On the Cognitive Linguistics of Emptiness

This essay applies an analytical method developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, especially as it occurs in the book Metaphors We Live By, originally published in 1981, with a revised edition 2003. I will also draw on their other published works, notably Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987). Lakoff and Johnson tell us that "cognitive metaphors" are ubiquitous in human language. These metaphors involve treating a target domain as if it were a member of the same category as the source domain. In these metaphors the source domain is usually some form of physical interaction that humans have with the objective world, and the target domain is some feature of cognition. In this way, cognitive metaphors are what enable us to think about the world in abstract terms. 

This is a modern form of philosophical analysis not available to the ancient world. So this type of analysis offers the possibility of new insights when applied to old discourses. This method has occasionally been applied to Buddhism in the past, though the application has been patchy and the methods involved have not become mainstream. In this essay, I am going to use the methods developed by Lakoff and Johnson to critique the abstract concept of "emptiness" as we mainly meet it in accounts of Buddhism. In this case, I'm not criticising any particular usage, but want to make some general points about the concept. 

Cognitive Metaphors

A metaphor involves treating one things as if it were another. In a series of five blog posts in 2016, I outline John Searle's account of social reality in which "as if" plays a major role (see Social Reality). In that account of social reality I noted that language is an institutional fact:

Language itself only works because of collective intentionality, i.e. we all agree that certain verbal sounds count as words; that certain words count as representing concepts; that certain combinations of words count as sentences, and so on. (Institutional Facts & Language: Social Reality. II).

What this means is that language relies on us all agreeing that a given word means what it means.  As Wittgenstein famously said, 

“For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (Wittgenstein 1967, section 43)

This is often abbreviated to "meaning is use". Individualism has a role to play in the evolution of language, especially where the individual is influential.  But, generally speaking, language relies on our collective agreement on what words mean (semantics) or do (pragmatics). Cognitive metaphors are no different; other people must understand our use of cognitive metaphors in order for us to communicate about abstractions. 

The metaphor relation is not arbitrary. It is not that anything can be anything. The relation requires that the target domain has some properties that make it a good candidate for metaphorical projection. I won't go more deeply into this since it involves invoking the image schema and explaining this is too involved for an essay like this one. The standard work on image schemas is still (as far as I know) Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind (1987). Suffice it to say that the target domain for the metaphor must be a good fit. 

For example, we may state a commonly used cognitive metaphor: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. (I use Lakoff and Johnson's convention of citing metaphors in small caps). In this metaphor, the source domain is our physical interactions with objects, while the target domain is a subjective experience of thought. If we accept the metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, then any operation we can physically perform on an object we can perform mentally on an idea. If I can grasp an object, then under this metaphor I can grasp an idea, as if it were an object. I can turn an idea over and look at it from another angle. I can look at an idea from different angles. If I have more than one idea, I can juggle them. I can throw an idea out, toss it around, and kick it into the long grass. Virtually anything I can physically do with an object finds a metaphorical application to an idea under the cognitive metaphor, IDEAS ARE OBJECTS.

A poor metaphor might be IDEAS ARE COWBOYS. Cowboys ride, bait, and subdue semi-wild animals for entertainment. It's not clear in what way an idea is like a cowboy. This metaphor is not intuitive. Another one might be FISH ARE BICYCLES. Note that these propositions are not forbidden by the rules of English grammar. Still, they don't make for obvious metaphorical usage. The metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS works because ideas have a limited scope, they can often expressible in a succinct way that makes each idea seem discreet from other ideas. Expressing the idea leads to a transfer of that discreet piece of knowledge to another person. It's not that an idea is an object, but that an idea is sufficiently like an object in specific ways. The similarity occurs at the level of "image schemas", which I'm trying to avoid for reasons of brevity. 

It may seem simplistic to labour the point, but I think it's worth saying that ideas are not real objects. In making the metaphor, we are not reifying the abstraction. Moreover, contrary to the prevailing view of humans amongst Buddhists, people are not easily fooled into reifying cognitive metaphors. It would be odd for a person to claim that ideas are objects in a substantial sense. We know this is not true. No one ever literally held an idea in the palm of their hand, for example. We know it's a metaphor and we intuitively deal with thousands of such metaphors every day. If we had to stop to analyse each one, abstract thought would not be possible.

Unlike a computing language I don't have to "declare" the metaphor before using it. We effortlessly decode hundreds and thousands of these cognitive metaphors on the fly without even noticing that we are doing it. When people are sitting around a table at a meeting and someone says, "we need to move on", and they change the subject rather than getting up and leaving the room, no one is surprised by this.

In this case, it is because we can form a cognitive metaphor: A CONVERSATION IS A JOURNEY. For example, we might be having a conversation and it "takes a turn" (perhaps a strange or unexpected turn, or a turn for the worse). Someone might wish to "return" to what was said earlier. If it's going badly, we might say "Let's start over". If the conservation was difficult but productive, we may say: "we got there in the end". When a conversation is at an impasse, we might say that we have to move on and leave the impasse unresolved. And a conversation may reach a natural conclusion: "let's stop there".

These cognitive metaphors are not incidental but rather they form an integral part of language use. The richness of our metaphorical use of language is part of what makes us human. Our ability to talk about one thing as if it were a member of a completely different class of thing is what distinguishes human communication from all other animals. Clearly, some animals and birds are capable of abstract thought to some extent. But they don't communicate in metaphors. We do. 

Once we get attuned to this idea of cognitive metaphors, we begin to see them everywhere. When I talk about typing on my keyboard (a physical act) and words appearing "on my screen" this is two cognitive metaphors: WORDS ARE OBJECTS and SCREENS ARE SURFACES. Of course the screen is literally a surface, but the words are not on it in a physical sense. I can't physically interact with words on a screen. Even on a touch screen that's not what is happening. Rather the patterns of light and dark created by pixels make words seem to appear on the screen, and electrical interactions between surface and finger help to create the illusion of physical interaction. At the end of the day there is dust and fingerprints on my screen, but no physical objects called "words". Still, all the verbs that can be used to describe interacting with objects on a surface, can now be applied to "words on a screen".

In order to get at the underlying metaphors involved in talking about emptiness in a Buddhist context, we have to consider the use of container metaphors.

Container Metaphors

A very common cognitive metaphor involves likening something to a container. For example, in English we have the metaphor: A BOOK IS A CONTAINER. A book can, for example, be filled with ideas (here again: IDEAS ARE OBJECTS). With this combination we make a complex source domain: putting objects into a container maps onto putting ideas or words into a book. We use the same verb in each case, but use it substantively on one hand and metaphorically on the other.

A very common metaphor in English is MIND IS A CONTAINER and more specifically, mind is a container of experiences. In this view, experience happens in the mind; experience is the content of the mind qua container of experiences. Interestingly, however, Indian Buddhists do not seem to have used a specific container metaphor that we take for granted: i.e. sensory experience is contained in the mind. In Buddhism, the mind (manas) is more like a translator that turns (physical) sensory experience into (mental) perception. An ancient Buddhist could not, for example, say something like "empty your mind" because this relies on the container metaphor and they did not conceive of the mind as a container or sensory experience as the content of the mind. They are more likely to use a surface metaphor for the mind, and to talk about sensory experience as a disturbance of that surface. They may also talk about a sensory event in terms of the sense organ being struck by the appearance of an object. Keeping in mind that "appearance" (rūpa) is to the eye as sound is to the ear.

Despite the fact that ancient Buddhists did not use the container metaphor for the mind, it is so ingrained in us as English speakers that it's almost impossible to not think of the mind as a container and sensory experience as the content. 

Given all this, what can we say about how to understand the term "emptiness" (Skt. śūnyatā)

Emptiness and Experience

The adjective "empty" and the abstract noun "emptiness" are part of the broader cognitive metaphor involving containers. There is no abstract "emptiness" in the absence of a container that could potentially contain something. Moverover, emptiness in the dictionary sense boils down to "the absence of content". "Emptiness" is defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary as "the state of containing nothing". Similarly Merriam-Webster defines emptiness as "containing nothing, not occupied or inhabited" and "lacking reality, substance, meaning, or value."

These definitions are curiously opposed to Buddhist definitions of "emptiness" which specifically state that it does not mean "void" or "nothingness". As one writer seeks to clarify:

"Emptiness is not complete nothingness; it doesn't mean that nothing exists at all. This would be a nihilistic view contrary to common sense." - Lewis Richmond.

In other words, in a Buddhist the concept "emptiness" does not mean emptiness, at least in any general sense. Rather it means, we are told, that things are not as they appear to us. It is the difference between appearance and reality. In which case, "emptiness" is obviously the wrong term for this concept. Still I want to press on and consider the cognitive metaphors that apply to our English word and circle back to the doctrinal mismatch.

