WHEN I BECAME A BUDDHIST I was initially attracted by the fellowship of the people and the promise of becoming a better person. I also found attractive the idea that Buddhism did not require blind faith, though it's obvious to me now that Buddhism does in fact strongly suggest, if not actually require, blind faith.Apropos faith I recently participated in quite an interesting discussion on Glenn Wallis's blog Speculative Non-Buddhism. Responding particularly to something written by Stephen Bachelor, but also from general observations of the Secular Buddhist online groups, Glenn outlined five articles of faith he could see in so-called Secular Buddhist discourse. These articles of faith, he suggested, showed that Secular Buddhism is not secular at all, it is another variety of what he styles 'x-Buddhism'.
Secular Buddhists (including Ted Meissner who might well have invented the term; and is now Executive Director of the Secular Buddhist Association) chimed in that they did not recognise Glenn's portrayal of them, but on the whole they missed the point of his meta-analysis of their discourse. Sadly it did not attract a response from Bachelor himself. Whatever we make of secular Buddhism, Glenn's articles of faith are interesting and I would like to discuss them in light of my own ideas.
Buddhist Articles of Faith
- Transcendental Dharma: The dharma—that unity of unique and timeless truths uttered by the enlightened Buddha—addresses and resolves our 'ultimate concern' as human being.
- The Buddha: the human source of this timeless dharmic clarification of the great matter of life and death.
- Special Teachings: both exigent and unique. "For, all four [Noble Truths] have been articulated throughout history, and continue to be formulated and developed, in ways far more sophisticated, hence appropriate to a modern audience, than Buddhism’s ancient, ascetically-driven versions."
- The Principle of Sufficient Buddhism: The Dharma as Theory of Everything, with no need for input from any other domain of knowledge.
- Ideological Rectitude: Buddhism is "natural, empirical, pragmatic, and in accord with science". The teachings, as the ancient trope has it, are simply how things are. They are phenomenologically obvious. Thus, they posit not matters to be believed but tasks to be done.
This list is intended as a polemic of Secular Buddhism, but I think it has a broader application as a polemic of Buddhist faith generally. I've critiqued the idea of the Dharma as Theory of Everything at some length (See: Is Paṭicca-samuppāda a Theory of Everything? Short answer: no it isn't). But some new ideas occurred to me as a result of thinking about the problem in the light of my essay on the interactions between reason and emotion, and the idea of embodied cognition (Facts and Feelings) and I began to articulate them in comments on Glenn's blog. I've gathered the threads together in this essay and tried to flesh them out.
I think we translate the word saddhā (Skt. śraddhā) as 'faith' because this is the standard English translation of the Latin 'credo', which probably comes from the same PIE root and is conventionally understood to mean 'I believe'. However, in practice saddhā has little in common with credo. I've explored the notion of saddhā before, but now I want to put forward a new interpretation. Recall that saddhā is typically tathāgate saddhaṃ, which is conventionally translated as 'faith in the tathāgata'. It arises after hearing the Buddha talking about the Dharma. It's widely known that saddhā comes from sad 'heart' (Skt. śrad = hṛd < PIE *kred > Latin cred; the śrad form is more closely related to Iranian forms, and only used in this context), and the verb dhā 'to place'. Saddhā then is 'what we give our heart to'; or as I am now suggesting what we fall in love with. This is very far from being an intellectual position or a mere statement of belief. Saddhā has an erotic charge to it (using eros in the Jungian rather than the Freudian sense). The Pāli texts, I suggest, do actually talk about saddhā as if people fall in love with the Buddha. And why not? He is always portrayed as supernaturally beautiful and extraordinarily charismatic. In Indian religious terms this feeling is also called bhakti 'devotion, love, worship', and one who feels it is a bhaktin. Once a disciple gets some fruit from their practice they experience avecca-pasāda 'definite clarity', i.e. they know from personal experience what the practice does. The first fruit traditionally being described as stream-entry (sotāpanna), after which one can say "I know, I see" (janāmi passāmi) And this knowledge replaces the superficial feelings of saddhā with something more grounded. One can now continue under one's own steam. Although the word is typically used in another way, we could call this śakti 'capability, power, strength', and one possessing it a śaktin.
