to apply to the monastic community.

This is another case of distinctions being hidden by imposed unity. The desire to see Buddhism as a unitary phenomenon, at the very least springing from a single individual overwhelms our ability to see the evidence clearly. We're taught that Buddhist ethics has a single mode that covers all the bases; that for example, the precepts for being a good community member are sufficient also for meditation. I think this simplification is probably an error, and that for meditation we need another, solitary, mode of ethical practice that is much more intensive. We're also taught that Buddhist ethics all grew out of the Buddha's awakening, though historically this simply cannot be true. The Buddha, if he lived at all, grew up in a community, the Śākyas, and must have absorbed the values of that community and expressed this in his teaching. And then at a later time Brahmanical values were super-imposed over Śākyan values. And then Mahāyāna overlaid yet another set of values.

So that this idea that as modern Buddhists bringing our values to Buddhism we are somehow doing something novel is simply ignorant and anachronistic. No adult convert can ever arrive in the Buddhist fold without a set of values and other baggage.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Jayarava. (2008) 'Did King Ajātasattu Confess to the Buddha, and did the Buddha Forgive Him?' Journal of Buddhist Ethics, 15.

Jayarava. (2012) 'The Spiral Path or Lokuttara Paṭiccasamuppāda.'Western Buddhist Review, 6.

Jayarava. (2013) Possible Iranian Origins. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies. 3.

Khema, [Ayya]. (1999) When The Iron Eagle Flies.

Ñāṇamoḷi. (1956) The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga). Singapore Buddhist Meditation Centre, 1997.

Ray, R. (1994) Buddhist Saints in India. Oxford University Press.

Sangharakshita. (1967). The Three Jewels. Windhorse.

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~~

Confucius

Tsze-lu said, "The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?"

The Master replied, "What is necessary is to rectify names."

The Analects. (13.1)

The three words in the title of this essay are often conflated and used pejoratively to criticise anyone who argues that the results of scientific exploration must be taken into account. In fact they delineate three different philosophical narratives, the first two are ontologies concerned with the nature of reality, while the latter is an epistemological position. Since the terms come up so often and are so often used indiscriminately, leading to confusion, it's worth unpacking them and sorting one from the other.

Physicalism.

Physicalism is a relatively new word. It was coined in the 1930's by the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, mathematicians and scientists, which is also associated with the epistemological stance of Positivism. Indeed the confusion of anti-science campaigners is such that they will often refer to science as "Positivist". This is very easy to refute since in the schism between Viennese refugee Karl Popper and the Vienna Circle, scientists decisively sided with Popper in rejecting Positivism. Modern science is not Positivist, it is, if anything, Popperian. The heart of the dispute was the Positivist claim that propositions could only be considered true when they could be directly verified. Popper showed, using the example of the black swan, that this was not a useful approach to assessing the truth value of knowledge. For example: "All swans are white" had been used as an example of an demonstrably true proposition in Europe, since all European swans are white. But in Australia swans are black and thus once Europeans got to Australia they realised that it was never true that all swans were white. This is now known as the Black Swan Effect. The Positivist approach is constantly undermined by unknown unknowns. Those who claim there is no certain knowledge cite the Black Swan Effect as a justification for this view.

The Physicalist position is essentially a linguistic one. They said that all linguistic statements are synonymous with some physical statement. Which boils down to the idea that everything is (ultimately) physical. If this were so it would certainly make truth claims a lot easier to establish or test. Everything we experience is simply a result of how the physical world is arranged. For example an arrangement of atoms.

Although philosophers still discuss the idea of Physicalism, it is not a very convincing position and has very little influence on the world at present. Indeed it is precisely the mind which undermines physicalism. It is very difficult to account for the phenomena of the mind in a Physicalist paradigm. While most current theories of mind are reductive, in the sense of explaining the mind as an activity of the brain, this would still be difficult to account for on the basis of Physicalism, because the phenomena of the mind are not physical. For some philosophers this looks like a case for substance dualism. David Chalmers who coined the term "The Hard Problem" is a substance dualist.

I think it's safe to say that no scientist is presently trying to explain the mind through the Physicalist paradigm. Granted, the physicists seeks to understand physical phenomena through studying the physical world. But this is a methodological approach rather than an ontological position. Physicists may believe that studying the world (the way they do) will lead to a theoretical understanding of reality, but this is technically not Physicalism, it is Naturalism.