Any given container—physical or metaphorical—may contain something or not, but to be a container it must potentially contain something. If a container contains anything, then it is not empty. If it contains nothing, it is empty. 

Note that this is unrelated to the expected content of the container. I drink my morning coffee from a teacup I like. The rest is in a thermos and stays hot. One could say that my cup is empty of tea, for example, but by being specific one falls down a rabbit hole. My cup may well be empty of tea, water, lime-juice, cooking oil, kerosene, and every other kind of liquid, but it presently is filled with coffee and thus my cup is not empty at all. This gives emptiness an important parameter. Emptiness tends to be an absolute: if my cup has any kind of content, then it is not empty. My cup is only empty when there is no liquid in it; i.e. when there is emptiness.

So far, so logical. But this is not how Buddhists, especially Mādhyamikas, use the termin practice. Mādhyamikas use the abstract noun "emptiness" in a concrete sense. The classic example is the statement "form is emptiness". This is a valid English sentence, but there is something wrong with it. Even when we take "form" to be "form in the abstract" (or matter generally as many Mādhyamikas do), this sentence is not logically valid because it is trying to equate two different levels of abstraction. "Form" here is generally taken to mean "phenomena". If the metaphor is FORMS ARE CONTAINERS then we might validly state that form is empty. 

There are several problems here. The first is that rūpa is (in English at least) not the container of experience, it is the content of experience (or part of it). Rūpa is to eye what sound is the ear. And note that this applies across the senses. Importantly, rūpa is to the eye as tangibles (spraśtavya) are to the body (kāya). Rūpa is on the wrong side of the equation to be equated with body, even metaphorically. In Chinese, rūpa is routinely translated as sè 色 "hue (from original meanings "form, appearance, complexion"); visual surface quality." (definition from Kroll). In Sanskrit, rūpa is typically a property of a surface reflecting light, it is not a metaphorical container. 

That said, there is no doubt that some modern Buddhists do take rūpa to mean "substance", "matter", or "body". We can see that this is incoherent even at face value since the word is neither defined that way nor used that way in ancient texts. Even the translation "form" misleads most English-speakers into thinking in substantive terms about rūpa. Rūpa means "appearance". Moreover, even if we invoke the container metaphor, it can't be applied to rūpa because rūpa is an element of experience, this is to say that rūpa is content. Ancient Buddhists preferred to see rūpa as a disturbance on the surface of the mind, but even in this metaphor, rūpa is not substantive.

The second problem is that even if rūpa were a container we could go as far as saying that it is empty if it did not contain anything. We could not logically assert that it is "emptiness". If emptiness is the absence of content and rūpa is content, then the two are logical contraries. Despite a great deal of hand waving in modern Buddhist philosophy, "form is emptiness" simply does not make sense in English. But then it doesn't make any more sense to state this in Sanskrit; rūpameva śūnyatā is still equating two different levels of abstraction. This is an egregious wrong turn in Buddhist philosophy.

I might never have thought of this had I not discovered that the phrase was not originally rūpaṃ śūnyatā "form is emptiness", but rūpaṃ māyā "appearance is illusion" (Attwood 2017). This equation occurs in Aṣṭa and in a few places in Pañc as well. It is clearly translated into Chinese by Kumārajīva as 色不異幻、幻不異色，色即是幻、幻即是色。 (e.g. at T 223, 8.239c6-7). Here huàn 幻 translates māyā "illusion", though it originally meant "creation" or the creative power of the devas to keep the world in harmony (ṛta). Given the long history of Buddhists comparing sensory experience to an illusion this makes perfect sense. A classic example of this is the Pheṇapiṇḍūpama Sutta, which concludes with a well-known verse:

Pheṇapiṇḍūpamaṃ rūpaṃ, vedanā bubbuḷūpamā /
Marīcikūpamā saññā, saṅkhārā kadalūpamā;
Māyūpamañca viññāṇaṃ, desitādiccabandhunā (SN iii.142).

Appearance is like a ball of foam, valence like a bubble.
Recognition is like a mirage, volition like a plantain.
Discrimination is like an illusion. So Ādiccabandhu taught.

Here, Ādiccabandhu means the Buddha, but it is a distinctively Brahmin name completely unconnected to any of the standard myths of the Buddha. A similar verse occurs at the end of the Vajracchedikā, where the simile becomes a metaphor:

tārakā timiraṃ dīpo māyāvaśyāya budbudaḥ |
supinaṃ vidyud abhraṃ ca evaṃ draṣṭavya saṃskṛtam ||Vaj 22 || (Harrison and Watanabe 2006)

We should see the conditioned as a star, a kind of blindness, a lamp;
An illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash, a cloud.

We also find the simile in Aṣṭa, “appearance is like an illusion” (māyopamaṃ rūpam. Vaidya 1960: 9). And this is all quite straightforward: experience and reality are not the same thing; different rules apply. 

There is a popular rhetorical strategy for dealing with "form is emptiness" amongst Buddhists which can be illustrated with a random example from the Tricycle website:

Avalokita found the five skandhas empty. But, empty of what? The key word is empty. To be empty is to be empty of something.

If I am holding a cup of water and I ask you, “Is this cup empty?” you will say, “No, it is full of water.” But if I pour out the water and ask you again, you may say, “Yes, it is empty.” But, empty of what? Empty means empty of something. The cup cannot be empty of nothing. “Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what. My cup is empty of water, but it is not empty of air. To be empty is to be empty of something. This is quite a discovery. When Avalokita says that the five skandhas are equally empty, to help him be precise we must ask, “Mr. Avalokita, empty of what?”

What we see here is a fantastic distortion of reality, leading to a false conclusion. It is nonsensical for you to ask me what my cup is empty of, because to be empty in any sense, it has to be empty of everything. As I noted above, my cup could be and regularly is empty of tea (and all other liquids) but full of coffee: in which case my cup is not empty at all. The conclusion here—“Empty” doesn’t mean anything unless you know empty of what—is simply not true. This is a case of the tail wagging the dog. That is to say, we know what the answer had to be in order to legitimise Buddhist dogma on emptiness, and the question is phrased in such as way as to elicit only that answer. But in doing so, Buddhists blithely defy the conventions of language. 

We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" The question is meaningless and the answer is simply a restatement of a dogma that doesn't make any sense. The idea that "empty of what" is a natural question is either extraordinarily naive or disingenuous. Either way, Buddhists propagate this falsehood in all sincerity. 

This invalid method and false conclusion are often parlayed into an even worse question using the abstract noun: "emptiness of what?" Such a thing is not allowed under English grammar. Emptiness is emptiness. "Of what" is an entirely meaningless question because if the answer is not "everything", then the vessel is not empty at all. 

We do sometimes suggest that emptiness might have degrees.  For example, we may say that a cup may be half full or half empty. Still, it's only from the point of view of being half full that we can ask "of what?" The "of what?" question only applies to the content of the container. An empty container has no content; a half empty container is half empty of all content. Even if we say the glass is half empty, no one in their right mind asks "Half empty of what?". This is simply not how the container metaphor works. 

We can see that the cognitive linguistic perspective is a powerful method for understanding utterances. But it also highlights how dogmatic the Buddhist discourse on emptiness is. This kind of invalid logic is de rigueur for Buddhist philosophy and is almost never questioned or critiqued: either from within or without. Rather such views are carefully curated by Buddhists, in the sense of being framed as deep truths, discovered by visionaries and mystics, and accompanied by frenzied hand waving so that they can be presented as something they are not, i.e. true. This is what we expect of a religious philosophy or theology. There are axioms that cannot be questioned or the whole thing would fall apart. The fabric of Madhyamaka is held together with unquestioned, religiously inspired, axioms. 

The same argument holds for Sanskrit which has identical cognitive metaphors. In Sanskrit it is nonsensical to say rūpaṃ śūṇyatā, but it is sensible to say rūpaṃ māyā, and even better to say rūpaṃ māyopamaṃ "appearance is like an illusion"

So my, rather awkward conclusion is this: Buddhists don't seem to understand the concept of empty, let alone the concept of emptiness. If they did understand, the question "empty of what?" would never occur to them. Worse, Buddhists routinely insist that this flawed concept of emptiness is what makes sense of Prajñāpāramitā. Two wrongs don't make a right. 

In this case, how should we understand the word emptiness?

Making Sense of Emptiness

The key here is to note that the first use of śūnyatā as a technical term is to refer to the state of meditative concentration in which all sensory experience has ceased due to the withdrawal of attention from the senses. This state is called suññatāvihāra or śūnyatāsamādhi. Since sensory experience is dependent on attention (manasikāra), by practising non-attention (amanasikāra), one prevents sensory experience from arising and causes arisen sensory experience to cease. 

