Meier's Historicity Criteria

Historians of Buddhism face a difficult task, since the further we go back in time the sketchier the evidence of Buddhism is. Before about 500 CE there are few certainties and this is ostensibly a millennium after the life of the Buddha. Let me give an apposite example. It is widely asserted that the Pāli suttas are the oldest Buddhist texts we possess. This is largely based on a tradition found in the Dīpavaṃsa (a religious text) that the suttas were written down in Sri Lanka around the beginning of the Common Era. That is to say, the idea that Pāli texts were being written down at that time comes from a Pāli text; it comes from within a religious tradition and has not been corroborated.

When we turn to archaeology, however, we get a very different story. The oldest extant Pāli document is from the sixth century CE, while the oldest complete sutta is from the ninth century CE. By contrast, we have a partial and damaged manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā from the first century CE. The oldest extant Prajñāpāramitā text is some 500 years older than the oldest Pāli text. Moreover, Prajñāpāramitā was also likely an oral tradition at first and, in my opinion, its origins lie in the pre-Buddhist forms of meditation leading to the cessation of sensory experience.

So which literature is really older? Which evidence is more reliable when it comes to history, religious tradition or archaeology? These are the kinds of questions that historians of religion seek answers to. The efforts broadly fall into two main processes: hermeneutics and criticism. Hermeneutics seeks to establish the authority of the text, based on its history, sources, and relations with tradition. Criticism, sometimes "higher criticism", seeks to establish the authenticity of the text based on the language and interpretation of the text.

Unfortunately, when historians of Buddhism write about this, each of them takes an ad hoc approach, eschewing formalised methods of evaluation and interpretation. This can rise to the level of a rejection of the concept of "methodology". My mentor Richard Gombrich, for example, likes to rail against methodology and says that his method is simply "conjecture and refutation". (The young Gombrich is credited as a proof-reader in Karl Popper's 1963 book Conjectures and Refutations). There's nothing wrong with this, per se, but it is too general to be useful in defining methods. In dealing with, say, the historicity of a given person we are often commenting on individual phrases and even words.

In the typical Buddhism Studies history, each piece of evidence, each relevant phrase, is presented and evaluated on an ad hoc basis. In some cases the reader faces a veritable avalanche of "facts" that are supposed to persuade the reader of the authenticity and authority of the words in question. Since each data point is assessed on a unique basis, the critical reader has the extremely laborious task of addressing each point individually. The idea here is to overwhelm the reader with evidence that is difficult to assess.

The ad hoc nature of hermeneutics in Buddhism Studies can be juxtaposed with the highly formalised and structured approach found in Christian Studies. This is partly due to the Protestant doctrine that everyone should read and interpret the Bible for themselves, and partly to the very strong feeling that everyone should come to more or less the same conclusions about the Bible. One way to accomplish both is to specify what methods are valid.

There are some works on Buddhist hermeneutics, but, as far as I can see, these relate to how ancient Buddhists practiced hermeneutics, not to how we as Buddhists and/or scholars should evaluate the historicity of Buddhist texts in the present. Moreover, it has become fashionable for Theravādin monks to write apologia for the authenticity of the Pāli texts. These efforts are quasi-scholarly. The authors have massive, unacknowledged bias in favour of traditional Theravāda beliefs, but beyond this proceed in a scholarly fashion to produce quasi-scholarly works that confirm their most cherished beliefs.

We see the same lack of insight in Nāgārjuna studies where apologist scholars uncritically adopt Nāgārjuna's worldview and then argue for the modern relevance of his conclusions. We almost never see a Nāgārjuna scholar doing the basic philosophical work of identifying the underlying assumptions of Nāgārjuna and putting them to the test. Nāgārjuna's definition of "real", for example, insists that real objects are permanent and unchanging. Since no object of any kind is permanent or unchanging, no objects are real. What we think of as "the real world" is, in fact, merely an illusion or a delusion, or perhaps both but, anyway, nothing really exists, since everything is contingent on something else. As a definition of "real" or "reality" this is completely incoherent, since it assumes from the outset that "real" is a meaningless category. Those who claim that Nāgārjuna "has no view" are simply blind to the axioms of Nāgārjunian thought because they have internalised the dogma and no one ever talks about it. No one ever talks about the way that Nāgārjuna distorts Buddhist thought away from established norms of the time or what might have prompted this.

The point is that there are no formal hermeneutics for Buddhists or scholars to apply. The only attempt to articulate something like this can be found in Jan Nattier's (2003) book A Few Good Men. However, Nattier provides no references for her "hermeneutic principles" meaning that the task of finding out about them is left to the reader. While I have found it very useful to have Nattier's articulation of these principles, I now want to use them in my work. Citing Nattier would probably satisfy most Buddhism Studies scholars, but I wanted to know more about where they came from.

To cut a long story short, the ideas like "the principle of embarrassment" come from Christian theology, especially from Protestant New Testament scholars concerned with the historicity of Jesus. Once I gave up searching for this ideas in a Buddhism studies context, things got a lot easier. One source in particular was repeatedly cited by authors who write on this topic:

Meier, John P. (1991). A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 4 Vol. New York: Doubleday.

In Meier we find a clear exposition and evaluation of the most common and/or useful criteria by which theologians have applied to the idea of an historical Jesus. While the obvious comparison might be the historicity of the Buddha, at present I'm more interested in Xuanzang as an historical character. The history of Xuanzang is typically—in a book like Sally Wriggins' (2004) The Silk Road Journey with Xuanzang—based on naïve readings of a narrow range of sources. I have been reading and making notes on a whole series of articles by Max Deeg critiquing the naïve use of historical sources for the life of Xuanzang. I'm also thinking about Jeffrey Kotyk's (2019) article that compares Buddhist and state histories and argues that, at the very least, we cannot understand Xuanzang as an historical character without considering all of the evidence. And into this mix has dropped the fascinating book chapter by Liu Shufen which argues for a very different picture of Xuanzang's later years under Emperor Gaozong.

Briefly, Liu (2022) argues that Xuanzang was held under house arrest by Gaozong for a number of years, and that during this time he was denied qualified assistants to help with translations. Indeed, his translation output dropped precipitously after the death of Emperor Taizong in 649. Moreover, Gaozong appointed a board of censors empowered to change Xuanzang's translations as they saw fit. These observations are based mainly on passages in the hagiography of Xuanzang attributed to Yancong (T 2053).

What I eventually want to do is write an article in which I analyse the historicity of Xuanzang according to criteria that I will state at the outset and apply even-handedly. To this end, I will here articulate Meier's hermeneutic criteria and give examples from my own published works or closely related publications. Meier articulates five primary and five secondary criteria which are tuned to recovering reliable historical information about Jesus from the Bible (and thus will require some tweaking for use in a Buddhist context).

Meier's Criteria

Primary criteria

1. the criterion of embarrassment
2. the criterion of discontinuity
3. the criterion of multiple attestation [aka corroboration]
4. the criterion of coherence
5. the criterion of rejection and execution [specifically related to reports of Jesus violent death]

Secondary criteria

1. the criterion of traces of Aramaic
2. the criterion of Palestinian environment
3. the criterion of vividness of narration
4. the criterion of tendencies of developing synoptic tradition
5. the criterion of historical presumption.

Primary Criteria

1. Embarrassment

When religieux write about their religion, they quite naturally portray it in the best possible light. Accounts of historical figures become hagiographies (from the Greek hagios "sacred, saintly"), that is, they are idealised accounts in which the characters become idealised vehicles for the values of the author. Thus in many Buddhist texts the Buddha is unfailingly good. He is not simply good, but his behaviour in the stories defines for Buddhists what good behaviour is. Scholars call this aspect of texts normative; it defines the norms of behaviour for Buddhists. This does not mean that Buddhists ever behaved the way the Buddha is portrayed as behaving. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the Vinaya to suggest that Buddhist monks were every bit as problematic as other human beings (I'll come back to this).

So, for example, when we read (per my 2004 article on the attitudes to suicide in Pāli suttas) that the Buddha taught a group of monks to meditate on death before going on retreat. On returning from retreat the Buddha finds that the monks have all committed suicide. Whoops. This reflects badly on the Buddha. It is an embarrassment. As a commentator, Buddhaghosa was obviously embarrassed, for example, and concocts a fanciful story in which it is secretly a good thing that the Buddha taught those monks the practice that drove them to suicide.

Another example of this is the story from the Ambaṭṭa Sutta in which the Sakya tribe are revealed to have practiced sibling incest marriages in the past (see Attwood 2012). Across Indian culture there are very strong social prohibitions on sibling incest (though in some parts of India first cousin marriages were and are common). This story doesn't simply reflect badly on the Buddha's tribe. It is one of the most taboo of all social conventions. "Sister-fucker" (Hindi bhenchod) is a very heinous insult for a man in modern India. So no one is going to simply make up a story about their ancestors practising sibling incest.

The criterion of embarrassment applied here makes the idea that Sakya's practiced sibling-incest marriages seem plausibly historical. In my article, I contrasted the strength of the incest taboo in India with the practice of sibling-incest marriages amongst Persian royalty as a way of consolidating power. Persian kings marrying their sisters may well have been following the example of Egyptian royalty who also practiced this.

