Manomaya: Background to Mind-Made Bodies.

© British Museum

In considering the Buddhist afterlife one of the more obscure terms, amidst a plethora of obscure terms, is manomaya kāya or 'mind-made body'. In the book of her PhD dissertation, Sue Hamilton (1996) explains that manomaya is one of the most obscure terms in the Pali Canon (138). This partly because of intrinsic ambiguity and partly because the word is used ambiguously. Also, Non-Theravāda Ābhidharmika Buddhists employed the word in a quite different metaphysical framework. This first of three essays on manomaya kāya will examine the Vedic and Pali uses of the term manomaya as a prerequisite to trying to understand the subsequent use manomaya kāya in the context of the Buddhist afterlife. I'll use the framework employed by Hamilton, though I won't always use her exact analysis.

PED tells us that the word maya is an adjective meaning 'made of' or 'consisting of' or 'originating in' (probably from √mā 'measure'). Thus the sense is similar to the metaphorical idiom "the measure of a man" in which we comment on "what a man is made of". It's related to the word māyā, which means 'to make, or create' (and later 'to make appear, illusion', 'to deceive'). The form maya is only used in Pali as the second member of a compound in the form x-maya where it generally means 'made of x' or 'consisting of x', though for example we'd translate aggimaya simply as 'fiery' (i.e. made of fire); sovaṇṇamaya 'golden'; dhūmamaya 'smoky' and so on.

Manas is also a polysemic word. It can mean virtually any phenomena that comes under the heading 'mental', from an individual thought, to the internal faculty of registering mental activity, to the entire apparatus of cognition, or mental activity generally. In some texts it even appears to substitute for hadaya. In Pali it is frequently used synonymously with, and indistinguishably from, citta, viññāṇa, and sometimes saññā; but later takes on the more fixed reference as the mental sense faculty (counterpart to the physical senses). As with all too many Buddhist technical terms, understanding any particular occurrence of manas in a text requires attention to the context.

Grammar Note: Textual Pali is uncomfortable with nouns ending in consonants that it inherits from earlier phases of the language. Thus the declensions of the word manas are a little confused. It's common to cite the word in the nominative singular, mano, as though it is an -a noun; and to see -a forms such as manena (instrumental singular). However it retains forms such as manaso, manasā and manasi (genitive, instrumental and locative singular) that reflect the form manas. Both forms of the instrumental singular occur, but manasā is more common in the suttas and manena in the later literature. Similarly for the genitive singular manaso/manassa. This suggests that as time went on Pali users saw manas more and more as mana.

We must be quite careful not to project modern ideas about the mind backwards in time and attribute them to the ancient Buddhists. Mind was not a function of the brain, but more likely of the heart (which we now know to be a slab of muscle for pumping blood). No distinction was made between thoughts and emotions (both were lumped into the category citta), but instead experience was understood as having physical (kāyika) and mental (cetasika) aspects depending on how they were presented to awareness, i.e. whether awareness arose in dependence on the five physical senses or the manas. Mind or consciousness was not a theatre of, or a container for, experience (see The 'Mind as Container' Metaphor). There was no resting-state consciousness waiting for sensory input, but instead we become aware of something when sense object and sense organ overlap and create the conditions for mental activity to arise (if any aspect of this set up is waiting for stimulus it is the organ itself, which is conceived of as being literally struck by sense impressions). The implication being that when there is no input, or, as in deep sleep, no viññāna to process the input, then we are not aware. Most importantly the ancient Buddhists focussed exclusively on cognition as a process rather than the mind as an entity. Where we are tempted to translate a Pali word as 'the mind', we'll find that 'mental activity' is almost always a better choice in the sense of more accurately conveying the understanding of the authors. There is no sense of having an organ 'the mind', which does the activity of thinking (as we conceptualise it now). 'The mind' precisely is the activity of thinking. Lastly as far as we can make out from their literature, the early Buddhists were not mind-body dualists, which is to say that, though they could make a distinction between mental and physical cognitions, they did not suppose the mind and body to be made of different stuff. To the extent they thought about ontology (which was seldom if ever) they seem to consider that phenomena were all of one kind no matter to which sense organ they presented themselves.

In other words, many if not most, of the fundamental metaphors we use for thinking about the mind would not have made sense to early Buddhists. They would not recognise our conception of the mind or consciousness. And this means that we struggle to see the mind from their point of view also.

According to Hamilton, the compound mano-maya can be analysed in at least three different ways:

1. made of mental activity.
2. made by mental activity,
3. made in mental activity; originating in mental activity.

That is, we can read mano as being in genitive (manaso mayaṃ), instrumental (manasā mayaṃ) or locative (manasi mayaṃ) case respectively. The dative case clearly doesn't apply. I'd add the ablative case: made from mental activity (manasā mayaṃ). Options 2. and 3b. amount to much the same thing, but option 3a. is very unlikely because Pali seemingly lacks the metaphor THE MIND IS CONTAINER. As we will see in the next essay the manomaya kāya qua body is made from this body (kāyā in the ablative case) [by mental activity]. Thus the ablative case not applicable.

There is a contrast between 1. and 2. The ontological implications are quite distinct. If something is made of mental activity then that suggests that mental activity is a kind of stuff something can be made of. The implication is that this is a different stuff than the body is made of (especially in the context of manomaya kāya). On the other hand if something is made by, or made in, mental activity, then it does not imply a separate stuff. Hamilton emphasises that in schemes like the khandhas, the interest is not in what a human is, in terms of substances, but in only in terms of the structure of human experience. And even the elements (mahābhūta) from which we are made are defined experientially (e.g. earth is characterised by resistance, colour, etc). In the Aṅguttara Nikāya commentary we find this gloss of manomaya: manena nibbattitaṃ "constructed by the mind" (Manorathapūraṇiyā 1.209) indicating that Buddhaghosa also understood the instrumental to apply. This means that we expect manomaya to mean "made by mental activity". Now we must look more closely at how it is used in practice to see if this is correct. 

Hamilton tackles the term in four contexts:

1. Dhammapada 1 & 2.
2. A single case of manomaya referring to manodhātu.
3. As a synonym for the cosmological rūpadhātu, in which there is no ontological discontinuity between the body (rūpa) and the mind (arūpa).
4. The idea of a manomaya kāya in meditation.

For the purposes of studying the Buddhist afterlife, it is the last two the mainly concern us, while and 4. will form part of a subsequent essay on manomaya kāya. However we need to establish the parameters of what is meant by manomaya.