Here, sensory experience can be seen as the content of experience or, in Buddhist terms as a distortion of the (naturally) smooth surface of the mind. As such, sensory experience may be present or absent and even admit degrees of these. Hence, between ordinary waking awareness and emptiness there are numerous stages (āyatana) of increasingly attenuated sensory experience. But here, too, absence is absolute; the presence of an any sensory experience means that emptiness doesn't apply. This point is made repeatedly in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā, for example. Emptiness in this case, is the complete absence of sensory experience. 

There are several Buddhist approaches to analysing the content of experience: a range of reductive ontologies into which experience is analysed. For example, the skandha-ontology, which focuses on the processes that give rise to experience, or the dhātu-ontology, which is focussed on the sense faculties and their objects. Mainstream Buddhism foregrounds this reductive, analytic approach of breaking experience down into simpler components in order to eliminate it as a source of absolute being. That complex objects disappear under analysis is not some great metaphysical truth, it is simply a consequence of methodological reductionism. 

If I dismantle my chariot, of course I no longer have a working chariot because I've just broken it on purpose. Who does that? Why would I want to dismantle a working chariot in the first place? And why would my destruction of the thing constitute proof that it never existed in the first place? This is the claim that many Buddhists make but, again, it is nonsensical.   

Prajñāpāramitā Buddhists, building on a tradition that is probably older than Buddhism itself, sought first to bring sensory experience to a halt. They didn't analyse sensory experience in any depth because the acme of their program was not an insight into sensory experience. What they sought, first and foremost, was an insight into death and rebirth. The whole fetish of emptiness was originally established on the analogy of emptiness with death. Mastery (vidyā) over sensory experience, in the form of the ability to voluntarily make it stop, equated to mastery over repeated death. This mastery was and is the driving force of Buddhism, even when it is buried in centuries of intellectual accretion. 

My current thinking is that the discovery of how to do this probably arose around the same time as major socio-political changes in India, reflected in, for example, the replacement of red and black pottery type by the painted grey ware style of pottery. Within a few centuries we see the emergence of walled city states which are stable for some 200-300 years before the Moriyan Dynasty of Magadha overwhelmed all the others, founding the first pan-Indian empire. One possible source of mind-training techniques that limit sensory experience is the "interiorisation" of Brahmanical rituals. In this development, some Brahmins began to perform their daily rituals in imagination rather than physically. This led to the discovery of radical changes in sensory experience, especially in the form of hallucinations due to sensory deprivation, and ultimately to the cessation and absence of sensory experience. By the time the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad was composed (in or around the Kingdom of Kosala) the correct performance of rituals was being linked to one's afterlife destination. Buddhists and Jains had similar ideas but focussed on actions more generally, with Buddhists refining this to just volitional actions. 

However it happened, it is apparent that in this milieu some religieux developed and shared the techniques that allowed them to bring sensory experience to a halt and to dwell in a state in which there is awareness but no content. Some Buddhists called this "emptiness" (śūnyatā). Other Buddhists called it "extinction"(nirvāṇa) and other names. This state is also known in modern times as "contentless awareness", "minimal phenomenal awareness", or "non-dual awareness". 

This is how I presently understand "emptiness" in Prajñāpāramitā.  I believe this is a better approach than anything based in later traditional interpretations based on the Madhyamaka telos (which sees Prajñāpāramitā merely as proto-Madhyamaka). 

Dharma as Container?

One of the key concepts in Madhyamaka is "the emptiness of dharmas". In this usage, dharmas have to be considered as metaphorical containers. The broader translation of dharmas as "phenomena" (as distinct from noumena; i.e. appearances rather than reality) seems to fit here, but what is the content of  a phenomenon? Is there really any phenomenon that is not sensory experience?

Nāgārjuna tells us that he expects that we will expect a dharma to have svabhāva in the sense of being autopoietic or self-creating. Nāgārjuna points out that this self-creating property of dharmas cannot exist in any changeable phenomenon. So far so good. The problem is that no one ever believed in self-creating dharmas. No one ever proposed this before Nāgārjuna. But he said that everyone believed it. Nāgārjuna appears to have lied about this. What puzzles me is that no one really cares about the lie. Many people seem to prefer this lie. 

The svabhāva of a dharma, according to Abhidharma lore, is the sui generis quality that gives us the ability to identify it. For example, it's important to all Buddhists to distinguish skillful (kuśala) motivations (cetanā) from unskillful (akuśala) ones. If I experience a moment of greed or generosity, I identify it as such by introspecting the content of the experience. The fact that I can identify an experience as motivated by greed or generosity doesn't imply anything like Nāgārjuna's autopoietic dharmas. As far as I can see, there is no way to even infer autopoietic dharmas from any early Buddhist doctrine. We have different kinds of experiences and these are identifiable by certain characteristics. No one disputes this, not even Nāgārjuna. 

However, Nāgārjuna also assumes that to be real a dharma must have svabhāva in his autopoietic sense. This axiom is incoherent, but is blindly accepted by all and sundry; even Graham Priest, the academic logician, seems to fail to see this basic logical error in Nāgārjuna's argument. Since he can (trivially) prove that no dharma can be autopoietic, he then deduces that dharmas are not real, that they don't exist. But this definition of "real" is completely incoherent. Not only did Buddhists never use this definition of real, they weren't even interested in the question of the reality or unreality of dharmas. They were interested in the arising and ceasing of dharmas; especially in the light of a state in which all dharmas cease except for the asaṃskṛtadharma, i.e. emptiness. Emptiness is asaṃskṛta because it does not occur due to the presence of a condition but rather occurs when all conditions for sensory experience are absent. 

In order to square the circle, Nāgārjuna has to introduce the nonsense idea of a "relative truth", which is not true at all. The ultimate truth, in this view, is that dharmas don't exist, because they are not self-creating. I can see no good reason to take Nāgārjuna seriously as a philosopher or even, frankly, as a Buddhist. He seems to have entirely missed the point of Buddhism and has gone off on a tangent. And still, he is routinely cited as "the most important Buddhist philosopher". 

Conclusion

The term "emptiness" is generally used in an incoherent way by Buddhists, especially in statements containing the idea "emptiness of...". We can never legitimately ask "empty of what?" let alone "emptiness of what?" because this is not how the container metaphor works. 

The idea that the proposition "form is emptiness" is meaningful now seems doubtful. Moreover, when we look at the kinds of post hoc arguments put forward to justify this proposition, they simply don't make sense. In addition, we know that it used to make sense when presented in the form: "appearance is an illusion." A sensory experience is like an illusion. I doubt anyone would argue with this.

It is also true that in the state called "emptiness" there are no dharmas because that state occurs only when all dharmas have ceased and no new dharmas are arising. This sense of the term is far more coherent than the general religious consensus that emptiness is reality. 

The incoherence reaches its apotheosis in Madhyamaka rhetoric about the emptiness of dharmas, by which Mādhyamikas mean that they think dharmas don't exist, since they tie existence to self-creation and it is trivial to show that dharmas cannot be self-creating. Nāgārjuna insists on an incoherent definition of what "real" means and uses that to argue that the concept of existence is incoherent. Prior to Nāgārjuna no one ever used this definition of real. Apart from his devotees, most Buddhists still don't use this definition. 

The standard ways we have of talking about this all seem to miss the point. Early Buddhists did not venture opinions on the existence or nonexistence of dharmas, except in the case of the sarvāsti doctrine. Even the Sarvāstivādins did not argue that the existence of dharmas was due to self-creation. The logic of sarvāsti is completely different but not difficult to follow. If a past dharma can be the cause of a present effect, then the doctrine of dependent arising itself says that it presently exists since imasmin sati, idaṃ hoti and imasmin asati, idaṃ na hoti. If the dharma doesn't exist now, then it cannot be a factor in the arising of a dharma in the present. This central argument is not even considered by Nāgārjuna, let alone refuted. 

The nature of dharmas is irrelevant in light of the fact that dharmas arise and cease, depending on where our attention goes. To say that dharmas lack svabhāva in Nāgārjuna's sense is trivial. To say that they have svabhāva in the Abhidharma sense is also trivial since we routinely recognise hundreds of different kinds of experience (for which we have thousands of words). The key to understanding Prajñāpāramitā lies in another direction entirely. The main point is that attention can be withdrawn from sensory experience. When we withdraw attention from sensory experience, it ceases, leaving us in a particular state characterised by some kind of basic awareness without any experiential content. That is, in a state of emptiness.

While it is not essential to my critique of Madhyamaka, it helps to understand the cognitive metaphors of emptiness and how cognitive metaphors function generally. This is so because "the emptiness of dharmas" is a cognitive metaphor: DHARMAS ARE CONTAINERS. But this is only true if dharmas exist and are capable of acting as metaphorical containers.