Probably most Western Buddhists initially fell in love with some aspect of Buddhism. When we fall in love we experience fascination with the beloved, a desire to be in their presence, to exclude others, and anxiety when apart. Another word for this is passion, the flooding of our system with strong emotions that alter the way we think and act (in my terms: that change the salience of information). The metaphor flooding is appropriate because the alteration in our faculties is paralleled by our endocrine system flooding our bloodstream with hormones. Love has been likened to a drug and to madness; and is often described as a sickness. Like drugs, love feels great, but often has unintended consequences. Under some circumstances, e.g. in a religion, we make common cause with people who share our passion and feel a sense of solidarity. Of course falling in love with Buddhism is complex because it involves relationships with teachers (whom we also fall in love with) and with communities of people. Often people seem to come to Buddhism on the back of some trauma or tragedy, and are looking for a solution to some problem. I don't want to reduce the phenomena of becoming a Buddhist, only to focus on an aspect of it for rhetorical purposes.
Most of us remain bhaktins; we fall in love, and we never become independent śaktins. We never stand on our own two feet. We could blame Western culture for this, but I think it is a more general problem for humanity. For example as humans we have become self-domesticated. Domestication induces certain characteristic changes on animals. One of which is a tendency to retain juvenile behaviours, and physical characteristics; the technical term for this is pedomorphosis (see e.g. Gilbert 2010). Compare for instance the domestic dog with the wolf. These two can in fact interbreed producing fertile offspring, which has forced a change in the taxonomy of domestic dogs. They are now considered a subspecies of the wolf, though their physiology and behaviour are very different. Dogs are behaviourally adapted to human society, and will tend to bond with a family, be very much less aggressive (than a wolf), and be more inclined to submissiveness. And we live in a society in which, for example we have to keep a lid on aggression; where some of us find it difficult to grow up and some of us are wilfully immature. I'm beginning to see that, yes, we are social animals, social apes; but also that we are domesticated social apes.
However it comes about, the majority of us, including many of the more prominent Buddhist Teachers, never quite become śaktins; we never experience the fruits that would make us truly independent. We fall in love and do not mature. In talking about Buddhism we often go beyond our personal experience and resort to quoting books and teachers. And I suspect this might also be related to falling in love with an abstraction (or some might say a projection). A real person inevitably disappoints us and even betrays us, so that we lose our naivety. This cannot happen with an abstraction since the relationship is entirely one sided. An abstract ideal always remains aloof. In Buddhism we might say that this abstraction is a true refuge, for example, because it lacks all human weaknesses and so it cannot let us down. While the down side of this obvious it might not be all bad. By projecting the best parts of ourselves onto an idealised anthropomorphic figure we can come into relationship with ourselves at our best, the angels of our better nature. Transference is not always a bad thing as long as there is some way to own the projections at some point. The problem comes when we over identify with the angels and forget about our demons, though Buddhism has a place for them too!
Falling in love also changes the salience of facts; changes the way we view, validate and value information. For religieux the articles of our faith take on so much mass that they almost always tip the balance back towards our belief system. And recall that this process of weighing facts is not intellectual, but primarily emotional: i.e. we experience the value of information as felt emotional responses to it (hence 'gut feeling').
Once Buddhism starts to 'feel right' to us, it changes the salience of other information. In particular we begin to think in terms of the articles of faith outlined by Glenn, and (re)interpret our experience according to the articles of faith in order to find confirmation of the articles. Anything which does not conform or confirm is either reinterpreted (e.g. as symbolic) or rejected. These responses are just abstract versions of the way primate groups deal with strange individuals: adopting or ousting. When someone reblogged my essay Rebirth is Neither Plausible Nor Salient on Reddit a number of the responses were hypercritical of me. They overstated my claims, and characterised me as reprehensible for trying to undermine "those who followed the original teaching of the philosophy" (Reddit). There was no attempt to engage with my ideas, only a clamour of irrational denunciation. In other words they acted just like jealous lovers.