1. In the case of Dhammapada my analysis, based as it is on Hamilton's second book (2000), is close in spirit to the analysis found in her first book (1996). The conclusion is that manomayā dhammā means that experiences are made by mental activity, or, in other words reliant on mental processes. Dhammas are mind-y or mind-ish. This is not Idealism because experiences are also reliant on sense objects, which do not depend on mental activity. The emphasis on mental activity is methodological, because freedom from automatic responses to sense objects comes from a disciplined mind. Hence mental activity takes precedence (mano pubbaṅgamā). The contrast is explicitly between manas and dhammā. We might see this as a contrast between sense faculty (indriya) and sense objects (ālambanā), but the focus of the first lines of both Dhp 1 & 2 seems to be on mental activity generally and experiences generally. The other two padas however, are not about having experiences, but about acting on them. Mano precedes dhammās, but it is the state of mind in which one acts that determine whether we subsequently experience sukha or dukkha (see also AN i.11). Hamilton argues that to translate manas as "mind" here is a mistake of reification. The sense is more like "thinking" as an action rather than mind an entity; or thinking that sets actions in motion. 

2. In the case of manomaya related to manodhātu Hamilton cites a verse from SN iv.71 (SN 35:94):

Papañca-saññā itarītarā narā,
Papañca-yantā upayanti saññino;
Mano-mayaṃ geha-sitañca sabbaṃ,
Panujja nekkhamma-sitaṃ irīyati.

Men with any perceptions of proliferation,
Approach the workings of proliferation connected with perception;
And dispelling everything mind-made connected with home;
They proceed to a life of renunciation.

Hamilton sees this as referring to "the fact that all saṃsāric phenomena are processed by the manodhātu" (143). That is, experience is conditioned by (maya) the mind (manas). My reading of pada b and my translation are somewhat different from Hamilton (and from Bodhi). I read papañca-yantā as "the workings or mechanisms (yanta) of proliferation (papañca)." In other words the verse suggests that once one begins to realise just how reactive mental activity is, one starts to lose interest in worldly things and wants more and more to follow up the insights, and this naturally leads to a renunciate lifestyle. Mano-maya is explicitly related "the home" (geha) as a metonym for all that is connected with ordinary daily life (with all its attachments). In other words here mental activity is responsible for proliferation and thus suffering.

This point warrants a brief digression. Experience is never "direct", despite the claims of some Buddhists. Experience is always a construct (e.g. of indriya, ālambana, and vijñāna); always mediated by mental activity; and only some aspects of experience are ever presented to awareness. Even in what we think of as integrated states such as jhāna, we stop experiencing the mundane sensual sensation (stop hearing the sounds around, stop experiencing our body) and become absorbed in the sensations associated with the object of meditation. What we are aware of is always partial, and always mediated by manas. Hamilton points out (143) that all experience, including experiences like insight, involves manas: "manodhātu is the door through which saṃsāra is subjectively experienced." And this is the reason experience is termed manomaya.

3.1 The Vedic Background

In order to establish a basis for relation between manomaya and the cosmological rūpadhātu (as distinct from the sensory experience of rūpa), Hamilton surveys various Vedic references to the power of the mind. For example in Ṛgveda X.129.4 desire is the first seed of mental activity. "The power of the mind originates in the process of thinking, or willing" (144). However, even in similar Upaniṣadic expressions the context is still ritual rather than ethical. "Desire" means the intense concentration of the sacrificer on the desired object of the sacrifice (very often a good afterlife). However, more of the power of the mind is associated with knowing: "Knowledge of a thing gives power over it, and the importance of knowledge underlies the sacrificial rationale: it is knowledge which gives the ritual actions their power" (145). 

The word manomaya itself occurs only once in Ṛgveda at RV 10.85.12 which describes the marriage of Sūryā (daughter of the Sun) and Soma: "Sūryā mounted a chariot made of thought as she went to her husband" (áno manasmáyaṃ sūryā́, ā́rohat prayatī́ pátim) [Doniger's translation]. As with all the Ṛgveda sūktas, what this means is open to interpretation. However there is another word manoratha, a chariot of the mind, which means 'a wish, a desire' especially one expressed indirectly. Along with Radich (2007: 225 - he cites a work in Japanese at this point) I think we can see this as the bride's enthusiasm to begin her sexual life with her husband. The Ṛgveda is unembarrassed about such things. 

In Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (BU) 4.4.5 we find the following passage reminiscent of Dhp 1-2:

sa vā ayam ātmā brahma vijñānamayo manomayo prāṇamayaś cakṣurmayaḥ śrotramayaḥ pṛthivīmaya āpomayo vāyumaya ākāśamayas tejomayo 'tejomayaḥ kāmamayo 'kāmamayaḥ krodhamayo 'krodhamayo dharmamayo 'dharmamayaḥ sarvamayaḥ |

The ātman is brahman: made of consciousness, made of mind, made of breath, made of the eye, made of ear, made of earth, made of water, made of wind, made of space, made of light, made of darkness, made of desire, made of non-desire, made of anger, made of non-anger, made of Dharma, made of non-Dharma, made of everything.

Note here the implication is very much "made of", but this is a passage from an Upaniṣad that is concerned with ontology, thus identical terms can take different meanings. The passage is part of a discussion of karma and rebirth which may well have influenced Buddhist ideas (BU 4.4). Hamilton notes that the first three items on the list (vijñānamaya, manomaya, and prāṇamaya) are taken up by the Taittirīya Upaniṣad (2.3) as an analysis of human existence. Breath makes up the bodily self; within this is a mind-made (manomaya) self; and within this again is a consciousness-made self (vijñānamaya). Hamilton sees this as evidence of existence on various levels of subtlety and density. While the Chāndogya Upaniṣad  (CU 6.5) speaks of three modes of existence: coarse (sthaviṣṭha), medium (madhyama) and subtlest (aṇiṣṭha). She says, "In corresponding to an intermediate subtle level of cosmological existence, manomaya therefore also corresponds to an intermediate stage on the path to liberation." (146)

Each more subtle mode seems to exist within the less subtle, suggesting concentric layers. Late Vedic existence, then, has three layers. There is an interesting difference in old and new Vedic views on the cosmos that Hamilton does not pick up on. The old Vedic cosmos was separated into earth, sky (literally 'between'), and heaven (pṛthivī, antarīkṣa, and svarga). These were layers of a flat universe one on top of the other, with fire-based rituals (yajña) providing a way of bridging the gap. The new Vedic cosmos of the Upaniṣads is radically different in its geometry. This universe originates at a singularity in the heart (likened to a cave) where ātman dwells. From this central point the universe expands out in all directions. Whereas old Vedic ritual homologies enabled the sacrificer to ensure ṛta (roughly 'harmony') in the cosmos by performing the appropriate actions in the ritual; the new Vedic ātman centred universe was identified with, and established on the basis of, brahman. The one who identified with ātman in themselves, not only identified with the whole cosmos (idaṃ sarvaṃ), but, through the magic of homology, they actually became the whole cosmos. In Ṛgveda 10.90 the universe is created by the carving up of the primordial man (Puruṣa) as a sacrificial victim. In the Upaniṣads the integrated individual becomes the whole cosmos. This meant that using fire rituals to bridge the layers was unnecessary, because actually being the whole cosmos, obviates the need for anything so crude. Hamilton emphasises that there are no ontological discontinuities in either the old three tiered or the new concentric cosmos. However the early Upaniṣadic accounts of this cosmos are not systematic or even consistent.

