What's the Difference Between a Meditator and Corpse?

At first glance, my title this week might seem like an odd question or the opening to a joke. In fact, the question is asked and answered in the Pāḷi Mahāvedalla Sutta (MN 43). This is one of those suttas that seems to be an attempt to comprehensively summarise Buddhism as it was understood at the time, but not in a standard Theravāda way. 

The Mahāvedella is a teaching by Elder Sāriputta for Elder Mahā-Koṭṭhita. The pair are also portrayed as speaking together in the Koṭṭhita Sutta (AN 9.13) and another Koṭṭhita Sutta (SN 35.232).

In this case, the sutta includes some ideas that are rare elsewhere. What the Pāḷi texts repeatedly show is that different ancient Buddhists thought about the same terms in different ways. Not everything that we find in a Pāḷi sutta was incorporated into Theravāda Buddhism, even in theory. 

The Mahāvedalla Sutta

The Mahāvedalla Sutta is a series of questions and answers. For example, the first question asks for a definition of "faulty pañño" (duppañño; Skt duḥprajñā) and compares this with someone endowed with pañño (paññavā; Skt. prajñāvat). Note how these are not quite opposites. The natural opposite of duppañño would be supañño; while the opposite of paññavā would be apaññavā. No doubt there was a story here, but it's lost to time. It's not clear how the Mahāvedalla-kāra understood pañño, the adjectival form of paññā, but in Prajñāpāramitā it seems to connote the knowledge gained by undergoing cessation (nirodha). The series of questions continues. Define "discrimination" (viññāṇaṃ; vijñāna)? What is the difference between viññāṇaṃ and paññā? The answer here is that paññā is to be cultivated; discrimination is to be comprehended (paññā bhāvetabbā, viññāṇaṃ pariññeyyaṃ). 

This explanation leaves me in the dark about the distinction, I think, because I lack the context in which to understand it. There is one other reference to cultivating paññā in Pāḷi. The Rāga Sutta (AN 6.107) describes a group of three things to be abandoned (raga, doha, moha) and three to be cultivated (asubha, mettā, and paññā) in order to eliminate them, i.e. cultivating understanding (paññā) dispels confusion (moha). This one is comprehensible on its own, but doesn't help us to distinguish paññā from viññāṇa. It seems that the Mahāvedalla-kāra did not see viññāṇa as something that could be cultivated or abandoned. But this doctrine was not developed by Buddhists and all we have is this incomplete snapshot. This happens a lot in the Pāḷi suttas. 

Then the sutta asks, what is valence (vedanā) and recognition (saññā)? And are these three—saññā, paññā, vedanā—inseparable? The sutta-kāra says they are not separable because "what one experiences, that one recognises; what one recognises one discriminates" (yaṃ hāvuso, vedeti taṃ sañjānāti, yaṃ sañjānāti taṃ vijānāti MN I 293). Note that the traditional skandha meditation practice is predicated on being able to distinguish these three, while here the three are said to be impossible to distinguish individually (na ca labbhā imesaṃ dhammānaṃ vinibbhujitvā vinibbhujitvā* nānākaraṇaṃ paññāpetuṃ).

* The repetition of vinibbhujitvā here is odd, but seems to be in the original texts. 

Then a change of pace. "Comrade, what can be inferred by purified mental discrimination that dismisses the five [physical] senses?" (Nissaṭṭhena hāvuso, pañcahi indriyehi parisuddhena manoviññāṇena kiṃ neyyan ti?)

* Ñāṇamoḷi & Bodhi "Friend, what can be known by the purified mind-consciousness released from the five faculties?

Interestingly, what can be inferred or understood (neyyan) from this are precisely the āyatana states. From the statement (or thought) "space has no limits" we can infer the stage of limitless space (ananto ākāso’ti ākāsānañcāyatanaṃ neyyaṃ); from "there is no limit to discrimination" we infer the stage of limitless discrimination can be inferred (anantaṃ viññāṇan ti viññāṇañcāyatanaṃ neyyaṃ); and from "there is nothing" we infer the stage of nothingness can be inferred (natthi kiñcī ti ākiñcaññāyatanaṃ neyyaṃ). And we know this phenomenon through the eye of paññā (paññācakkhunā). And what is the purpose of paññā? It is higher knowledge (abhiññatthā), exact knowledge (pariññatthā), and abandonment (pahānatthā). The latter refers to eliminating sensory experience (cf. Pahāna Sutta SN 35.24).

More questions follow on right view (sammādiṭṭhi), being (bhava), first jhāna, the five faculties, and then the section that really interests me.

Life and Heat

The pertinent question is, "On what condition do the five faculties depend?" (pañcindriyāni kiṃ paṭicca tiṭṭhantī ti); where the five faculties are eye, ear, nose, tongue, body. The Mahāvedalla Sutta says that they depend on āyu "life" (Skt āyuḥ; as in āyurveda). Life itself depends on the condition of "heat" (āyu usmaṃ paṭicca tiṭṭhati) but, at the same time, heat depends on the condition of life (usmā āyuṃ paṭicca tiṭṭhati). The relation between the two is explained by an analogy: it's just like how seeing the light of a lamp is dependent on seeing the flame, and seeing the flame is dependent on seeing the light. This mirrors the analogy between mutually conditioning viññāṇa and nāmarūpa in the Mahānidāna Sutta (DN 15) there conceptualised as two sheaves of harvested grain that lean against each other (called a "stook" in English).

Life and heat are not a common topic in Pāḷi; they occur together in just three texts including the Mahāvedalla Sutta, and I will digress briefly to consider the other two. We find life and heat together in a verse at the end of the Pheṇa­piṇḍ­ūpama Sutta (SN 22.95) where death is equated with the absence of āyu, usmā, and viññāṇa (SN III 143). In the Kāmbhū Sutta (SN 41.6), which features a discussion between the patriarch* Citta and the bhikkhu Kāmbhū, we find a similar discussion of the difference between a corpse and a meditator experiencing cessation (Starting at SN IV 294). Here the bodily, verbal, and mental formations (kāya-, vācī-, and citta-saṅkhāra) cease in a meditator undergoing cessation. However, they still have life and heat, and their "faculties are serene" (indriyāni vippasannāni).

*Gahapati refers to the patriarch of an extended household or possibly an extended family within a clan structure. Standard translations like "householder" seem to miss the point.

Note the inconsistency here: a living person in both texts has life and heat, but the third factor is viññāṇa in one account and indriyāni in another. Here we might conjecture that viññāṇa is intended as the function of the indriyāni, i.e. objectification is the function of the sense faculties. We could, at a pinch, see the two terms in this context as synonyms. Though this is a neat solution, we have to consider other possibilities as well. The two texts may be trying to say something different and incompatible that we no longer understand (this is not uncommon between two Pāli texts).

I don't understand how we came to translate viññāṇa as "consciousness" but it seems plain wrong to me. Notably, viññāṇa is an action noun rather than an abstract noun, so viññāṇa and consciousness are not even on the same level of abstraction. It is my view that no Pāḷi word can be translated into English as an abstract noun "consciousness" and that our whole philosophical concept of "consciousness" is absent from ancient Buddhist dialogues (see also The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor). The use of "consciousness" in discussing ancient Buddhist discourses is a Whiggish anachronism (in which we imagine ancient Indians to be primitive precursors of ourselves).

In any case, the gist here is clear. It can be very difficult to distinguish a meditator from a corpse by the usual signs of life that we look for in a conscious and aware person, because we cannot interact with them. We could say that following cessation a person becomes completely unresponsive to the world around them. People undergoing cessation of sensory experience necessarily lack all sense of time, since all of the clues to the passing of time have, by definition, ceased. Hence, perhaps, the Buddhist insistence that the Buddhadharma is akāliko "timeless", though in a culture where death is often referred to as kālaṅkato "having done one's time", akāliko could also be a synonym for amata "deathless" (Skt. amṛta). The phenomenon of people sitting lost in samādhi for days on end is likely related to their undergoing cessation and having no sense of time passing. It is likely that thirst, i.e. a need for water, is what rouses them. Being dragged out of samādhi by thirst may explain why "thirst" (Skt. tṛṣṇa; P. taṇha) became such a key word in the Buddhist lexicon.

Life Force

Coming back to the Mahāvedalla Sutta and moving to the next section the subject is now "life" (āyu) and the "constituents of life" (āyu-saṇkhārā). The sutta explicitly states that these "constituents of life" are not phenomena that one can experience (na kho, āvuso, teva āyusaṅkhārā te vedaniyā dhammā). And then it says that, if the āyu-saṅkhārā were phenomena to be experienced, the one who experienced the cessation of awareness and experience would not emerge from their meditation, that is to say they would die. The logic here is that if āyu and āyu-saṅkhāra were part of the experienced world, then when the experienced world ceased, so too would life. Rather, the text makes the apposite observation that life continues even when all sensory experience ceases. 

What did the sutta-kāra mean by āyu and āyu-saṇkhārā? It is difficult to say, because the terms are not defined. Sujato has blogged about how the words āyusaṇkhāra and jīvitasaṇkhāra are used. There is not a great deal more to be said. In the Mahāparinibbāna Sutta (DN 16) the Buddha mentions jīvitasaṅkhāra in a sense that Sujato interprets as a "will to live". He is, I think, here relying on the traditional idea that saṅkhāra means "volition" because it is explained as the six kinds of cetanā associated with the six sense spheres.

This meaning of saṅkhāra derives from the earlier Brahmanical use of the Sanskrit equivalent. In Vedic ritual, a saṃskāra is a rite of passage. When performing these rites, the Brahmin priests carry out a series of actions (karman). Hence, in Buddhist usage, saṇkhāra/saṃskāra is "an opportunity for doing karma". Keeping in mind that all intentional acts carry a karmic debt. At the same time, the unique but influential passage in AN 6.63 famously says "intention is how I talk about karma, monks" (cetanāhaṃ bhikkhave kammaṃ vadāmi). Thus an opportunity for doing karma becomes an intention to act. 

Whether this meaning can be applied to āyusaṅkhāra is moot and, since Sujato doesn't make this case, we are none the wiser. He finds a way to make sense of jīvitasaṇkhāra as "the will to life" and then retrospectively relates āyusaṇkhāra to this as a kind of "vital force". In the end, however, Sujato concludes that distinction between āyusaṇkhāra and jīvitasaṇkhāra probably emerged later and that the two words are synonyms for "vitality" and "vital energies" and are best translated as "life force". This is a self-consistent explanation and it might be right. But there is presently no way to confirm such conjectures: we are trying to make sense of how a word was used in the absence of any contemporary explanation and from just a few instances that are vague and/or ambiguous. This is a common problem when dealing with older Buddhist texts (in any language). 