In the Rebirth essay I summed up my understanding of the general dynamic of the belief in an afterlife like this:
I think we translate the word saddhā (Skt. śraddhā) as 'faith' because this is the standard English translation of the Latin 'credo', which probably comes from the same PIE root and is conventionally understood to mean 'I believe'. However, in practice saddhā has little in common with credo. I've explored the notion of saddhā before, but now I want to put forward a new interpretation. Recall that saddhā is typically tathāgate saddhaṃ, which is conventionally translated as 'faith in the tathāgata'. It arises after hearing the Buddha talking about the Dharma. It's widely known that saddhā comes from sad 'heart' (Skt. śrad = hṛd < PIE *kred > Latin cred; the śrad form is more closely related to Iranian forms, and only used in this context), and the verb dhā 'to place'. Saddhā then is 'what we give our heart to'; or as I am now suggesting what we fall in love with. This is very far from being an intellectual position or a mere statement of belief. Saddhā has an erotic charge to it (using eros in the Jungian rather than the Freudian sense). The Pāli texts, I suggest, do actually talk about saddhā as if people fall in love with the Buddha. And why not? He is always portrayed as supernaturally beautiful and extraordinarily charismatic. In Indian religious terms this feeling is also called bhakti 'devotion, love, worship', and one who feels it is a bhaktin. Once a disciple gets some fruit from their practice they experience avecca-pasāda 'definite clarity', i.e. they know from personal experience what the practice does. The first fruit traditionally being described as stream-entry (sotāpanna), after which one can say "I know, I see" (janāmi passāmi) And this knowledge replaces the superficial feelings of saddhā with something more grounded. One can now continue under one's own steam. Although the word is typically used in another way, we could call this śakti 'capability, power, strength', and one possessing it a śaktin.
Probably most Western Buddhists initially fell in love with some aspect of Buddhism. When we fall in love we experience fascination with the beloved, a desire to be in their presence, to exclude others, and anxiety when apart. Another word for this is passion, the flooding of our system with strong emotions that alter the way we think and act (in my terms: that change the salience of information). The metaphor flooding is appropriate because the alteration in our faculties is paralleled by our endocrine system flooding our bloodstream with hormones. Love has been likened to a drug and to madness; and is often described as a sickness. Like drugs, love feels great, but often has unintended consequences. Under some circumstances, e.g. in a religion, we make common cause with people who share our passion and feel a sense of solidarity. Of course falling in love with Buddhism is complex because it involves relationships with teachers (whom we also fall in love with) and with communities of people. Often people seem to come to Buddhism on the back of some trauma or tragedy, and are looking for a solution to some problem. I don't want to reduce the phenomena of becoming a Buddhist, only to focus on an aspect of it for rhetorical purposes.
Most of us remain bhaktins; we fall in love, and we never become independent śaktins. We never stand on our own two feet. We could blame Western culture for this, but I think it is a more general problem for humanity. For example as humans we have become self-domesticated. Domestication induces certain characteristic changes on animals. One of which is a tendency to retain juvenile behaviours, and physical characteristics; the technical term for this is pedomorphosis (see e.g. Gilbert 2010). Compare for instance the domestic dog with the wolf. These two can in fact interbreed producing fertile offspring, which has forced a change in the taxonomy of domestic dogs. They are now considered a subspecies of the wolf, though their physiology and behaviour are very different. Dogs are behaviourally adapted to human society, and will tend to bond with a family, be very much less aggressive (than a wolf), and be more inclined to submissiveness. And we live in a society in which, for example we have to keep a lid on aggression; where some of us find it difficult to grow up and some of us are wilfully immature. I'm beginning to see that, yes, we are social animals, social apes; but also that we are domesticated social apes.
However it comes about, the majority of us, including many of the more prominent Buddhist Teachers, never quite become śaktins; we never experience the fruits that would make us truly independent. We fall in love and do not mature. In talking about Buddhism we often go beyond our personal experience and resort to quoting books and teachers. And I suspect this might also be related to falling in love with an abstraction (or some might say a projection). A real person inevitably disappoints us and even betrays us, so that we lose our naivety. This cannot happen with an abstraction since the relationship is entirely one sided. An abstract ideal always remains aloof. In Buddhism we might say that this abstraction is a true refuge, for example, because it lacks all human weaknesses and so it cannot let us down. While the down side of this obvious it might not be all bad. By projecting the best parts of ourselves onto an idealised anthropomorphic figure we can come into relationship with ourselves at our best, the angels of our better nature. Transference is not always a bad thing as long as there is some way to own the projections at some point. The problem comes when we over identify with the angels and forget about our demons, though Buddhism has a place for them too!
Falling in love also changes the salience of facts; changes the way we view, validate and value information. For religieux the articles of our faith take on so much mass that they almost always tip the balance back towards our belief system. And recall that this process of weighing facts is not intellectual, but primarily emotional: i.e. we experience the value of information as felt emotional responses to it (hence 'gut feeling').