Materialism

Materialism is a somewhat older term with roots in the early Enlightenment. We need to think carefully about the historical context of Materialism. In fact some of the Ancient Greeks were materialists - they believed that the world was made up of one substance and it's transformations. A popular early contender for this single substance was water. Fire was also considered by some. There were apparently some materialists in ancient India as well and they also played around with both water and fire as the ultimate substance. A little note here is that in Buddhism we frequently meet Nihilists who do not believe in rebirth, or Determinists who believe our actions are all pre-determined, but neither of them can legitimately (or rationally) be called Materialists because they do not espouse a substance ontology. However it is de rigueur to irrationally call such characters materialists. Materialism, as an ontology, did not catch on either in Europe or in India. In Europe materialism lost ground to other ideas and then was obliterated by Christianity for over 1000 years. In India the transmigration of souls in a cyclic eschatology required some form of Vitalism that dominates the Indian worldview even today.

At the dawn of the Enlightenment the Roman Catholic Church (previously the Holy Roman Empire) had been the dominant intellectual power for a millennia. They maintained this by having a monopoly on education and by persecuting heretics. Roman theology translated into secular power as well. Thus when the first cracks appeared in Church dogma - discoveries by Johannes Kepler, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Galileo - they were embraced with great enthusiasm in some quarters where the Church was less popular.

As much as anything the early Materialists hoped to throw off the oppressive yoke of the Church. And they did this by playing up the possibilities of gaining knowledge by studying the material world as distinct from the spiritual world of the Church; and by playing down the superstition and ignorance fostered by the Church as part of its program to control the masses.

We have to see the Materialism of the Enlightenment as distinct from contemporary Materialism because of the historical context and the fact that most of the central planks of contemporary materialism were discovered in the 20th century. The understanding of the 17th and 18th Century materialists was entirely different and commentators such as Arnold Schopenhauer (the darling of many Romantics) who attempt to refute 18th century Materialism.

In the 21st century the Church is a spent force intellectually. For a start it is divided and full of internal strife over issues of equality. The Church plays no major role in public discourse any more. In addition we have a series of discoveries that have established materialism as a very useful way of seeing the world: building on the life and works of Newton, Hume and Kant; 19th century natural philosophers extended our knowledge of the natural world: evolution and the discovery of fossils; the explorations of the early chemists; Maxwell's electromagnetism and so on. This laid the foundations for far more sophisticated theories which have explored the natural world in greater breadth and depth, such as: Relativity, quantum mechanics, nuclear forces, deep space telescopes, electron microscopes, and fMRI scanners taking pictures of the brain in action. These are all the activities of what used to be called natural philosophers - those whose study is of the natural world, and who nowadays take an approach that might be called Naturalism.

The success of methodological Naturalism can lead to the ontological view that the material world is all that there is, i.e. to mono-substance materialism. However the Materialism of today is vastly different to the Materialism of the 19th Century. The picture of nature is much more wide ranging and compelling. It will readily be admitted that we do not understand everything, the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, not to mention problems associated with the mind, are as yet unsolved. Still, what we do know about the world is astounding. And we know the basic principles upon which the world, as we know it, operates. (See Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood).

The main problem that undermines Materialism as a complete ontology is what David Chalmers has called "the hard problem of consciousness. As he says "The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience." It's very difficult to explain first person experience, the fact that we are subjects of experience, from a Materialist perspective. However we must carefully note that, rather disappointingly, Chalmers is a substance dualist: in expounding his views he makes it clear that he believes that the mind is a different substance to matter. It is natural, even axiomatic, for a mind/body substance dualist to argue that studying matter will tell us nothing about the mind. Substance dualism is a theological position rather than a philosophical position: there is no way to test the proposition, it must simply be taken on faith. Just because a substance dualist like Chalmers cannot conceive of a way around the problem, his definition of mind erects insurmountable barriers around it, does not mean that people who reject substance dualism are bound by the same assumptions. I recently cited John Searle and his contention that these discussions often mix up ontology and epistemology:

"The ontological subjectivity of the domain [of consciousness] does not prevent us from having an epistemologically objective science of that domain". - (Consciousness as a Problem in Philosophy and Neurobiology)

Over the last few weeks I've been arguing that substance dualism, and in particular Vitalism, is incompatible with basic Buddhism. In fact like Nāgārjuna I'm forced to conclude that any hard and fast ontological position is untenable, because by the Buddhist understanding of the existential situation there is no epistemological support for any ontology. We simply have no way to know one way or the other if the world really exists or really doesn't. All we can know is that experience arises and passes away and it marked by impermanence, disappointment and insubstantiality. However I offer the caveat that together we can infer a lot about the world and that through empiricism and comparing notes we have a lot of useful information and accurate theories.