Still, it is only Madhyamakas who believe that in order to exist, to be real, a dharma must be self-creating. "Self-creation" is an odd choice for the content of that container. I can imagine a thing being self-creating, but I cannot imagining a thing containing self-creation. Self-creation doesn't fit the cognitive metaphor. 

So even if we could legitimately ask "empty of what?" the answer "empty of self-creation" is nonsense on several levels. For example, it would require us to relate to "self-creation" as content. To my mind this simply doesn't work. "Self-creation" is not a suitable target for the source domain of things we put in containers, except in the very broadest sense that IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. The idea of self-creation might be the content of a metaphorical container, the fact of self-creation cannot be.  

On the other hand, the emptiness of the mind, i.e. the concept of the absence of mental content in meditation, is not plagued by these inconsistencies and incoherences. In English it is natural to use the container metaphor for this. It is not so natural in scriptural languages, but, nevertheless, the absence of dharmas in meditation is the key concept here, not the absence of being self-creating. The whole idea of self-creating dharmas is a red herring. 

The metaphysical speculations that attract us as explanations for emptiness are largely based on prior indoctrination. In my reading, such speculations are absent from both early Buddhism and Prajñāpāramitā. This is not to say that metaphysics is generally absent from or irrelevant to Buddhism.  All ancient Buddhists believed in karma and rebirth, for example. These involve commitments to metaphysical views that we now know to be false, though few Buddhists will admit to this. 

The methods of cognitive linguistics are a powerful tool for thinking critically about Buddhist doctrines. That said, most existing applications of these methods have been in the service of tradition, i.e. used purely descriptively by scholars who have no interest in critiques of Buddhist philosophy. Whatever the reason for it, this side-stepping manoeuvre allows those people to continue evangelising for traditional Buddhism without ever confronting the inevitable antinomies between Iron Age or Medieval thought in India and present day science and philosophy. Many Buddhists seem attracted by the idea of subsuming all knowledge within Buddhism. This tends to involve a rather blasé form of dualism in which science is merely concerned with the "physical" and Buddhism is concerned something that we often see called "spiritual".

Unfortunately, this exceptionalist discourse appears to obscure and devalue the real contribution of Buddhists, i.e. the cultivation and exploration of states of contentless awareness. I see this as a lose-lose scenario. I see the neuroscience community studying this phenomenon and developing their own terminology for it, though at present we still see a proliferation of different terminologies. At some point, an objective account of the methods and consequences of meditation will eclipse the religious accounts. Those who insist on the religious accounts, with all their incoherence and misdirection, will be relegated out of the conversation and become irrelevant. I'd prefer to see experienced meditators staying in the game, but as long as they cling to outmoded forms of talking about emptiness, they will not be part of the conversation for much longer. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. (2017). "Form is (Not) Emptiness: The Enigma at the Heart of the Heart Sutra." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13,52–80. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/issue/view/15/showToc.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

Image Schemas, Metaphor, and Thought.

Along The Yellow Brick Road

My understanding of myself and the world is quite strongly influenced by the writings of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. These two scholars are at the forefront of the idea of embodied cognition and between them have developed some of the basic terminology. In particular Mark Johnson explored some of the theoretical nuts and bolts of how we understand our world. The idea is that we structure our experience via what he calls the image schema. These can be represented by diagrams or content rich images or even propositional statements, but in practice they are more primitive than any of these. Schemas drawn from experience that can apply to other domains, particularly abstract domains, form the basis of metaphor.

In this essay I will outline three image schemas: path, link, and cycle, drawing primarily on a section in Mark Johnson (1987: 112-121). While there are many schemas and each of them might require a book in their own right to fully explore them, I found Johnson's outlines evocative and thought provoking. Using the path schema I will try to give a brief overview of the idea of image schemas and then add notes on link and cycle schemas, trying to show why this way of thinking is relevant to understanding thought itself. 

SCHEMAS

Some of the key early experiences we have as infants involve gaining control of our body. Moving our hands to where our eyes are looking, and moving our body from place to place for example. The path schema emerges from these kinds of experiences. Our body is in one place and we want to move it to another place. As we go from our starting point to our end point we traverse all the points in between, which form a path. Before we move we can project the path in imagination. If I plan to go down to the kitchen from my writing desk, there is a virtual path in my mind, based on my internal map of the house. Incidentally we now know these internal maps are stored in hexagonal arrays of neurons in the brain, called "grid cells". We literally locate ourselves on this internal map when we think about our location. The discovery earned the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Even more interesting is that in 2015 we discovered that the timing of when the grid cells are active also locates us in time (Kraus et al 2015).

Since we often travel with a purpose in mind, we experience paths as directional, though of course a path usually goes both ways (except in Ikea). This gives us the bare bones structure of the path schema. It consists of

• A starting point or source and,
• An end point of goal,
• connected by contiguous intermediate points.

This kind of structure, which is well defined and yet simple, is a feature of image schemas. Each is well demarcated in this way. They must also be pervasive in experience and for that reason widely understood. The ubiquity of schemas is what underpins our effortless use of metaphors, and also our ability to understand the metaphors of a long dead language like Pāḷi. 

The path schema is important for how we understand time in the English speaking world. We experience time as a path with the past as source and the future as goal. We are traversing the intermediate points. We don't know the future yet because we haven't arrived there. We look back to the past. However, in some cultures time is experienced as though we are standing in a river looking downstream - i.e. we are standing still and it is the path that moves. The past is downstream, in front of us and moving away; we can see it because it has happened. The future is upstream, behind us moving towards us, we cannot see it because it has not happened yet. These are both valid ways of describing the experience of being in time. 

Central to the experience of time is entropy. The universe because less ordered over time and we intuitively understand this because experience of non-living objects tends to confirm it. If a cup falls and smashes we go from more ordered to less ordered. Living beings use energy to hold themselves in an highly ordered state while alive and then rapidly become more disordered at death. We have internalised this law of physics before we can speak. If we see the film of this event backwards it is immediately apparent that it is backwards. Time is a path from more order to less order. Theoretical time travel notwithstanding, this is how we experience it. 

A key observation from the above examples of experiences of paths is that the desire to be in a particular location is the purpose for following a path. And on arriving we feel our purpose for following the path has been achieved. Thus there is an identity between our starting point and the state of desire; and also between our final location and satisfied purpose. This relationship is not itself metaphorical. It is simply that the path schema fits both situations. And this gives rise to the possibility of metaphorical mappings. For example we can state the metaphor: PURPOSES ARE PHYSICAL GOALS. So we say of a successful actor that "they have arrived". We can also arrive at a conclusion, or follow a path to enlightenment. Because the path schema applies in both domains, we can use the language of one to describe the experience of the other. 

This metaphor is very important in Buddhism. For example, we talk about the "path to purity" (visuddhimagga) or the "Noble Eightfold Path" (āryāṣṭāṅgamārga). We use these kinds of metaphors from Iron Age India without any need to stop and decode the idea of a path to an abstract quality like "purity" or "awakening". We can do so because image schemas underpin how we structure experience independent of culture and language. This is why these metaphors transfer effortlessly from the dead languages of Iron Age to living languages. This is a good demonstration of just how important images schemas are. There are, of course, some Pāḷi or Sanskrit metaphors that we do not get or some that we use that ancient Indians might not have understood. For example, in July 2012, I discussed the MIND IS A CONTAINER metaphor that is so vital to how we understand psychology in the present and tried to show that it is absent from Pāḷi literature. This difference affects our ability to translate between the two times.

These metaphorical mappings are not arbitrary, but are constrained by the structure of the schemas we use and by the applicability of the schema to the domain. Another common use of the path schema in Buddhist thought is paying homage to the three jewels. We bow, or make the añjali gesture, towards a shrine, stūpa, or buddharūpa and metaphorically something traverses the path from us to the image. Our transmission of homage, or worship, or however we conceive of what we are offering, goes from us (starting point) to the shrine (end point) traversing all the contiguous points in-between. This helps us feel connected to the three jewels, though here we are also invoking the link schema which I will come to shortly.

Another important application of the path schema is for arguments. As Michael Palin said "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definitite proposition." (Argument Sketch) Again the path schema fits. We have a start point (proposition not established, ignorance); an end point (proposition established, knowledge); and a contiguous series of connecting points (statements that are logically connected). And this enables us to use the important metaphor for discourse: AN ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY. When making an argument we lay out our reasoning, one step at a time, trying to avoid being side-tracked, and arrive at a conclusion. The latter in Pāḷi is niṭṭhaṃ gacchati "arrive at a conclusion". Because an argument can be understood in terms of the path schema we can use the language of a journey following a path to talk about it. And because the path schema is ubiquitous and widely understood we don't have to explain our metaphor - it is immediately apparent to any English speaker, or Pāḷi speaker for that matter.