Explicit reference to a subtle body (liṅga śarīra or sūkṣma śarīra) is rare, in fact singular, in the early Upaniṣads, but common in later Upaniṣads and in the commentaries of Śaṅkara. "Śaṅkara clearly identifies the manomaya body with the subtle body" (148). The equivalent word/words do not occur in Pali, even in the commentaries. We'll have to return to the subject of possible cross pollination with non-Buddhist religious ideas about subtle bodies in the next essay.

Buddhists analyse a person into one rūpakkhandha (masses of form) and four arūpakkhandha (masses without form). However Hamilton is quick to emphasise that, again, this is not an ontological distinction, not indicative of substance dualism (despite what many Buddhists think). From the Buddhist point of view all of the khandhas are experiential and all have the same nature, i.e. they are all impermanent, disappointing and insubstantial (in the sense of not providing a suitable anchor point for self identification). Despite later trends in Buddhist thought, rūpa/arūpa is an epistemological rather than ontological statement. Both impermanence and dependent arising are specifically features of mental activity in early Buddhist texts. In this worldview, though we are certain about the conditioned nature of experience, we are still none the wiser as to the nature of objects or the nature of the mind. But, as Hamilton says, this doesn't matter because: "What the phenomena are, in the ultimate sense, is irrelevant to attaining liberating insight" (149). This limitation on the domain of application of Buddhist ideas in early Buddhism is vital to understanding the basic metaphysics of early Buddhism. The philosophical problems involved in trying to generalise this observation about mental activity as a Theory of Everything are huge.

Buddhists also divided the "world" into three (flat) layers: kāmadhātu, rūpadhātu and arūpadhātu. However Buddhists added a twist in creating homologies between cosmological and psychological experiences. Each layer corresponds both to a realm or collection of realms in which beings can be reborn and to levels or states of meditation. Beings born in the various sub-levels of the kāmadhātu have form (rūpa) and experience sensual desire; and this corresponds to everyday consciousness. In the singular rūpadhātu beings have form (though it's not yet clear what this means); this corresponds to first four 'rūpa' jhānas which are characterised by increasing integration (samādhi) of the mind and the falling away of mental activity leaving equanimity. Finally in the various levels of arūpadhātu, beings who are formless and corresponds to the second lot of four 'arūpa' jhānas.

In the Ariyapariyesana Sutta the Buddha remarks that attaining the ākiñcaññāyatana (the sphere of nothingness; aka the third arūpajhāna) only leads to ākiñcaññāyatanūpapatti which literally means "rebirth in the sphere of nothingness"; where the verbal noun upapatti is the word most often used in connection with action of being reborn. The main sense is probably that having attained the ākiñcaññāyatana all that results is coming and going between ordinary awareness and ākiñcaññāyatana. There is no permanent radical reorientation of the psyche that we would usually equate with nibbāna. However, there is a implication of literal rebirth in the arūpadhātu or formless realm which corresponds to the psychological state.

Although the levels are to some extent reified into actual rebirth destinations, and elaborated on in this vein by commentators, this model seems to have been used as a metaphor for spiritual progress with increasing levels of attainment, purity, subtlety, and integration. Still there is no ontological distinction between the levels, they represent milestones on a continuous spectrum of attainment. Hamilton is thus cautious about the reading of, say, rūpadhātu as a literal place of rebirth which would have stronger ontological implications. There is some tension here between what seems to be implied by the suttas and how later Buddhists read the suttas. At some point Buddhists (including Māhāyānikas) abandoned any ontological reticence they had about rebirth realms.


3.2 Manomaya in the Pāḷi Suttas.

The term manomaya, then, is already in use in late Vedic texts which pre-date Buddhism and might reasonable be thought to influence early Buddhists. In Pali it is used in a similar way in the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta (DN 9). Poṭṭhapāda asks the Buddha if self (attan) and mental activity (saññā) are the same thing or different. Asked in turn what kind of self (attan) he believes in Poṭṭhapāda (described as a paribbājaka), declares three successive kinds of self, each of which is criticised by the Buddha.

"Oḷārikaṃ kho ahaṃ, bhante, attānaṃ paccemi rūpiṃ cātumahābhūtikaṃ kabaḷīkārāhārabhakkhan" ti

I believe in a material self (oḷārika attan), Bhante, with form (rūpa), the four main elements and nourished by material food

"Manomayaṃ kho ahaṃ, bhante, attānaṃ paccemi sabbaṅgapaccaṅgiṃ ahīnindriyan" ti.

I believe in a mind-made self (manomaya attan) with a complete set of limbs and functioning senses.

"Arūpiṃ kho ahaṃ, bhante, attānaṃ paccemi saññāmayan" ti

I believe in a formless self (arūpin attan) made of mental activity.

In each case the Buddha responds that:

Evaṃ santaṃ kho te, poṭṭhapāda, aññāva saññā bhavissati añño attā.... atha imassa purisassa aññā ca saññā uppajjanti, aññā ca saññā nirujjhanti. Iminā kho etaṃ, poṭṭhapāda, pariyāyena veditabbaṃ yathā aññāva saññā bhavissati añño attā" ti.

That being so, Poṭṭhapāda, saññā would be one thing and attan another... then [given such a self] some mental activity would arise in a person, and some would cease. The situation would be understood this way: saññā is one thing and attan is another.

A couple of little notes. The word attan has several references: it can mean body (as it might do here). Hīnidriya, i.e. hīna-indriya, means 'defective senses'. In the compound saññāmaya we're not entirely sure what saññā means. It can mean 'name'; 'the mind' (i.e. mental activity) generally, and the mental activity of 'perception' (or apperception) specifically. Walsh translates 'perception', but I think the more general sense probably applies here and have translated appropriately.

The main point here is that however one conceives of the self in relation to the three modes of existence, the self and mental activity are not identical. The reason is obvious to Buddhist thinkers: mental activity arises and passes away and a self is said to be permanent. Nothing that arises and passes away can be the permanent self. Or, the immortal soul cannot be found in experience (and for Buddhists experience is the only source of knowledge). Indeed the preceding paragraph in the Poṭṭhapāda Sutta establishes that knowledge arises on the specific condition of saññā:

"saññā paṭhamaṃ uppajjati, pacchā ñāṇaṃ, saññuppādā ca pana ñāṇuppādo hotī" ti

Mental activity arises first, knowledge arises after; and from the arising of mental activity knowledge arises.