The other kind of Materialism, the other side of the mono-substance ontology, argues that there is only one kind of substance in the universe and it is mind. Whereas the Materialism that is regularly attacked by Buddhists is a form of Realism, if we say that there is only mind then we have a form of Idealism (after Plato's conception of 'ideas' the ultimate, true, noumena behind phenomena). Idealism is quite a popular philosophical stance amongst Buddhists. And it's still a mono-substance ontology and thus a form of Materialism.

Scientism

Scientism is distinct from Physicalism and Materialism because it's primarily an epistemological stance. Scientism, on the back of the massive success of science, argues that the scientific method (empiricism) is the only valid method of acquiring knowledge. Presumably Scientism would argue that common sense is a less sophisticated form of empiricism. In fact this is mostly a pejorative term used by social "scientists" against real scientists. And the irony here is that the humanities have been vigorously gearing up to be sciences since around the time "Scientism" was coined as a pejorative. So in some sense the argument is not with scientists, but with humanities scholars enthusiastically adopting the paradigms of science. Of course they do this because of the kudos that comes with empirical research: it's much harder to argue with measurement than with surmise or reflection.

In fact I see this adoption of empiricism outside the natural sciences as a rather baleful influence on everyday life. Ordinary professionals such as teachers and nurses now have to have masters degrees and spend half their time on administrative and bureaucratic tasks designed to measure their performance. Such initiatives stem from the influence of Neolibertatian ideology to society: Neolibertarians enthusiastically adopted Game Theory for example and measurements of productivity adapted from manufacturing. The most egregious example of this was measuring the efficiency of the Vietnam War in terms of the "body count". The inventor of this metric, Allan Enhoven, was subsequently employed in the 1980s by British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher to reorganise the National Health Service. But the upshot of this is that there is never enough efficiency and constant organisation reviews and reorganisation that do more to sap efficiency than regular bouts of Norovirus. If there's a downside to empiricism this is it.

The critics of science particularly focus on the reductive nature of scientific theories - things are always explained in terms of simpler components. (Which is just what Buddhism does in models like the skandhas, dhātus and nidānas). In fact though science does largely rely on reductive accounts, with huge success it must be said, this is changing with the rise of cross-discipline work and systems theory. Reductive explanations give you a particular kind of leverage on the problems you are looking at. Buddhists exploit this leverage as much as scientists to, though to different ends.

In many ways the term Scientism expresses the anxiety that the efficacy of previously privileged forms of knowledge seeking (such as through meditation or abstract philosophy) are denied by scientists. This anxiety being felt as much within the disciplines of sociology and psychology as without. The application of empiricism to fields like psychology looks like reducing the role of gifted pioneers like Sigmund Freud. The impressionistic and visionary approach to psychology doesn't always tally with what scientists find. take homeopathy which is so popular amongst those who lean towards Buddhism. Factually speaking there is nothing in homeopathic remedies and homeopathy is exposed as based on untrue propositions. The Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal cartoon website sells tee-shirts with the legend: Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543. The term "Scientism" is aimed at taunting those killjoy scientists who disprove unicorns and homeopathy, often with no real acknowledgement of the successes of science and the new stuff that we enjoy: like the internet.

Ontology and Epistemology

Buddhism has a reasonably clear epistemology i.e. it is reasonably clear on what constitutes sources of valid knowledge (pramāṇa). Historically this clarity is lost because Buddhists begin to prioritise ontology, but before they go down that dusty road, there is some clarity. Knowledge comes from experience.

The central truth criteria are three axioms: experience is impermanent; experience is unsatisfactory; and experience is insubstantial. Any knowledge which conforms to these three axioms is valid knowledge. But here we must be cognizant of the scope of early Buddhist thought. Time and again the Buddha says: "I teach suffering, the origin of suffering, the cessation of suffering, and the way to cessation." Thus early Buddhist ideas were never intended as a philosophical system as though Gotama were an Indian Plato or Aristotle. Buddhism is programmatic. It's pragmatically focussed on duḥkha and minimalist in being unconcerned with wider philosophical questions which when asked are frequently left aside as unexplained (avyākata).