However, this criterion has limitations. Clear cut cases of embarrassment are rare in religious literature for obvious reasons. Even if the embarrassing fact is true, there is no need to blurt it out. There are things that we simply don't talk about. So while we think this criterion is useful, there are not that many times we can apply it.

Moreover, what seems embarrassing for us may not have been embarrassing for the author. It is common to see people who encounter the myths of Buddhism to see the going forth of the Buddha in the standard account of his life (according to say the Lalitavistara or the Mahāvastu) in a negative way; the Buddha is seen to abandon his wife and baby to go off and become a wandering mendicant. This is sometimes seen as an indictment of his moral character. Even if we grant historicity to the myth of the Buddha we have to see the leaving home in context. In that version of the story, the Buddha lives with his family in a palace. The wife naturally, according to millennia old practice, goes to live with her husband's family. In that palace, Yasodharā lacks for nothing. She lives in luxury. Later, in this version of the story, the Buddha returns home and teaches Yasodharā and Rahula how to be liberated themselves. So it all turns out well in the end and there is no "embarrassment". We might go further and point out that other sources of biography, notably the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, make no mention of the wife and baby, the Buddha appears to be an unmarried youth and, what's more, his mother lives to see him leave home rather than dying in the first week of his life." It is unlikely that the authors of either account thought of these details as embarrassing. It is only modern sensibilities that make it so.

2. Discontinuity

The idea here is to identify words or deeds attributed to an historical character that cannot be derived from their milieu or from later development of their religion. If we could identify such speech or actions in Buddhist texts, we might feel justified in supposing these to be attributable to the authors of the texts.

The problem for Buddhism is that its not a linear development from an existing culture. The authors of the texts attribute authorship to the Buddha. We only know the Buddha from normative Buddhist texts, since there are no contemporary records from other traditions that mention Buddhism or Buddhists.

The early Buddhist texts are the "Old Testament" of Buddhism, so, unlike New Testament scholars arguing about Jesus, there is no clear backdrop from which the Buddha emerged. That said, it is obvious that early Buddhists did draw on existing culture in formulating Buddhism. The presence of deva and asura figures is clear evidence of Brahmanical influence. The Buddhist doctrine of karma is likely an adaptation of an existing Jain doctrine. Mythic figures such as Yakkha and Nāga seem to be non-Indo-European and borrowed from some pre-existing chthonic animistic tradition. As I have noted (along with Anālayo), it seems very likely that key Buddhist meditation practices (leading to the āyatana states and to śūnyatā-samādhi) were also borrowed from a pre-existing tradition. There is also Michael Witzel's idea, articulated in my article (2012), that Buddhists borrowed from Iranian tradition.

This criterion will be much more difficult to apply in a Buddhist context, simply because the relations between Buddhists and their milieu were complex, but reliable sources don't exist. We are guessing a lot of the time. Moreover, the literature that later traditions produced was huge compared to the Bible.

A potential example is the word paṭiccasamuppāda. This word does not derive from existing traditions, so far as we have evidence of them. Such evidence as we have is extremely sketchy, however, and arguments from absence are weak. However, what about this word insists that the Buddha rather than the followers of the Buddha coined it?

Another problem that I don't think theologians face is that the first literature we meet is already translated, edited, and organised. In other words, the early Buddhist texts are the product of considerable literary effort on the part of early Buddhists. As already noted, the actual dates of the composition of the Pāli sutta are simply guesses based on normative traditions. The archaeology of Pāli texts does not begin until the 6th century CE.

3. Multiple Attestation or Corroboration

This criterion seems fairly self-evident: a historical event is more plausible if it is mentioned in two or more different sources.

A feature of Liu's (2022) thesis about Xuanzang is that the Yancong Biography contains numerous "facts" about him that are not recorded elsewhere. Liu appears to argue that in these cases the Biography is more valuable as an historical source. The criterion of multiple attestation, or what Nattier calls the "principle of corroboration", tells us the opposite. Where details are included in the Yancong Biography but not corroborated by other sources we must judge such details to be less plausible. This is is also Jeffrey Kotyk's (2019) criticism of the use that scholars have made of the Biography.

On the other hand, Kotyk (2019) notes the existence of another source for an event that is recorded in the Biography, namely the gift of a Heart Sutra in gold ink, accompanied by a presentation case (dated 26 Dec 656). This event occurs in a letter (often referred to by Sinologists as a "memorial") sent by Xuanzang to Gaozong to celebrate the first month of life of a royal prince born to Wu Zhao. The same letter is preserved as part of a collection of Xuanzang's letters preserved independently in Japan (seemingly not extant in China). Since this constitutes corroboration, Kotyk is minded to accept this event as plausibly historical. I agree. Furthermore, this is the earliest reliably dated attestation of the Heart Sutra anywhere in the world. The earliest artefact is from a few years later in the form of an Chinese inscription commissioned on 13 March 661.

4. The Criterion of Coherence

This criterion only comes into play after at least a first pass using the first three criteria. The aim is to establish a baseline of style or behaviour that allows us to compare a new passage with our existing understanding and judge how well it fits into the existing whole.

In a sense, this is a particular case of what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls the hermeneutic circle. Understanding the whole requires us to first understand the parts. But in order to fully understand each part, we have to know what contribution it makes to the whole. Each iteration clarifies our understanding of how it all fits together and what contribution each part makes.

The problem for Buddhists is, again, the complexity of Buddhist sources.

5. The Criterion of Rejection and Execution

This one is clearly specific to Christianity. The idea here is that the Jewish and Roman authorities would not have condemned and executed Jesus if they did not have cause. However, I'm not entirely sympathetic to this one. The Romans in Palestine are an example of authoritarian control by an foreign occupying power. Authoritarian regimes don't need logical reasons to persecute groups or individuals. As we know, such regimes routinely carry out show trials in which innocent individuals are convicted of crimes and punished. The idea that the Romans executed Jesus for cause is part of Christian mythology, but it's not corroborated by Roman sources. Tacitus is often mentioned as a source, but his mention of Jesus being executed by Pilate was written in 116 CE, a century after the fact. And Tacitus does not mention his sources.

A parallel here might be discerned in Buddhist discussions of the Buddha's last meal. The Parinibbāna Sutta appears to show him eating some dish which gave him food poisoning and led to his death. The criterion of embarrassment makes this detail seem a little more plausible, since being killed off by food poisoning is a rather ignominious death for a saint.

Secondary Criteria

1. Traces of Aramaic

The New Testament was written in koine Greek. Thus when we see traces of Aramaic, supposedly the language spoken by Jesus, this makes a given statement seem more authentic. As Meier immediately says, there are "serious problems" (178) with this criterion.

We see a similar analysis of Pāli, in which we often see evidence of another Prakrit which is close to the language used for the Asoka edicts in Magadha and for this reason called Magadhī. We see examples of Magadhī case endings in particular.

As in the case of Aramaic features in the Greek New Testament, the occurrence of Magadhī case endings in Pāli has been interpreted as evidence of the antiquity and therefore authenticity of the texts where they occur.

2. Palestinian environment

The idea here is that details in stories about Jesus that reflect the known customs, beliefs, and practices associated with Palestine in the first century, are more likely to be authentic. But it is easy for an author to interpolate such details from their own memory, from oral tradition, or from other sources.

The problem here, for Buddhism, is that we only have normative Buddhist sources for this. There is no contemporary literature that we can draw on. All we have for comparison is scant and fragmentary evidence from archaeology. Buddhist Stories are, for example, set in real cities. We know these cities existed because we have the remains of them. We can still visit the ruins (as I have done).

This criterion is more useful negatively. For example, we may say that the appearance of foreign ideas and customs should make us sceptical. As noted above, some of my speculations about the possibility that certain details of Buddhism might be explained if the Sakya tribe had originally come from Iran. Note that this is not the same as relating the Sakya tribe to the Iranian Saka tribe (no, the Sakya were not Scythians).

3. Vividness of narration

This criterion supposes that the kinds of vivid descriptions that we see of Palestine in some Biblical stories indicate an eyewitness account.

The problem here is that supplying vivid details is something that any competent storyteller does to make their account seem more plausible. The example that immediately comes to mind is the fact that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street, Marylebone, London. This address was not real at the time, although the road has since been extended and now does have a 221. The Sherlock Holmes Museum can be found at 239 Baker St. Again, museums are generally the place where we store and display historical artefacts. But Sherlock Holmes is ahistorical, he's a fictional character.

In his paper Has Xuanzang ever been in Mathura?, Max Deeg notes that a number of vivid accounts in Xuanzang's Record of the Western Regions, are not based on first hand accounts. Xuanzang did not go to Mathura, despite providing a vivid description of it.

4. Tendencies of developing synoptic tradition

Maier Considers this principle "highly questionable". This is because it involves subjective opinions about the internal development of the gospel literature. There were, for example, more Aramaic expressions and syntax in the earlier gospel by Mark, that were gradually eliminated in Matthew and Luke.