With that proviso this passage seems as though it might reflect a view similar to that in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad above, where manomaya attan reflects the Sanskrit manomaya ātman idea of a subtle body. But note that here the Buddha rejects the idea as irrelevant to his liberation project.

Later in the text (DN i.197-202) the Buddha acknowledges the three types of attan: here referred to as attapaṭilābha 'acquired self'. The commentary glosses attapaṭilābha = attabhāva and Hamilton associates each with a level of existence (and we can additionally relate these to the three levels of the cosmos):

• oḷārika attapaṭilābha = kāmabhava ~ kāmadhātu
• manomaya attapaṭilābha = rūpabhava ~ rūpadhātu
• arūpa attapaṭilābha = arūpabhava ~ arūpadhātu

However in each case the Buddha is more concerned with the contradictions of identifying aspects of experience with the self, and with how to get rid of such an idea of self. One gets the sense here that the Buddha is taking his interlocutors beliefs on face value and then turning the conversation on its head by showing that there is nothing desirable about any form of existence; and what's more the Buddha's teaching can be used to end (pahāna) all forms of existence. Thus I think here that Hamilton dwells too much on the characteristics of the different types of attapaṭilābha. They might be someone's view, but they don't form part of the early Buddhist worldview.

The Brahmajāla Sutta (DN 1), in its parody of Brahmanical belief, talks about beings born in the ābhassaro brahmā world who are mind-made. They feed on rapture (pīti), are self-luminous (sayaṃpabho), move through the intermediate realm (antalikkha-caro) and are beautiful (subhaṭṭhāyin). In other words they fit the sort of paradigm of floaty, ethereal, disembodied beings, like angels. The same passage occurs in the Mahāvastu (I'll deal with this along with other non-Pali Buddhist sources). Though note that they move through the intermediate realm (Skt antarīkṣa) which in Vedic thought is between heaven (svarga or devaloka) and earth. Does this mean that they move freely between the two? In Buddhist cosmology Brahmā beings are usually higher than devas in the hierarchy, not lower. Certainly devas are frequently portrayed as visiting the Buddha, so perhaps this requires freedom of movement through the antarīkṣa?

As the text is a parody of the whole idea of a creator god, we should be cautious of taking this sequence too seriously as cosmology. The terminology appears to drawn from Vedic mythology. However later Buddhists seem to have lost the sense of these stories and reified them: the mythic Brahmā world of the Upaniṣads and Purāṇa texts, where it represents the goal of the religious life of the Brahmins, becomes a saṃsāric, but literal rebirth destination (gati) for Buddhists.

Another passage in the Majjhima Nikāya (MN i.410) uses manomaya with reference to devas. Here there is an argument over the existence of immaterial realms (āruppā). Āruppa here is a substantive in -ya from arūpa 'formless', and roughly means 'formlessness'. Strangely enough, here the Buddha claims not to be in a position to answer the question on the existence or not of an arūpa realm, which contrasts with other times when, for example, he apparently personally travels to Brahmā's realm. He argues that whether or not there is an āruppā, there is still the possibility of rebirth in the rūpadhātu:

ye te devā rūpino manomayā, apaṇṇakaṃ me tatrūpapatti bhavissati.

I might still be reborn amongst the those mind-made devas with form.

But the point of this discussion here is captured right at the end

So iti paṭisaṅkhāya rūpānaṃyeva nibbidāya virāgāya nirodhāya paṭipanno hoti.

Considering that this is so, he practices being fed up with forms, turning away from forms, and the cessation of forms.

Again the point is not to affirm or deny rūpadhātu or manomaya devas, but to orient people who have such beliefs away from kāmadhātu. Presumably having a belief in heaven is being leveraged to focus believers away from sense pleasure towards more refined types of pleasure (such as jhāna). The same sutta contains a number of similar arguments. The disputes about ontology do not need to be resolved for someone to practice Buddhist methods, nor does successful attainment of the goal rely on resolving such disputes.

In this connection one also thinks of Nanda and the dove-footed nymphs (Ud 3.2). The Buddha's cousin Nanda had become a monk but was thinking of giving up the homeless life because he found it too difficult. When asked why he says that as he was leaving a lovely Śākya women had said to him, "hurry back noble son" (tuvaṭaṃ kho, ayyaputta, āgaccheyyāsī’ti). The memory of her was making celibacy and austerity painful for him. So the Buddha uses his magical powers to take Nanda to the heaven of the thirty-three devas (devesu tāvatiṃsesu). There he saw 500 celestial goddesses ((pañca accharāsatāni) with feet of doves (kakuṭapādāni). Having seen these heavenly beauties he reassessed his opinion of ordinary beautiful women and found he could continue to practice and the shift of his attention, though apparently (to his fellow bhikkhus) still on attachment to pleasure, soon resulted in his liberation from craving. The point of this story is the same. One way to become disenchanted with ordinary sense pleasures is to begin to experience the bliss of higher states of consciousness (jhāna). Having experienced the bliss which has a cosmological counterpart in the deva realms, one will find ordinary sense pleasures uninteresting.

Conclusion

As far we can see the word mano-maya means 'made by the mental activity' rather than 'made of/in or from mental activity'. In other words there is no suggestion of ontological dualism inherent in the phrase. This observation notwithstanding, many Buddhists have chosen to interpret manomaya as having a dualistic connotation because they are ideologically committed to ontological dualism. And having made that commitment it is almost impossible to argue with them, since no evidence is available or required for belief in an immaterial "mind" entity. Dualism is not susceptible to reasoned argument. It is far easier to explain the afterlife if one starts from a position of dualism. In previous essays I've looked at why people have a predilection for post-mortem continuity and at some reasons dualist beliefs are so prevalent. It's not that difficult to understand. It's easy to imagine where such beliefs come from and why they persist into our era when science seems to so dominant as a way of understanding the world. But it also means that the kind of metaphysical problems that emerge when trying to think about the afterlife are bound to emerge.

Mano-maya seems generally to apply to supernatural beings only (except in one case where it seems to refer to the mental process of proliferation or papañca). Especially it applies to devas, and often to the most refined kind of devas (thought there is some confusion over whether it applies to both rūpadhātu and arūpadhātu. And at least some of the early texts are not asserting the existence of such devas, or that form of existence, they are stipulating them for the sake of argument and using the idea of higher, divine pleasures as a way to help people detach themselves from lower, sensual pleasures. One of the most important stories (repeated in a number of suttas) is a clear parody of Brahmanical belief about how the universe began.