By cultivating certain kinds of experience, particularly samādhi or integration and by reflecting on experience per se in that state, one can get access to knowledge of the nature of experience (yathābhūta-jñānadarśana) and become liberated from duḥkha. Subsequent to that liberation (vimukti) we obtain knowledge that we are liberated (vimuktijñāna).

There is another kind of knowledge traditionally associated with samādhi called abhijñā. This is more or less extra-sensory perception. How we understand these ESPs will depend on temperament and worldview. However the most import of the abhijñās, and the only one described as lokuttara, is āsravakṣaya the destruction of the fluxes; synonymous with vimukti. And although it is certainly possible, in early Buddhist texts, to gain ESP powers, it is not usually seen as desirable, especially in contrast to the āsravakṣaya.

At no point in early Buddhist texts, and as far as I know in the Perfection of Wisdom texts, the Sukhāvativyūha texts or other Mahāyāna Sūtras, does the Buddha say anything at all about the nature of reality or of objects. Such speculations as we have in the Buddhist tradition seem to come out of arguments between the successors of the Ābhidharmikas and non-Buddhist Indian philosophers and to date mainly from ca. the 6th century AD onwards. Buddhists went for over 1000 years without worrying about what the world is made of. Even the so-called "elements" (dhātu) are defined in experiential terms: earth is characterised by the experience of resistance and so on.

It's important to be clear about all this, about the doctrinal stance that underpins Buddhism: both early Buddhism, sectarian Buddhism and at least the early Mahāyāna. The focus is on gaining knowledge that can release us from suffering. That knowledge is obtained by examining our mind, especially from a state of samādhi or through reflections carried out immediately post-samādhi. While natural processes do offer metaphors for the mind, the natural world is never given any consideration in the process of liberation. It is broadly speaking a source domain of objects of the senses, but nothing more and of little or no interest to Buddhist thinkers.

I've already mentioned that one of the implications of this Buddhist epistemology is that it can support no ontological arguments. And indeed where Buddhists make ontological arguments they have to first modify the Buddhist epistemology in ways that are not related to the program of gaining liberation from suffering. Thus, I would argue, that if one is a Buddhist then one cannot legitimately take an ontological stand. I believe that this is precisely the message of the Kaccānagotta Sutta.

We have no basis for arguing that "reality" or "things" or "the universe" is one way or the other. We have no basis for a Realist point of view and no basis for an Idealist point of view. We have no valid source of knowledge about the nature of reality or the nature of objects of the senses. All we have is experience. And even those people with insight are just describing another kind of experience which is entirely personal to them. Knowledge from the senses can be reliable to varying degrees, even the unawakened can function in the world and physics makes incredibly accurate predictions. But any ultimate knowledge we might gain can only be of the workings of the mind, and in particular the way the mind responds to sensory stimulation and how that related to the three axioms of experience.

Conclusions

Whenever we see pejoratives flying around in a intellectual discussion we know that someone's toes have been stepped on. Pejoratives are about trying to score points. Good polemic deals with substantive points, it does not resort to lazy labelling. Of course it can be helpful to point out that a critic has an unstated, and possibly unexamined, assumption or philosophical stance. Buddhists all too often take a stand in Romantic ideology or in Vitalist ontology. Or they may cite some anachronistic philosophy or view (Schopenhauer is a favourite). And it can be helpful to point out and critique the stance or the view when developing an argument. When one's critics are thoughtlessly expounding a philosophical stance, then undermining that stance is a valid way of proceeding. Negatively pejoratives are employed to shut down discussions, to silence opposition, and to try to put an opponent at a disadvantage so as simply to win an argument.

It's useful to see that Physicalism, Materialism, and Scientism are three different labels for three different approaches to being and/or knowledge. And to know that if one wants to put a non-polemical label on the worldview of most scientists it would be Naturalism.

If someone wants to pick a fight on the basis of their own confusion about these terms, or based on an anachronistic view of science, or the views of a philosopher who died before science really got going; or to make an argument based on an ontology for which there is no supporting epistemology; then I'm under no more obligation to take up that fight than I would be to argue theology with a Jehovah's Witness on my doorstep.

~~oOo~~

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~~

Edward Conze was of the opinion that the oldest layer of the Prajñāpāramitā textual tradition is probably the first two chapters of the Ratnaguṇasaṃcayagāthā (Rgs). He sees it as closely related to the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (8000 line Perfection of Wisdom Text; Aṣṭa) but conjectures that verse precedes prose. Other scholars have conjectured that the verse is actually a post hoc summary of the prose. At present there is insufficient information to decide one way or the other. In some manuscripts the Rgs is included as a chapter of a larger Prajñāpāramitā text (8k and 100k), inevitably numbered "chapter 84".