This overview of the path schema gives an idea of the basic features of any schema and how they underpin metaphors and other kinds of cognitive processes.

Link Schema

Like the path schema the link schema emerges from experience. The link schema is formed by our own relationships and the integrity of our body. When we grip an object in our hand we form a link between us and the object. A common action is that of binding two objects together. The schema here is precisely this: two or more objects, concrete or abstract, that are in contact within our experiential field. The most basic form of contact is physical adjacency, but we can also apply the schema to notional or abstract adjacency such as contiguous moments in time, or objects with shared characteristics. The caveat of "within our experiential field" is important in deciding what is intuitive and what is not. If the connection is not visible, or we should say sensible, to us then the possibility of linkage intuitively seems remote.

As social animals physically connecting with our social group is typically quite important even if it is formalised almost to the point of abstraction, as in a handshake. At the very least proximity to our social groups alone produces a sense of well-being. As infants we feel a sense of both physical and emotional connection to parents and other family members or carers. Separate an infant of any social animal (though perhaps not insects) from its mother and it feels a powerful anxiety. We come to see ourselves as bonded to members of our family and our circle of friends. We physically express our connection through hugs, kisses, touching, hold hands, and having sex, all of which also shape our experience of connection. As we grow older shared experiences form connections between unrelated individuals. A shared ordeal, such as a disaster, or a initiation ceremony, can create a life-long bond. The human experience is one in which we perceive ourselves as being at the centre of a web of an interwoven complex of concrete and abstract linkage: physical, spatial, abstract, notional, temporal. Everywhere we look we see and experience connections.

All of these metaphors for human connection—e.g. being BONDED by genetics or shared experience—are possible because the link schema applies in many domains and allows us to use the language of physical bonds metaphorically.

Ariel Glucklich has argued that a pervasive sense of interconnectedness is important for human beings. He sees it as the heart of the magical healing art of tantric wizards in Benares. In a passage I have cited many times, for example in Mantra, Magic, and Interconnectedness (27 June 2008), in which he says:

Magic is based on a unique type of consciousness: the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the world by means of simple but refined sense perception... magical actions... constitute a direct, ritual way of restoring the experience of relatedness in cases where that experience has been broken by disease, drought, war, or any number of other events. (1997: 12)

We may also experience events as linked or contiguous in time. And this allows us to perceive temporally linked events as having a causal relationship. We experience memories as providing links between temporal events. Thus the link schema is very important in the concept of causality. As David Hume discovered, we never see an even which could be called "causality". We see a sequence of events and project the idea of causality onto those events. Although we don't see causality, we do experience it. The idea of causality emerges from our experience of gaining control of our eyes and beginning to direct our gaze; from gaining control of our limbs and directing., e.g. where they reach and what they grasp; and from experience our will as setting us in motion towards all kinds of goals. In other words we begin to experience ourselves as agents of cause and generalise from this experience that all events have causes.

The coherence of connections between sequences of events underlies the idea of the arrow of time. If we show a movie backwards it is immediately apparent that events are proceeding in the wrong temporal direction. A backwards sequence is not coherent with our expectations of how the world works based on experience. Non-living objects do not fly up into the air, for example, without the application of some force. The force itself ought to leave some sense impression that accompanies the action. So a broken cup does not fly back to the table and reassemble itself. Experientially this never happens. Our sense of what is coherent derives from everyday experience from the moment our minds start processing sense data (probably in the womb).

The link schema also places limits on what seems intuitive. For example in the phenomenon of quantum entanglement there appears to be actions that are related in time (i.e. that happen simultaneously) and causally (observing the quantum state of one of a pair of entangled particles causes the second to adopt a quantum state determined by the first), but which can be separated by arbitrarily large distances in space. The counter-intuitive nature of this proposition was summed up by Einstein's quip that it amounted to "spooky action at a distance". Unfortunately we seem to be stuck with spooky action at a distance at the nano-scale, despite the fact it is powerfully counter-intuitive.

More apposite to Buddhist readers I have pointed out that the Doctrine of Karma requires action at a temporal distance, i.e. events that are causally linked but separated in time, often by many years or even lifetimes. This situation is disallowed by the Doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda or Dependent Arising and it counter-intuitive compared to experiences of causality and time. Around the time that the Abhidharma was being codified, a number of solutions to this problem were proposed including the Sarva-asti doctrine which argues that dharmas must always be existent and only sometimes active, and the Doctrine of Momentariness which argued the opposite, that dharmas are only briefly existent, but always active. Of course "existent" (astitā) as it was used by the ancient Indians doesn't apply since it always implies permanence, but neither does non-existence (nāstitā) since this would preclude us actually having experiences. It was Momentariness that won the argument in Buddhism, but I've also showed that it fails to account for the phenomenon that it purports to explain (see The Logic of Karma).

Pre-Classical Buddhist texts largely eschew the language of causation, even though this is emphasised in the received tradition. In fact the Buddhist texts propose another kind of link, one which is based on presence rather than sequence. The key word is paṭicca  (Skt pratītya), the etymology of which is "going (√i) back to (prati)" and we can read as "based on" or "dependent on". The doctrine of pratītyasamutpāda is not a doctrine of causality at all but one in which arising is dependent on coexistence (sam-utpāda). The most apposite analogy for this is the requirement for foundations to support a wall, or walls to support the roof of a house. The foundations must exist before the walls can be erected, so we can can say that the foundations are a necessary condition for walls of the house, but the foundations do not cause the walls to go up. And this is the nature of conditionality also. 

Two kinds of abstract links are also very common. The first is shared characteristics, i.e. perceived links between objects of perception that have characteristics in common. Such links between perceived objects are what enable us to categorise perceptions and structure them into a comprehensible world. The subject of categorisation is covered in great depth in Lakoff (1987). Lakoff describes a philosophy of categorisation that draws on Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" amongst other sources. A category has a prototype, an image of the ideal member of the category defined by our experience of interacting with the world, and membership of the category is greater or less depending on the number of shared characteristics the object of perception shares.

The second is functional links. A functional link exists between objects or processes that are otherwise (potentially) unrelated if they work together to achieve a common goal. Level and fulcrum or wheel and axle do not fit into similar categories, but work together to form a useful mechanism.

Combinations of the link and path schemas are the basis of formal logic. A logical syllogism is a path in which propositions are linked by particular kinds of relations. Schemas emerge from experience thus even logic, usually thought of as a purely abstract process, is fundamentally embodied. Without the the experience of embodiment the structuring concepts used in logic would not make sense to us. Indeed, as Lakoff and Johnson (2003) repeatedly emphasise, virtually all abstract thought involves metaphors for which the source domain is our physical experience of the world, and the rationale for mapping one domain onto another rests in the applicability of image schemas that emerge from and structure experience. If we add the observations of Mercier & Sperber about the nature of reasoning then we see that Classical accounts of it were fundamentally and profoundly wrong. Making sense of experience is possible only when we consider the mind as embodied and how that embodiment contributes to the schemas that we use to make sense of the world.

The link schema really is pervasive and at the heart of how we orient ourselves in space and time, and how we perceive ourselves more generally. As social animals, connections define us. The link schema structures our perceptions of connections, shared features, and functional unities. It also enables us to make sense of notional connections such as causality or logical connectedness; making possible the notion of actions having consequences for example. The link schema also underlies our use of metaphor itself since in order to use metaphors we must understand the source domain and the target domain as having shared features which are isomorphic with the schema.

Cycles

The final schema I want to explore in this essay is the cycle. The cycle schema is another pervasive aspect of experience. We experience many natural cycles such as the annual cycle with its seasons; the phases of the moon and with them the tides and also the menstrual cycle which seems to be related to the lunar cycle; the diurnal cycle; our heartbeat, breathing, and digestion. Cycles of emotional arousal (mediated by the sympathetic nervous system) and recovery. We also experience conventional cycles such as weeks and weekends, months, terms, semesters, meal times, the working or school day, and holidays. Conventional cycles can overlay natural cycles.

Cycles as schema can be represented as a circle, though this can be misleading. A circle is an image, with more content than a schema. In fact again we see that the cycle is related to both the link and path schemas. The cycle schema is a path, or a series of contiguous links, in which the beginning and end-points are contiguous. The simplest form of this is a closed loop, of which the circle is an ideal. The journey around the loop is typically in one direction, one must go forward to return to the point of origin.

However, we also experience cycles as having a climatic quality. We think of the annual cycle for example as having a nadir in winter to which we descend through autumn (or fall), and a zenith in summer to which we ascend through spring. In this case the simple circle doesn't suffice and we can instead imagine a sin wave. 