Once Buddhism starts to 'feel right' to us, it changes the salience of other information. In particular we begin to think in terms of the articles of faith outlined by Glenn, and (re)interpret our experience according to the articles of faith in order to find confirmation of the articles. Anything which does not conform or confirm is either reinterpreted (e.g. as symbolic) or rejected. These responses are just abstract versions of the way primate groups deal with strange individuals: adopting or ousting. When someone reblogged my essay Rebirth is Neither Plausible Nor Salient on Reddit a number of the responses were hypercritical of me. They overstated my claims, and characterised me as reprehensible for trying to undermine "those who followed the original teaching of the philosophy" (Reddit). There was no attempt to engage with my ideas, only a clamour of irrational denunciation. In other words they acted just like jealous lovers.
In the Rebirth essay I summed up my understanding of the general dynamic of the belief in an afterlife like this:
- We believe a priori that self-awareness is not tied to the body...
- So the idea that 'something' survives death and continues to 'live' seems plausible.
- The emotional weighting of facts makes this seem probable, and the finality of death improbable,
- And since we don't want to believe in death, post-mortem survival seems preferable!
- We make the leap from preferable to actually true, and it feels satisfying because we have resolved the dissonance and been consistent with our other values.
Falling in love with Buddhism, which stipulates an afterlife as another article of faith, also changes the salience of statements about the afterlife; though it is circular because the eschatology of Buddhism is part of what makes it attractive. This makes the third step of the dynamic very much stronger; and powerfully influences us to make the leap described in the fifth step. Add to that the power of peer pressure, and it becomes very difficult for any Buddhist not to believe in rebirth. The feeling of rightness drives the intellectual effort to justify the belief, though such attempts are always flawed in some way. (See my review of Thanissaro's Apologetic for Rebirth).
As I have suggested, falling in love can make us jealous and possessive. This may help to explain why Buddhists are so very jealous of their texts, their lineages and titles, their special words, and their myths and legends, and especially the historical uniqueness of the Buddha and his Dharma. From the very beginning the peaceful and tolerant religion of Buddhism has been openly contemptuous in its treatment of competing religions. A great deal of effort goes into refutation of heterodox views, which suggests a sense of insecurity in the face of competition. It sometimes appears that Buddhists are afraid that the Buddha's sāsana can't stand on it's own merits. At the same time Buddhists have absorbed whatever seems to work from some of those same traditions! For people who repudiated Brahmanical soteriology and made fun of Brahmins, the early Buddhists surely incorporate a disproportionate amount of Brahmanical cosmology. The very word brahman comes to signify anything particularly important to early Buddhists! There's a very powerful contradiction here that I don't think anyone has yet fully understood or explained.
As I have suggested, falling in love can make us jealous and possessive. This may help to explain why Buddhists are so very jealous of their texts, their lineages and titles, their special words, and their myths and legends, and especially the historical uniqueness of the Buddha and his Dharma. From the very beginning the peaceful and tolerant religion of Buddhism has been openly contemptuous in its treatment of competing religions. A great deal of effort goes into refutation of heterodox views, which suggests a sense of insecurity in the face of competition. It sometimes appears that Buddhists are afraid that the Buddha's sāsana can't stand on it's own merits. At the same time Buddhists have absorbed whatever seems to work from some of those same traditions! For people who repudiated Brahmanical soteriology and made fun of Brahmins, the early Buddhists surely incorporate a disproportionate amount of Brahmanical cosmology. The very word brahman comes to signify anything particularly important to early Buddhists! There's a very powerful contradiction here that I don't think anyone has yet fully understood or explained.
The idea that Buddhists are often playing the jealous lover may help to explain why, in a religion whose central idea seems to be that everything changes, that so many Buddhists are hostile to changes in their belief system. Glenn Wallis quotes Noam Chomsky:
"The system protects itself with indignation against a challenge to deceit in the service of power, and the very idea of subjecting the ideological system to rational inquiry elicits incomprehension or outrage, though it is often masked in other terms."Buddhists often lack any sense of chronology in their teachings, any kind of historical analysis. I've tried to provide some in my posts about how karma and rebirth have changed over time. The teachings are far from timeless. Indeed the very timelessness of them is an article of faith; and it is obvious to anyone who studies even a little of the history of Buddhist ideas that fundamental doctrines do change. This, however, is not enough to outweigh the transcendental Dharma's status as an article of faith. The gravity of the faith gives the article of that faith much greater salience than it would otherwise have. Which means that it feels right to continue believing it even in the fact of counter-factual evidence. You can't prove something wrong to a believer, because if what you say is contradictory then it is not salient! Historical changes or (mere) human expressions are not salient in relation to a transcendent absolute. This is a metaphysical proposition which is not open to debate, or to evidence one way or another--we either believe it or we don't.