There is an exact parallel with Buddhist literature featuring Prakrits gradually being Sanskritised. Early Buddhist texts were composed in various Prakrits, but these tended to become standardised and increasingly Sanskritised. In some texts there is an argument as to whether they reflect a Sanskritised Prakrit, or a Sanskrit with some Prakrit features. And of course there are, by the fourth century, texts composed in Pāṇinian Sanskrit. And after this, Buddhists once again began to use Prakrit. Notably, many dhāraṇī appear to have been composed in a Sanskritised Prakrit, i.e. they have Sanskrit words, with an archaic Prakrit case ending in -e. A good example is the dhāraṇī in the Heart Sutra which uses the Prakrit masculine nominative singular -e ending: gate gate pārasaṃgate bodhi svhāhā. Note that bodhi is also in the nominative singular and svāhā is now considered indeclinable.

The problem for Buddhists, as for Christians, is that constructing such internal chronologies that have no corroboration from external sources is speculative and subjective. All too often Buddhists work on the axiom "older is more authentic" and the people claiming to have discovered internal structures and developments are apologists for a sectarian tradition whose identity and livelihood are tightly bound to the outcome of the inquiry. No Theravādin bhikkhu, for example, is going to undermine Theravāda orthodoxy, since in doing so they risk expulsion from their order or worse, they risk talking themselves into apostasy.

So, for example, some Pāli texts contain elements of a living Prakrit that is similar to the language of the Asoka edicts from Magadha. We call that language Māgadhī. This is the Prakrit that emerged south of the Ganga around the kingdom of Rājagāha, then based in what is now Southern Bihar. We get many hints that there was considerably more linguistic diversity in the second urbanisation period ca. 600 BCE - 200 BCE. Arguments are made that the persistence of elements of Māgadhī in Pāli is evidence of antiquity amongst texts. These are combined with other speculative ideas, such as the idea that the use of certain poetic meters was prevalent in older material.

The problem is that the Pāli that has come down to us is the product of both translation (from various Prakrits into Pāli) and repeated editing (which is inevitable in the process of compilation). The Pāli suttas, for example, may well have relied on older traditions in some form, but they reflect Buddhism at the time the suttas were compiled and, even more than this, they reflect Buddhism at the time the suttas were written down. The trouble is that we don't know when Pāli was written down because the only evidence we have is from normative religious texts that have not been assessed using standardised hermeneutic principles.

5. Historical presumption

The last criterion that Meier considers concerns opinions about where the burden of proof lies. One of the things that Richard Gombrich has said about this issue was: "We have no reason to doubt the traditional accounts." For Gombrich the burden of proof lies with those who distrust the normative sources. But this is problematic. If, for example, we take Gombrich's assertion that the Buddha was an historical person, how can we prove that he was not? We cannot prove a negative. Many religieux take a similar position to the historicity of the Buddha, claiming, for example, that the very existence of Buddhism or the literature of Buddhism, is all the proof we need that someone called Buddha lived.

However, Meier notes the standard objection to this approach: "The burden of proof is simply on anyone who tries to prove something" (183). For example, anyone who wishes to assert that the Buddha was an historical person bears the burden of proof.

And, on the contrary, we have the argument by David Drewes that the Buddha has never been linked to any historical fact or event. There is no archaeology associated with the Buddha, and precious little even from that time beyond some sherds of pottery. The argument David Drewes makes is not that the Buddha was not historical. You cannot prove a negative. Drewes argues that there is simply no basis on which to make a conjecture because he does not consider the Pāli suttas to be a source of historical information. The suttas are normative religious documents that primarily reflect the religious ideas and ideals of the authors of the stories. If they are supposed to reflect the religious ideas of someone other than the author, then let us see that evidence. And let us evaluate the plausibility of that evidence according to standardised criteria.

Conclusions

While not all of Meier's criteria are directly applicable to reading Buddhist texts, we have here a coherent account of how some scholars have tried to work with the literature of early Christianity to divine the historical Jesus. In most cases I can see how I would apply such criteria to working with Buddhist normative texts. And have given examples.

These essays of mine are really just my notes typed up into a coherent form. The field of New Testament hermeneutics has thrown up many different lists of criteria and many arguments about which is applicable and to what extent.

The benefits of standardising our evaluations of the historical value of our sources have obvious advantages for scholars amateur and professional, because we have a common basis of evaluation. To date, a lot of the work on historicity is piecemeal; each fact is presented and justified in an isolated fashion so that a refutation of the whole requires a refutation of each fact individually. This makes the arguments for the historicity of the Buddha or the Pāli suttas very arduous and it makes the claims for "authenticity" sketchy, at best. This is the principle advantage of eschewing methods.

The rejection of standardised methods seems to be a conscious thing in Buddhist Studies as though our methods are value-free. A key social studies criticism of science, which also purports to be value-free, or at least value-neutral, is that it is theory laden. Science proceeds from certain axioms and we cannot pretend that those axioms don't matter. This criticism is entirely fair and identifying those axioms has helped to improve the scientific process and make scientific inquiry more rigorous.

It's hard to imagine a more theory-laden scenario, however, than a religious (often one who has given up sex for their religion) writing an apologia for one of the central tenets of their religion. The idea that their writing is value-free or that it is not theory-laden is simply laughable. As Upton Sinclair said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” How much more so when that person, on the basis of their religious convictions, lives in extreme self-denial, is accorded exalted social status, and is praised sycophantically by followers.

And this is the problem that hermeneutic criteria were meant to solve. How can we be confident that anything we read in a religious text has any connection to history in the complete absence of any contemporary archaeology that might shed light on the situation. We examine claims, weighing them against our stated criteria, and then highlight what seems to be the most plausible explanation or narrative.

Such a procedure does not produce certainty, however. We have to treat it in a Bayesian way: using information gleaned from sources to assign finite probabilities to each scenario, and then adjusting the probabilities as new information comes in. Meier emphasises that no single criterion used in isolation would be useful. Rather, we have to view each new piece of information in relation to all the criteria.

Again, this process of going from part to whole and back to the parts in an iterative cycle was identified by Gadamer as the historiographical process par excellence. This is our best way forward in trying to reconstruct history from partial and fragmentary information produced by a community of religieux. And this process is never finished. New information is emerging all the time. And very often this means that we have to weigh up everything anew.

For example, the Chinese origins of the Heart Sutra now seems certain because there is a mountain of evidence for the Sanskrit text being a back-translation from Chinese. How does this knowledge affect other conclusions that we have about the Heart Sutra? If the text is not authenticated as a genuine, Indian, Buddhist text, then on what basis can it be authenticated? Or if we are being more provocative, we might ask, Is the Heart Sutra an authentic Buddhist text at all? If we don't have clear and agreed upon criteria for having such a discussion, then it tends to be a waste of time.

Of course, even within New Testament scholarship the criteria themselves are contentious and contended. Meier's work is widely cited in their literature. Meier values some principles (embarrassment, discontinuity, corroboration) and devalues others (historical presumption). Other authors come to different conclusions. But at least they know which argument they are having and what is at stake. My sense is that parallel discussions in Buddhism and Buddhism Studies are largely incoherent and slaved to sectarian orthodoxy. I think we can do better than a series of disconnected, idiosyncratic asseverations of faith. Certainly, in amateur and professional Buddhism Studies we need to pay more attention to methods and methodology (the study of methods).

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. 2004. "Suicide as a response to suffering." Western Buddhist Review, 4.

Attwood, J. 2012. "Possible Iranian Origins for Sākyas and Aspects of Buddhism." Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 3, 47-69.

Liu, Shufen. (2022). “The Waning Years of the Eminent Monk Xuanzang and his Deification in China and Japan.” In Chinese Buddhism and the Scholarship of Erik Zürcher. Edited by Jonathan A. Silk and Stefano Zacchetti, 255–289. Leiden: Brill.

Meier, John P. (1991). A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 4 Vol. New York: Doubleday.

Nattier, Jan. (2003). A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

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~~

Modern Interpretations of the Khandhas: Saṅkhāra

This is the fourth installment in my series of essays on two modern interpretations of the skandhas. Tilmann Vetter's The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas and Sue Hamilton's Early Buddhism: A New Approach were both published in the year 2000. After the rūpa essay was published I found Rupert Gethin's article: “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma” (1986) which is a valuable document for being a succinct description of what the Sutta-Piṭaka and Abhidhamma say without much extra exegesis or interpretation. 

When I embarked on this task I was optimistic and I thought it might help clarify some things that had long been unclear for me. Sadly, this has not been the case. I am no longer optimistic; very little has been clarified, the methods used by the two main authors leave much to be desired. This realisation comes just as Vetter is hitting his stride and his attempt to explain saṅkhārā and his translation, "impulses", takes up more than half of his entire summary of the khandhas (36 pages!).

In any case, we now come to the khandha of saṅkhārā (The only khandha that is routinely plural). The problem we have with saṅkhārā is that everyone agrees how the word is used, but no one can make sense of why this word is used this way. As Gethin (37) says, the saṅkhārā are "primarily defined in terms of will or volition (cetanā)" and we can relate this to the famous phrase "cetanā is what I call kamma" (AN 6.63). Thus the saṅkhārā are somehow connected to karma (I will say something about this below). However, Gethin also points out that the Nikāyas "describe [saṅkhārā] as putting together (abhisaṃkharonti) each of the khandhas in turn into something that is put-together (saṃkhata) (37). The latter is a reference to the Khajjanīya Sutta that I will also address below. 