Across the ancient world we repeatedly encounter the idea of a "life force", but it is almost always conceptualised as breath. Words indicating breath as life force include: psyche, anima, spirit, qi 氣, and prāṇa. For more on this theme see my 2014 essay: Spiritual I: The Life's Breath. In the Indian context the vital force is āṇa "breath" which itself is caused by the action of the element of wind (vāyu). Vāyu conceptualises all forms of movement. The word āyu, however, does not refer to "breath". Rather, it is related to the words aeon and age, and often refers to lifespan or longevity. Breath (āṇa) is what animates the body (kāya); the resulting animation seems to be called āyu (and is accompanied by usmā). Similarly, jīva is not related to breath but is cognate with Greek bio, Latin vivarus, and Germanic quick; all meaning "life; living".

These are not ideas that were integrated into later Buddhism. Nor does the concept of a life-force as distinct from mind and body ever become mainstream. The reason is obvious, and has also bothered European philosophers. If there were a "life-force", then it would surely have a roll to play in facilitating life after death. And if it is present in all living things, as appears to be implied, then we are in the realms of eternalism: that is to say āyu starts to sound suspiciously like ātman. Not surprisingly most Buddhist schools of thought set the idea of a "life force" outside of their orthodoxy and āyusaṅkhāra never became a mainstream Buddhists' technical term. Moreover, Buddhist knowledge of physiology never really developed beyond this Iron Age conception.

Conclusions

To answer the question in the title, a meditator and a corpse are similar in that signs of life in the form of actions of body, speech, and mind are absent. Even though the meditator is insensate, or even catatonic, they are still alive; still warm. The corpse is cold and lifeless (and decay sets in almost immediately). 

Presumably, this was enough of an issue for the early Buddhists thought that it required some doctrinal explanation. That said, the terms used to explain the difference—like āyu and āyusaṅkhāra—did not seem to need an explanation in the minds of the author(s). Leaving us scratching our heads. 

This sutta is not consistent with Theravāda Buddhism, if only because it unequivocally states that vedanā, saññā, and viññāṇa cannot be distinguished from each other. Nor is this statement consistent with any form of Buddhism I am familiar with. The Mahāvedella Sutta appears to be from an unknown sect of Buddhists, missing from the historical record. Their text was preserved, but the teaching lineage associated with it was not. I suspect this is true in a large number of Pāḷi suttas.

However, that āyu and usmā occur together in three texts suggests that at least some Buddhists believed in some kind of "life force" as distinct from a soul (ātman). A life force (jīva) was also important in Jain theology, where it provided the necessary continuity for rebirth. At least some Buddhists further conceptualised life as composite and posited life-constituents (āyu-saṅkhāra). However, in the end we don't know precisely what words like āyu or āyusaṅkhāra meant to those people then, because they didn't say and there is not enough context to guess.

In this case it is very tempting to smooth over the difficulty by conjecturing an answer that solves all the problems, is plausible, and self-consistent. However, this is not sufficient to establish how the author(s) thought. Any number of plausible, self-consistent answers are possible. But we have no objective facts available to help us choose between them.

~~oOo~~

Buddhist "Ethics" and Sensory Deprivation

In my previous essay, I argued for a link between meditation and sensory deprivation: more specifically that meditation, viewed as withdrawal of attention from the sensorium, causes (non-pathological) hallucinations in the same way that sensory deprivation does. In this essay, I want to broaden the scope to look at śīla "conduct" in the light of this link and its place in the threefold path: śīla, samādhi, and prajñā. Along the way I introduce the Spiral Path (which ought to be familiar to my readers) and Karl Friston's free energy principle. 

It is common to translate śīla as "ethics", even though we have known for some time that Buddhism has no ethics. That is to say, traditional Buddhism produced no treatise on ethics. Here, I am making the philosophical distinction between morality as rules of conduct (pañcaśīla, praṭimokṣa) and ethics as the principles or meta-rules that guide the formation of rules. Alternatively we could think of ethics as the reasons for following moral rules. The lack of ethics in Buddhism has been a problem for those of us who wish to adapt Buddhism to modern life. On one hand, we have no guidance for forming new rules and, on the other, we have yet to write our own ethical treatises. Europeans, much like their Buddhist counterparts in Asia, have filled in the lacuna by drawing upon their own culture. European Buddhists tend to be liberals (of various types including, more recently, neoliberals) and as David Chapman discovered in relation to US "Consensus Buddhism" we tend to see liberal values as Buddhist values, because after all these are our values and we are Buddhists. It's a shame David McMahan did not include liberalism amongst his important factors of modernity, in Buddhist Modernism. 

Here I want to revisit some research I did before getting sucked into the Heart Sutra vortex.

Ethics and the Spiral Path

In Triratna we emphasise what Sangharakshita called the Spiral Path, for which we tend to use his book The Three Jewels (1967) as the principal source. I published a scholarly essay on this formulation of the Buddhist path (Attwood 2013). I also created an infographic (right) which describes the main features and variants of these texts.

Sangharakshita based his exposition on the Upanisā Sutta (SN 12:23) which is something of an oddity. Ayya Khema (1991) and Bodhi (1980) also composed commentaries on the Upanisā Sutta, the latter directly in response to Sangharakshita (who used Sanskrit technical terms rather than Pāli). However, in my view, the locus classicus for this doctrinal formulation should be considered the first five suttas of the Dasakanipātapāḷi and the Ekādasakanipātapāḷi of the Aṅguttara Nikāya (i.e. the Tenfold Chapter and Elevenfold Chapter)*.

* The reason we cite both is that, while otherwise the texts in the different chapters are identical, in the Tenfold Chapter, nibbidā and virāga are treated as one step, while in the Elevenfold Chapter. they are treated as two.

The Spiral Path describes a form of conditionality that has a different emphasis from the one that most Buddhists are focussed on. The presence of one condition naturally (effortlessly) gives rise to the effect, which then becomes the condition for the next effect, in a cumulative manner. In some cases it is accompanied by the image of water overflowing from one container to the next like a champagne fountain. 

This doctrine is less systematic than its counterpart the twelve nidānas and, at least in Pāli, shows little standardisation, especially in the early stages. The Chinese counterparts of these texts, collected in the Chinese Madhyamāgama translation (MĀ 42-55), have been homogenised to a greater extent, though some variations remain.

When I looked at all of the forty or so Pāli suttas that have some version of the Spiral Path, I could see a familiar pattern. I was able to show that the Spiral Path is in fact an elaboration of the threefold path: śīla, samādhi, and prajñā, which we routinely see translated as "ethics, meditation, and wisdom" One of the salient features of the threefold path in these suttas is the two liminal states that link the three phases. So in śīla we see a range of techniques that culminate in pāmojja "joy" (also pāmujja; Skt prāmodya) which is a result of śīla rather and an example of śīla. In her exposition of the Spiral Path, Ayya Khema (1991) refers to pāmojja as a necessary prerequisite for meditation. Pāmojja is the culmination of practising sīla and the doorway to samādhi. Similarly, the stages of meditation in the spiral path texts—pīti, passadhi, sukha, and samādhi; which seem to approximate the stages of jhāna—lead to another liminal state: yathabhūtañāṇadassaṇa "knowledge and vision of things as they are". Knowledge and vision opens the door to the prajñā stage of the threefold path, i.e. one becomes fed up with sensory experience (nibbidā) and rejects it (virāga), resulting in either liberation (vimokkha) and the knowledge of liberation (vimokkhañāṇa), or the cutting off of karma-making (āsavakkhaya) and the knowledge of this (āsavakkhayañāṇa).

Defining Śīla.

One approach to defining śīla would be to list all the practices that lead up to pamojjā in the Spiral Path literature and look for patterns. From my 2013 article here is such a list:

• saṃvara/saṃvuta "restraint"
• indriyesu guttadvāra "guarding the sense doors"
• yoniso-manasikāra "wise attention"
• appamattassa vihārato "dwelling vigilantly"
• sati sampajañña "mindfulness and attentiveness"
• hiri-otappa "shame & scruple" (AN 8.81)
• sīla "behaviour"
• kusalāni sīlāni "virtuous behaviour"
• saddhā "faith".

Of these, the only practices with an explicit moral character are shame (hiri) and scruple (ottapa). Like mindfulness (sati) and full attention (sampajañña), these two terms often occur together and are often poorly distinguished in the literature. They are said to reflect one's active recognition of an unskilful act, and the fear of being judged unskilful by the discriminating (viññū) members of the Buddhist community. And keep in mind that these are not passive feelings about actions, these are practices or, in other words, these are actions that one consciously and voluntarily engages in for the purposes of achieving the goals of Buddhism, including the ultimate goal of ending rebirth. 

The odd one out is "faith" (saddhā). Despite a great deal being written about faith in Buddhism, I have yet to see a modern English account that accurately reflects saddhā as I encounter it in Pāli. In the suttas, saddhā is that feeling when one has listened to the Buddha talk about his teaching, it makes you want to try what he's talking about. What saddhā means, then, is less about faith (unreasoning and/or unreasoned belief) than it is about enthusiasm combined with intention. Enthusiasm for Buddhist practices based on understanding an explanation by an expert, and an intention to try it out. This is not an unreasoning belief as faith in Christianity is supposed to be. Nor is this confidence in the teachings based on experience. The quality of having confidence in the practices as described is called aveccapasāda "perfect clarity". Saddhā is "faith" in the reasoned sense that having listened to a presentation on Dharma, one finds it plausible enough to want to go ahead and try it. Unreasoned faith comes into Buddhism only with the advent of so-called "Pure Land Buddhism", with the focus of the early centuries being initially on Akṣobhya and his realm of Abhirati, before moving to Amitābha and Sukhāvati. Neither is part of our universe but both are able to appear in our universe to succor those who have sufficient faith, with a gradually lowering bar on "sufficient". 

The bulk of these ideas, by contrast, are not obviously moral in character and, indeed, they involve minimising, to the point of elimination, interacting with other people rather than improving the quality of those interactions. More precisely the practices listed as comprising śīla appear to aim to limit our relationship with sensory experience. Here, for example, we are counselled to reduce input, to stop ourselves from seeking out sensory experience, to guard the sense doors (against the intrusion of sensory experience), to attend to the sensorium wisely, i.e. to not be intoxicated (appamāda) by experience but to remain indifferent (virāga) to it. These are not instructions on how to treat other people well (morality), nor are they principles for treating people well (ethics). They mostly involve avoiding and ignoring other people as much as possible. The idea for Buddhists being the solitary retreat. 