Relation between circle and sin wave

The animated image on the right shows the relationship between these two. In this climatic version of the schema we often think of the cycle as having distinct phases. Researchers William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson described a cycle of human sexual response in terms of arousal, plateau, climax, and resolution. To some extent we can link this to the cycle of anticipation, seeking, reward, and satiation typically thought to underlie our responses to pleasurable sensations of all kinds. In this case we do have evidence from physiology that this experience is embodied in the form of the  different hormones and neurotransmitters that characterise the different phases of the reward system.

Mark Johnson insists that this climatic structure is not inherent to natural cycles like the annual cycle, that we project zenith and nadir onto the year (usually coinciding with mid-summer and mid-winter). I'm not so sure about this. Other cycles are built into this annual cycle which seem to me to undermine this claim. For example the length of the day and the average temperature also fluctuate cyclically because of the physics of the solar system. We're naturally more active in summer than we are in winter. These natural variations seem to me to contribute to the the experience of a climatic structure. 

Another image to which the cycle schema can be applied is the helix. Although the earth orbits the sun once per year and seems to return to the same spot each time, in fact the sun is in orbit around the galactic centre (the plane of the ecliptic is inclined by about 60º with respect to the plane of the sun's orbit ) and so the orbit of the earth describes a helix. In this sense a cycle is not simply a closed loop which always returns to its origin, but any cyclic phenomenon that recurs regularly or quasi-regularly.

Cycles constitute temporal boundaries for activities and tend to be rigid. Hence the persistence of the 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, of the clock. Also the persistence of the seven day week. Apparently the Soviets tried to change this to five days and it was, according to Johnson, "disastrous". This system of time keeping goes all the way back to ancient Babylonia. 

The experience of cycles and the cycle schema may well explain why astrology continues to seem plausible to some people. The cyclic schema makes the idea of a relationship between those cycles we experience, between emotional states, or good and bad fortune, and the cycles of the observable planets. The planets were imagined to have agency and personality, especially they were seen as manifestation of gods (our names for the planets are the Latin names of Greco-Roman gods). The discovery of the true nature of the planets, of more and more remote planets not visible to the naked eye, of the precession of orbits, and the ambiguity in the definition of a planet have complicated the practice of astrology, though despite what some critics say, serious astrologers have tried to adapt to all this new information. However, there is no question that extremely remote lumps of rock or balls of gas orbiting the sun can affect our lives in the way that astrologers claim. They cannot.

Even with conventional cycles, such as the week we can experience a qualitative difference between the phases of the cycle. This is why despite 24/7 shopping many of us still feel differently about the different days of the week and the weekend. Again this difference is not inherent in the cycle - there is no inherent difference between Monday, Friday, or Sunday, but we experience them as being different. Such cycles can become so pervasive that they define the character of our experience.

The cycles that we live in are multiple, overlapping, and sequential. Many metaphors emerge from the applicability of cycles to experience, for example THE LIFE CYCLE IS A YEAR means we can talk about someone being a spring chicken, or being in their autumn years. The metaphor SITUATIONS ARE MARRIAGES is quite peculiar, but if I say that I'm in a new town, country or relationships and the "honeymoon period is over" you know what I mean (the underlying schema is related to the climatic cycle of novelty, familiarity, and indifference). A common metaphor in scholarship based on the climactic cycle schema is A SOCIETY IS A PERSON. Historians of the past we particularly fond of this one, seeing the phases of conception, birth, infancy, maturity and dotage as mirrored in civilisations: e.g. in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Some early WEIRD scholars of Buddhism mapped this scheme onto the emic categories hīnayāna, mahāyāna and vajrayāna, seeing in this a climatic cycle, with vajrayāna representing the inevitable decline of Buddhism as it aged and became senile, helped by the Victorian contempt for magical thinking, and the embrace of teleological thinking, the idea that everything has a purpose and moves inexorably towards a predetermined end. The latter underlies the apocalyptic and millennial ideas that Christians share with some Buddhists who are convinced that we must be in the end times. That Buddhism had died out in India only reinforced this notion. In fact Buddhism has gone through many climatic cycles phases of decline and renewal, often many overlapping phases at once, and the idea of an overall arc has long been shown to be nonsense. 

The Classical Theravāda commentator Buddhaghosa used the idea of niyāma or restriction to describe the cyclic nature of unseen processes like kamma and citta. Both kamma and citta are like the life-cycle of a plant, in that if one sows rice one reaps rice. He called this restriction bījaniyāma "the seed limit" and used it to analogically explain that kusala actions gave rise to kusala vipaka or phala (literally fruit). Similarly with akusala actions and akusala fruits. He expanded the metaphor by adding that just as the trees flowered and fruited in the right season (utu) so kamma and citta produced their results at the appropriate time, a principle he called utuniyāma "the seasonal limit". The restrictions on kamma and citta were called kammaniyāma and cittaniyāma respectively. Buddhaghosa's fifth example of the cyclic niyāma was the miracles which inevitably manifest at key points in the life cycle of a Buddha (conception, birth, enlightenment, teaching, dying), which he called dhammaniyāma "the nature limit" (as in, it is the nature of a Buddha that their life is accompanied by miracles). This system was distorted by early translators so that it seemed to described causality in the universe seen at different scales. This distortion was popularised by the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, Sangharakshita, and recently refined by Subhuti into a grand meta-narrative. Buddhaghosa had something quite different in mind.

India and Buddhism are famous for their cyclic eschatology, the course of the life of an individual and the universe itself are governed by climatic cycles. Although in truth our Buddhist eschatology is a hybrid of cyclic and lineage eschatologies (see my Taxonomy of Afterlife Beliefs). Without making an effort to abandon seeking sense pleasure as a means to happiness one is reborn time and again in circumstances that are dependent on how one has lived. And if one is able to abandon pleasure-seeking then one is not reborn, though in pre-classical Buddhism which rejected absolutes, nothing more could be said by way of clarification of what happened to a tathāgata after death. The question was unanswerable (avyākṛta). The Upaniṣads have a similar eschatology, the major difference being the means of achieving liberation (ātman vs anātman) and the destination (Brahman vs avyākṛta).

Conclusions

To summarise, an image schema emerges from our physical experience of the world, it is pervasive in experience and thus widely understood. It has a simple, well-defined structure. It can be represented by diagrams, but our use of it is not necessarily visual or diagrammatic. Isomorphism, a similarity of form, in different domains allows the image schema to apply to many domains. This wide applicability of a schema is what enables us to effortlessly use metaphors in which we describe one domain in terms of another. The source domain is usually experiential, but the target domain may be experiential, entirely abstract, or somewhere in-between. For example if we talk about the flow of money around an economy, then we are applying the metaphor MONEY IS A FLUID and this is possible because a fluid schema exists and there is some isomorphism between our experience of fluids and our experience of money that allows the schema to apply in both domains and allowing us to use the language of one to describe the language of the other.

There are many image schemas, Johnson mentions about 50 in his book and seems to place no limits on the possible number. Because all human beings have the same kinds of bodies and sensory processes we can say that schemas are not cultural, but part of our shared heritage. As we've seen, metaphors used in the ancient dead language Pāḷi are often immediately clear. If a Pāli text refers to "grasping an concept" or "following the path to enlightenment", we understand without having to do anything more than translate the words. The metaphor is effortlessly, immediately apparent to us because we also have an object schema and a path schema that allows the mapping. Indeed we have these very same metaphors in English. 

The necessity of isomorphism between source and target domains of a metaphor does places limits on how and where metaphors apply. For example, a wall is not a path. The experience of a wall typically lacks the structural features which would allow us to map the path schema onto it. An exception to this might be that some walls are think and have a path along their top, as in a castle wall. But more typically the wall is characterised by the barrier schema, related to force schemas, which are also discussed in Johnson (1987).

One of the important assumptions of this work is that what gets stored in the brain is not individual metaphors, but the image schemas themselves. What is missing, so far as I know, is evidence from neuroscience supporting the philosophy. The description of image schemas is compelling and has good deal of explanatory power but we have yet to see the neural correlates. In the case of spatial and temporal location we now know that this information is stored in the brain in a hexagonal array of neurons which literally map out the space around us. And since the neurons involves fire in a sequence we also use them to orient ourselves in time, a discovery that was announce in 2015. We also know a good deal about how the cycles of our body are mediated by the sympathetic nervous and endocrine systems.

In a forthcoming essay I will again dip into Johnson (1987). I'll look at metaphors related to the body and how the entailments of metaphors guide how we make inferences from experience. This is an important process in understanding the history of religious ideas. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Glucklich, Ariel. (1997) The End of Magic. New York, Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Kraus, Benjamin J. et al. During Running in Place, Grid Cells Integrate Elapsed Time and Distance Run. Neuron, 88(3), 578-589. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.031

Lakoff, G., (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. University of Chicago Press.

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

Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. (2003) Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]

Mercier, Hugo & Sperber, Dan. (2011) Why Do Humans Reason. Arguments for an Argumentative Theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 34: 57 – 111. doi:10.1017/S0140525X10000968. Available from Dan Sperber's website.