Bodhi (2000: 45) tells us that the word saṅkhārā can be analysed as a verb karoti "make" (√kṛ) with a prefix saṃ- that usually means "together" or "complete". In Latin, "to make" is facere and the cognate prefix is con-, so saṅkhāra is very like our word confection. Given the difference between the etymological meaning and the usage in Buddhism, especially in the khandhas, we ought to be alert for our old friend the etymological fallacy (which has been a feature of these essays). Bodhi points to five different contexts in which the word is used. As a khandha, Bodhi translates saṅkhārā as "volitional formations". Another common translation is "karmic formations". Translators who use these phrases as translation are trying to link the two different meanings of the word—volition and confection—in one phrase. The result is rather awkward.

A quick digression on the kha in saṅkhara. If we switch to Sanskrit, the skandha is saṃskārāḥ and through abhisaṃskaronti we get things that are saṃskṛta. But the verb is karoti (√kṛ). The extra s in saṃ-skāra and saṃ-skṛta is there because in Indo-European the root is *sk^u̯er. The s is largely dropped in Vedic and Sanskrit but reappears when some suffixes are added. Sanskrit /sk/ becomes /kh/ in Pāli, so saṃskārāḥ becomes saṇkhārā but /k/ is unchanged so a Sanskrit word like sūtrakāra "the author of the sutra" (where -kāra is also from √kṛ) becomes suttakāra in Pāli. 

 

Vetter

Vetter's method is now settled. He begins by consulting the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79). And this is vexing because, as I have now repeatedly shown, this text is not a reliable source. It is fool's gold, shiny but not valuable. For the first time, Vetter moves deeper into the Khajjanīya Sutta and considers another  passage. Vetter declares there is no good translation into English and instead gives a German translation that he doesn't bother to translate into English. Fortunately, in that very same year, 2000, Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya came out:

Kiñca, bhikkhave, saṅkhāre vadetha? Saṅ­kha­ta­mabhi­saṅ­kha­ron­tīti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saṅkhārā’ti vuccati. Kiñca saṅ­kha­ta­mabhi­saṅ­kha­ronti? Rūpaṃ rūpattāya saṅ­kha­ta­mabhi­saṅ­kha­ronti, .... (SN III.87). 

“And why, bhikkhus, do you call them volitional formations? ‘They construct the conditioned,’ bhikkhus, therefore they are called volitional formations. And what is the conditioned that they construct? They construct conditioned form as form...” (Bodhi 2000: 915)

Note that what is explained here is not the volitional part, only the formations part. Gethin points to a few other suttas that have this formula. But it's a pericope—the same passage repeated—rather than more on the theme. Vetter's explanation looks post hoc to me. The heart of it is: 

saṅ­kha­ta­m abhi­saṅ­kha­ron­tī ti kho, bhikkhave, tasmā ‘saṅkhārā’ti vuccati. 

They construct (abhisaṁkharonti) the constructed (saṅkhata) therefore (tasmā) they are called (vuccati) the constructs (saṅkhāra). 

It doesn't take much thought to see that this is completely unrelated to karma. Vetter says this is difficult to translate. The first part is not. What is difficult is the repeated formula that comes next. In Bodhi's translation: "They construct conditioned form as form" (rūpaṃ rūpattāya saṅ­kha­ta­m abhi­saṅ­kha­ronti). 

We know the agent must be saṅkhārā since the verb is in the 3rd person plural, which makes rūpaṃ the patient and saṅkhatam an adjective or predicate. So the basic sense is that the "volitions construct appearance" ([saṅkhārā] rūpaṃ abhisaṅkharonti). But this is nonsense, even in Buddhism. We have volitions in response to sense experience, especially in response to the positive and negative hedonic qualities of experience. This is saying the opposite, i.e. that volition is what makes form. To repeat, this is nonsense. 

Worse we still have yet to explain rūpattāya. One of the difficulties is that rūpattā is an abstract noun, which I am at a loss to translate directly into English: "form-ness"? We tend to treat rūpa as abstraction in the first place, both as the traditional translation "form" and in my preferred translation "appearance". We know this partly because when we use form in this sense we don't include articles. It is not "a form" or "the form" but just "form". My grammar checker doesn't deal with abstract nouns very well and pings me on this every time. And I think this might explain why Bodhi's translation does not distinguish between rūpa and rūpattā. Effectively they mean the same thing in Buddhist English. I have my doubts that they mean the same thing in Pāli, but I don't understand what the distinction is. 

Unfortunately, rūpattāya is a degenerate case ending that could be instrumental, dative, ablative, or genitive. Not all of which can fit, though, so we have some options: the saṅkhārās construct form through form-ness (ins), for form-ness (dat), from formness (abl), or saṅkhārās construct form that is formness (indirect object). The latter is apparently how Bodhi reads it, but as I say he translates both rūpa and rūpattā as "form". His explanation follows the commentary (2000: 1071-2 n.113), i.e. the passage means that form "becomes conditioned form in accordance with its nature". This doesn't seem remotely connected to the khandhas or their functions. Nor does it link saṅkhārā to karma. Form is conditioned when considered as the object of the eye, but we are talking khandhas. In what sense does the rūpakhandha become a conditioned thing? It is conditioned.

Once again the Khajjanīya Sutta (SN 22.79) is tempting because it appears to offer an explanation of the khandhas that is lacking elsewhere, but once again the explanation turns out to be impenetrable or nonsensical. My view is that the suttakāra did not know why the word saṅkhārā was used in this context and tried to make something up based on the obvious etymology. But this does not shed any light on how the word saṅkhārā is used in Pāli. But it did start an long running attempt to shoehorn the literal meaning of saṅkhārā into explanations of the khandhas. 

Vetter carries on for 36 pages of learned discourse, looking at literally all the ways in which the word is used, with examples. But he never manages a convincing explanation. Working through all of this has become intensely irritating because it appears to be wilfully ignorant of the manifold textual and linguistic problems. Bodhi can be forgiven because he is a senior Theravādin monk with responsibilities and is thus naturally an apologist for the tradition. Vetter has no such excuse for failing to read this material critically. 

So I'm just going to move on. And yet this brings me no joy.

Hamilton

As Hamilton says, "The order of the khandhas is never explained, but they are almost invariably (the single exception being to accommodate the metre of a verse) in the order given above; that is, body, sensations, apperception, volitional activities, consciousness." (72). We are slightly surprised, then, when in the succeeding pages she describes her understanding of body, sensations, apperception, and consciousness, and then introduces "The fifth khanda of volitional activities" (78). Because it is not the fifth khandha, it is the fourth khandha. 

Hamilton describes saṅkhārā as "one's affective response to what one is experiencing" (78). She rightly notes the centrality of karma in Buddhist soteriology and of volitions to karma: "The aim of the path of Buddhism is to arrive at a point when the fuel of continuity is blown out, and it is volitions that are that fuel." (78). 

But affect is not equivalent to volition: affect is a very much broader category. Whether used in a technical or lay sense, affect is a general way of talking about emotional or felt responses to sensory experience (the word literally means "to have an effect"). Volition is related in the sense that emotions usually lie behind actions. The problem is that Pāli doesn't really have this EMOTIONS ARE AGENTS metaphor.  In fact, as I have noted elsewhere, Pāli doesn't consider emotions separately from what we would call cognitive activity. Pāli makes a distinction between physical (kāyika) and mental (cetasika) events, but does not distinguish emotions as a distinct category. 

Hamilton then draws attention to none other than the passage from the Khajjanīya Sutta just discussed. In her account, abhisamkharonti means "to volitionally construct". Except that this is not what the word means or how it is used. Here volitionally is an adverb that Hamilton has tacked onto the verb, in a way that looks tendentious - it suits her argument to translate it this way. 

This is not the only problem we encounter in the details of Hamilton's account of saṅkhārā. In her view: 

"the khandhas that are described as being volitionally constructed need to be interpreted in the sense that together they represent the entire human being. So it is one's volitional activities that determine one's future coming-to-be in its entirety. (80). 

And yet two pages earlier:

Understanding them as the individual physical and mental 'parts' of which a human being is comprised misses two crucial points. First, that it is collectively that they operate, and second, perhaps even more importantly, that what they represent is one's cognitive system: the apparatus by means of which we have all our experiences. The point is not to offer an analysis of all that we are... Rather, they are what one needs to understand about oneself in one is to achieve liberation from the cycle of lives as the Buddha did. (78) 

These two passages seem to contradict each other. And the main drift of Hamilton's argument is in favor of the second reading. The khandhas do not represent the entire human being, they represent what we need to understand in the pursuit of liberation. Specifically they tie the perceptual/cognitive process to karma. 

But of course, Hamilton has the same problem as Vetter in using this passage, i.e. that it is deceptive because the khandhas are not "volitionally constructed". Neither rūpa nor vedanā are volitional. Except, while dwelling in emptiness (suññatā-vihāra), we are bound to experience both without having any say in the matter. We have free won't over rūpa and vedanā if we practice meditation, but we don't have free will.

And at this point I feel like I'm getting nowhere. So again, I'm going to move on. 