While we don't have very old manuscripts of the Rgs, we do have one of the Aṣṭa in Prakrit from the 1st Century (carbon dated to between 47 and 147 CE) and thus probably from the end of the 1st Century CE. We also have a very early (179 CE) Chinese translation by the Scythian translator, Lokakṣema. We now know that the Aṣṭa was composed in Prakrit in Gandhāra which solves some of the existing problems of where to locate the early Prajñāpāramitā tradition. Rgs by contrast was not translated in Chinese until the 10th century by Faxian 法賢 (991CE), 《佛母寶德藏般若波羅蜜經》Fúmǔ-bǎodécáng-bōrěbōluómì(duo)-Jīng (T 229). This means that it played no part in the understanding and development of Perfection of Wisdom thought in China. This Chinese version is, according to Yuyama (1976), probably the most corrupt of all the versions. It is closer to Recension A, but still very different in many places. This may be due to Faxian's "free (or perhaps bad) translation." (xl)

As we now know, the Heart Sutra or Hṛdayaprajñāpāramitā is mostly comprised of some quotes from a Chinese Large Perfection of Wisdom Text equivalent to the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. The most likely candidate is Kumārajīva's translation 《摩訶般若波羅蜜經》Móhēbōrěbōluómì Jīng by Kumārajīva (T 223; 404 CE). We also know that the larger texts in 18,000, 25,000 and 100,000 lines are simply an expansion of the Aṣṭa. It is possible to trace many of the cited passages from the Hṛdaya back into the Pañcaviṃśati; but we ought to be able to go one step further and trace some of them back into the Aṣṭa and Rgs. This essay will revisit an aspect of the roots of the Hṛdaya in the Prajñāpāramitā literature, particularly for the epithets passage:

Tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāvidyā anuttaravidyā 'samasamavidyā.

In Jan Nattier's watershed article (1992) she notes a few examples of this genealogical approach with respect to the epithets passage. Nattier, in note 54a, explains that the epithets are epithets of prajñāpāramitā itself and that the word mantra is an erroneous back translation of 明咒 míng zhòu (= vidyā), with confusion arising because 咒 zhòu is used in the same capacity and even appears alongside 明咒. I conjecture that the confusion was exacerbated because the composition of the early Prajñāpāramitā texts occurred well before Tantric Buddhism, while the translation of the Hṛdaya from Chinese into Sanskrit occurred post-tantra and the reading of 咒 was.

An interesting comparison is with the six-syllable mantra: oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ. Alex Studholm's study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra (Kvs) reveals the early history of this mantra. I've written two previous essays on Studholm's conclusions:

Throughout the Kvs the "mantra" is never referred to as a mantra, but only and always as the ṣaḍakṣarī mahāvidyā (61) "the six-syllabled great techne". Vidyā is a difficult word to find a good English translation for in this context. Techne is a Greek word which has almost exactly the same range of meaning, i.e. 'art, craft, skill', and is the source of our word technology. I'm trying it out in this essay, but I wouldn't insist on it. My only stipulation would be that we cannot translate vidyā as "science" because it is anachronistic. The word "science" properly applies to the systematic empirically based descriptions of the world, tested through conjecture and refutation, which began in the late 15th century in Europe. There is an archaic use of the word science which does cross over with vidyā, but it is archaic. And in the present there is too much confusion over the distinctions between science and religion to be slack in how we use the words. Better a neologism than an anachronism if we communicating to a present day audience. Indeed if anything the argument ought to go the other way. We might, as some do, translate vidyā as 'spell' or 'magic'. The main idea here is the specialist knowledge of Buddhist practices which allow us to gain first-hand, experiential knowledge of how the perceptual situation creates duḥkha. This has a magical flavour in many texts, and can result in extra-sensory perceptions, but there is nothing of science here. Vidyā is religious knowledge.

As we know, mahāvidyā is one of the epithets of prajñāpāramitā also. In the Chinese Heart Sutra, it is 大明咒 dà míng zhòu, where 大 means 'great' and 明咒 = vidyā. Due to the ambiguity of the characters and the confusion over the original meaning this is often translated as "great bright mantra". See e.g. Mu Soeng's recent translation and commentary on the Chinese version. Soeng, like Red Pine, simply ignores Nattier's findings. In the Chinese 咒 = vidyā also. Hence the change I have suggested in the Sanskrit: that "mantra" (qua word) is eliminated from the text and replaced everywhere with vidyā. For the argument in more detail see: Heart Sutra Mantra Epithets.