Buddhists took the idea that mental events (dhammā) are made by the mind (Dhp 1-2) with its lack of ontological connotation; combined them with existing cosmology and tried to turn it into a post-mortem ontology. And this leads us to the topic of the next essay which is the idea of a manomayakāya, a mind-made body.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Hamilton, Sue. (1996) Identity and Experience: The Constitution of the Human Being According to Early Buddhism. Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue. (2000) Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.

Lee, Sumi. (2014) 'The Meaning of ‘Mind-made Body’ (S. manomaya-kāya, C. yisheng shen 意生身) in Buddhist Cosmological and Soteriological systems'. Buddhist Studies Review. 31(1): 65-90.

What Did the Buddha Mean by 'World'?

I have been working on a commentary to the Kaccānagotta Sutta (SN 12.15, PTS Sii.16.) and considering the term loka, usually translated as 'world', and how the Buddha used it; especially in the context of the compound lokasamdaya 'origin of the world'. In my research I found a trail already followed by Bhikkhu Bodhi in the notes to his Saṃyutta Nikāya translation. I will work through these texts myself, offer my own translations and observations, but leave Bhikkhu Bodhi the last word, since he got there before me.

Our first text is the Discourse of Going to the End of the World. [1] Here an odd question is raised:

kena cāvuso lokasmiṃ lokasaññī hoti lokamānī?
And by what, friend, in the world is one a perceiver and cogniser of the world?

The answer is that one is a perceiver and cogniser of the world by the six sense organs in the world. On one hand this is obvious - one perceives 'the world' through the senses - however the senses themselves are in the world (lokasmiṃ). Bhikkhu Bodhi points to SN 2.26 for an explanation. This is the Rohitassa Sutta. [2] Here the young deva, Rohitassa, asks the Buddha:

yatha nu kho bhante na jāyati na jīyati na mīyati na cavati na upapajjati, sakkā nu kho so, bhante, gamanena lokassa anto ñātuṃ vā daṭṭhum vā pāpuṇituṃ vā ti?

Is there a way by travelling to know, or see, or to reach, the end of the world where one is not born, grow old, die; where is is no death and rebirth?

The answer is no. One cannot reach the goal by actually travelling. I take this to mean that the Buddha is not talking about a place, that the language of the 'path' is only a metaphor. So the world being talked about is not the physical world, not the external objective world. He then makes a statement which might be familiar:

Na kho panāhaṃ, āvuso, appatvā lokassa antaṃ dukkhassa antakiriyaṃ vadāmi. Api ca khvāhaṃ, āvuso, imasmiṃyeva byāmamatte kaḷevare sasaññimhi samanake lokañca paññapemi lokasamudayañca lokanirodhañca lokanirodhagāminiñca paṭipadanti.

However, I, friend, there is no making an end of disappointment, without reaching the end of the world. And, friend, it is right here in this 'fathom long' [3] body endowed with perception and cognition that I declare the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world.

So this reinforces the idea that 'the world' is not 'the world' as we usually think about it, but the kind of world we refer to when we refer to some who "lives in a world of their own" - a subjective world. If we turn to Buddhaghosa's commentary [4] at this point (as Bhikkhu Bodhi does in his notes) we find that he links loka with dukka and associates the four truths of the noble ones with the world, the origin and cessation of the world and the way to the cessation of the world. Buddhaghosa then says:

Iti – ‘‘nāhaṃ, āvuso, imāni cattāri saccāni tiṇakaṭṭhādīsu paññapemi, imasmiṃ pana cātumahābhūtike kāyasmiṃ yeva paññapemī’’ti dasseti.

Thus he should see: ' I do not, friend, declare these four truths in grass and wood, but I declare them only in this body of the four great elements'.

Now this is presented as a quote from the Buddha, but modern databases make it easy to show that it does not occur in the Pāli texts that have come down to us. So we must be cautious in how we use it. With this caveat I may say that this the most unequivocal statement that the Buddha is unconcerned with the objective world, but only with the subjective world, that I know of. What in effect Buddhaghosa, at least, is saying is that paṭicca-sammupāda is not intended to apply to the external world, but to one's world of experience - to the processes of perception (the senses) and cognition (the mind) located within the body.

In the World Sutta [5] the Buddha asks the rhetorical question: "what is the origin of the world". His answer is a well known formula:

Cakkhuñca paṭicca rūpe ca uppajjati cakkhuviññāṇaṃ. Tiṇṇaṃ saṅgati phasso. Phassapaccayā vedanā; vedanāpaccayā taṇhā; taṇhāpaccayā upādānaṃ; upādānapaccayā bhavo; bhavapaccayā jāti; jātipaccayā jarāmaraṇaṃ sokaparideva-dukkhadomanassupāyāsā sambhavanti. Ayaṃ kho, bhikkhave, lokassa samudayo.

With the eye and forms as condition, eye-consciousness arises. The coincidence of the three is contact. On the basis of contact there are sensations, which give rise to desires. Desires are fuel which supports becoming. [6] With becoming there is birth, and from birth old-age, and death, grief, lamenting, misery, dejection, and trouble are produced. This, monks, is the origin of the world.

This is a portion of the nidāna chain (the most useful and relevant part) which we normally associate with the arising of dukkha. Here the world is more or less equivalent to dukkha. Note that 'the world' comes into being on the basis of contact between sense organ and sense object - forms. Here forms are not part of 'the world', they are part of the conditions which give rise to the world - this is a very important distinction. The nidānas do not give rise to forms, they give rise to the experience, the world of suffering.

The conclusion of this exploration is, I hope, clear and I will leave it to Bhikkhu Bodhi to articulate it:

"The world with which the Buddha's teaching is principally concerned is 'the world of experience,' and even the objective world is of interest only to the extent that it serves as that necessary external condition for experience" [7]

~~||~~

Notes

1. Lokantagamana Sutta (SN 35.116, PTS S iv.93)
2. Rohitassa Sutta (SN 2.26, PTS S i.61; also AN 4.45, PTS A ii.47)
3. 'fathom long carcass' is (I think) Mrs Rhys David's translation of byāmamatte kalebara which has a great ring to it: but byāma refers to 'an arm-span' which is typically somewhat less than a fathom or six feet. Kaḷevara (or kaḷebara) is 'the body'. It also means 'a corpse or carcass', but a dead body is seldom "endowed with perception and cognition"
4. Rohitassa Sutta Vaṇṇanā (SA i.116)
5. Loka Sutta (SN 12.43, PTS S ii.73)
6. upādāna is typically translated as 'clinging'. This is neither bad doctrine, nor bad philology. However Richard Gombrich has shown how the word more literally means 'the thing which supports a active process' i.e. fuel. The equation that "desire fuels becoming" is part of the metaphor of fire, which characterises becoming (bhava) as like a fire which can only continue when there is fuel. In my opinion it makes more sense. I've written more on the use of the metaphor of fire in these essays: Everything is on fire! and Playing with Fire.
7. Bodhi. Connected Discourses p. 394, n.182.

image: earth in hands from Worthington Libraries.