How Does Saṅkhārā Relate to Karma?

As we saw above we can make the link between saṅkhārā and karma via cetanā. This is because saṅkhārā are often described in Pāli in terms of the six kinds of cetanā. For example, in the Upādānaparipavatta Sutta (SN 22.56):

katame ca, bhikkhave, saṅkhārā? chayime, bhikkhave, cetanākāyā – rūpasañcetanā, saddasañcetanā, gandhasañcetanā, rasasañcetanā, phoṭṭhabbasañcetanā, dhammasañcetanā. (SN III.60)

And what, monks, is volition? Monks, there are six kinds of intention: intention towards appearance, sounds, smells, tastes, tangibles, and mental events. 

The text switches from cetanā to sañcetanā but there is no discernible change in meaning. But there is no logic here. No one, as far as I can see, can explain why a word the denotes confection can connote volition. Where is the link? The connection between cetanā and karma is much easier. Which brings us back to the Nibbedhika Sutta (AN 6.63):

cetanāhaṃ, bhikkhave, kammaṃ vadāmi. cetayitvā kammaṃ karoti – kāyena vācāya manasā. (A III.409)

Monks intention is what I call karma. Having intended one acts, with body, voice, or mind. 

Hence, volition is karma. As Vetter notes, this is only one way of talking about karma and not the most common. The equation cetanāhaṃ kammaṃ vadāmi occurs only once in the Nikāyas though it is clearly important as it is picked up by later writers, especially Nāgārjuna (in his MMK chapter on karma). 

But how are saṅkhārā equated with volition? 

I think there is a more direct link between saṅkhārā and karma, and this draws inspiration from work by Joanna Jurewicz (2005) on how Pāli might have borrowed terms from Vedic religion. This is made easier if we move the discussion into Sanskrit again, in which case saṅkhārā becomes saṁskārāḥ.

Saṃskāra is a word familiar to anyone who knows about Vedic culture, where it means a rite of passage. In this context saṃskāra means something like occasion or consecration. It is a feature of words from √kṛ that their meaning is highly context dependent. The prefix saṃ- does not just mean "together" it also means "complete" and from this we get the sense of "perfected". So saṃskāra can mean "finishing, refining, perfecting" and it is used in many figurative ways such as "purification, cleansing, preparing, or rearing of animals". 

 There are typically sixteen rites of passage (saṃskārāḥ) for a twice-born Hindu (for an overview see for example, Klostermaier 1994: 183-92). In fact, different texts prescribe different numbers of sacraments, but sixteen is the most common number. The saṁskāra are rituals conducted at certain points in the life of orthodox Hindus, including birth, naming, first haircut, marriage, and death. The rite of passage puts the finishing touch on the stage of life. It helps to refine the recipient's life and helps them attain the purity required for mokṣa. 

As Klostermaier says, "It is through the performance of saṃskāras that all Hindus practice the karma-mārga, the Path of Works" (1994: 192). The karmamārga  was previously introduced by Klostermaier in two chapters (9 and 10) and is contrasted with the jñānamārga (path of knowledge). The karmamārga is prescribed for people (men) who follow the householder's life of that Zorba the Greek called the "full catastrophe": wife, children, house, property, business. The jñānamārga is for those who renounce the household life and seek mokṣa or liberation from rebirth. 

Thus a saṃskāra is an occasion on which karma is performed by those pursuing the karmamārga as prescribed by the Dharmaśāstra texts outlining the dharma or religious duties of someone who follows some form of Vedic religion. Buddhists borrowed this idea and incorporated it with little change into their own doctrines. It has been changed mainly by the emphasis on the internalisation and ethicisation of religion; i.e. the focus for Buddhists was not the external performance of ritual actions aimed at manipulating the world, but was instead internal—volitional—and aimed at the world of experience. If one makes no effort at purifying one's intentions, one performs karma that leads to rebirth, i.e. one follows the karma-mārga. Buddhism holds out the possibility that by purifying one's intentions one does not perform karma, and one eventually brings rebirth to a halt. Not being reborn, one is free from suffering, since suffering is associated with embodiment.

The attempts—ancient and modern—to fit the semantic meaning of "confections" or "formations" to saṅkhārākhandha seem to me to be a red herring based on the etymological fallacy (the idea that the meaning of a word can only be obtained by examining the morphology, the past use, and the meaning of the parts of the word. Because the word is not defined this way in this case, such attempts are at best confusing and unconvincing. At worst they are nonsensical.

In this context saṅkhārā seems to straight-forwardly mean volitions (cetanā), i.e. contributions to karma that fuel rebirth. And since understanding how we create karma is central to Buddhist soteriology, this makes sense.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Bodhi. 2000. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Saṃyutta Nikāya. Wisdom.

Gethin, Rupert. 1986. “The Five Khandhas: Their Treatment In The Nikāyas And Early Abhidhamma.” Journal Of Indian Philosophy 14(1): 35-53.

Hamilton, Sue. 1996. Identity and experience: the constitution of the human being according to early Buddhism. London: Luzac Oriental.

Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism: A New Approach. London: Routledge.

Jurewicz, Joanna. (2005) "Playing with Fire: The pratītyasamutpāda from the perspective of Vedic thought." In Buddhism: Critical Concepts in Religious Studies, Vol. I, edited by Paul Williams. Psychology Press. Originally published 2000 Journal of the Pali Text Society 26 pp. 77-103.

Klostermaier, Klaus K. 1994. A Survey of Hinduism. 2nd Ed. State University of New York Press.

Vetter, Tilmann. 2000. The Khandha Passages in the Vinayapiṭaka and the Four Main Nikāyas. Wien Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Compatibility Issues 3. Buddhism

In the first two parts of this essay I set up a scenario. I made a case for a mind-independent world, arguing that it is consistent with scientific knowledge and not inconsistent with early Buddhism. This dual approach hints at the overall purpose of the essay. I also tried to stress that I don't think we can project the human desire for perfection onto the mind-independent world, so that referring to it as Transcendental, Absolute, or even fair, is not warranted. The idea of an ordered universe is compelling; but why should it be ordered according to human standards? In fact, it isn't. Humans are only important to humans. An important and ongoing intellectual task is to identify the myths linked to such desires—just-world, perfect world, afterlife, immortality, supernatural, etc.—and reclaim them as human desires rather than as properties of the kosmos, per se. The world isn't like that, but we are. On a practical level, if we acknowledge our desires, we can figure out which are achievable and organise things as best we can to achieve them. It's not like fairness is a crazy idea, for humans.

Having established that there is a mind-independent world and that it is neutral with respect to our values, I tried to locate humans wholly within that world. Just because the world is independent of my mind, from my perspective, does not require that there is an ontological distinction between mind and world. There is an epistemological distinction due to the channels by which we gain knowledge. We tend to conflate the classic five physical senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) as providing us with information about the world and treat our mind-sense, that part of our mental activity which brings sensations and inferences to our attention, as providing a completely different form of information. Early Buddhists by contrast placed the mind-sense in the same category as the classic set of five senses.

The opening question of Part 1 was whether my experience was real or an illusion. I've been researching the history of the phrases from the Heart Sutra that begin "form is emptiness" (rūpam śūnyatā). These were, originally, a reference to that familiar Buddhist simile, "form is like an illusion (rūpam māyopamaṃ). There are two ways of looking at the skandhas: they can be seen as categories into which all phenomena—mental and physical—can be slotted; i.e., the skandhas encompass everything and are an ontology or a theory of existence. In some views, this totality (sarvam) is real and in others it is unreal, an illusion. The middle way is to say that this totality is neither real nor unreal, but because it is contingent and ephemeral, it is like an illusion.

Alternatively, the skandhas can be seen as the apparatus of experience or the experiencing apparatus and are concerned only with experience (i.e., with mental phenomena). In this case, the metaphysical question about real/unreal doesn't arise. Experience per se is like an illusion, because (in Western terms) it's all just representations in our heads. Experience is virtual - not real, not unreal. In this case the skandhas are not an ontology, but an epistemology; a theory of knowledge or of how we produce knowledge.

Sue Hamilton has made a good case for taking early Buddhism as referring to experience. And, over many years of reading early Buddhist texts, I have found this by far the most productive approach to them. It also works extremely well when reading the Prajñāpāramitā texts. Where an ontological reading throws up paradoxes and conundrums, many times an epistemological reading is far more straightforward. This impression has been reinforced by discovering certain modern approaches to ontology and epistemology. But all this begs the question...

So What?

What does this account of experience and a neutral mind-independent world gain us? Why insist on the epistemological nature of Buddhist insight, e.g., that the skandhas are experience? The reason is compatibility. And hence the title of the essay. Traditional Buddhism—e.g., the skandhas as ontology—is incompatible with what we currently know about the world. This can hardly be a surprise, since Buddhist ideas originate in Iron Age North India and are developed in a number of medieval Asian contexts. Very little knowledge about the world from these periods (ca. 500 BCE to 1800 CE) is considered accurate or reliable any more.