In Nattier's article she notes that the epithets passage has been traced by Nobuyoshi Yamabe in various Chinese translations of Pañcaviṃśati and Aṣṭa. I have been working on a comprehensive list of the counterpart passages in the basic Prajñāpāramitā texts in Sanskrit and Chinese. There are in fact only two passages, but they recur across two languages and multiple translations of multiple texts and so number about two dozen in total. I hope to publish this information before too long. Using electronic searches, I also came across a counterpart in the Rgs. In Chinese the passage is (T 8.229 678.a4-5):

大明般若諸佛母，
能除苦惱徧世界，
所有三世十方佛，
學此明得無上師。

This great techne of perfect wisdom is the mother of all Buddhas,
Able to remove distress in all world spheres,
All the Buddhas of the three times and the ten directions,
Schooled in this techne are the supreme masters.

We can identify it as a counterpart because of its place in the sequence; its use of mahāvidyā in connection to prajñāpāramitā; and because it connects the vidyā with the buddhas of the three times and ten directions. The latter also links it to the second of two possible Pañcaviṃśati passages that are the basis of the Hṛdaya epithets (and the more likely of the two). In this translation mahāvidyā is rendered as 大明 dà míng (line 1), while vidyā in line 4 is simply 明 míng, in line with the practice of the day.

There are two main recensions of the Sanskrit Rgs and I have used recension A from the critical edition published by Akira Yuyama. Vaidya's edition is based on Recension B mss and has only minor differences in this verse which are discussed below. Conze describes the metre as "irregular Vasantatilaka" though my sources suggest that this is a 14 syllable metre, with a caesura after 8, i.e.:

– – ∪ | – ∪ | ∪ ∪ – ॥ ∪ ∪ – | ∪ – –

(∪ light; - heavy; ॥ ceasura)

Rgs has 13, 14 and 15 syllable lines, with 15 seeming to be the norm and the verse we're looking at is quite regular. The final pattern of Rgs 3.5 does match the post-caesura portion of Vasanatilaka, i.e. | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ – – (If anyone knows Sanskrit metres and can tell us more please comment or email me).

The text is not really in Sanskrit, but rather in a Prakrit that has been Sanskritised to some extent. It's quite near the Prakrit end of the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit spectrum, though this verse looks more or less like Sanskrit. Conze's translation is based on his "corrected" edition of Recension B, published in Russia by E. Obermiller and (not infrequently) on the Tibetan edition (Yuyama 1976: xlvii). I will compare both, but favour Recension A as found in Yuyama (1976). The text of the Rgs (A) verse which corresponds to the Chinese above is:

mahavidya prajña ayu pāramitā jinānāṃ |
dukhadharmaśokaśamanī pṛthusattvadhātoḥ ||
ye ’tīta’nāgatadaśaddiśa lokanāthā |
ima vidya śikṣita anuttaravaidyarājāḥ || Rgs 3.5 ||

∪ ∪ – | * – ∪ | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ – – (* see discussion)
∪ ∪ – | ∪ – ∪ | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ – –
∪ * – | ∪ – ∪ | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ – –
∪ ∪ – | ∪ – ∪ | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ ∪ – | ∪ – –

This perfection of wisdom of the Jinas is a major techne;
In the realm abounding in beings, whose nature is suffering, grief, and darkness.
The world protectors of past and future, in the ten directions, who;
Trained in this knowledge, are the unexcelled kings of the knowledgeable.

The overall similarity of content shows that these two are the same passage, and the numbering also accords. That said some interesting differences occur as we would expect from the introductory comments based on Yuyama's observations about the state of the Chinese text.

The first line in particular marks this passage out as not being Classical Sanskrit. In Sanskrit it would probably read: mahāvidyā prajñā ayaṃ pāramitā jinānām | Such differences might appear trivial to the non-philologist, but all to often it is these differences in vowel length and final syllables that make the difference between languages. One can see that, here at least, the metre is fairly regular and in fact the Classical Sanskrit spelling would spoil the metre!