Buddhism and Western Philosophy : the Fundamental Mismatch

Following on from last week I want to continue the theme of ontology. This week I want to look at the differing attitudes to ontological speculation in early Buddhism and Western Philosophy generally. It seems to me that there is an almost irreconcilable difference between the two approaches. I've been sparked off by reading Confessions Of A Philosopher by Bryan Magee (left) . Here's what he says philosophy is about:

"The ur-question of philosophy throughout most of its history has been ‘what, ultimately, is there?’ This was the dominant question for the pre-Socratics, and it has underlain, then it has not dominated, most of the best philosophy since. In pursuit of an answer, philosophers have asked a multitude of subsidiary questions, such as ‘what is the nature of physical objects? What is space? What is causal connection? What is time?’ And by a natural progression from this they have become deeply exercised about the possibility of human knowledge: ‘How can we find out these things? Can we know any of them for certain? If so, which? And how can we be sure we know when we do know?’" (Magee p.86)

Magee puts this definition forward in his explanation that the so-called Oxford School, aka Linguistic Philosophy, really isn't philosophy at all. I want to use this paragraph as a jumping off point for comparison of early Buddhism (the narrow definition is necessary) and Western Philosophy, and to show that Buddhism, at least early Buddhism, is also not really philosophy at all.

In the west the primary question then is "what is there?" The assumption is that there is something "there", i.e. it assumes that we are a subject having an experience of an object. Early Buddhism too acknowledges this view point and sees humans as experiencing subjects being aware of objects. In particular we find the oft repeated formula that vedanā arises in dependence on contact between a sense object, a sense organ, and sense consciousness; and from vedanā all of the other functions of consciousness (or at least the functions relvant to the Buddhist project). Contemporary Buddhist discourse often tries to play down or eliminate this duality, but it is inherent in the early Buddhist texts. We have experiences of something.

However there is a fundamental difference in attitude towards the objective pole of experience. For philosophers the nature of 'what is there' is at the forefront. They enquire into the nature of the objects and the relationships between them. Even those that accept that to a large extent what we are talking about is a mental representation of some perceived reality, are still interested in what can be known and/or said about that external reality. Magee himself is not content to accept that nothing can be known for certain about Reality, but strives to find the limits of such knowledge. This is the broad subject area of metaphysics - the study of what is beyond physics. He describes more than once his disappointment that he was unable to persuade Karl Popper into the field of metaphysics.

Early Buddhism whilst acknowledging objects, has nothing much more to say about them - I know of nothing but leave open the possibility that I have not yet found it, or over looked something. The vast corpus of texts focus almost entirely on the experience, that is the subjective pole of contact. It is our response to sensations (vedanā - literally 'the known') that occupies the attention of the Buddha and early Buddhists, the cascade of mental functions and phenomena that follow from vedanā. I've harped on the Buddhists use of the word 'loka' lately so it should be familiar to my readers. It does not mean the objective world in most cases, but the subjective. When the Buddha is called "lokavidū" (in the Buddha Vandana for example) - the knower of the world - this does not mean that he knows about worldly things, but that he has fully understood his own world, his self-constructed world. He understands how experiences arise and pass away.

This is where we must specify early Buddhism - by which I mean the earliest strands of Buddhism largely represented by the Pāli texts, but with fragmentary parallels in Gāndhārī and Sanskrit, as well as translations into Chinese, and to some extent Tibetan and some Central Asian languages. Later on, although not that late, at least one strand of Buddhism began to think in terms of actually existent objective entities. This strand was called Sarvāstivāda after the Sanskrit phrase "sarvaṃ asti - everything exists". Perhaps because India had philosophers as well, the Buddhists got sucked into creating and systematising theories about reality (or worse, Reality), but this drew them well away from what seem to be the concerns of the early texts.

Where there is a quest for knowledge in philosophy it is knowledge of reality, knowledge of the the objective world. Questions of Truth and Authority revolve around this notion of a reality (or Reality) external to us in which we participate. There is a great deal of mileage in this. After all we to a large extent share experiences, and we can communicate about them. Technology relies on observations of objects and their relationship: from the earliest tools, to working metals and clays, to the hi-tech of atom smashers and the internet, these are all successes of the view that objects are real and knowable. Technology is not simply a matter of mental phenomena. If we dismiss the objective world out of hand, then we run the risk of appearing (and actually being) silly.

However once again the Buddha seems to have been preoccupied with other matters - generally speaking in the nature of experience, and more specifically in the nature of suffering or unpleasant experience. And not just in the content of experience, but in the mechanics of it. In the process by which we have experiences. This becomes apparent when we take an overview of the teachings on the khandhas, which Sue Hamilton has described as the "apparatus of experience". It's not that objects are denied. The observation that we can only know what we can experience, is shared by Western thinkers. It's that the Buddha's project was to end suffering, and not to make samara more pleasent or livable. Technology was beside the point to the Buddha, even if he had not adopted the lifestyle of a traditional wanderer. The focus, as I explained in Life, the Universe and Everything [16 Jan 2009], is suffering, it's causes, it's ceasing, and the ways one can make it cease. No technology is required to do this, because it is all about understanding how the experience of suffering arises from vedanā.

I would suggest then that Buddhism is not, or at least not in its earliest known texts, a philosophy, and the Buddha was not a philosopher, at least not in the terms given by Bryan Magee. The Buddha appears not to have been interested in the central questions of philosophy, and they have no bearing on the method of Buddhism - the object is immaterial compared to our experience of it, and how we understand that experience.

If Buddhism is not a philosophy, this begs the question, is it a religion? A subject for another rave...


Reading

• Magee, Bryan. 1997. Confessions Of A Philosopher. London: Pheonix.

The World and What Exists

Some time back I wrote a post about the early Buddhist attitude to ontology - the issue of what exists, and what the nature of that existence is. I argued that ontology plays no part in the Buddha's presentation of his teaching. However in a note to the Flower Sutta (SN 22:94; PTS S iii.138-140) Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the foremost authorities on Theravāda Buddhism, states "The Buddha's utterances at 22:94, for example, show that he did not hesitate to make pronouncements with a clear ontological import when they were called for" (Bodhi 2000 : 734, n.29). I want to look at key passages in this sutta, and examine the claim that they have an "ontological import".

The Flower Sutta begins like this:

Sāvatthinidānaṃ. ‘‘Nāhaṃ, bhikkhave, lokena vivadāmi, lokova mayā vivadati. Na, bhikkhave, dhammavādī kenaci lokasmiṃ vivadati. Yaṃ, bhikkhave, natthisammataṃ loke paṇḍitānaṃ, ahampi taṃ ‘natthī’ti vadāmi. Yaṃ, bhikkhave, atthisammataṃ loke paṇḍitānaṃ, ahampi taṃ ‘atthī’ti vadāmi’’.