During the last 400 years in Europe and its imperialist enclaves around the world, we have discovered a great deal about the value neutral, mind-independent world. In 2003/4, Cambridge Buddhists went to India on pilgrimage to walk in the footsteps of the Buddha. Right here in Cambridge many of the giants of the Enlightenment have studied, lived, and worked. Not figures of myth, but genuine historical people such as Newton, Rutherford, Darwin, Krebs, Crick, Maxwell, Eddington, Turing, Goodall... to name a few personal favourites. People whose ideas helped me to make sense of my world. Hundreds of other luminaries across the entire spectrum of human knowledge (and folly) lived and worked just down the hill from here. Why go to India?

A lot of Buddhists, especially Buddhists I know, are powerfully influenced by Romanticism. As such, they can be carelessly dismissive of the European Enlightenment; some of them, rather ironically, use the internet to devalue science and technology. They seemingly forget that, though the Enlightenment did go down some culs de sac from time to time, it did a huge amount of good. For example, the Enlightenment effectively broke the power of the church over all our lives. It extracted concessions for ordinary people in the form of basic freedoms and rights for the first time. Nor did these freedoms exist in any Buddhist country, where totalitarianism was the norm. Power shifted away from ecclesiastical hierarchies to democratic institutions. As new, more reliable ideas began to emerge, superstitions lost their grip on our lives, particularly the big superstition, God. Nietzsche announced the death of God, but it was the great figures of the Enlightenment who killed him. And a good job that was. The Roman Church and its Protestant spin-offs subjugated the people of Europe and the people conquered by Europe for more than a millennium.

But things were no better in Asia or India. Buddhist nation states routinely denied citizens basic rights and freedoms; they substituted the kinds of religious ideologies that made subjects content to be subjects. The idea of karma was used to undermine Buddhists' sense of agency in the present, by insisting that what is happening now is a fate predetermined by how we lived our previous lives. We need to be clear that traditional Buddhism seeks to turn back the clock and take us back to a medieval worldview. The risk with this is that we relinquish the basic freedoms wrested from the church and put an ecclesiastical hierarchy back in charge. The level of sycophantic deference directed towards "venerable" monastics suggests that many Buddhists are all too willing to be subjugated by them. Just as it's important to resist the rise of the far-right in France, the "moral majority" in the USA, and the right-wing nationalists in the UK or India, we have to recognise the regressive and backwards social and political organisation associated with Buddhist nation states and Buddhist monasticism.

What I hope to show is that there is a middle way between embracing the intellectual slavery of religious ideology and the complete, nihilistic rejection of Buddhism. In other words, acknowledging the kind of world we live in, both in a physical and political sense, I want to show that we can easily imagine a Buddhism which is compatible with the modern world, but still worthy of the name "Buddhism".

Buddhism as Epistemology

The account of Buddhism as concerned with epistemology is consistent not only with key features of early Buddhist and Prajñāpāramitā accounts of experience, but also with a number of post-Enlightenment accounts.

On the Buddhist side, I associate the ideas most strongly with Sue Hamilton but, for example, Bhikkhu Bodhi has also commented that the world with which the Buddha's teachings are concerned is the world of experience. It is also a view that seems to resonate with those people I personally know who have made most progress with meditation and insight, though not always with the people who have adopted so-called "direct pointing" methods, with whom I am still out of step. The latter still seem to believe that they have discovered "reality" in their experience, and while this is an understandable mistake, it is a mistake and only sets back the project of modernising Buddhism.

My approach does undermine those streams of Buddhism which purport to be about reality or metaphysics. Buddhism has nothing of interest to say on matters of existence, causality, space, or time. Nor does any religion. Buddhists may have a major contribution to make on the nature of experience and on the role of the first-person perspective in organising experience, but only if we can disentangle it from our narratives about "reality".

Buddhism as ontology is not compatible with what we know about the value-neutral, mind-independent world. When some Buddhists assert that the mind creates the world in the sense that "mind precedes matter", they are clearly at odds with most of philosophy and all of science. Those Buddhists are asserting a form of causality for which there is no evidence, and which appears to go in the opposite direction to "reality". Worse, Buddhist narratives about reality are not even supportable on their own terms (as I have been pointing out for some years now in considerable detail on this blog). When they come into contact with modern methods and knowledge, these narratives cannot compete, except where people positively want magical explanations and are thus willing to be fooled (and I know plenty of people like this). However, if we interpret "world" as the early Buddhists texts clearly did, as "world of experience", then yes, the mind does create that world or, at the very least, is a central element in creating that world. (Note, it's not that Buddhist texts lack a social world, or a physical world. In fact, they use the word loka for all three. But the world we gain insight into is specifically the world of experience). 

This epistemological account of Buddhism is compatible with basic, macroscopic laws of nature because it says nothing about them and nothing that is at odds with them. There are other accounts of Buddhism which have similar compatibility. This is not a monolithic argument for Jayarava-ism. It's a general argument in favour of compatibility, using my ideas as an example of a compatible account.

When we confuse experience and reality, then the result is usually inconsistent with laws of nature, because the contents of our minds, as virtual representations, are not constrained the same way that physical objects are (I illustrated this in Part 2 using the image of pigs with wings). When we correctly distinguish experience and reality, then we gain some wriggle room. Unfortunately for Buddhism, science is very accurate when it comes to the human scale physical world. At the scales of length, mass, and energy that we work with in our daily lives and which our naked senses can take in, science makes predictions far more accurate than our ability to perceive them, and in some cases more accurate than our ability to measure them at all.

When we take Buddhism to be concerned with epistemology we gain in two ways:

1. we gain an internally coherent reading of doctrines that are incoherent under an ontological reading;  and 
2. we gain an accommodation with science as the leading knowledge system of any time or place by stepping out of its way.

Taken together, I submit that these two factors make a compelling case for adapting Buddhism towards an epistemological reading. This is the essence of what I wanted to say with this essay. So the reader could stop at this point. In what follows, I try to characterise in more detail the situation we Buddhists face in the modern world.

Keystones

Some years ago I was obsessed with the environmental art of Andy Goldsworthy. I emulated his efforts, often using discarded objects to create ephemeral sculptures. I began making freestanding arches out of whatever was at hand. A big feature of my four month ordination retreat was using my spare time to create arches from the abundant local stone (some pics here). I also got into making tall thin spires of stone, but I want to focus here on arches. A stone has certain properties: rigidity, density, external texture, colour, etc. The stone I was working with was weathered from surrounding cliffs. Individual stones tended to be fairly flat and had a rough texture. Now, a simple pile of stones does not have rigidity as a property, it is less dense than the stones that make it up, and doesn't really cohere into an object. It's more of an aggregate. When you make an arch you create something more than a pile of stones. You create a new kind of entity that has properties that piles of stones don't have. Archs are structures with emergent properties. 

My method was to erect two towers of stones that curved toward each other until there was a final gap that could be plugged by one more stone - the keystone in arch-making jargon. Up to that point neither tower would be capable of supporting itself, but relied on a substructure to hold it up. Inserting the keystone to complete the arc feels a bit like an act of magic (I know). The two unstable structures become one structure that is stable, there is a palpable shift in the distribution of forces as two things that feel inherent unstable, become one that is stable. The best arches are lifted off their support a little by wedging in the keystone, so that the arch is already free-standing at that point.

No investigation of the properties of the stones would throw up the possibility of making arches if one did not already have the idea of an arch as a structure in your head. The building blocks do not enable us to predict the architecture. This is the fundamental limitation on reductionism with respect to structure. On the other hand, one can analyse arches to see how the properties of the stones, assembled in a particular way, create the new property that enables the freestanding arches to remain standing. 

King's College Chapel

The basic principles of arch-making are old. The Romans were already experts at making them. The physics is all quite well understood and can be described in classical terms. Cambridge and the surrounding area are home to some spectacular medieval architecture. The fan-vaulted ceiling of King's College Chapel is an apotheosis of the architectural arch. The Norman cathedral at Ely is a classic of the type and full of spectacular arches and a dome. However, these days we have pre-stressed, reinforced concrete, steel beams, lightweight metal-alloy cladding, and toughened glass. It's nowhere near as aesthetically pleasing, but to some extent it democratised grand spaces.

Architecture tells us a lot about a society. For example, the periods of self-indulgent monumental architecture in Britain, associated with the Normans and later with the British Empire, were signs of the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a tiny ruling elite at the expense of both British workers and the indigenous people of the various colonies. During the height of the Empire, for example, typical housing for working people was rows of tiny, small-roomed houses, crammed together; built at minimal cost, with the cheapest materials, and little or no decoration. Walls were thin, the houses were not insulated, and many had little or no garden space. Socialising in such houses was next to impossible, so this was done at the local pub for adults, or out in the street for children (weather permitting). Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie were building a network of country mansions, each with vast landscaped gardens, and a staff of peasants, many of these establishments on what was once common land, previously owned by no one but used by peasants as back-up for when work dried up. The huge dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London represents, as much as anything, the cruel inequality of British society, and the avarice of the Church of England at the time. You also learn a lot about British society by noting that the statues lining the walls inside the cathedral are mostly military figures, rather than saints. The role of the military is to protect commerce.