And here is what I see as the crux of the matter. Falling in love changes our evaluation of salience in favour of the beloved. Always. Love is blind. Love is a passion that overcomes reason. Unfortunately this means that most Buddhists are living a fundamental contradiction. On one hand they've adopted a powerful salience-altering ideology which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop (with internal and environmental vectors) that is incredibly difficult to be free of; and one the other hand it is precisely this kind of world altering view we wish to free ourselves from. Buddhism, as many of us receive it, has the strong potential to be inherently self-defeating. In the oft quoted metaphor from the Aladgadūpama Sutta the Dhamma is a raft which we have to abandon when we reach the other side. Unfortunately for many people the Dhamma becomes a millstone instead, and prevents them from setting off, let alone reaching the other side.
One of primary postulates of Buddhism is that the Buddhism itself is a perfect panacea that endows us with infinite compassion and perfect wisdom. But in real life even the great and good amongst the living are not perfect or immune from vice or, notably, from suffering. The ideology fails to deliver. In a few rare cases where people seem temperamentally (or perhaps genetically) suited to a more ethereal worldview; or it happens by accident e.g. Eckhart Tolle, Ramana Maharshi, Jill Bolte Taylor. 2500 year after the first "fully and perfectly enlightened" human being, the human race, including all the Buddhists of various denominations I've ever met, still suffer. The general failure to deliver has historically caused some Buddhists to adopt an apocalyptic worldview: they see this is a 'dark age' (kāliyuga), and there's nothing we can do except tread water until Maitreya comes in five gazillion years. The long time frame has not prevented a number of sincere and plausible lunatics have come forward to claim the title of living Buddha. Self proclaimed arahants seem to possess something rather less than perfect wisdom and infinite compassion. Despite this notable failure, that we attribute to human weakness and not to wrong information, most of us decide that despite everything Buddhism still "feels right" and persist with it. Surprise, surprise. Failure is simply not salient to a believer. Just as the current global economic depression is not salient to economists. This is not to say that Buddhist practice is not beneficial, because most of the time we do benefit from it. Just not in the way we might hope for, not in that forever life changing blinding flash we read (and talk) about. However, we weave any benefits into our story, and bracket out any difficulties, and thus interpret our experience as confirming Buddhist ideas.
When we're in love with an abstract idea we enter into dialogue with other domains of knowledge only to the extent that it reflects well on our beloved: such as the rather facile and pathetic attempts by Buddhists to invoke quantum mechanics (c.f. Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat); or the appeals to Romantic Poetry (when most Romantics were and are quite morally reprehensible from the point of view of Buddhist morality). Glenn calls this the Principle of Sufficiency. Buddhism can become a box that we cannot think outside of, and don't even want to. This places some severe limitations on us that aren't really helpful. Glenn argues that they are positively harmful, which I will concede can be the case, but I don't think it is universally so.
To summarise, Buddhists are often in love with an abstraction called Buddhism, or with the imagined figure of a Buddha. Falling in love changes our values, and changes the way we assess the salience of information. Love is blind. Passion overwhelms reason. Because we are in love with an abstraction we cannot lose our naïveté in the usual way, through betrayal. As domesticated social primates we have a strong tendency towards paedomorphia, and juvenile behaviour anyway. Love is jealous and protective. Falling in love makes the beloved more beautiful. As such when presented with articles of faith, we are happy to go along with them, and unlikely to be critical if they confirm our opinion of the beloved. Ironically Buddhism can easily become a view (diṭṭhi/dṛṣṭi) that, according to our own rhetoric, traps us in saṃsāra. It's therefore vitally important to identify articles of faith and subject them to the most rigorous intellectual and experiential examination, and be receptive to criticism of them. Most articles of faith are unlikely to survive this process, so we need to be prepared to relinquish them.
The situation is similar to Relativity. Values bend the space in which information is situated; and therefore reason travels in curves near values, and can become captured in orbits. People with strong convictions are caught in an emotional gravity well, and reason in circles about their beliefs. Opinions that matter to us seem to have gravitas. Of course we're all operating in this relativistic cosmos, and no one is free of values or convictions. However falling in love magnifies the value of the beloved enormously, and can leave us happy in our little orbit looking inward, oblivious to the stars. Belief needn't be a black-hole, but leaving orbit requires us to look up and wonder; and it requires concerted effort.
~~oOo~~
Cited in this essay
Bachelor, Stephen. A Secular Buddhist. www.londoninsight.org.