At Sāvatthi: Bhikkhus I don't dispute with the world, the world disputes with me. A Dhammavādin doesn't quarrel with anyone in the world. That which the wise in the world agree "it does not exist (na atthi), I too say "it doesn't exist". That which the wise in the world agree "it exists" (atthi), I too say "it exists".

Dhammavādī is an adjective which describes someone who professes, or speaks, Dhamma. Vāda is an argument, view, or ideology; and the -in suffix (vādin) is a possessive - someone who has that view. In my translation I've adopted Dhammavādin (the uninflected form) because it is on the model of Theravādin, or Yogacārin and should be familiar enough. I quite like the term Dhammavādin.*

The sutta continues by asking what it is that the wise agree doesn't exist in the world? The answer is forms, feelings, perceptions, volitions, and consciousness that are permanent, stable, eternal, not subject to change do not exist in the world. These are of course the five khandhas, aka the apparatus of experience. What the wise agree as existing in the world are khandhas that are impermanent, suffering and subject to change.

Taken at face value this passage we might read this as an ontological statement. However I think we need to be quite careful. The problem is with the word loka. Literally it means 'world', and Bhikkhu Bodhi is clearly taking it to mean that the khandhas exist in some impermanent sense in the world (loke/lokasmiṃ). However in his long essay on the word on 'loka' Jan Gonda (1966) shows that the original meaning of the word was something like 'the visible world' or 'the world of experience'. The original image is one of a clearing in a forest - loka is what can be seen clearly, what appears to the mind. On the physical level this means the sensual world. However it also has the connotation that we have in English with regard to the world - one can live in 'one's own world' for instance. In this case the meaning is more personal, it is a psychological term. Gonda is concerned with Vedic literature which predates the Buddha, but he establishes the metaphorical/psychological use of the word. Sue Hamilton (2000) has shown that this is also how the Buddha uses the world loka. Hamilton links loka and khandha together as part of an elaborate extended metaphor developed by the Buddha for describing the subjective pole of experience.

So I would paraphrase the above as: in the world of experience, there is nothing in that experience which is lasting, satisfying, or independent of experience. Read in this way there is nothing here of ontological import. Bhikkhu Bodhi is mislead by reading loka literally rather than metaphorically. I think the Buddha was an empirical realist - he has no explicit quarrel with the idea that there are objects of the senses, but he has nothing definite or positive to say about such objects or their natures.

To play the devils advocate for a moment, if we were to accept Bhikkhu Bodhi's assertion that the Flower Sutta has something ontological to say, then what would it be saying? Presuming also that Bhikkhu Bodhi, going along with orthodox Theravada doctrine, accepts that the khandhas are a complete definition of reality, then what is being said in this sutta is that nothing definite can be said about the reality that Bhikkhu Bodhi is thinking of. In this view nothing at all is stable. There is nothing in this view on which to pin an ontology. Nothing exists in fact. So accepting the proposition we are lead to a paradox - one that is often overlooked. The way out of this is provided by Hamilton. What the Buddha is describing is not reality but experience. If reality really were so fluid we could not experience it. By necessity we must water down the statement that 'everything changes' to 'everything changes, but some things change slowly enough for us to experience them as persisting'. In fact everything that we experience as a something, must change slowly else we wouldn't experience it as a something. If something is there one second and gone the next, we usually assume that it was a trick of the mind (recalling that the Buddha had only his bare senses and no camera or other recording equipment!). So things must actually exist for a time in order for us to experience them.

However Hamilton's is a more elegant view. It is our experience of things which is changing from moment to moment, which is never satisfying. The fact that our experience changes from moment to moment says nothing about the nature of reality. It is a comment on the nature of consciousness and awareness. This is a statement that can be taken at face value, without having to back off to allow for practicalities. In fact it has important practical implications for Buddhists in the sense that it directs our attention not to the world as such, but to the world of experience.

The sutta later describes each of the khandhas as "loke lokadhammo", which Bikkhu Bodhi translates as "a world-phenomena in the world". It is this that the Buddha has awoken to (abhisambujjhati) and realised (abhisameti). If we read loka as something more like 'world of experience' then the Buddha is saying that he has understood the elements of experience in the world of experience. I think we can see this as further vindication of Hamilton's approach to the subject. Her view is that the khandhas are not the sum total of existence, but the elements of, or by which we have, experiences. What the Buddha was interested in was understanding the very process whereby we have experiences, and why we misinterpret them to our detriment. The nature of the world as an externally existing 'something' (kiñci) is not relevant to this question, because the Buddha, like many Western thinkers, took the view that we could not directly touch that something. We have only the information of our senses and what our mind makes of them. It is by understanding the mechanics of the process - by watching it in action - and disentangling ourselves from the stories we tell about experience, that we can free ourselves from the erroneous conclusions that cause us suffering.

Notes

* Members of the Western Buddhist Order are known as Dharmacārī or Dharmacāriṇī which are, respectively, the masculine and feminine nominative singular of the adjective dharmacārin. Dharma is familiar, and cāra means "going, motion, progression, course; proceeding; practising". The -in suffix, as above, is a possessive. So dharmacārin describes someone who is practising the Dharma. Dharmacārin is the stem or uninflected form and therefore gender neutral. I have argued, so far unsuccessfully, that the WBO should adopt this usage rather than the gender specific terms.

Reading

• Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha : a Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Boston : Wisdom Publications.
  
• Gonda, J. 1966. Loka : World and heaven in the Veda. Amsterdam, Noord-Hollandsche U.M.
• Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey : Curzon.

See also: To be or not to be : the problem with ontology. Jayarava's Raves 31-10-2008


image: World map from ancientworldmaps.blogspot.com

To be or not to be : the problem with ontology.

When Hamlet was pondering the question of "to be or not to be" he was contemplating ending his sea of troubles by taking his own life. This nicely delineates the Western attitude to 'being': despite the fact that 'to be' is a verb something either is or is not. One of the fundamental religious questions of our time is: "does God exist?" This question is regularly covered by the UK media, and has recently been the subject of heated and vituperous public debate. The study of what exists is known as ontology. Etymologists tell us that onto is from a present participle, ōn, of the Greek verb eimi 'be'. In the West the question of the nature of being is one that goes back to the ancient Greeks.

The question of ontology is at the forefront of the western mind, however for Buddhists it seems to me that ontology - questions of being - present a translation problem on the one hand, and a methodological problem on the other.