Why Killing is Wrong

One of my friends recently shared this picture on Facebook, the comment, "Why indeed?" The subject came up again a few days later with this Robert Fisk article about Syria in The Independent newspaper pointing out that our Prime Minster is openly lying in order to bolster the case for killing more people in the Middle East. The accompanying picture shows a protester holding a placard with the same text.

Having read George Lakoff (See Moral Metaphors) and Mark Johnson and thought about the psychology of religious belief, the answer to the question seemed obvious to me. I started typing an explanation of the process. That answer became this essay. The fact is that all nations sanction killing under special certain circumstances, so to say that "killing people is wrong" is an oversimplification. The placard is actually a bit misleading and a bit naive. The laws we follow do not make killing a blanket offence. In some cases we can, like our British Prime Minister, apparently be proud of killing or having commissioned the killing. This does raise the question of the morality of killing. My approach to this question will be to look at how morality works, the underlying concepts and metaphors that form the mechanism of moral decision making, and to show how they apply to the subject of killing.

Debt and Balance.

The rationale behind the prohibition on killing is related to the underlying metaphors involved in our concept of justice. Ancient law codes tend to enshrine the principles: So we get the infamous passage of the Bible which lays out the penalties for personal injury, "eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot". The rule occurs in a number of places: Exodus 21:24; Leviticus 24:20; Deuteronomy 19:21. The last adds, "show no pity". With regard to killing there are several other passages which legislate for a penalty of death: e.g. Genesis 9:6, Numbers 35:16, and 35:30. The Old Testament - the law book of a small tribe of wandering desert dwellers - seems to be in no doubt that killing a killer is precisely the right thing to do. It is also quite happy to recommend the killing of enemies to the point of inflicting genocide on them. Contracts and debts were so important in Vedic society that they had a special god, Mitra, to oversee them.

The idea appears to be that fear of the consequences will prevent the transgression in the first place. Though of course we know that people are pretty hopeless at thinking through the consequences of their actions in most cases. Even if they were good at it, actions always have unintended and unforeseen consequences. We also know that extreme punishments do not prevent crime, else Saudi Arabia would not be about to behead a group of its citizens.

The Biblical laws, such a huge influence on our own ideas of justice, can be understood in terms of obligations and debts (See Lakoff 1995). So what is the rationale? My understanding is that transgression metaphorically creates a debt, or at least is treated as though it creates a debt. And an important principle in most societies is that debts must be paid. In a society in which transgression invokes punishment in the form of inflicting injury on the transgressor, they will most likely try to hide their transgression and avoid paying the debt. The Biblical law code enshrines the idea that the easiest way to collect on the debt is to repay the debtor in kind: injure the injurer, kill the killer.

We also see justice in terms of a moral balance. A transgression such as murder is believed to create an imbalance in favour of the transgressor. Punishment removes any benefit the transgressor might accrue, it clears the debt and restores balance. We punish criminals so that they may "pay their debt to society". We also anthropomorphise justice as a woman carrying a set of weighing scales - the association of a just world with scales dates from ancient Egyptian times at least.

Our basic model of a just world involves the metaphors: TRANSGRESSION IS DEBT and DEBTS ARE WEIGHTS. The Jains see actions as causing the accumulation of dust that weighs down the soul and prevents it from achieving liberation. Metaphors of debt and balance go together well. A good accountant "balances" the books, by which we do not mean they perform a kind of physical juggling act, but that they equalise the credits and debits. As Mr Micawber says in David Copperfield,

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds, nineteen, and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds, ought and six, result misery."

Killing also places a burden on those who seek justice for the killing in the form of grief and the effort required to extract payment for the debt. The person who has been killed had potential - to live, to breed, to work, etc. That potential can now never be realised. So although killing the killer pays the debt (which is why it is not wrong in this logic), there is some debt that is unpayable. And because killing creates an unpayable debt we see it as particularly heinous. The metaphor TRANSGRESSION IS DEBT seems to go both ways, so that also some are also transgressions. An unpayable debt is a moral outrage. This is why sometimes, "hanging is too good for them."

Of course none of this algebra of morality is conscious. It's a black box, unconscious process that produces conscious conclusions associated with strong emotions that indicate to us that the thoughts we have in response are both salient and important, and thus we are highly motivated to act on them. The insight only emerges from a close analysis of the language used in talking about a just world.


The Politics of Morality and the Morality of Politics.

Beyond the basic insight that morality is an accounting exercise, there are two basic attitudes to debts that roughly correspond to the political divisions called left/right or progressive/conservative. For a conservative, paying back debts is especially important to their self-view and may over-ride other considerations. Thus in response to killing, many conservatives may be in favour of capital punishment, and going to war against enemies. Many progressives accept that moral debts can never be paid in full and live with this. It was progressives who introduced reform into the justice system, arguing, for example, for the need to rehabilitate criminals rather than simply punishing them. Progressives argue for humane treatment of prisoners and alternative forms of justice. All this with a view to creating a broader harmony. Just two days ago a conservative British government, aided by conservatives of the left (!), voted to extent the protracted war that we have been fighting in the Middle East for 14 years. The progressives of the left and right have been against the war from the beginning arguing that the second gulf war was illegal. Conservatives believe that bombs going off in Europe constitutes a debt that must be paid in kind. Never mind the fact that Europe started the war. or that Britain has accrued massive debts in that part of the world since 1915. Self-deception is an important aspect of morality, particularly amongst those who wield power.

In a progressive society we have come to accept that the Biblical injunction is too brutal. We have moved on from the simple equation in which the punishment for murder is execution, at least as far as our own citizens are concerned. When a judge passes sentence on a convicted criminal what they do is weigh the seriousness of the crime and consult the law to see what is considered to balance out that crime by the government of the day. Governments are able to adjust this balance. But it does mean that justice might look different for different classes of people: if two people, one an unemployed person and one a professional of some sort are convicted of theft, the two punishments may look different. The first may get a heavy fine and some sort of community service. The second may well lose their career, all their future earning potential as a professional and thus just being convicted is already a heavy blow to them and this is taken into account. Some argue that the punishment ought not to take into account these other factors. One of the things about justice is that the truism "justice must be seen to be done" is still important. 

The problem with this consequentialist view can be summarised in Mr Spock's famous Utilitarian catch-phrase: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. As Mark Johnson (1987: 95) has pointed out this algebraic approach to justice, the "consequentialist" model of ethics, often sees the needs of the few sidelined completely. Spock's cliché does not take into account class and the historical attitudes of class. In a class system, as we have in the UK, some people weigh more than others in the moral balance. Particularly, the wealthy outweigh the poor. This is why the needs of the richest 1% dominate the needs of the 99% today: 1 billionaire outweighs 100 wage-slaves. Governments are increasingly members of the 1% and act to secure more for themselves and their peers, because they see their own needs as out-weighing the needs of the many.

In the UK we have an on-going crisis related to the precipitous drop in government revenue caused by the global financial crisis. The ideological response to this is to lower taxes for the wealthy (with the view to them using their retained wealth wisely) and cut services that are mainly used by the poor. The wealthy are seen by conservatives as morally worthy by mere virtue of being wealthy. Wealth is perceived as the reward of the just. Thus the wealthy are more weighty. This incidentally is also a step away from traditional Christian morality. Indeed it might be argued that those who feared that the collapse of Christianity would see the world slide into immorality, have seen their fears realised when it comes to the wealthy. It is assumed (by other wealthy people) that being morally worthy, the wealthy will use their wealth wisely. But they do not. They conspicuously consume with no higher purpose. They actively avoid paying into the community-chest through taxes, placing a higher burden on the poor. At the same time some of the wealthy seek the notoriety of public philanthropy instead of the anonymity of paying taxes. They give, but want adoration for doing what we all do. In this class based calculation, the poor are morally unworthy (by virtue of being poor) and thus cutting services that they use in order to lower the taxes on the wealthy is seen as a balanced policy by conservatives. They see this as fair. In this case the wealthy are few, but weighty. The poor are also few, but light. The majority in the middle only want their own wealth to remain stable and to be insulated from the risks of change. And in exchange for this they are willing to manage and administrate the empire of the wealthy.

We may have one person one vote, but when it comes to the policies actually enacted these are largely driven by the 1% and their perceived needs. Ironically, if we look at extreme political systems such as Stalinism or Maoism we also find a 1% who believe their needs outweigh the needs of the many and who organise their environment to ensure their needs, as they perceive them, are met at the expense of everyone else. The behaviour of the 1% may just be a constant in large scale societies. We certainly lack any effective narrative to counteract the current trend for the wealthy to get more wealthy at the expense of the poor. When they capture both the legislature and executive branches of government, we seem to lean back towards feudalism. Incidentally almost all businesses are run on feudal models of governance. And it is businessmen who have hijacked national governments.