From the point of view of modern Buddhists, śīla is about our moral conduct. We link śīla not to these practices of restraint, but to the precepts (sikkhapāda) or monastic rules (vinaya, paṭimokkha) or some other formulation. The Spiral Path texts, by contrast, don't mention precepts or rules. So there is a disconnect between the received tradition of Buddhist rules of conduct and this formulation of the path of Buddhism. Treating people well is not really considered in this context. Rather one is largely concerned with maintaining social isolation and having a sober relationship with sensory experience; concerned with reducing sensory input. It seems to me that śīla as a moral teaching came along after the fact as a sop for people who were not spending their days in samādhi.

If śīla is not principally about moral conduct, if Buddhism moral rules are an afterthought, then what is śīla concerned with? Here I foreground the idea of restraining the senses and try to relate it to the idea that sensory deprivation is an important component of Buddhist meditation. 

Śīla as Preparation for Meditation.

The threefold way formulation of Buddhism includes the idea that śīla is preparatory. Specifically, we learn that śīla prepares us for the samādhi "meditation" phase. Moreover, the Spiral Path texts suggest that the significant result of our preparation is pāmojja "joy". In this view, śīla leaves us with an untroubled conscience which then facilitates our entry into jhāna and other altered states". And this is not wrong. It is explicitly included in the Spiral Path texts in AN 11.1, where the benefit of wholesome conduct (kusalāni sīlāni) is non-regret (avippaṭisāro) which in turn is the condition for pāmojja, which, as we have seen, is the doorway to meditation. It's not hard to interpret this as relating to morality. "Non-regret" appears to tie in with seemingly moral practices such as shame (hiri) and scruple (ottapa). In this context, "wholesome conduct" seems to suggest the practices of restraint that we find in the other Spiral Path texts.

In most cases, the idea that good behaviour contributes to liberation is largely concerned with obtaining the right kind of fortunate rebirth. It needs emphasising that, for Buddhists, good behaviour alone provides no escape from saṃsāra. Good actions (kusalāni sīlāni) result in a good rebirth destination (suggati), but the acme of Buddhism is the cessation of rebirth. This can only be accomplished once we stop making new karma. And we only stop making karma when we see things as they are.

What if the point of śīla in this context was not morality? What if these behavioural norms were actually intended to help us cope with the intense sensory deprivation of samādhi meditation?

Experience shows that difficulty applying meditation techniques is often correlated to how busy one's life is. The Buddha almost always recommends that a meditator should detach themselves from society, to find a deserted spot in the wilderness, far away from the intense sensory stimulation of town, village, or monastery. Buddhist monastics are supposed to definitively severe their social connections and live adrift from society. As the Buddha says in a memorable Vinaya passage,

"Monks," said the Bhagavan, "you have no mother and no father to care for you. If you don't care for each other, then who will care for you? If you would care for me, then tend to the sick." (Vin I 301).

The ideal Buddhist meditator is solitary, isolated, and disenchanted with sensory experience.

As noted in the previous essay, it is very common for meditators to meet hallucinations when they practice, almost ubiquitous. Even complete beginners can meet with hallucinations the first time they try it (I've known people for whom this was true). For the most part, these gross hallucinations are a barrier to deeper concentration. We experience them as a kind of turbulence or disturbance that distracts us from the focus of the meditation. At least in traditional Buddhist ideas about mind, hallucinations are a form for sensory experience in which the object is mental rather than physical. Buddhism treats the mind as a "sense" in this worldview. So internally generated experiences, with no objective counterpart, are not seen as special, they are just experiences, just the kind of thing that stops with cessation. And the goal of Buddhist meditation is to make experience cease (I'm going to get into this in a subsequent essay).

Perhaps it is worth saying that Pāli clearly does allow for an objective world that follows different rules to sensory experience. There is no talking of breaking down the subject/object distinction. There is no talk of non-dualism. And to my mind, had non-dualism been part of early Buddhism, it would have been mentioned. Not being dualists, I doubt such a doctrine would have appealed to the authors of the Pāli suttas.

The Allostatic Brain

If we take śīla in the sense that I have been suggesting, then we can begin to see how it helps. It comes back to the brain and allostasis. If our brain were simply reacting to sensory input, it would never be able to keep up, even with the relatively coarse-grained representation that reaches awareness in our first person perspective. It is true that life requires that various parameters of our body are kept within limits conducive to life. This is called homeostasis, which effectively means "keeping things the same". Homeostasis is achieved using feedback loops. The basic process is represented by the simplest version of feedback, the kind of mechanical switches we see in thermostats. Heat causes a bar composed of two metals to bend as they expand at different rates. The bending breaks the contact, switching the heating off. The room cools and the metal bar straightens out, and eventually makes contact and switches on the heating.

Our body has various, far more complex and interrelated, feedback loops that help to keep things like the composition of our blood in the optimal range. But the feedback process is reactive and thus can only change things after the fact. And reactive processes can't account for what the brain does. Rather, neuroscientists have shown that the brain anticipates changes and sometimes takes preemptive actions. We could go so far as to say that what the brain does is predict future inputs and try to minimise any discrepancies between what it predicted and what is happening. Moreover, this can be seen as a specific application of a principle, first enunciated by Karl Friston and called the Free Energy Principle. Friston has given this idea its own mathematical formalism, but also showed that the resulting formulas recreate results from statistical mechanics and information theory. Thus the FEP appears to unify a number of seemingly disparate fields. I suspect that eventually this will tie into work by David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto on constructor theory, but that is another essay entirely. 

There are two ways the brain can minimise prediction errors (or in Friston's terms to minimise the free energy of the system): it can alter its prediction, or it can alter the input (which is usually accomplished by intervening in the world through some action).

It's worth emphasising that this is not a process open to introspection. And therefore, it is not intuitive. Moreover, when we talk about the brain "predicting inputs" we are not talking about the high-level, coarse-grained experiences that we are aware of. The only "inputs" to the brain are 1) electrochemical signals from peripheral nerves; and 2) electrochemical signals from within the central nervous system. With respect to 2), Lisa Feldman-Barrett notes that 90% of the incoming connections to the visual cortex are from other parts of the brain, rather than from the eyes. There are millions of such inputs. So what the brain is predicting is patterns of electrochemical signals, i.e. variations in signal strength and frequency across millions of individual inputs. Similarly the only output the brain has is firing neurons that connect outwards to the body, sending identical electrochemical signals that cause the body to move in various ways.

Let's use an example from Feldman-Barrett's account: standing up. Moving from sitting to standing involves a lot of coordinated muscle activity, all of which is stimulated at a fine-grained level by brain activity. Our coarse-grained first person perspective on this is very different in scope and detail. One of the problems we face is that suddenly standing up causes a drop in blood pressure in the head, which means insufficient blood reaches the brain and the brain does not work at optimum. In other words, standing up threatens to disrupt homeostasis.

Before we consciously decide the stand up, the brain is balancing the odds. If it predicts that we are going to stand up, then it initiates actions that at a coarse-grained level amount to raising our blood pressure (and neither the prediction nor the preemptive action are available to introspection). At best we become aware of this process when it fails, i.e. we stand up too quickly and get dizzy due to transient low blood pressure in the head. Of course, how we get from the fine-grained view of nerve cells storing energy and releasing it in pulses, to coarse-grained first person perspective, is still unclear. But there is no other viable explanation.

Conclusion

In my last essay, I floated the idea that sensory deprivation is an issue for meditators. In this view, one of the consequences of doing mediation techniques can be, often is, hallucinations. In this view, hallucinations are internally generated distractions and while they may bother meditators at first, they are generally transient. My too-small sample of meditation instruction books suggested that as we become more profoundly cut off from sensory experience, as we may experience more subtle hallucinations that are more tempting to assign meaning or specialness.

Even with a tenuous grasp of Friston's free energy principle (which mine admittedly is)  we can see hallucinations due to sensory deprivation in the context of what the brain expects to see. If one lives a hedonistic lifestyle, one's brain comes to expect high levels of sensory stimulation. One outcome of this is insensitivity to more subtle stimulus. 

It seems to me that we can now state a hypothesis: dropping from high levels of stimulation to very low levels of stimulation is likely to produce a much stronger response that moving from low levels of stimulation to very low levels. Trying to meditate after a busy day at work, is likely to throw up a lot of internal stimulation (I'm going to avoid calling this self-stimulation). 

At least some Buddhists have been concerned to attain what neuroscientists are various calling "contentless experience", "contentless awareness" or "minimal phenomenal consciousness". If our aim is to bring sensory experience to a halt, then reducing the gap between the starting level of stimulation and the aimed-at level would make sense. That is to say, if we aim to achieve contentless awareness, then starting from a much reduced level of stimulation would be advantageous. 

My meditation teachers always emphasised preparation. It's no use going from indulging in the senses to trying to cut oneself off from them. It just creates misery and doubt. Rather one must actively reduce input, reduce stimulation. 

I often find myself explaining that for Buddhists, good behaviour or good karma has little soteriological value. No one is saved by good works. Rather the key to Buddhist soteriology is ending karma-driven rebirth; this requires ending karma. Yes, this does require being reborn as a human and having access to instruction in Buddhist techniques, which in Buddhist soteriology we achieve through good karma, That this is as far as good karma can get us, the mere opportunity to escape. The acme of Buddhism is the end of rebirth. Something similar applies to sensory experience. There is no mileage, from a Buddhist perspective, in indulging the senses. Indeed, since karma is intention (cetanā) in early Buddhist thought, indulging in sensory perception is counterproductive since it gives rise to greed and hatred. 

If śīla is seen as preparation for Buddhist meditation, then it would make sense if it were aimed at reducing sensory stimulation. This is, to some extent at least, intuitive. If Karl Friston is right, and he does seem to be, then the free energy principle gives us a deep explanation for this. It's not simply a useful heuristic, though it is that. Rather it reflects something built into the human mind. We can cope with low levels of stimulation, we can avoid distracting hallucinations, if and when our brain comes to expect low levels of stimulation. And the brain can be habituated by, for example, long intervals of not talking for example, or periods of doing nothing (which is much harder than it sounds).

Thinking about traditional Buddhism in these ultra-modern ways, incorporating cutting edge science, is not straightforward. One has to be aware of projections. I'm not suggesting that Buddhists pre-empted or even prefigured the free energy principle and its detailed mathematical formalism. Buddhism is not scientific and certainly not proto-scientific. There is a kind of systematic approach to Buddhism, but it is all presented in a thoroughly religious context. The central problems of Buddhism are much the same as in all religion, i.e. the afterlife and the problem of evil (i.e. it is based on interpreting a metaphysical speculation as though it accurately reflected reality). 