The translation problem emerges when we begin to examine ancient Indian equivalents of the verb "to be". These have roots in as-, bhū, or hū - although actually hū is really a dialectical variant on bhū. When you want to assert something definite and concrete - "there is a something" in Pāli you tend to use the root as. The form atthi is common - for instance atthi ajāti - "there is the unborn". Bhū is also frequently translated as "he is, there exists" and yet PED also says about bhū that it means "to become". The Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary gives a much wider sense for bhū: "to become, be, arise, come into being, exist, be found, live, stay, abide, happen, occur" and so on. In Sanskrit bhāvanā can also mean "the saturation of any powder with a fluid, steeping, infusion". Bhū is the root of words meaning "beings" (as in human beings; bhūt in Hindi are ghosts!) and is also used in the part-participle to indicate the content of insight: yathābhūta-ñāṇādassana which I have suggested might be translated as the knowledge from seeing the process of becoming.

Clearly the ancient India notion of 'being' is far more fluid than our contemporary Western notion (the slight influence of Quantum theory notwithstanding). We see being as a state which is stable and fixed, while the ancient Indian saw being as a process, a cyclic process even. The same root gives us bhāva which in Buddhism carries the connotation of returning again and again to this world over many life times. So where we read verbs from "to be" in a Buddhist text we are apt to misunderstand what is intended. So this is the first caveat: that existence in a Buddhist context is always a coming into being, not an either or. However note that the Sanskrit word satya (Pāli sacca) can mean both real, existing; and true.

The other problem emerges when we take a look at the Buddha's method. The idea of dependent origination is famously summed up by Assaji as:

Ye dhammā hetuppabhavā
tesaṃ hetuṃ tathāgato āha,
tesañca yo nirodho
evaṃ vādī mahāsamaṇo

A standard translation being:

Of those things that arise from a cause,
The Tathāgata has told the cause,
And also what their cessation is:
This is the doctrine of the Great Recluse

We tend to translate "dhammā" as "things" which takes us into the realm of ontology. Now clearly Buddhists down the ages have been at pains to explain that "things" are impermanent and disappointing and lack any immanent noumenal essence (the latter being more relevant to Brahmins - see Anatta in Context). We use examples of "things" being impermanent - cups which break, rivers that flow, and people who die for instance. It is true that "things" are on the whole impermanent. But careful observation tells us that actually many things are quite stable, and some objects may well not change noticeably in our lifetimes - geological time-frames in particular stretch to hundreds of millions of years, with changes noticeable only on the scale of millions of years - something which would not have been knowable in the time of the Buddha. To the ancients geological features would have appeared unchanging and timeless. However what can and does change all the time is our relationship to, and experience of, objects of the mind and the senses. It is this subjective aspect of experience which constantly changes even when the object does not!

In any case as a technical term dhammā does not indicate "things" as such, that is dhammas are not external independently existing objects, but the objects of manas, the mental sense. Dhammas are mental phenomena. As such their ontological status becomes difficult to define - is a thought or a sensation existent or non-existent? Or perhaps neither existent nor non-existent, or perhaps both? Or none of the above? The Buddha's stellar successor Nāgārjuna made it clear that the terms existent and non-existent do not apply to dhammas. This is sometimes seen as paradoxical, but the difficulty can usually be found in a wrong understanding of what a dhamma is. The statement has profound implications, but is not at all mystical, in fact is it quite pragmatic.

Sangharakshita has pointed out the methodological advantages of basing the teaching of Dependent Arising on an experience - especially the experience of suffering (Sangharakshita p.142 ff). It is because we are intimately acquainted with experience, we all suffer to some extent, and experience is less likely to throw up a lot of arguments about definitions. I take this a little bit further and suggest that the Buddha fully intended that his principle be applied to experience rather than the objective pole of experience. Early Buddhism tacitly acknowledges a distinction between the mind and it's objects, but this is not the same as a separation. In fact the one cannot be experienced without the other. So I am arguing for a distinction with a methodological benefit, not for a physical and metaphysical absolute.

Now if we take dhammas as having a firm ontological status, one way or the other, or even if we get caught up in trying to define that status, a number of problems emerge. If dhammas are considered real in any concrete sense then that suggests that we are experiencing a sort of stable external reality when we have an experience. We become concerned with questions about the nature of that external reality: like establishing once and for all "does god exist?"; or the allied question "how did the universe begin?" These have no bearing on what we should do now about suffering. Look at the resources in terms of time and energy that goes into these enterprises - how many books and lecture tours recently have been devoted to this stupid argument that no one can win. You can't prove that God doesn't exists even when God is plainly irrelevant. You can't prove that God does exist - at best you have an experience that you might label an experience of divinity. And yet quite intelligent people try to convince each other they are right - right and wrong become absolutes when you believe in really existent "things" behind experience. Belief in reality leads to fixed ideas about anything - canons of literature or law for instance. It also leads to follies such as the millions spent on trying to work out how the universe started. There may be some minor spin-off technologies that filter down to the us regular folk, but how does it help us to deal with our own suffering to know if the Higg's Boson is "real" or just a convenient mathematical fiction?

If dhammas are considered as absolutely un-real then all experience is just an illusion. Nothing really matters, nothing really happens. It opens the way to nihilism and to amoralism. If everything is illusion then there is no reason to favour moral action over immoral. This view is less common in the West. Our nihilism seems to emerge as a reaction against the failure of our belief in reality, that is through disillusionment rather than a positive belief in unreality or illusion. We want to believe in reality, but experience the disappointment this belief brings.

The many philosophies that are critiqued by the Buddha in the old texts (which we assume to have existed amongst his contemporaries) were not the result of things being real or unreal, existent or non-existent - they were the result of someone believing they were real or unreal. Eternalism and nihilism are views about experience. We frame the debate in terms of the nature of reality because that is our Western bias - we believe in reality, and we haven't fully taken on board the Buddhist teaching. But whatever reality might be like, our working ground is experience. If we want to go beyond experience then we need to examine experience itself, need to focus our attention on the process of experiencing - this is what the texts and the more genuine traditions indicate again and again. Then through knowing directly for ourselves the nature of experience we can give up on views about the world, because our theories cease to be relevant to the task at hand.

The "to be or not to be" habit is a difficult one for us to break. We think that things exist or not, and this spins us off into other either/or oppositions. We think there is right and wrong for instance that is distinct from our experience of positive and negative results. We find it hard not to think in these terms, and in terms of definite "things". Because we hardly even see that we layer our experience with these concepts, it is difficult to see that we are doing it. It's really only through disciplined meditation and reflection that we can break the habit. Once we let go of the "to be or not to be" habit a whole range of new possibilities open up to us.



Reference

• Sangharakshita. 1993. A Survey of Buddhism : it's Doctrines and Methods Through the Ages. 7th ed. Glasgow : Windhorse Publications.

image: Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, Alternate Film Guide