Gilbert, Scott F. (2010) DevBio: a companion to Developmental Biology. (9th ed.). Especially 23.7 'Evolution and Domestication: Selection on Developmental Genes?'. http://9e.devbio.com/article.php?id=223
Jayarava
- Erwin Schrödinger Didn't Have a Cat. JR. Oct 2010. [with many updates, so have another look at it]
- Facts and Feelings. JR. May 2012.
- Faith in What? JR. July 2011.
- Is Paṭicca-samuppāda a Theory of Everything? Unpublished Essay. July 2011.
- Rebirth and Buddhist Fundamentalism. JR. May 2012.
- Rebirth is Neither Plausible Nor Salient. JR. Jan 2012. Discussed (if that is the word) on Reddit.
Wallis, Glen. 'On the Faith of Secular Buddhists.' Speculative Non-Buddhism. May 2012.
Update: 24 June.
Anyone who is unconvinced by the idea that Buddhists have articles of faith, and that it is blind faith should read the Wikipedia entry on Faith in Buddhism while trying to imagine how it might sound to a non-Buddhism. Jargon abounds, but worse the page is full of magical thinking, supernatural entities and forces, and bizarre metaphysical statements. Underlying it all is the notion that Buddhism represents the ultimate truth about the universe (though several different and mutually exclusive versions of the ultimate truth can be found on the page). The authors of the Wikipedia page are plainly deluded, if not delusional. They are incapable of seeing their views except from within a framework in which Buddhist Dogmas represents the ultimate truth. I cannot imagine a better example of the idea of reason in orbit around a belief.
15 comments:
Thanks for this interesting essay. Am I right Jayarava thinking that what you call “falling in love” in Buddhist context is pretty much the same what Glenn means by "decision", especially in its affective mode?
Another good one, thanks Jayarava. Your essays help me take a step back and take inventory of my beliefs. They have certainly gone a long way in helping me to simplify my practice. Very sorry to see you are winding down the blog.
Jayarava,
This reminds me of the Buddha's injunction to disenchantment and dispassion. I remember becoming disenchanted with Buddhism. It happened gradually as I studied more and more history. The absolute truths gained historical context and variability. No longer were they transcendental; they were often reactions to what came before.
Please don't stop posting. Your blog posts resonate with me so deeply. You seem to have the most wonderful combination of scholarship and practice, and you provide something that can't be found anywhere else online.
@Tomek
I don't know Glenn's jargon very well and this term "decision" not at all. He and I tend to have very different assumptions so I'd be cautious about guessing. What do you think?
Jayarava
Well it interesting to see people delurking at this late stage when I am already tired and jaded and beyond really caring. A bit late guys. I appreciate the present positivity, but where have you been all these years? Too little, too late.
I'm just back from doing an intro to Buddhist ethics for 8 people. So refreshing to talk with passion about my experience of practice, and to have the immediate feedback of face to face communication. The internet is so anonymous and sterile. Most people don't use their names, don't use pictures of themselves, and don't sign their comments. The whole thing is abstract and impersonal and the longer I do it the more alienated I feel. It cannot be healthy, at least not for me!
Everyone log off now and go and talk to a real person. Stop reading this rubbish! It doesn't matter. And go and meet your elected representative and tell them about your ideal society. They are the only ones who can change the rules.
Jayarava, you mentioned at least one of the terms from his heuristic in your essay, so I thought that maybe you might know his central term, namely “decision”. When you write that “You can't prove something wrong to a believer, because if what you say is contradictory then it is not salient!" it reminds me about Glenn's describing “Buddhist” as someone “who has performed a psychologically charged determination that Buddhism provides thaumaturgical refuge. In this sense, decision is an emotional reliance on or hopefulness for the veracity of Buddhist teachings. As such, affective decision violates the methodological spirit of all legitimate knowledge systems, weather in the sciences or in the humanities.” And earlier he writes, that “Buddhists (…) are incapable of discerning the decisional structure that informs their affiliation because of admittance to affiliation ensues from a blinding condition: reflexivity”. (“Nascent Speculative Non-Buddhism”, p. 5-6) So according to what he says, first is this hopefulness of people that, as you write “are looking for a solution to some problem” and then when suddenly they happen to find Buddhist teachings (Glenn's thaumaturgical refuge) they “fall in love with them”, as you say or make a “decision” as says Glenn, that those teachings constitute for them veracity. This affective acceptance of Buddhist teachings enforce the “decisional structure” which is synonymous with reflexivity or even with hyper-reflexivity, which is, I guess the very basis of principle of sufficient Buddhism, which in turn partially leads to the difficulties to “prove something wrong to the believer”. In other words, I think that the saliency you talk about is beyond the reach of Buddhist because s/he might be blinded by the very reflexivity, that in the first place guards the affective core of the decision.