We need to be clear that the meeting of Buddhism and modernism is not like two leaning towers of blocks coming together with only the keystone missing to join them into one harmonious whole. No. While Buddhists are hunting around for just the right keystone to complete the arch from the ancient past to the present, secular modernists have already just dropped a couple of massive steel beams across the gap, bypassing our religion entirely. Mindfulness is already a secular commodity and enlightenment is about to become one (Look up Jeffery A Martin for one version of how this might look, complete with hi-tech gadgets).

Once people realise that they can have the enlightenment experience without the burden of memorising a bunch of words in a dead language, a load of ancient Indian myths, some rather doubtful "history", and incoherent ancient philosophical speculations, then "Buddhism" is going to become an even more niche activity; a theme park attraction or a Asian fetish. Like most people, while I do appreciate the elitist grandeur of the Norman Cathedral, I mostly just want an affordable roof over my head.

As beautiful as arches are, and as fascinating as it is to make them, they no longer serve as structural features in buildings. Where arches are used, they are merely decorative rather than functional. Load -bearing is handled by modern materials in modern configurations. We might mourn the loss of the arch, but no one is arguing that we stop using steel beams or prestressed concrete and go back to using them as functional features of our buildings. Idea on the value of arches in structures is pretty much irrelevant.

Buddhism and Modernism

Some critics of what they call "Buddhist Modernism" complain that the values being promulgated by Western Buddhists are just modern liberal values masquerading as Buddhism. I suppose, to some extent, this is true, but what is the alternative? Look around at societies in which Buddhism is the dominant religion. Look at their values. Most are nominally democracies, but until very recently most have also been dictatorships, very often military dictatorships. Most have been engaged in civil wars recently; many in wars with other nations. Democracy and human rights are not so much embraced by nominally Buddhist nations, as they are imposed on them by external, secular influences (one of the main ones being the cultural imperialism of the USA). 

Here in the West we now take liberal values—such as democracy and human rights—for granted. A couple of weeks ago, 68% or around two-thirds of eligible voters turned out for an election in the UK and this figure was considered "high". A third of the electorate not voting is outrageous when you consider what people went through to get the right to vote in this country! Ironically, traditional Buddhism, unmolested by modernism, might never have produced the kind of liberal values that we hold dear, if traditional Buddhist countries are anything to go by. Traditional Buddhists are likely be fatalistic about their lot in life, about the unfairness of the system, and about who is in power. As often as Buddhist monks protest oppression, they are the oppressors.  

If Japan had won the Pacific War, for example, and subjugated Asia and the USA, leaving the Germans a free hand in Europe and Africa, would we expect to have the UN declaration of human rights? History makes it fairly clear that the authoritarian, imperialist, militaristic government of nominally Buddhist Japan, with support from Buddhist clergy, was not heading in that direction. Communist China was brutal in Tibet, but it would have been much worse if Buddhist Japan had completed their conquest of Asia (which had begun some years before WWII).

So, yes, we Western Buddhists have created a Buddhism that is consistent with our liberal values. But to be fair, we have created it from an idealised version of morality as found in Buddhist scripture, not from the historical values of Buddhist societies. Critics can be grateful for that, because in most Buddhist regimes, critics are not tolerated! We Western Buddhists may be religious, but we're not idiots. To argue that this is a form of modernism rather than a form of Buddhism is to ignore the highly eclectic intellectual history of Buddhism. The critique of Buddhism seems itself to be motivated by Protestant ideas about what a religion ought to be like. Sometimes I think it is ironic that my friend David Chapman touts a modernist version of tantric Buddhism, itself a syncretistic amalgam of various elements of medieval Indian and indigenous Tibetan religion, as a better "alternative" to what he calls 'consensus Buddhism'. On the other hand, he is probably right that embracing the hedonistic tendency of the West is more likely to be successful than the suppression of it required by renunciation-focussed forms of Buddhism. Puritanism still has its appeal to many Europeans (especially in the colonies they founded to allow Protestants to follow their religious ideology unmolested), but it's never been a realistic alternative to the way of life most people prefer.

The Protestant trend in religious critique, combined with simplistic readings of Foucault and others on the idea of power and society, has made Westerners overly suspicious of community. Indeed, it seems to be de rigueur for critics of modern Buddhism to define the social aspects of Buddhism as not Buddhism. Modernists' Buddhism is sometimes narrowly defined in terms of a few elite practitioners with on-going non-symbolic experiences. Which excludes 99% of Buddhists from the category of "Buddhist". Pop psychology buzz-words like "group-think" or "echo chamber" seem to be over-worked at the expense of any attempt to understand humans as social animals. Still, I think Buddhists embracing Protestant attitudes is probably neutral. At least, in Protestantism, fatalism is undermined by the imperative to actually do something about one's faith, something sorely lacking in traditional Buddhism.

It is essential for any modern critic to acknowledge that human beings are social and hierarchical by nature (which is, incidentally, why I am a socialist and not an anarchist). The same is true for all social mammals and many social birds, as well. Yes, some social situations are open to exploitation by sociopaths, but a human set apart from society, alienated from society, is far more vulnerable than one in a group. Isolation is cruel and unusual punishment for a reason. Alienated individuals are prone to addiction and mental illness.

Foucault's notions of power embrace the role of the subject in hierarchical relationships. As social animals we instinctively subject ourselves to the group norms in a trade off for the protection and other benefits that community membership (ideally) provides. Some of the happiest people in the USA live in strictly religious communities. Amongst the Amish, rigid social norms constrain the behaviour of individuals in ways that look oppressive to outsiders. However, an Amish knows that they can rely on their community to a much greater extent than any outsider can on theirs. And in most cultures, this tradeoff of conformity for a very high degree of support is the norm. It is ironic that in secular society, with all its freedoms, inequality is orders of magnitude greater, and so many people appear to have no support at all. The destruction of the union movement, for example, has decoupled employment rates from wages. Employment is at record highs in the UK, while wages have been falling in real terms for 10 years and continue to fall. Divided, we fall.

The embracing of Romanticism and the rejection of science, however, seem positively detrimental to me. Of course, alpha-critic, David McMahan, highlights ways in which he thinks Buddhists have embraced science, but my observation is that the influence is tiny in practice. Those Buddhists who do embrace science are few, and have started to form breakaway movements, though it remains to be seen how well they can integrate the two. They often fail to make the corrective move away from ontological readings of Buddhism, leaving them attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. Or else they throw out far too much in an attempt at reconciliation. 

More interesting are those who have some ongoing non-symbolic experience and have either modified or largely abandoned the tradition to focus on just the elements that appear to directly contribute to non-symbolic experiences. This exacerbates the old tension (I almost said, the old injury) already mentioned, in which the social and cultural aspects of Buddhism are devalued in favour of isolated people doing specific meditative techniques. One of my friends characterises this as the distinction between Buddhism and the Dharma. Some movements are teaching people how to be Buddhists; others are solely focussed on creating non-symbolic experiences. I think we need both.

If a Buddhist group is only teaching people how to act like Buddhists (which, of course, may include a regular meditation practice) then they would seem to be guilty of the complaint often laid at the door of secular mindfulness teachers: i.e., that their program is incomplete. On the other hand, a group that only offers intensive meditation instruction, and no pastoral care or community support, also seems to be incomplete. On one side is the danger of fatalism, complacency, and formalism; while on the other the danger is solipsism, alienation, and delusions of grandeur. Is there a keystone waiting to be inserted? I'm not convinced there is one. I suspect this will be another case of steel beams making keystones irrelevant.

Buddhism and STEM

The rejection of science is particularly problematic for Buddhism. It is true that the scientific project is incomplete. There is a great deal that is not understood. And it is problematic that so much of science is dominated by reductionist ideology, which ignores structure and emergent properties. This seems to be changing. It's mainly physicists and neuroscientists who are obsessed with reductionism. A lot of other branches of science, such as biology, AI, or cosmology, understand that anti-reductionism is required where structures and systems are concerned. Chemistry is somewhere in the middle. We chemists know that everything is made of atoms, but that the really interesting objects are molecules and macromolecules, because they have properties and variety that are not found in atoms. No one designing a semiconductor or superconductor can afford an ideological commitment to reductionism, because the very properties that they investigate are systemic and emergent. Imagine if an architect only ever studied bricks and thought houses (let alone mortar) were not relevant because, being composite, they are not real. That's where a lot of science is right now. On the other hand, it's also where Buddhist doctrine has been stuck for 2000 years or more.

In the clash of Buddhism and modernity, Buddhism stands to lose unless Western civilisation collapses and we go back to medieval or earlier forms of knowledge. I suspect that, in fact, the tipping point has been reached and traditional Buddhism has peaked. Buddhism as a religion is going to be gradually eclipsed by recycled secular presentations of our best ideas (few) and practices (many). However, if we cede the domain of reality to science we gain in two ways. We are still the experts in understanding the world of experience (for now) and we are seen not to insist on the kinds of obviously false claims about reality that religieux typically make.