Rather, what I am trying to show here is that modern perspectives, especially scientific perspectives, often give us better explanations than Iron Age or Medieval religious texts. Which ought to come as no surprise. My sense is that Buddhists, for example, are highly critical of Christian fundamentalism, but their arguments against Christianity often amount to Buddhist fundamentalism, i.e. your religious book is not right, because our religious books say so. I don't think looking to the Iron Age for solutions to living in the twenty-first century makes much sense. Since I have taken the time to learn Pāli and read those Iron Age texts in that language (and compared them with Sanskrit and Chinese counterparts) I find the anachronisms in Buddhism even harder to take seriously. Our texts are no more an accurate reflection of reality than any other religious text. 

In the final analysis, if samādhi is your goal, then you will need to have some understanding of, and strategies for dealing with, sensory deprivation. Traditionally this amounts to reducing sensory input across the board. And this process of reducing sensory input preparatory to meditation is called śīla.

Anyone interested to follow up the connection between meditation and the free energy principle could try reading the recent paper by Ruben Laukkonen and Heleen Slagter (2021) which uses Friston's model to propose a new way of understanding what meditation does. It's not easy and I don't fully understand it myself, but it seems very promising as an addition to how we think about what we wish to achieve as Buddhists. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. (2013). "The Spiral Path or Lokuttara Paṭiccasamuppāda." Western Buddhist Review 6, 1–34. http://www.jayarava.org/texts/the-spiral-path.pdf

Bodhi. (1980). Transcendental Dependent Arising: a Translation and Exposition of the Upanisa Sutta. (The Wheel Publication no.277/278.) Buddhist Publication Society. Online: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/wheel277.html

Khema (1991). When the Iron Eagle Flies. Penguin.

Laukkonen, Ruben E. and Slagter, Heleen A. (2021) “From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 128, 199-217.

Sangharakshita. (1967). The Three Jewels: An Introduction to Buddhism. Rider.

Woods, T.J., Windt, J.M. & Carter, O. (2022). "The path to contentless experience in meditation: An evidence synthesis based on expert texts." Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.  (Open access version unpaginated) https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09812-y

Buddhist Meditation and Sensory Deprivation

Buddhist meditation techniques are coming under increasing scientific scrutiny as researchers realise that the altered states engendered by meditation may provide clues to how the brain creates the mind. These pioneering studies are laudable and producing some very interesting observations. However, there is a lacuna in scientific accounts of meditation, for example, reports of light experiences… “are well documented in traditional Buddhist texts but are virtually undocumented in scientific literature on meditation.” (Lindahl et al 2014). When someone sits down, closes their eyes, tunes out the world, and begins to focus on the sensations of breathing, they enter a state of substantially reduced sensory input, i.e. sensory deprivation. I suggest that sensory deprivation appears to have been overlooked as a factor in meditation. This is a theme I hope to develop, but here I just want to establish that in thinking about meditation, sensory deprivation cannot be ignored. 

Sensory Deprivation

Research on sensory deprivation began in the 1950s. In the early experiments, students were placed in very low stimulation environments with every effort made to reduce sensory stimulation. As Oliver Sacks describes the results,

At first the test subjects tend to fall asleep, but then, on awakening, they became bored and craved stimulation… and at this point, self-stimulation of various sorts began: mental games, counting, fantasies, and, sooner or later, visual hallucinations. (2012: 35)

Similar effects observed amongst people kept in solitary confinement gave Sacks his chapter title: The Prisoner’s Cinema. We also know that it is quite common for people who lose their sight to start having vivid hallucinations, which is known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome.

In the 1960s isolation tanks were invented. In these contraptions the subject lies floating in a warm buoyant salt solution, in a light-proof and sound-proof, box. “Such immersion chambers could produce ‘altered states’ much more profound that those described in the original experiments” (Sacks 2012: 37). However, interest in sensory deprivation declined in the 1970s and has only recently revived.

Although visual hallucinations are the most common side effect of sensory deprivation, hallucinations in other modalities also occur, notably with respect to proprioception. Sacks notes that long periods of physical immobility—for example, in children afflicted by polio and confined to an iron lung—may also produce hallucinations:

“Most commonly these are corporeal hallucinations, in which limbs may seem to be absent, distorted, misaligned, or multiplied.”(Sacks 2012: 42)

Physical immobility is a commonly practiced austerity amongst Indian religieux down to the present and talk of multiplied limbs ought to ring bells for devotees of Indian myth. 

Imaging studies have shown that visual hallucinations have different patterns of brain activity to visual stimulus, with the conclusion that “hallucination is the result of a direct, bottom-up activations of regions in the ventral visual pathway, regions rendered hyperexcitable by a lack of normal sensory input” (Sacks 2012: 41. Emphasis added). That is to say, deprived of stimulation, the brain may lower the threshold of excitability to the point it begins to self-stimulate. Merabet et al (2004) showed that there are limits to this effect. Simply blindfolding test subjects but allowing them access to stimulation of the other senses at will, did not reproduce the effects of sensory deprivation. This suggests that physical immobility alone is insufficient and must be accompanied by more general sensory monotony (which certainly afflicted those confined to iron lungs). 

We now know (e.g. Feldman-Barrett 2018) that the brain operates on an allostatic principle: that is to say it is constantly predicting patterns of activation, which at a coarse-grained level become our sensory experience and (motor) responses to it. We can think of hallucinations due to sensory deprivation as the brain expecting input and trying to fill in the gaps when the expected input is missing, largely by lowering the threshold at which the brain responds to the stimulus. Something like this mechanism is also now thought to be at work in tinnitus and phantom limb syndrome.

The kinds of hallucinations reported in sensory deprivation studies are strikingly similar to those reported by Buddhist meditators.

Meditation

Consider this description from a modern Buddhist meditation manual:

What does it mean, for example, if we find ourselves experiencing beautiful colours, marvellous patterns, voices, or other sounds in our meditation? … What seems to happen is that we achieve a good level of concentration, so that we are no longer aware of our body and sense-impressions. But it is as though our senses still insist on trying to operate, in spite of the fact that they are now disconnected from the physical world (Kamalashila 1994: 58).

Here, Kamalashila has precisely described the short-term, hallucinatory, effects of sensory deprivation. However, note that his explanation, while not inaccurate, is not grounded in any explanatory framework. Buddhism doesn't really have a good explanation for these phenomena. 

Kamalashila refers to this type of hallucination using the Pāli term, samāpatti, although traditionally this term refers to attaining either jhāna or āyatana states (Nyanatiloka 2004: 186). Modern Theravādin meditators call the same hallucinations nimitta or “signs” but, again, traditionally nimitta refers to the aspects of the object that allow us to recognise the object from what appears in our sensorium. Modern Buddhists want to put a traditional name to the hallucinations engendered by meditation, but lack one. I think we can frame this as a legitimation strategy: yes, you are hallucinating, but we have a technical term  (in a "sacred" language) which valorises those experiences as "signs" of states of withdrawal from sensory experience. 

Compare the following description of the types of hallucination that are common in meditation with Sacks’ account (above) of corporeal hallucinations due to being immobile:

You may feel as though your body has become enormous… Or you may feel tiny, microscopic. You may feel as though you have been turned upside down, or that you are now sitting facing the opposite way. Or you may experience your body in terms of some totally indescribable physical sensation.  (Kamalashila 1994: 58).

Sacks and Kamalashila appear to be describing the same phenomenon or at least the same kinds of phenomena. Which makes the link between meditation and sensory deprivation seem plausible. 

Kamalashila (1994: 58) tells us that, “Eventually these signs will pass, as you enter a smoother phase of concentration”. He emphasises that the hallucinations themselves have no significance. They are just weird experiences and not connected to insight or liberation. Although Kamalashila says that these experiences tend to fade away as we become more concentrated, he in fact contradicts himself the next time he mentions samāpatti, saying:

“Sometimes we may go beyond the hindrances [to meditation] altogether and transcend the world of the senses and he ordinary mind… When we enter the state of absorption at this deeper level, some of the contents of our subconscious minds will come ‘up’ into our consciousness” (1994: 65).

He adds that these upwellings of experience are unconnected to the physical senses “may well be vision-like” and explicitly invokes Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes of the collective unconscious (reflecting the bias towards Romanticism in Triratna). It seems, from this, that we don’t necessarily stop hallucinating in states of absorption (jhāna), but rather that the hallucinations we do have become more subtle and more vivid at the same time. This second type of hallucination has a much greater sense of verisimilitude, or even hyper-reality. We are more likely to assign some special meaning to these experiences. As Thomas Metzinger noted with respect to out-of-body experiences (also common in meditation):

For anyone who actually had [an out-of-body experience] it is almost impossible not to become an ontological dualist afterwards. In all their realism, cognitive clarity and general coherence, these phenomenal experiences almost inevitably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and body. (2009: 78)

Metzinger is equally clear, however, that the dualist account of out-of-body experiences fails to explain the phenomenology of out-of-body experiences. Metzinger, who had many such experiences as a young man, eventually concluded that out-of-body experiences were the result of disruption of the integration of different streams of information about the body: especially the visual sense and the felt sense of the body. In other words the sensation of being "out of your body" is a hallucination.

Making the Connection

I can find few studies that link meditation and sensory deprivation in the scholarly or scientific literature. It does pop up in some popular level accounts, for example: A blog post by Bridget W Webber (I Didn’t Think of Meditation as Sensory Deprivation Before Then I saw thelight, literally.) and one by Rose Eveleth (The Ancient, Peaceful Art of Self-GeneratedHallucination). One scientific study that does make the link explicit is Lindahl et al (2014):

“Taken together, these studies also provide evidence in support of the hypothesis that certain meditative practices – especially those that deliberately decrease social, kinesthetic, and sensory stimulation and emphasize focused attention – have perceptual and cognitive outcomes similar to sensory deprivation.”

Why is this important? 

Refining our understanding of meditation helps us to communicate about it and to explain the effects of withdrawal from sensory experience. And it helps those who are researching meditation and the mind to ask better research questions. Since Buddhism lacks an explanatory framework for meditation, it's up to us to come up with one. 

What is needed now is a systematic investigation of sensory deprivation and the contribution it makes to meditation experiences. Could hallucinations engendered by sensory deprivation be the whole story of Buddhist visions? I think this is entirely possible. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Kamalashila. (1994). Meditation: The Buddhist Way of Tranquillity and Insight. Windhorse Publications.