More Calculations

When it comes to killing there is also a different weight attached to different people. There is a kind of algebra that we mentally perform. As well as the weights associated with class, we have different weights for different roles, for example, civilian, soldier, general, politician all have different weights. The UK and the USA apparently have no moral quandary using bombs to assassinate tribal leaders in Waziristan because they support our enemy, the Taliban. The Taliban are our enemy because they once offered succour to our other enemy, Al-Qaeda (even though it is now believed that the Taliban have severed all ties with Al-Qaeda). Ironically we once supported the proto-Taliban mujahideen in their fight against our other erstwhile enemy and sometime ally, Russia. So we are technically our own enemy now. If we kill twenty civilians to bomb one tribal leader, then our leaders calculate that justice is served, partly because they have decreed that no-one is a civilian in that part of the world . This may be true in the sense that they are all fighting for their land and resisting our illegal invasion and pathetic attempts to set up puppet governments. On the other hand gun-toting Americans suffering the latest mass-shooting ought to remember that the logic of their state is that armed individuals are enemy combatants, not civilians. What we don't do is target the leaders of the House of Saud who finance terrorism and Islamic State, and spread the extremist version of Islam that underpins terrorist ideology. In fact we do the opposite - we pay them huge bribes to buy our weaponry and support them with our military, even when they use the price of oil to hold us hostage. The algebra of this relationship is beyond my moral mathematics to solve.

With the modern study of societies and groups of people we can now see that behaviour is not simply the result of our own motivations and drives as the crude Freudian model suggests. How we behave is a product, sometimes wholly a product, of our environment. The people around us have a much stronger effect on us than we like to admit. Our myth is that we are all individuals, making our own decisions, determining our own fate. God gave us free will so we could misbehave (and what a mistake that turned out to be). The truth is that we're social animals and, for most of us, going along with the group is a survival strategy with tens of millions of years of successful history that is hard to argue against. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have shown that reasoning, that faculty we hold to be the highest virtue of the individual, doesn't even usually work in individuals. Across a wide range of tests and measures, individuals are hopeless at reasoning tasks, worse than random guessing. Reasoning seems to have evolved to help small groups make decisions and really only works in small groups. Of course for all these qualities and faculties there is a bell curve. A few individuals are naturally good at reasoning. Other's can learn to reason effectively as an individual. But even formal training is no guarantee of success. As Mercier and Sperber say, confirmation bias is a feature of reasoning, not a bug.

Morality or Justice have yet to catch up with these facts. The idea of freewill, and the interminable arguments over it, actually hampers progress in understanding human beings. Freewill is a legacy concept from Christianity, but also built into WEIRD notions of justice. But as we all know from experience none of us is completely free or completely constrained. At the very least we have obligations to our community that constrain our choices. In practice that community likely shapes most of our decisions. Many of the people in our prisons have mental illnesses or developmental problems that impair their ability to make good life choices, though short of a demonstrable inability to understand the consequences of one's actions, one still has to live with those choices. And being insane is no picnic even if we are free of societal expectations. However the notion of freewill continues to dominate the public debate, probably because it's what journalists understand or think we will understand. Social psychology is still almost inevitably trumped by that old fraud Freud.

The debt created by killing can be lessened or mitigated by circumstances. If I plan out killing someone that is weightier than if I kill on the spur of the moment. Killing on purpose is weightier than killing by accident. Killing because one was in fear of one's life, out of self-defence, may cancel out - the threat to your life may mean that the killing anticipates that debt. Killing when one is insane and unable to understand the consequences of one's action is not blameworthy in the eyes of the law, though many social conservatives consider that the insane should still be punished (for them a debt is a debt and must be paid). Killing in a war is to a person's credit - we celebrate our most efficient and effective killers. As I said, our British Prime Minister is quite proud of all the killing he is commissioning in the Middle East. David "Killer" Cameron seems to have a taste for ordering executions. 

However we are squeamish about mass killings. Fire bombing Dresden and killing tens of thousands of civilians (figures are disputed and were distorted at the time) was just about acceptable to the British, if not the Germans. Atomic bombs, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians on the day and many more from cancer in the following generations is a more ambivalent subject. Some still claim it saved American lives and shortened the war and that this justified the use of atomics. This is yet another example of the utilitarian approach to ethics in which one weighs up consequences, it's just that in this case foreign lives are worth considerable less than domestic lives. A few hundred thousand Japanese  civilians are worth a lot less than say, ten thousand American soldiers. Others argue that the use of atomics was a "war crime" of the most heinous kind (because it created a massive unpayable debt).

This in-group/out-group distinction has always been important when it comes to killing. Prohibitions on killing seldom apply in the same way, or at all, to out-group people. Funnily enough we see the same behaviour in chimps. When the Gombe Stream group became too large a group of chimps split off and set up a range next door. The alpha male of the Gombe Stream Group, a large and unusually violent male (ironically) called Frodo by Jane Goodall, lead a series of raids on the splitters in which they were all killed. Human beings are not the only species that commit murder.

Every time, every single time, a government wants to justify killing its enemies it characterises them as inhuman. This makes it easier to justify killing them. And note that the present call to extend the illegal war in the Middle-East does portray the enemy as monsters who "must be stopped". And there is certainly some truth in this. European and US governments have created a number of monstrous dictators and organisations in the Middle East. But what about the states who arm and fund them? Are they not culpable also?


From Payback to Restoration and Redemption.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the Christian myth connected with justice, is the redemption of sinners. Some members of society see criminals, even killers, as in need of redemption, rehabilitation. This goes beyond the simple idea of balancing out the crime with punishment. Part of the motivation here is that we acknowledge that our methods of punishment tend to produce more criminal behaviour: relative innocents who are sent to prison come out hardened by their intimate association with other criminals; many people commit crimes as a kind of career and prison does nothing to deter them. Punishment only seems to make the situation worse in the majority of cases. So there are lobby groups who try to get the government to implement rehabilitation programs, with limited success.

It is notable that since roughly 1971 the developed world's attitude to private debt has significantly shifted. Where pre-war the average person would have avoided going into debt, by the 1970s debt  in the form of credit cards and personal loans was being promoted to more or less every adult. We began to accumulate huge average levels of personal debt. At present household debt is roughly equal to the annual Gross Domestic Product of the nation and forecast to rise steeply. Business debt is much higher because banks are heavily indebted to each other, but non-finance sector business debt is also about equal to annual GDP. Currently private sector debt in the UK stands at about £6.5 trillion and GDP at £1.5 trillion. (See this chart). Given the applicable metaphors, this change in attitude to debt may have had a major impact on our ideas about morality, but I don't think this has been studied yet (I'd be very interested to know if it has). 

In recent times we have also developed more nuanced views about justice. For example we now distinguish between retributive justice and restorative justice. Both are still based on the balance metaphor, but employ different methods to achieve balance. Retributive justice, which I have so far focussed on, seeks to restore balance by inflicting suffering and humiliation on the one who has transgressed. Restorative justices aims to balance things out by forcing the transgressor to make a positive contribution to the victim and society. Whether this takes the form of community service, compensation payments, or reconciliation meetings, the aim is still to have the transgressor actively restore balance through their actions rather than being passive subjects of punishment. The underlying concepts and metaphors are the same.

As I have already mentioned, the whole system of identifying criminals and punishing them makes it virtually certain that people will always try to hide their misdeeds out of fear. Our idea of justice still largely consists of inflicting suffering and humiliation on wrong doers. We learn this as children - those who are caught breaking the rules are punished. So, don't get caught. We also Romanticise and idolise individuals who can break rules with impunity. In particular many of the "heroes" in our story telling are able to kill without consequence. Why would anyone come forward and confess to a crime knowing that they will suffer as a result? It is irrational to seek punishment. However, sometimes the guilt of committing the crime outweighs the fear of punishment. In this case we might say that guilt comes from an awareness of having created a debt and the knowledge that it must be paid. Guilt is the feeling we have when there is a moral imbalance. And it can override concerns for personal safety and make people confess to crimes even though they know that they are inviting injury on themselves. This must be coupled with a deep indoctrination that guilt requires punishment in order to restore the balance of a just world.


Last Words

So the slogan that sparked this essay has misconstrued the situation. Killing is not wrong per se. Some killing is emphatically right (in the eyes of the law). The problem is that unsanctioned killing creates a debt. The simplest way of repaying that debt is for the killer to die. That is why social conservatives want to kill killers. Not to show that killing is wrong, because it isn't always wrong, but to show that killing is a weighty debt and that all debts must be paid. Progressives see the conservatives here locked in combat with conservatives there and wonder where it will end.

~~oOo~~

Johnson, Mark. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

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