In line 1 measure 2 the ya in vidya does not make position. It is followed by pra which ought to make it heavy. The Pāli spelling would be paññā so it may be that the Prakrit speaking author pronounced prajña more like Pāli i.e. /pa/ rather than /pra/ and thus thought of ya as light. Or it may be an adjustment metri causa. Also the caesura occurs after the pā of pāramitā which is quite poor poetry. The Chinese (line 1) introduces the phrase 諸佛母 'mother of all the Buddhas' as an epithet of prajñāpāramitā. This may relate to the time period of the translation. A translation of Aṣṭa from 985 CE gives the title as《佛母出生三法藏般若波羅蜜多經》Fúmǔ-chūshēng-sānfǎcáng-bōrěbōluómìduō-jīng. 佛母出生三法藏 means something like: "The mother of the Buddhas that gives birth to the casket of the three Dharmas"; while 般若波羅蜜多 is the standard transliteration of prajñāpāramitā. And note that the title of Rgs also contains the phrase 佛母 'mother of the Buddhas'. This is an epithet of prajñāpāramitā even in early texts, but seems to have become more important by 10th century in China.

Line 2 is interpreted in a more positive sense in the Chinese version. The Sanskrit merely notes the characteristics of saṃsāra (misery and grief) while the Chinese insists that the vidyā is able to relieve the suffering. This change is consistent with parallel changes in how the Buddha was seen in the Mahāyāna that I noted in my recent article in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (21): Escaping the Inescapable: Changes in Buddhist Karma. What we see is the Buddha becoming more like a messiah in his ability to intervene in human affairs to benefit people. In particular in the revised (Mahāyāna) versions of the Śrāmaṇyaphala Sūtra, King Ajātaśatru, who has killed his father, is excused from a lengthy stay in Hell simply by meeting the Buddha. It seems that the idea that a Buddha, or in this case prajñāpāramitā, was unable to intervene was unacceptable to Mahāyānavādins. As was the idea that a Buddha might not return to this world as a saviour despite having won liberation from it.

Line 3 shows minimal variation between the two versions, except that the epithet lokanāthā'protectors of the world' is exchanged for 佛 = buddhas. Since Faxian was translating in verse he may well have made a change like this for the sake of preserving the metre (metri causa). Chinese verse is restricted not only in the number of characters, but sometimes in the pattern of tones also, though we don't have reliable information about tones from Middle Chinese as far as I know. The Sanskrit metre means that one of the elided letters in ye 'tīta 'nāgata must have been spoken since the metre has 15 syllables and the line as written only 14. In order to fit the metrical pattern we must read ye atīta 'nāgata. It is here that Vaidya's edition differs: ye 'tīta ye 'pi ca daśaddiśa lokanāthā. However this also only has 14 syllables and here we must read ye atīta ye 'pi ca. The metrical argument here is strong and might merit emending the Sanskrit text.

Line 4 in Prakrit uses a simple play on words that might have been confusing in Chinese. One who trains in the vidyā becomes a supremely knowledgeable (vaidya) king. Here vaidya derives either from vidyā and means 'of or related to vidyā'; or from veda with much the same meaning. In any case someone who "knows" is "knowledgeable". (Note that "Vaidya" is the surname of one of the editors of the Sanskrit text.) In Chinese however two cognate words like vidyā and vaidya would be represented by the same character: 明 míng. Since this might be confusing, Faxian opts for 師 shī, which less ambiguously (and more concisely) conveys the sense of "mastery" and "expertise". Faxian does however retain 無上 wú shàng as a rendering of an-uttara, both meaning 'none higher' or 'unexcelled'.

Conclusion

If Conze is correct then this mention of prajñāpāramitā qua vidyā in Rgs may be the original passage. However the chronology is complex. Between the composition of Rgs, the copying of the ms. that recension A is based on, and the Chinese translation ten centuries have passed. These texts are known to change over time. For example the Sanskrit parallel in extant Aṣṭa is much more elaborate than the version in extant Pañcaviṃśati suggesting that the manuscript of Aṣṭa is later, though overall we observe the opposite. In general Pañcaviṃśati is a development of Aṣṭa but apparently different parts of the texts evolved at different rates.

So any differences may be due to differences in the text rather than changes introduced by the translator. For all we know Faxian might be absolutely true to the text the translator had before him. However there are indications of adaptation to both cultural assumptions and to metric necessity.