Lindahl, J. R., Kaplan, C. T., Winget, E. M., and Britton, W. B. (2014) “A phenomenology of meditation-induced light experiences: traditional Buddhist and neurobiological perspectives.” Frontiers in Psychology 03 January 2014 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00973 (Online version of the article is unpaginated).

Merabet, L, Maguire, D, Warde, A, Alterescu, Stickgold, R, and Pascual-Leone, A. (2004). “Visual Hallucinations During Prolonged Blindfolding in sighted subjects.” Journal of Neuro-Opthalmology 24(2): 109-13.

Sacks, Oliver. (2012). Hallucinations. Picador.

Reframing the Perennial Philosophy. Part III: Applications

In this three-part essay, I've argued against the idea of a single, overarching metaphysical truth as conceived in the Perennial Philosophy. I characterised it as an eclectic and syncretic form of religiosity that eschews the organised part of religion. At the heart of Perennial Philosophy lies the matter-spirit duality that has retarded progress in thinking about religion, religiosity, and religious experiences. And this duality is itself based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the distinction between epistemology and ontology: i.e., mistaking experience for reality. The single metaphysical truth is not the conclusion of Perennial Philosophy, it is the intuitive premise on which it is based. Religious experiences merely confirm this intuition. This is not to say that people do not have experiences that are outside the usual range of waking awareness. Altered experiences are relatively common.

In order to better place these kinds of experience in a naturalist setting, I introduced the idea of a spectrum with pure subjectivity at one end and pure objectivity at the other. Religious experiences, in the Perennialist understanding, point to some form of pure objectivity, but I began to suggest that they are more like pure subjectivity.

In Part III, I will try to show how we can make sense of, and find value in, altered experiences without accepting the premises of either traditional religion or of modernist forms of religiosity. I will argue that Buddhism employs methods that involve increasing subjectivity. Thus, any knowledge gained is not concerned with the nature of reality, but with the nature of experience. And, crucially, that this form of knowledge is useful and valuable to anyone who attains it.

Meditation

There are so many different approaches to meditation that any generalisation is bound to fall short. I'm going to say that the paradigm for meditation is sitting still, eyes closed, focusing on some aspect of experience (aka an ālambhana or object of meditation). Of course, some people prefer to meditate walking, with eyes open, or with no particular focus. Generalisations always admit to exceptions and are thus limited in scope. For the moment I want to work within this limited scope in order to make the subject manageable for an essay. So when I refer to "meditation" below, I am referring to this paradigm.

In meditation then, we withdraw our attention from the sensory world. As we focus our attention on the object it appears to expand to fill up our awareness. The sensory world appears, from our point of view, to fade away. By this I mean, in Buddhist terms, that deprived of contact (sparśa) the mental objects (dharmas) associated with objects don't arise. One may pass through a threshold so that this minimal experience becomes stable. The object remains present in our minds without distraction, but the experience may be accompanied by quite intense physical/emotional resonances: traditionally called rapture (prīti) and bliss (sukha). Whatever we call this threshold or the experience of stability, with practice we can cross over and sustain it more or less at will.

Going deeper, all bodily sensations fade away leaving us in a state of profound equanimity that is traditionally referred to as samādhi, a word that I understand to mean "integration" (the word has a more general sense as well, but I will use it in this specific sense of profound integration). Our usual awareness flits constantly from object to object, accompanied by conscious perceptions, reactions toward or away, urges to act, and associative thinking. Samādhi is characterised by awareness being one-pointed (ekodibhāva). Generally speaking, in this state there is no awareness of the world or of our body. It is a happy and contented state to be in.

One of the interesting side-effects of a lengthy period of samādhi can be a subsequent lack of motivation to do anything; a kind of lassitude with respect to the world. Normally we feel all kinds of competing desires and want to do all kinds of things as a result. Such desires may be attenuated by samādhi. In the absence of desires, there is no motivation. Even usually powerful urges like hunger might not have much effect for a while after a lengthy period of samādhi.

The fading away of the world raises an old question. What happens to the world when we do not perceive it? Before going anywhere with this we need to address a prior question: what is meant by the world here? In a number of discourses, the Pali suttas discuss the idea of ending the world without going anywhere (I studied these discourses in my unpublished essay Is Paticca-samuppāda a Theory of Everything). It turns out that by "world" (loka) we can mean three things in Sanskrit and Pali:

1. the world as everything that exists;
2. the world as a metonym for the people in the world; and
3. the world as it is represented by our minds.

And when the Pali texts are talking about bringing the world to an end, they are using the third definition. So the question in a Buddhist context is more precisely this: what happens to perceptions of the world when we do not perceive the world? The answer is nothing happens. Percepts simply fail to arise. When we are not in contact with an object, then no perceptions of that object will be presented to our minds. We will not be aware of that object. This is an epistemological point. It speaks to what we know. It says nothing whatever about the existence or non-existence of the object. Indeed, the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12:15) explicitly says that in this context, existence and non-existence don't apply.

Incidentally, we can also say that nothing happens to the world in the more general sense as well. Contrary to popular belief, the world does not depend on our attention, at least this is what mainstream physicists tell us. Consciousness plays no role in the universe. If one person sitting in a hall of 100 people enters samādhi, the world carries on for the 99 who are not in samādhi. Meditation is localised. Your meditation does not affect my experience (in the moment).

Where does this put us on the subjective/objective spectrum? Simply closing our eyes cuts off visual perception of the world and pulls us back from shared experience. Absorbed in the object of meditation with no sensory cognitions, we enter states of increasing subjectivity. Not pure subjectivity perhaps, but there is very little overlap and perhaps nothing that fits in the middle ground. In meditation, as described, we lean toward the subjective pole of experience and away from the objective pole.

Imagine that a skilled meditator enters a stable state of withdrawal, but they go deeper, until passing through more and more subtle thresholds, they find themselves in a state where no sensory cognitions arise and no mental cognitions arise. Experience as we generally understand this term has stopped for that person. There are no sense impressions reaching their conscious minds at all and no thoughts about anything. Unlike states of sleep or anaesthesia, they are still aware. When there are no longer any objects registering the sense of being a subject, i.e., the experience of selfhood, itself tends to fade away. There are no physical sensations registering, so there is no way to orient themselves in spacetime. There is awareness but it is not intentional, i.e., not directed at anything, because nothing is presenting itself to awareness.

We might call this state, following the Pali suttas, "emptiness" (suññatā). Nothing from the objective world impinges on awareness in emptiness, there is not even a sense of subject/object duality. So one has gone over to the subjective pole as far as one can go; this is pure subjectivity, or as close to it as one can get. And it is as far from pure objectivity as one can get. It is precisely from this experience of pure subjectivity that we are asked to believe, as Buddhists, that knowledge of the true nature of reality emerges.

It is true that having been in emptiness, one's perceptions may change, sometimes permanently. One of the most common changes that people notice is an absence of self-referential thinking. Sometimes this is referred to as being egoless.

Egolessness

There is a circular discussion that I've been having with a colleague for a couple of years now. He reports that he has no sense of self. His world is just a field of experience and there is no sense of ownership or a special perspective on the field. He goes further and states unequivocally that arising and passing away no longer characterises his field of experience. I am fortunate enough to have a couple of other people with whom I can compare notes on this. Doing so with one of them, he pauses, introspects for a few seconds, and then offers, "Yes, it can seem like that".

As far as I can tell, both colleagues are enlightened in the traditional sense. And there are a bunch of other people around who are credibly enlightened. Or something very like it (I'm not much interested in the traditional definitions or quibbles over them). Their stories differ in some respects and coalesce at others. But here we run into problems. What seems to happen with the awakened is that after awakening they confirm the accuracy of the doctrine they learned before awakening. So in the case of, say, a Vedanta practitioner like Gary Weber, he confirms absolute being (brahman as described in the Upaniṣads). This means that the world is completely deterministic and events just unfold as preordained. There is no such thing as free-will. But awakened Buddhists confirm something completely different: there is no absolute being, the world is largely deterministic but there is a chink through which we can escape because we have some freedom of will. Theists who experience awakening confirm that they have experienced communion with God or been in God's presence. Mystics that they have experienced the ineffable. And so on.

At a stretch, one may extract something common from all these accounts so that they appear to confirm the Perennial Philosophy. This is simple confirmation bias. The fact is that when you look at the accounts they are all different. Their methods push them towards the subjective pole and any knowledge they gain is more or less purely subjective. Just like a meditating Buddhist.

People who claim to have no ego or no first-person perspective find it difficult to acknowledge that whatever events or changes that have occurred are subjective. They still have a pair of eyes that receive photons and a brain that turns electrochemical signals into an experience. And the experience they have is just their experience and no one else's. I have previously used John Searle's example of nutrition obtained from food. When we eat food we absorb nutrients from it and these are not available to other people. If the Buddha has lunch, Ānanda does not feel full.

If an egoless person perceives, say, a red apple, that perception is not mine. It is not yours. It is not everybody's experience. And it is not nobody's experience. It is an experience that one person is experiencing. It is their experience. It is therefore subjective. Whatever they say about how they perceive experience or themselves, the experiences that awakened people have are still particular to one individual. They are still only accessible to the individual whose sense organs are creating the signals to the brain. It does not matter how the individual conceptualises and communicates about it. If you genuinely don't perceive a subject in your field of experience then this will not be an easy argument to get your head around. If you mistake the subjective for the objective, if you argue, for example, that the pure subjectivity of emptiness is actually pure objectivity, then your understanding of this situation will be compromised. Which may be why the awakened appear to be so bad at philosophy, on the whole.

In some conversations I've had, I have pointed out that the egoless person is still able to have a conversation. They know who is speaking and can parse heard sentences into meaning (which requires temporal sequences of sounds being processed into language). They know that the ideas in their head as a result of hearing someone speak are not the same as the ideas that come from their own thought processes. Thus, you can ask them "how's it going?" and they reliably convey information about their own state of well-being and do not try to answer from some other point of view.

To "parse" a sentence is literally to state the parts of speech for each word. It comes from the French plural of "part". But we can use the term generally for any process by which we sort information into categories in order to make sense of it. For example, in every two-way conversation the participants have to accurately parse all utterances into "I said" and "the other said". In other words, we have to keep track of who said what. There is simply no way around this. If a person is able to converse successfully, then they are, minimally, parsing the utterances into their own and the other persons. They have to parse the concepts and the grammar of the utterance. Then they have to construct some kind of appropriate utterance in response.

I'm reminded of John Searle's idea of background capabilities. Although societies have rules and we do have to learn them, becoming a competent citizen (or whatever) requires that we internalise the rules. In Searle's language, we develop dispositions for action that largely conform to the rules without having to consciously reference the rules. I cover this in the 5th of 5 essays about Searle's ideas on social reality: Norms Without Conscious Rule Following (28 Oct 2016).