Jayarava,
Well I've been here for years now, commenting positively for the most part, and frankly I couldn't agree more with your assessment of internet debate. I've reduced my participation in cyberarguments dramatically in the last year because I was finding it caused only stress - literal physical tension in my body, not to mention cyclic angry thoughts, all to no discernible purpose.
Your body of essays is already an enormous contribution and if you feel you're done, then there's no reason to drag it out. Nekhamma is a virtue, after all, and a pleasure too.
Thank you for your work in presenting genuine knowledge of the texts in a graspable form. May you and all people attain deeply.
PS I just reread your essay above, replacing all instances of "Buddhism" and "Buddhist" with "Islam" and "Muslim", and making other necessary changes - good thing there are no Buddhist suicide bombers! :D
Hi Swanditch
All credit to you. Yes, you have consistently engaged with the process and written stimulating and informative replies. I wish I had a couple more readers of your calibre and consistency. Though I still don't know your name, your nationality or anything about you!
It's become increasingly clear that Buddhist religious belief is just religious belief. Frankly I'm unsure where that leaves me. But yes at least we have no suicide bombers, yet. Suicide is increasingly been seen as a political weapon in Tibet, and it's not far from that to taking a few Han with you when you go!
But after 10 years or so of living in a bubble I suddenly seem to be awake to the cries of the world and have a strong desire to respond. I'm hoping to organise a showing of the film The Four Horseman in my town (preferably at our Buddhist centre). I have an appointment to meet my MP early next month. Hopefully something will unfold.
I'll post another 6 or 7 essays, so it will be fading away rather than burning out.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
hi jayarava
Great post. I've been thinking along the same lines myself and I reckon you've nailed it: it is love and all of the resulting complexities.
The idealisation/honeymoon period is pretty much what I've seen in myself and in others. If nothing else, Glenn's blog has helped me see that for what it is. IMO, your single post is lots more accessible, acceptable to an x-buddhist and to the point. Perhaps it would even elicit a response from Mr Batchelor!
Anyway, I'm not entirely sure where to take my faith (and I'm pretty comfortable with that label) next - I'm certainly going to keep with the emotional / cultural / practice side of things but intellectually, I'm probably going to have a period of separation (with the exception of a couple of blogs).
Community/sangha wise, I'm finding it difficult to hang out with love-struck x-buddhists. I get the urge to lecture. I find the tiny online community of mid-life crisis struck Buddhists comforting. And i think that's the primary benefit of the on-line stuff. I agree that face-to-face is preferable where they exist. But so far, I have not found a similar collection of disenchanted Buddhists to hang out with in real-life. Maybe they are out in my sangha but wisely keeping silent about it.
Also, it might be that the level of engagement you've had so far is unsatisfactory because you've been ahead of your time - my feel/hope is that the popularity of SecBud is going to generate a lot more quality buddhists with an open mind, once they get through the honeymoon. Assuming they stay on that is after and don't just file for a divorce.
Anyway, your ten year effort is impressive and excellent and so long as you don't actually delete this blog (i'd like to have the time to attempt to read it all), you've certainly got every right to retire. I've checked out your Steve Keen blog (economics is a pet interest of mine too) so I'm assuming that you do not mean leaving the interwebs.
cheers
"A bit late guys. I appreciate the present positivity, but where have you been all these years? Too little, too late."
I like to glance through your writings. Many articles I read beginning to end, some I don't. I'm one of your silent readers I suppose. How many more there are, you could check in google analytics.
But you are right, why not meet in person.
Dear Jayarava,
from a lot of what you say, you seem to imply something like:
Buddhism is just like any other religion, i.e., it is self-verifying and cannot be falsified. In other words, it is by definition irrational.
However, your next step seems to be:
Clinging to Buddhist dogmas goes against the "original spirit of Buddhism" (my wording), which is anti-dogmatic and says to get rid of the raft once you have used it.
Thus, in order to be genuinely Buddhist, you have to relinquish Buddhism-as-a-dogma and embrace Buddhism-as-a-dynamism.
Am I right? If so, what would you answer to the criticism that you are yourself embracing some sort of Perennial Buddhism (although in a dynamic form)? I do not think that this is necessarily a flaw, but I cannot avoid asking the question, after having read the beginning of your post with the 5 points.