Most commentaries on the Heart Sutra project late, synthetic views back onto the text. Thus for the recently published Zen commentaries (e.g. Red Pine or Mu Soeng) the text is almost a tabula rasa onto which the ideas of Zen are inscribed, drawing on the Sūtra's status for authentication. Conze's commentary, influenced no doubt by D T Suzuki, takes a similar approach. Commentators like Pine and Soeng set out to tell a story about Zen based on the Heart Sutra. They seem unaware of any tension between the story they wish to tell and the text itself; and blithely gloss over any inconsistencies. Neither have any time for Jan Nattier's discovery. Pine talks himself out of having to take it seriously on spurious grounds, while Soeng notes the article and then proceeds as if it were never written. The religious story they wish to tell overrides any inconvenient historical or philological facts. And yet both writers are praised for being "scholarly".

For some scholars this genealogical approach to re-used passages is texts is intrinsically interesting. The re-use of passages and texts is a distinct subject for study in Indology (see Elisa Freschi on academia.org, her blog, and Indian Philosophy Blog). In the case of the Hṛdaya however it also opens up an entirely new way of reading the text (an hermeneutic). We can see that the Heart Sutra is thoroughly rooted in the early Prajñāpāramitā texts and that at the very least we need to allow that the author of the text (working between about 400 CE and 650 CE) had that kind reading in mind. It is possible that we see in the Heart Sutra an epitome of early Mahāyāna/Prajñāpāramitā thought rather than a legitimation of later readings which synthesise many elements of Mahāyāna thought and manifest as new forms of Buddhism like Zen or Gelugpa.

In which case we ought to be looking at the characteristic ideas of the early Prajñāpāramitā texts for the foundation concepts that allow us to understand the Heart Sutra. This exploration is a large part of what I will be doing over the next few years. Clearly there are many continuities with a particular stream of early Buddhist ideas and practice. For example, meditation practices such as the skandha reflections provide continuity. And an obvious discontinuity was the rejection of Abhidharma Realism, particularly the Sarvāstivāda ideas that were expressed in pursuit of a solution to the problem of Action at a Temporal Distance (I've yet to discover a specifically Prajñāpāramitā solution to this problem, though Nāgārjuna's solution may give us hints about what to look for). In any case there is a great deal of research on early Mahāyāna that modern commentators pay lip-service to, but fail to incorporate into their narratives. I'd like to revise the story of the Heart Sutra, particularly in the light of Nattier (1992).

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Chinese text from the CBETA version of the Taishō Edition of the Chinese Tripiṭaka.

Falk, Harry and Karashima, Seishi. (2012) A first‐century Prajñāpāramitā manu-script from Gandhāra - parivarta 1 (Texts from the Split Collection 1). ARIRIAB XV, 19-61. Online: https://www.academia.edu/3561115/prajnaparamita-5

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].

Nattier, Jan. (1992). The Heart Sūtra : a Chinese apocryphal text? Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. Vol. 15 (2), p.153-223.

Studholme, Alexander (2002). The Origins of oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ: A Study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. State University of New York Press.

Vaidya, P. L. (1960) Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning. Also online: http://www.dsbcproject.org/node/8242

Yuyama, Akira. (1976) Prajñā-pāramitā-ratna-guṇa-saṃcaya-gāthā (Sanskrit Recension A). Cambridge University Press.

Sarvāstivāda and the Chinese Sarva Sūtra

Sarvāstivāda Approach to the Problem of Action at a Temporal Distance.

cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi

One Citta at a time

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti
imass' uppādā idaṃ uppajjati
imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti
imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati

sense object + sense organ + sense discrimination = contact

Thus, dharmas exist in all three times: present, past, and future.

Where and Why Did the Sarvāstivādins Go Wrong?

Water, water everywhere...

Vitalism: The Philosophy That Wouldn't Die

Crossing the Line Between Death and Life

Spiritual I: The Life's Breath

Etymology

The Life's Breath

RIP MIchael Dorfman

Spiritual II: Frames.

Spiritual III: Demesnes of Power

Why Artificial Intelligences Will Never Be Like Us and Aliens Will Be Just Like Us.

Is Experience Really Ineffable?

The Antarabhava or Interim State as a Vitalist Concept

Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics

Basics

Demonising Our Religion

Ethical Modes in Early Buddhism

Pulling Wings Off Fairies

Physicalism, Materialism, and Scientism

Thinking Like a Buddhist about Karma & Rebirth

Roots of the Heart Sutra

cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi

One Citta at a time

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hotiimass' uppādā idaṃ uppajjatiimasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hotiimassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati

sense object + sense organ + sense discrimination = contact

Thus, dharmas exist in all three times: present, past, and future.

Etymology

The Life's Breath

Basics

imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti
imass' uppādā idaṃ uppajjati
imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti
imassa nirodhā idaṃ nirujjhati