Some Other Accounts of Emptiness

When I was learning Sanskrit, one of the texts I read in class was the Sāṃkhyakārikā (SK), a sūtra style text composed ca. 350-450 CE and attributed to Īśvarakṛṣṇa. This outlines what is called a dualistic worldview: the duality is between puruṣa and prakṛti. Puruṣa is the eternal, passive conscious observer while prakṛti is the ephemeral active phenomenal world. The usual state of affairs is that consciousness is caught up in the play of phenomena and treats them as real. Thus, people do not see the true nature of phenomena or their own true nature. However, through religious practices one can roll back the phenomenal world until prakṛti is in the quiescent state called pradhāna "first". At this point, puruṣa is no longer assailed by phenomena and one's true, eternal nature can be realised.

Anyone attuned to the language of modern Buddhism ought to hear the resonances here. A lot of us talk about Buddhism in Sāṃkhya terms. And no one questions this or asks how the Sāṃkhya vocabulary made its way into Buddhist discourse.

I suggest that what Īśvarakṛṣṇa called pradhāna is the same as, or at least equivalent to, śūnyatā. Meditation techniques were widely known and practised across India in the first millennium BCE. There are hints that formless meditations were widespread, for example, in the stories about the Buddha's early career in the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta (MN 26). It seems that some techniques were shared across different sects. Both pradhāna and śūnyatā are described as states in which the practitioner becomes a passive observer of a quiescent state in which no phenomena are arising or ceasing, a state in which all sense of orientation in spacetime is lost, giving one a sense of timelessness (no beginning or end). These are classic "mystical" or "religious" experiences.

Another parallel to this can be found in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.9. In Olivelle's translation (15)

In the beginning this world (idaṃ sarvaṃ) was only Brahman, and it knew itself (ātman), thinking "I am Brahman" (ahaṃ brahman). As a result it became the Whole (idaṃ sarvaṃ). Among the gods, likewise, whosoever realizes this, only they become the Whole. It was the same also among the seers and among humans... This is true even now. if a man knows 'I am Brahman' in this way he becomes this whole world. Not even the gods are able to prevent it, for he becomes their very self (ātman). So when a man venerates another deity, thinking, "he is one, and I am another", he does not understand.

The Vedanta interpretation of this suggests that awakening is merging with Brahman, where Brahman is conceived of (a priori) as absolute being. There are various expressions of this, ahaṃ brahamaṃ, "I am Brahman"; tat tvaṃ asi, "You are it"; and so on. Brahman is said to have three characteristics: saccidānanda; i.e., being (sat), awareness (cit), and bliss (ānanda). The last is particularly resonant with Buddhist descriptions of cessation or emptiness, although the very idea of Brahman is criticised in the early Buddhist canon, especially the Tevijjā Sutta (DN 13).

This suggests that we need to take a fresh look at certain types of altered experience.

Altered Experiences

Although the term "mystical experience" is in widespread use, to my mind the term suggests acceptance of certain premises that I think are up for discussion. I will, therefore, refer to "altered experiences" as an attempt at something more neutral. Altered experiences come in a great deal of variety and not all of them overlap with the idea of mystical experiences. In trying to tabulate them researchers have come up with various related qualities that might apply to altered experiences. There are 100 different qualities in the States of Consciousness Questionnaire, but many researchers now used a revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire with 30 items drawn from the 100. The qualities are grouped into categories like internal unity, external unity, ineffability, transcendence of space and time.

One of the prominent target qualities is interpreting the experience as "ultimate reality". This highlights the deeply problematic nature of the idea of altered experiences. Our approaches to them are interpretative. Both experience and interpretation are ontologically subjective, so there is no easy way to probe these. If someone tells us they experienced "ultimate reality" we cannot easily know what they mean by that. One would have to do extensive research into the way a person thinks about reality to really know what they meant by reality in the first place, let alone what ultimate reality might mean for them. Ironically, the very concept of ultimate reality is highly subjective. And interestingly, ultimate reality appears to be different for different people, which tells us at least that whatever the experience is, it is not ultimate.

The hyperreal sense that one has of these types of experience is a quality of the experience. And we have to emphasise that this is not a shared experience, so the hyperreality of the experience places it at the subjectivity end of the spectrum: hyperreality is an illusion. There are two main occasions for altered experience: in a religious context, which usually involves indoctrination and heightened expectation; and in drug taking in which a drug molecule interferes with the normal working of the brain, often by suppressing the operation of centres which coordinate information. Expectation is highly influential on how we interpret what we perceive and can even directly affect what we perceive. The illusion of hyperreality is simply that, an illusion. It is certainly an altered state of consciousness, but if anything it is less real. Some will argue that it is more real because it seems more meaningful. But meaning is not intrinsic to experiences, meaning is subjective. We make meaning.

And think about it. If I take some psychedelic drug and my perceptions of the world change, do your perceptions change? No. They don't. The drug is ingested and works by a molecule interfering with the activity of the brain either as agonist or antagonist. And when the molecule is metabolised then the effects wear off. Ultimate reality can't wear off.

Some of the experiences are framed in mystic terms when they needn't be. For example, if you lose your sense of orientation in space and time, because you have lost out awareness of the reference points that make this possible, you have not, as the questionnaire suggests "transcended space and time". You just lost your awareness of them. No one ever transcends space and time in any real sense. You may think you are transcending space, but no one around you can tell what is happening in your head at that moment. So the feeling of losing track of spatial boundaries and orientation is just that losing track. As freaky as this experience may be, no transcending takes place.

It is entirely possible that someone might transcend their sense of self or their attachment to certain types of experiences. Subjectivity can be transcended, but objectivity can only be lost track of. There are a whole raft of ways of saying that you find it difficult to communicate your experience afterwards. But this can hardly be surprising if you lose awareness of cognitive processes in the altered state. In Thomas Nagel's terms, there is nothing that it is like to be in a state of emptiness.

Another prominent target property is a sense of connectedness or oneness. Why is this so prominent and why does it feel so meaningful? The boundaries of selfhood are obviously part of a brain-generated self-model (a la Thomas Metzinger) and they can break down under a variety of circumstances, some of which are not at all mystical. I've often cited the example of Jill Bolte Taylor's account of her stroke. It's a very moving account of the beauty she experienced as those boundaries dissolved. On the other hand, she was having a major stroke and it took her eight years to rehabilitate. Another reference to connectedness that I've often cited comes from Ariel Glucklich's book The End of Magic. He describes our basic state of well-being as involving a sense of interconnectedness. That sense can break down due to illness and what the Tantric healers of Varanasi try to do is revive that sense of connectedness.

With respect to a sense of connectedness, we may also reference Frans de Waal and his work on the dynamics of primate groups. As social primates, we are bound to our social group by empathy and reciprocity. Feeling "connected" is something that all social primates spend a lot of time on. About a third of wild primates' time is spent in mutual grooming. As Robin Dunbar has shown, humans have found more efficient ways to achieve cohesion in large groups where one to one grooming would take up far too much time (we also have to forage and sleep). In traditional societies we do this through communal singing, dancing, telling stories, and shared ordeals. Modern urban societies tend to rely on ersatz versions of these. As a young man, the euphoria of being part of a dense crowd at a rock concert, singing along and dancing was one of my favourite experiences.* The social lifestyle requires a heightened ability to feel connected with other members of the group. That we can isolate and over-clock this quality is hardly surprising.

* Speaking of which, I note with sadness the passing of Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, who were the best live band I ever saw.

There is something about human brains that allows us to have these kinds of experiences. We don't yet know what it is, but we have some interesting clues. For example, we know that certain types of task cause the sense of self to "shut down". The inhibition of ego is a built-in function.

“The regions of the brain involved in introspection and sensory perception are completely segregated, although well connected,” says Goldberg, “and when the brain needs to divert all its resources to carry out a difficult task, the self-related cortex is inhibited.” (Vince 2006)

This is presumably also related to the phenomenon known as flow, first noted by the magnificently named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Perennial Epistemology

The Perennial Philosophy is an argument about metaphysics, i.e., about existence and truth. What I have tried to show is that this presentation is orthogonal to reality. What mystics experience is not ultimate reality, but pure subjectivity, albeit with a quality of hyperreality. There is no doubt that this experience has attractive features, despite the fact that it tends to make for confused philosophy. It's not even true that altered experiences all have the same flavour. There are at least 30 different flavours of altered experience, perhaps as many as a hundred.

No matter what games they play with language, the awakened individual is still just one person having experiences. Awakening is one person's experience, even if they don't perceive themselves as a person. Given this and the methods used to attain this state, there is no possibility of a purely objective truth emerging from it. Yes, there are some common features of the experience itself. The commonality is not widely shared and is still not the middle ground, but towards the subjective pole.

If there is a workable Perennial Philosophy then it points to a variety of epistemic patterns rather than a single metaphysical truth. Perception is an activity of the brain and it can be disrupted in different ways to give a range of altered experiences characterised by as many as a 100 different properties in several categories.

One of the tendencies for those who have altered experiences is to see them in isolation. In a long conversation about insight with Vessantara he described the "Aha" moment and how it leads one to think along the lines of "this is it!". Without further practice, for example, one can become fixated on a particular interpretation of emptiness. If one keeps practising, then one reaches another "Aha" moment and realises that one's previous insight has been superseded. That was not it, but this, now, this is it. If one keeps practising then the same thing happens. Again and again. Until one realises that despite all the "Aha" moments there doesn't seem to be a definitive "this is it". The process simply keeps unfolding and one learns to relax about it and not to take the conclusions too seriously.

So, in effect, there is no one truth that is pointed to, except that whatever you believe to be the truth, turns out not to be, from another point of view. Perhaps this is why the mental state of emptiness came to symbolise a more general truth for Buddhists.

Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that there is one metaphysical truth, no one ever seems to experience it; or everyone experiences it differently. Those who claim to have experienced the ultimate truth are, in fact, just stuck in their current phase of awakening and making a mistake. The mistake is primarily an epistemological mistake; it is a misinterpretation of an experience that is towards the pure subjective pole. The secondary mistake is to extrapolate an ontology from this mistaken view and the technical term for this is prapañca.

As I understand the Buddhist project, the idea is to suspend judgement and just pay attention to what we happen to be experiencing (without getting hung up on the past or the future). And, at the same time, to deliberately pursue experiences far towards the pole of subjectivity. The idea seems to be that we are supposed to turn this into a definite view, because repeated insights tend to deconstruct any views that develop about past experiences. There is nothing in this about the nature of reality or theories about the nature of reality. There is no metaphysical truth. We are not spiritual beings.