(I am happy comments are open again!)
yours elisa
Hi Elisa
"...you are yourself embracing some sort of Perennial Buddhism."
Yes. The dogma of no dogmas. Which is a contradiction of sorts.
I suppose it grows out of two things. A belief in our unlimited potential to learn. And a belief that certainty makes learning new things difficult. Both of which grow out of a life time of learning. I've seen my job as creating uncertainty about dogmas - at times I have unnerved even myself by doing this.
I try to embrace the principles of Buddhism, rather than the dogmas.
I am not someone who says if you meditate you will get enlightened. I have no idea if that is true. But I can tell you, with the confidence of both personal experience and close observation of others over 20 years, that if you sit quietly and comfortably and gently follow your breath with unbroken attention then something very interesting begins to happen in the body and mind.
And so for the other practices I do or have done, including study. Each one produces interesting changes. Study unexpectedly produced faith in me for instance, and a commitment to principles rather than dogmas.
We have myths, legends and stories because this is how we contextualise the experience of the exercises. But religious people deify the stories, and make them sacred and holy. We make them dogmas. Then they can never be wrong, and no one can ever learn a new thing from the exercises. We stop paying attention to what is actually happening, and start looking for confirmation of our dogmas instead.
And most of the time we set people up for failure by using these dogmas to create unrealistic expectations of the exercises. And we make adoption of dogmas a condition of group membership.
It's as we (Buddhists in general) say that if you go jogging you'll get fitter (which is true); and that if you only apply yourself you'll win the Olympic gold medal (which might be true). Though of course no one actually has a medal, but in our art the saints all wear them. We make it clear that only the gold medal counts, that silver doesn't really count. If only everyone went jogging the world would be a better place and we'd all win the gold medal and live happily every after.
And we proclaim, with a touch of insecurity, "WE ARE THE PEOPLE WHO JOG" and look down on people who hop, or skip or jump for gold medals. Those who only watch the Olympics on TV are beneath contempt. We cannot even conceive that some people just aren't interested in athletics.
I can't imagine the Buddha being like us. And if he was I'd have the same criticism of him.
And do you know what? I think the world economic crisis or global warming cannot be solved by teaching more middle-class white people to meditate (which is mostly what we do). It would be nice, but actually the people whose minds we need to change are politicians. And they are taboo to Buddhists - ritually polluted, and to be avoided at all costs. Our own views prevent us from taking the kinds of actions that would really relieve suffering in the world: poverty, famine, disease, wars, slavery, etc. We Buddhists need to re-examine our views.
Best Wishes
Jayarava
Thank you very much, Jayarava. This is a honest and though-provoking answer.
As for your first point, I basically agree with you (in your metaphor: we keep on jogging, because it actualy "works" and because the fact that it works can make us hope that even a golden medal could be possible). I would just ask more honesty about it. The kind of Buddhists I encounter (unlike you, as already noted) claim that they are "not believers" and that "Buddhism is not a religion" and try to persuade me on the ground of "mere rationality" that they are right. Either they do not know that they are biased, or they deliberately ignoring their initial "falling in love" experience.
As for the second point, a friend of mine (a Buddhist since decades) recently considered creating some sort of Buddhist "party". I had her read your blog posts, which she really appreciated. After some months, she wrote me back saying that usual prejudices about Buddhists are true, i.e., they are really not interested in politics, in the "outer" world, in the other people's welfare, etc.
But what could one actually do?
Hello Jayarava :-)
Hope this finds you well, despite your fatigue with blogging. Maybe a period of writing your books in privacy & calm might be more germane for you at this stage? Most theories of creativity posit the necessity of the suspension of criticism in the early stages of a creation. Exposing one's newly formed thoughts etc. to the large & anonymous internet public isn't always a serene event, as you well know. Bon courage…
Please don't un-publish your blog as I am still reading the past articles!
I haven't been closely reading your posts off-late, mostly because of 'information over-load' & partly because I am trying to limit my time on the computer. I also continue to ruminate on my primary interest (as an artist) in the thread of phenomena/perception/experience. The dialogue that you kindly entered into
has really helped my understanding - thanks!
Hi Adam
I always appreciated your contributions. One of the few. No plans to unpublish.
I'm busy sussing out pressure groups and harassing my MP to do something about bankers. Writing on economics subjects. On the whole it is a lot more satisfying than the Buddhist bubble. At least in the real world the ideologues with the magical panacea are the obvious enemy!
Cheers
Jayarava
Post a Comment