In his first book on Buddhism, authored from notes for a series of talks delivered in 1954 in India, my first Buddhist teacher, the founder of the Triratna Buddhist Order, Sangharakshita, wrote that he prefered Buddhist doctrine to rational inquiry, in all things (A Survey of Buddhism, Chp 1). Even then, the romantic influence on this thinking is apparent. For example, describing Wong Mow Lam's translation of the Platform Sutra he says:

"Despite bad grammar, faulty syntax and wrong use of words (to say nothing of printer's errors, coarse paper and unattractive binding of the original edition) there shines through its pages a light which is not of this world... (Survey 42; emphasis added)

Sangharakshita studiously ignored science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) throughout his long teaching career despite the advances that occurred during his career, including the discovery of DNA, the integrated circuit, space flight, personal computers, organ transplants, brain surgery, and so on. None of this ever seems to attract his attention. Even when he spoke about evolution (a 19th Century theory) in the 1960s, rather than citing Darwin, Sangharakshita innovated a teleological and vitalist approach to evolution that was completely out of touch, not to say at odds, with the science of his own day (let alone the science of our day). Sangharakshita's layered approach to "reality" under the rubric of niyāma (an unfortunate misnomer that considerable effort from scholars of Pāḷi in the Order has been unable to shift), recently reiterated and elaborated on by Subhuti, incorporates elements of the 19th Century Western thought of Comte and Mill, via the Edwardian figure of Caroline Rhys Davids. However, again, Sangharakshita incorporates no insights from the STEM fields, but simply reiterates his vitalist teleology.

I know I find this frustrating and I'm sure many of my STEM educated friends and colleague do also. I seldom make the challenge direct and personal, but I think this time I have to. The idea of a value-neutral, mind-independent world eviscerates Romanticism. My whole approach is anti-Romantic. And it is a considered stance that I believe is necessary, however confrontational it appears (my motivation is not to provoke confrontation, it is to rescue Buddhism from obscurity). While any influence is unconscious, it is potentially pernicious. This seems to me to be consistent with the early Buddhist criticism of dṛṣṭi or "views".

On the other hand, I have never articulated a theory of aesthetics. Art and music do affect our states of mind. And, if we are in pursuit of altered states of mind, then, for this reason, aesthetics are important. The lack of an articulated approach to aesthetics is something I ought to address at some point (art and music have been important to me most of my life). In an environment in which aesthetics has become synonymous with Romanticism, what would an anti-Romantic aesthetic even look like? But if I have failed to engage with aesthetics, then I'm in good company, because neither has any other critic of traditional Buddhism. 

Buddhism and the Supernatural

A major remaining problem for modern Buddhism is the supernatural. I no longer find anything about the supernatural plausible - it is not required in a value-neutral, mind-independent world. But virtually all religious, and even some non-religious, people do. Many intelligent people are willing to remain, or insist on remaining, agnostic on this matter. I know that many of my Buddhist colleagues and acquaintances are fully committed to supernatural interpretations of experience and structure their self-views around supernatural narratives. The supernatural is a fact to many people and likely to remain plausible to them for reasons I have previously explored on this blog. I find the evolutionary accounts produced by scholars such as Justin Barrett, Thomas Metzinger, Robin Dunbar, and Stewart Guthrie compelling. However, if their accounts are accurate, then factual arguments will most likely never convince believers that they are wrong. The supernatural will remain plausible and will be impossible to eradicate from religion. It will continue to form the core of religion, but it also informs people's views about the world far beyond the religious sphere. Unfortunately, the supernatural involves built-in falsehood, and it can only hinder any attempt to free ourselves from harmful views. 

Meanwhile, our methods and insights are being repackaged even now and represented in secular terms that appeal to a growing number of people who are not otherwise interested in religion, let alone an exotic minority religion like Buddhism.

I suspect that at some point Western Buddhism will split into two broad factions over the issue of the supernatural. If this happens then a lot that is good about the tradition in terms of stories, myths, art, and so on, will be lost. I say this because I think that Buddhism, as presented to Westerners, is not sufficiently in tune with Western Values to ever be anything but exotic, with appeal to a tiny minority. As much as critics complain about the presentation of Western liberal values as Buddhist morality, in fact, many Buddhists are scornful and dismissive towards Western values. Politics (and with it concepts like freedom and liberty) and STEM are seen as outside the scope of valid knowledge. And the view seems to be that once one is enlightened one's values will be radically altered to be consistent with the sentiments of the English Romantic Poets (a bunch of degenerate freeloaders who spent a lot of time getting out of their skulls on opium).

Since science and technology more or less define our modern values, any religion which eschews them or demonises them, as Buddhists tend to, will not grow beyond the 1% that we have attracted to date. And we will watch in frustration as other supernatural narratives, particularly God's love, divine forgiveness, and everlasting life, continue to outperform ours. It's a lot of hard work for quite meagre returns, and not really sustainable. Of course, a diaspora who have nothing left but their deeply religious culture will probably keep the traditions alive for centuries. Judaism shows just how powerful cultural identity can be under extreme adverse conditions. 

Conclusion

In this longish essay I've outlined a view of the world that I think provides maximum compatibility between contemporary knowledge of the world and Buddhism. It requires a considerable compromise on our part. In this last part I've tried to make it clear, using the imagery of arch building, that the task is not simply finding the right "keystone" that will allow science and Buddhism to map onto each other. In fact, I think it far more likely that science will simply bypass traditional Buddhism and leave it behind as a curiosity or fetish for Asiaphiles. Instead, commodified, secular versions of our key approaches to experience will eclipse traditional Buddhism, making much of it irrelevant. All it lacks at present is a sense of communal values, though, of course, the very act of commodifying something strips it of much of its value; and the therapeutic model steers away from creating communities.

I want to finish with a different metaphor. In his book on the canon of Western literature, curmudgeonly literary critic, Harold Bloom (The Western Canon), turns the tables on Freud. Freud had infamously diagnosed many of Shakespeare's characters with psychopathologies. Bloom was of the opinion that Shakespeare had the greater insight into the human psyche, and argued that Freud probably agreed with this, at least subconsciously. Freud was reputed to be obsessed with Shakespeare. Where Freud had diagnosed Hamlet as having an Oedipus Complex—a rather simplistic and gross reading of the character—Bloom turns it around and diagnoses Freud as having a Hamlet Complex as a result of his feeling that Shakespeare had the deeper insight. However plausible we find this characterisation, the idea of a Hamlet complex is one I find useful in considering many things in life, but particularly the potential fate of Buddhism.

Hamlet discovers from his father's ghost that his uncle Claudius, at his mother's bidding, has murdered his father and usurped the throne of Denmark. The testimony of a ghost would not stand up in court, but the knowledge compels him to act. He knows his mother, Gertrude, is complicit, so to confront his uncle is also to condemn his mother which he recoils from. For a while he feigns madness, or perhaps is a little mad, and during this period rebuffs his childhood friend and sweetheart, Ophelia. Things go from bad to worse when he inadvertently kills Ophelia's father, Polonius. Ophelia is so distraught from Hamlet's rejection and Polonius's death that she kills herself. There seems to be no course of action or inaction Hamlet can take to relieve the unbearable tension of his knowledge. Hamlet's attempt to expose Claudius using the play-within-a-play only alerts Claudius to Hamlet's awareness of his crime. Claudius plots to kill Hamlet, resulting instead in the deaths of his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the end, events overrun Hamlet as Ophelia's brother Laertes returns and, prompted by Claudius, accuses Hamlet of responsibility for her death. Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel. At the duel Claudius offers poisoned wine to Hamlet, but Gertrude drinks it instead and dies. But not before Laertes cuts Hamlet with a poisoned blade supplied by Claudius, sealing his doom. Hamlet's dying act is to stab Claudius with his sword, a final act of justice. 

We can define the Hamlet Complex as, when one understands the situation, knows that action is required, but is prevented from acting, not simply by indecision or cowardice, but also by the terrible unintended consequences provoked by attempts at action, and by the machinations of opposing agents. Eventually, events overrun the protagonist, leading to the worst possible outcome. (I'm not sure that this applies to Freud, but I'll pass over that)

To me, Buddhism has a Hamlet Complex. I think deep down we all know that the world has changed and, indeed, is changing rapidly around us. I suppose we might go down the route of the Amish. We might reject the modern world, get off the internet, stop using electricity, motor-vehicles, and modern medicine; we might give up personal freedoms and adopt rigid social norms; and that might be a satisfying life. I've certainly dabbled in it, during, for example, my four month ordination retreat. But we'll never sell this as an ideal which modern Westerners can aspire to.

So here we are. We know that God is dead and religion is dying. We know that fewer and fewer people are religious. And yet, we who are still religious stand by as some promote an identical program but call it something else, and some pick out parts of our program and commodify it. We have good PR to an extent that we don't deserve, but we can't seem to capitalise on it, because we are promoting the one thing that no one wants any more. And yet,with some adjustments we could make it interesting to everyone.

On Twitter this week, David Chapman asked what Buddhists offer the world. We offer a vision of human potential; a practical path for realising that potential; and a community of people who want more from life than mindless consumerism and blind obedience to the dictates of commerce. These are our gifts (ratna) to the world. If we were more aware of the limitations of these gifts (particularly the powerful constraints on who can achieve their potential) and of what we don't offer (an ontology; politics), then I think we would be in a stronger position. Perhaps we can boil it down to the idea that, at our best, Buddhists offer a way for people to experience a powerful sense of interconnectedness; something they crave, but which modern life does not provide. Let's not allow ideology to get in the way of giving our gifts with an open hand. 

~~oOo~~