We are human beings, having human experiences. No more, no less.

~~oOo~~


Bibliography

Vince, Gaia. (2006) Watching the brain ‘switch off’ self-awareness. New Scientist. 9 April 2006

The True History of the Heart Sutra. III

Kuījī

In Part I and Part II of this essay, I laid out a lot of evidence drawn from Chinese sources from the 4th to the 8th century. Most of the evidence is complicated in that it can be interpreted different ways. The received tradition has relied on presenting a partial picture and a single monolithic reading that sustains the status quo of the Buddhist establishment.

Having an esoteric text that can only be understood by masters is a way to engage in what has recently been called "charismatic signalling". Masters display their mastery by commenting on the ineffable as embodied by the Heart Sutra. "Effing the ineffable" as David Chapman has memorably phrased it. The master signals that they have a shaman-like ability to cross the boundaries into the other world and bring back knowledge.

The status quo was disrupted in 1992 by Jan Nattier when she proved that the Heart Sutra was composed in Chinese and the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya was a translation from the Chinese. Nattier has made an inestimable contribution to Buddhism Studies. However, her discovery has been met with ambivalence and rather late, grudging acknowledgement from Western academics and open hostility from some Japanese (who are typically also clergymen).

Given the evidence of the bibliographers and early commentators, there are at least three different narratives that we must now consider: 1) the already discredited received tradition of the Heart Sutra in which Xuanzang translates a text he is given in Sichuan; 2) a version of events in which the Xīnjīng is identified with the shénzhòu texts and is an anonymous digest text; and 3) a version in which the Xīnjīng is a standalone digest text.

The question of the Sanskrit text is secondary to this, since it is a translation of the Xīnjīng. My paper putting this beyond all doubt has been accepted by the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and will appear in November 2018. When we think about what was happening in China at the time and how Buddhist texts were being used, it becomes apparent that the Sanskrit text had a particular role in the history of the Heart Sutra and I will spell this out.

We begin by reviewing the received tradition.

The Received Tradition

The received tradition is that the Heart Sutra was composed in the 3rd or 4th Century, in Sanskrit, in India, and transmitted via the usual routes to China. It may have been in China by 374 CE, but was definitely translated by Kumārajīva (Damingzhoujing; T250) in the early 5th Century and then by Xuanzang (Xīnjīng; T251) in 649 CE. This is complicated by the story of Xuanzang receiving the text in Sichuan from a sick man before travelling to India in 629. Was that text in Chinese or Sanskrit? Each option is problematic.

But the problems go very deep with this narrative. Jan Nattier (1992) has already shown, on the basis of internal evidence, that the Sanskrit text is a translation of the Chinese rather than vice versa. Publications by Matthew Orsborn (writing as Huifeng 2014) and myself (2017, 2018 forthcoming) have confirmed this by showing that the translator at times misread the Chinese text and chose the wrong Sanskrit words and phrases, and that the Sanskrit text contains a number of Chinese idioms that cannot have come from an Indian, Sanskrit-using milieu.

Furthermore, in this three part essay, I have now shown that the Chinese bibliographies do not support this version of events either. Rather, they consistently see the text as having no translator and class it with other digest texts. The Heart Sutra perfectly fits the description of a digest text in that it cites a passage from Chapter 3 of the Dajing (T223) but also uses shorter pericopes from Chapters 19 and 33. 

The received tradition is also historically problematic in the way it portrays Xuanzang in relation to Taizong, Gaozong, and Wu Zetian. The historical evidence frequently contradicts the received tradition and makes it seem highly implausible.

Clearly, this version of the history of the Heart Sutra does not stand even superficial scrutiny. It is surprising how little scrutiny it has received from scholars of Buddhism and how long it has survived as the official story. Many facts, such as the translation date, are cited uncritically even by scholars who should know better.

The Shénzhòu Identity

In the second scenario, a digest text similar (or identical) to the Damingzhoujing was produced soon after Kumārajīva completed his Dajing translation (T223) in 404 CE, although there is no record of this until the Kaiyuan Catalogue of 730 CE. This text circulated, but was completely eclipsed by Xuanzang's translation when it appeared — the first and only time a translation by Xuanzang displaced one by Kumārajīva in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Though the Damingzhoujing exists, and is regarded as canonical, not a single commentary on it is preserved, nor is it mentioned in any other text until the 20th Century.

This early version of the Heart Sutra went by a different name before the Tang Dynasty, i.e., (摩訶)般若波羅蜜神呪 (Móhē)bōrěbōluómì-shénzhòu. Even so, all the extant bibliographies up to the Tang recognise the text as lacking a translator, and most also class it as a digest text (抄經 chāojīng). As such the text was always recorded apart from authentic sutras.

The problem with this scenario is that the shénzhòu texts appear in bibliographies stretching back to Dàoān's catalogue dated 374 CE, as recorded by Sēngyòu in 515 CE. The texts that we take to be the Heart Sutra date from before Kumārajīva's Dajing (T223); however, all the extant Heart Sutra texts cite it.

If the Xīnjīng is, in fact, a continuation of the shénzhòu texts, then we have a fundamental contradiction and the scenario falls apart. If the Xīnjīng is not related to the shénzhòu texts then the shénzhò texts are irrelevant to the history of the Heart Sutra. Either way, this scenario is not viable.


Xīnjīng Standalone

The final scenario is that the shénzhòu texts referred to in pre-Tang catalogues are not the Heart Sutra. The shénzhòu texts do, indeed, predate Kumārajīva's Dajing, but this is not problematic because they are not the Heart Sutra. Hundreds of digest texts (抄經) were produced in early medieval China. It would be more surprising if there were not more than one digest based on Prajñāpāramitā texts which were first translated in China in the 2nd and 3rd Centuries.

In this scenario, the Xīnjīng is a completely new digest of Kumārajīva's Dajing, including a smattering of terms introduced by Xuanzang. As these terms were introduced by Xuanzang after his return from India, the Xīnjīng must have been created after 645 CE. Since the text is carved in stone in 661 CE, we have a maximum window of just 16 years in which it could have been redacted from Kumārajīva's Dajing. Given that it must have taken some time for the popularisation of these new translations, the window narrows towards the later date.

The fly in the ointment is the Damingzhoujing which, by consensus, represents an earlier version by virtue of being closer to the original. However, it was clearly not redacted by Kumārajīva for the many reasons spelled out by Nattier (1992: 184-189). We can add that Kumārajīva was a foreigner and the elegance of his translations is almost entirely due to his working with talented Chinese assistants. The fact is that Kumārajīva is unlikely to have had sufficient command of written Chinese to make a digest sutra in that language, though some of his assistants may have. By the 7th Century, the manuscripts of the Large Sutra and commentary that Kumārajīva's translation group worked from in the 5th Century were unlikely to be extant. Hence the need to travel to India to get more manuscripts. As such, the date of the Damingzhoujing is in doubt. I will advance a new theory about this text below.

Of these three narratives there is only one which is not immediately ruled out by the evidence from the bibliographies. In this view, the Xīnjīng is a relatively late, Chinese-language, digest sutra produced between 645 and 661.

The Chinese/Sanskrit Complex

The Xīnjīng is easily recognised as a digest text if one is aware of the category and is scrutinising the text. I've shown how bibliographers from Sengyou (515 CE) onwards established the criteria for judging authenticity and consistently treated digest texts as inauthentic. Chief amongst the authenticity criteria were a connection to India and attribution to a named translator. This set the scene for making the Xīnjīng, a digest text, into a bone fide sutra. The transformation was achieved by attributing the "translation" of the text to the famous pilgrim and translator, Xuanzang. The first time we actually meet the Xīnjīng, in 661 CE, it is presented as a fully fledged sutra translated by him.

Religieux and scholars alike have uncritically accepted the authenticity of the Heart Sutra based primarily on this association with Xuanzang.

The rest of the information establishing the authenticity of the Heart Sutra dribbled out over quite a long period of time, but is also treated as authentic by scholars. After Xuanzang's death (664 CE), the sutra is officially ascribed to him by the bibliographer, Dàoxuān, in his Nèidiǎn Catalogue (664 CE). The story is elaborated twenty years later in the Biography (688 CE). It depicts a much closer bond to Taizong than seems plausible; and introduces important elements of the backstory such as receiving the text from a sick man and presenting Gaozong with a copy in 656 CE. There seems to be no reference to any of this in secular sources. However, note that all of these events take place during the time that Wu Zetian is either de facto or de jure ruler of China.

Then, in 730, the Kāiyuán Catalogue adds the date of the translation. This date was not noted by either of the catalogues produced in 664, even though one of them was compiled specifically to include translations by Xuanzang. The Kāiyuán Catalogue also introduces us to the Damingzhoujing for the first time.

The problem with relying on Xuanzang to legitimise the text is that his work is very well known. The fact that he does not mention the Heart Sutra or include it in with his Prajñāpāramitā translations is more significant than has been credited. To be credible, the attribution would require some sort of recognition from Xuanzang himself. Instead, he seems to be unaware of the text. The same goes for Kumārajīva and the Damingzhoujing. There are many reasons to be doubtful about these attributions, but the fact that two prolific authors themselves never mention a text they are supposed to have translated should ring alarm bells. Not including the Heart Sutra translation in T220 is effectively a denial by Xuanzang that he did translate it.

We have also seen how the commentaries of Kuījī (ca 664-683) and Woncheuk (ca 664-696) played a role in legitimising the text by taking on its own terms. Kuījī appears to be writing sometime after the death of Xuanzang, since he quotes from T220, but makes no reference to a Sanskrit text. Woncheuk, writing at an unspecified period but possibly after Kuījī, does appear to have a Sanskrit text but does not translate it and does not treat it as wholly authoritative. Both men seem to be aware that they are commenting on a digest text extracted from the Dajing, though there remains some ambiguity to this. Since Kuījī was Xuanzang's successor, he would have had access to a Sanskrit text if one was available, hence it was probably produced after his commentary.

When looking at the history of Buddhism we are frequently asked to believe that the assigning of an author or translator could be an act of humility or homage on the part of the true author. Ancient writers, we are told, credited their teacher, for example, or some other worthy person rather than take credit themselves. It was all quite innocent and "in that culture" they were not bothered by questions of authorship or copyright.

The Chinese bibliographers show that at least some Chinese Buddhist monks did not think this way at all. They were very much concerned with authorship, authenticity and the accurate attribution of texts to authors and translators. They went to a lot of trouble to distinguish authentic translations from inauthentic, and codified different levels of authenticity. It was often the bibliographers who added attributions to anonymous texts based on their research. On the other hand, Robert Buswell has argued that, in the wider Chinese culture of the time, the concerns of the bibliographers were not always shared by other Buddhists. Texts identified by Bibliographers as fake, such as The Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna and the Pseudo-Śūraṃgama Sūtra remained in popular use (on the former see Lai 1975 and the latter see Benn 2009).

Creating a Chinese language digest text for a Chinese audience would not have raised any eyebrows. It was a common practice, though going out of fashion by the beginning of the Tang (in 618) as genuine Buddhist texts began to flood into China. It is a stretch to accept the attempt to pass off a digest as an authentic sutra as quite so innocent. Some digest texts and outright fakes were passed off and were only identified much later, often after modern methods of scholarship emerged. I can find no other case where a Sanskrit text was produced for the purposes of legitimising a Chinese apocryphon.

The Chinese Xīnjīng was already in a rather grey area when, late in the 7th Century, someone produced a Sanskrit translation of it and managed to convince the experts that it was an Indian "original" of which the Xīnjīng is a translation by Xuanzang. And this before Xuanzang was even dead. In an environment in which Buddhism was taught and practiced through the medium of Chinese (hence the importance of translations), and only a handful of people could read Sanskrit, the Sanskrit text served only one purpose; i.e., to make a text of doubtful authenticity seem completely authentic. This seems to go beyond what might be put down as humility or piety by the author. Someone set out to deceive us as to the origins of this text.

Far from being an Indian original, the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya is a deliberate and knowing forgery. The forgery succeeded spectacularly, producing what must be one of the longest running hoaxes in history. By the end of the 7th century the Xīnjīng was incorporated into the Chinese Canon as a translation of an authentic Sanskrit sūtra produced in India. By the eighth century it was joined by the Damingzhoujing, the Amoghavajra transliteration of the Sanskrit text (T256), and two more translations that were from the Sanskrit (T252, T253). More would follow along with the longer version of the text, which possibly was produced in India. The existence of the Sanskrit text blinded everyone to the true history of the Heart Sutra, including the Indian commentators.

Not only is the true history of the Heart Sutra emerging for the first time, but some hard truths about the transmission of Buddhism are coming out also. The romantic ideal of disciples writing down the wise words of the master and transmitting high-fidelity copies of these to far off places is clearly bunk. When cultures assimilate Buddhism, they are not passive. They actively shape the form that Buddhism takes in their society. Buddhism is literally whatever Buddhists say it is.


Who Forged the Hṛdaya?

The Fengshan Stele, dated 661 CE, already attributes the "translation" of the Xīnjīng to Xuanzang. Thus we know that the plot was hatched during Xuanzang's lifetime, but it is very difficult to know what involvement he might have had. Certainly, had he been the translator (of the Sanskrit) we'd have expected him to do a better job of it and to own it. By 660 he was in failing health and he spent the last three years of his life in seclusion with a team translating the Prajñāpāramitā texts that he'd brought from India. Scholars will often reference Xuanzang's strong connection with Prajñāpāramitā, but, in fact, they were the last texts that he translated. His main concern was with texts directly related to Yogācāra.

There is still a lot more painstaking, detailed, forensic examination of relevant material to be conducted and I can only hope that my amateur efforts will stimulate the professionals to come back and look again at the neglected Heart Sutra. We may never be able to establish who pulled off the initial hoax. At the moment, I think it is likely that the forger worked alone since no word of it ever leaked. They managed to deflect attention away from themselves - no one claims responsibility for "finding" the Sanskrit text, for example. The forger had to be a member of the small circle of Chinese monks educated in Sanskrit, but also someone with the authority to pass off a counterfeit manuscript without causing suspicion. The text had to have been physically forged as well and in such a way as other experts were not suspicious. Very few monks of the day would have dealt directly with Indian manuscripts.

Perhaps 60 monks were part of Xuanzang's inner circle of translators and most of their names are lost. Woncheuk, Huili, and Dàoxuān were around at the time, but they seem to have alibis. One suspect stands out as having the means and the opportunity, i.e., Kuījī, Xuanzang's chief student and successor.

However, it is not at all clear what the forger's motivation might have been. Obviously someone wanted us to believe that the Heart Sutra is authentic, but what is gained by this? What does anyone stand to gain by convincing people that the Heart Sutra was composed in India when there are any number of genuine Indian Buddhist texts available, in multiple translations. Identifying the underlying motive for the forgery will be an important step in the process of identifying the culprit. 

This, then, is the true history of the Heart Sutra, or at least as close to it as I have been able to get. Lest it be seen as a wholesale denunciation of the text I will finish by suggesting some reasons that the Heart Sutra should continue to valued by Buddhists.

The Value of the Heart Sutra

When Jan Nattier suggested, with a good deal more politesse than I would have, that the Heart Sutra was a Chinese apocryphon, it caused a minor stir. A few Japanese scholars got angry and soon produced refutations that bring to mind the hysterical response of historians to Wu Zetian. Western Scholars mostly decided to stay out of it. Both Matthew Orsborn and Dan Lusthaus suggested that there might be minor flaws in Nattier's argument (I disagree, but have also suggested my own very minor corrections). That said, Orsborn, then writing as Huifeng (2014), was the first scholar to publish work which took on Nattier's approach and extended it. And by doing so he transformed our understanding of the text. When I appeared on the scene, in 2015 (having started working on the Heart Sutra in 2012), I began by showing that Edward Conze had made errors in editing, translating, and explaining the text. Over the next few years I also explored the evolution of the Heart Sutra and extended Nattier and Orsborn's work on understanding and translating the Chinese text. I've now written more than 40 essays on aspects of the Heart Sutra, and my 5th peer-reviewed article has just been accepted for publication (No.6 is almost finished, and no. 7 will be a formal write up of these notes). All going to plan, a book will follow. I am as qualified as any person, living or dead, to comment on this text.

We now know that the received tradition of the history of the Heart Sutra is bunk. We also know that the standard mystical approaches to the text, the Theosophy inspired gnosticism, are very wide of the mark. Suzuki and Conze might have understood Zen, but they did not understand the Heart Sutra or the long-dead Prajñāpāramitā tradition.

Where does all this leave the text? When Orsborn showed that aprāptitvād "from a state of nonattainment" was, in fact, a mistranslation of a Chinese phrase and ought to have been anupalambhayogena "through the exercise of nonapprehension", he also noted that his discovery shifted the reading from the usual metaphysics and mysticism towards a more realist epistemology. In fact, his discovery is key to understanding the Heart Sutra as a Prajñāpāramitā text and to understanding the Prajñāpāramitā literature as a whole. I have also argued for such an approach, showing that we can read the Heart Sutra using Sue Hamilton's hermeneutic of experience (2017b). My colleague Satyadhana has highlighted connections with Pāli suttas and meditations in the formless spheres (arūpa-āyatanā). Although I have made small original contributions, my work on the Heart Sutra is largely corrective and synthesises the contributions of Nattier, Osborn, Satyadhana, and Hamilton.

“Mediation is not about having experiences, it is about bringing experience to an end.” 

 ‒ Satyapriya

“The Buddha presents a life extinction program, not a life improvement program” 

 ‒ Kenneth Folk & Michael Taft

In this view the text does have magical elements, but it is primarily a perspective on a kind of Buddhist practice that involves withdrawing attention from sense experiences so that one does not apprehend (upa√labh) them. The practice of nonapprehension (anupalambha-yoga) of dharmas is central to the Prajñāpāramitā. Just such a practice of withdrawing attention from sense experience is outlined in the Majjhima-Nikāya (MN 121) and so this material is relevant for early Buddhism enthusiasts as well.

By withdrawing attention from sense experience, using meditative techniques, we can bring sense experience to a halt without losing consciousness. In the ensuing state, the processes which give rise to experience (i.e., the skandhas) are not apprehended. Nor are the objects of the senses. This state feels like being in infinite space. If we also withdraw attention from cognitive experience, then we cease to apprehend thoughts and it feels like infinite consciousness. Through several more refinements that are more difficult to explain, one ends up in the state of emptiness in which there is only a kind of base awareness; one is conscious, but not of anything. Subject and object do not arise. Self does not arise. No dharmas arise in this state. And this is what the Heart Sutra is describing.

That is to say, the Heart Sutra does not deny the existence of dharmas, but notes that in emptiness (śūnyatāyām) no dharmas register in the awareness of the practitioner. And we can say that having been in that state (tathā-gata) one's whole world is changed. The idea that the Heart Sutra is about negation or  non-existence is simply wrong. Despite the fact that negation is at the heart of a lot of Mahāyāna rhetoric, it has nothing to do with the anupalambha-yoga. Far from being profound, the ontological reading of the Heart Sutra is facile. It ends in paradox, and no, that is not a good thing. Paradox in this case represents a level of unhelpful confusion that pervades Buddhist ideology. We have to set aside Nāgārajuna if we ever hope to understand Prajñāpāramitā, because he has disappeared down a metaphysical cul de sac.

The Heart Sutra epitomises the Buddhist project to extinguish sense experience and cognition, but it also reminds us of the credulity of religious Buddhists and the superficiality of most Buddhist philosophy. And this strongly suggests that what Buddhists believe is nowhere near as relevant to success with Buddhist practices as Buddhists say it is. Right-view is something that emerges from  the experience of emptiness, it seems to make no contribution to having the experience. And in this sense, meditation is an equal opportunity practice: it requires no intellectual skill, no philosophy, no education, and no ability to think clearly. It only requires an ability to first direct attention and then withdraw attention.

Fundamentally, Buddhism asks us to orient ourselves away from the kamaloka, to turn away from sense experience as a means to life satisfaction. The Heart Sutra draws mainly on a tradition of attempts to communicate from the ārupaloka. This is not some metaphysical absolute. It is not a paramārtha-satya or ultimate truth. Emptiness is not some alternative reality. It is experiential, though perhaps not in any way that someone intoxicated with sense experience can appreciate.

In conclusion, then, the Heart Sutra is not what we were told it is, but it is exactly what we wish it to be. It is not an Indian, Sanskrit text. It is not a genuine sutra. It is a patchwork of pericopes, stitched together by a 7th Century Chinese monk. However, it does contain an accurate depiction of what we often call the farther shore, the cessation of sensory experience and cognitive experience that results in the radical reorganisation of our psyche away from self-centredness.

~~oOo~~

1. Part I (03 August 2018). Bibliographies up to the Tang and early commentaries.
2. Part II (10 August 2018). The historical background, Xuanzang, and the emergence of the Heart Sutra

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