Proto-tathagatagarbha?

image: Project Gutenberg:
Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany.

In discussions on the place of the Tathāgatagarbha Doctrine in Buddhism there is often considerable division. Some scholars defend it as a central Buddhist idea, while others deny that it is Buddhist at all. In the Western Buddhist Order there has been, despite frank and outspoken scepticism from Sangharakshita, a growing interest in Tathāgatagarbha amongst serious meditators, and especially so amongst people who favour formless meditation practices. (see eg Kamalasila below). I sometimes like to tease them about Tathāgatagarbha not being Buddhist and this has lead to some interesting discussions. Recently on a WBO forum I suggested that Tathāgatagarbha was "crypto-Vedantic eternalism" and the response I got was a quote from the Aṅguttara Nikāya (AN), supposedly showing that the idea pre-existed in the Pāli Canon. Leaving aside issues of the authority of texts (see The Cult of the Book and Western Ideas of Canonicity) I decided it might be interesting to look at what it actually says, and at the context of it, to see if it supported the contention.

The passage as quoted to me goes:

‘This mind [citta], monks, is luminous [pabhassara], but is defiled by taints that come from without.’ (Pabhassara Sutta AN 1.49-52 Translated by Bhikkhu Nanananda). A ‘worldling’ is one who doesn’t see this, an ‘Ariyan disciple’ is one who does.

This "luminous mind" is said by proponents of this theory to represent the idea of Tathāgatagarbha in nascent form. As my interlocutor said: "this is not in any way different from what Dzogchen and Mahamudra are getting at, often using exactly the same term."

The citation is to a group of four verses that span two sections of the first chapter of the AN. I decided to do my own translation of 1.51-2 to see what I could make of them. The Pāli goes:

51. ‘‘Pabhassaramidaṃ , bhikkhave, cittaṃ. Tañca kho āgantukehi upakkilesehi upakkiliṭṭhaṃ. Taṃ assutavā puthujjano yathābhūtaṃ nappajānāti. Tasmā ‘assutavato puthujjanassa cittabhāvanā natthī’ti vadāmī’’ti. Paṭhamaṃ.

52. ‘‘Pabhassaramidaṃ , bhikkhave, cittaṃ. Tañca kho āgantukehi upakkilesehi vippamuttaṃ. Taṃ sutavā ariyasāvako yathābhūtaṃ pajānāti. Tasmā ‘sutavato ariyasāvakassa cittabhāvanā atthī’ti vadāmī’’ti. Dutiyaṃ.
(Pāli text from the www.tipitaka.org)

The grammar here is not too tricky and the vocab is also straightforward. My admittedly rough translation goes:

This mind is bright, O bhikkhus. And it indeed is soiled by incidental defilements. That one who has not heard, the worldling, does not know it as become. Thus I say “for the one who has not heard, the worldling, there is no production of this mind”.

This mind is bright, O bhikkhus. And it indeed is released from incidental defilements. That one who has heard, the hearer of the noble ones, he knows it as become. Thus I say “for the one who has heard, the hearer of the noble ones, there is production of this mind”.

[On the translation of yathābhūta please see Knowledge and Vision, 3 Oct 2008]

Verses 1.49 and 50 leave off the second part beginning with "That one who has heard..." So taken as stand-alone verses one can see that something like the intrinsicly pure mind associated with Tathāgatagarbha might be implied here.

My first observation is that the verses are referring to "this mind" - idaṃ cittaṃ - and that since the 30 or so preceding verses have for some time been referring to citta we can take this as a continuation of that discussion. And what do these preceding verses have to say about this mind? They say that the effect of citta depends on what we do with it. For instance untamed (adanta) it leads to great loss. In fact the Buddha says that no other thing, untamed, unguarded (agutta), unprotected (arakkhita), unrestrained (asaṃvuta) brings so much disadvantage (anattho)! So this mind seems not to be something intrinsically pure, as we would expect of an equivalent of the Tathāgatagarbha. The context reveals that this mind is potentially disastrous if not properly disciplined.

My second observation is that this mind is to be produced or developed or cultivated, i.e. bhāvanā - derived from the verbal root bhū meaning "to become", or "to be". Now in WBO circles a bhāvanā approach to meditation where one pursues concentration (e.g. The mindfulness of breathing) is frequently contrasted with the Tathāgatagarbha based approach in which one simply sits and allows the mind to reveal itself (or something like that). So it is important here that the citta in question is combined in a tappurisa compound with bhāvanā - "the production of mind", or as the context makes clear "the development of this mind". I'm assuming that the citta being spoken of here is the same as in the first sentence - i.e. still this mind. Clearly the Pāli text has something different in mind to the contemporary WBO exegetes of Tathāgatagarbha. This mind is something we must develop or produce or cultivate, which does not suggests something intrinsic but extrinsic.

I will mention in passing that both Bhikkhu Bodhi and Bhikkhu Thanissaro note that the commentary to this passage take citta to mean bhavaṅga-citta or the kind of consciousness that links one life to the next. Clearly this would be very difficult to reconcile with the text and seems very unlikely indeed - Thanissaro concurs. Indeed Thanissaro suggests that a more reasonable interpretation would be that "the luminous mind is the mind that the meditator is trying to develop", (AN 1.49, note 1, emphasis added) and draws parallels with descriptions of the fourth jhana.

So if the link here is not as clear as all that, then why is it quoted? I'm in no position to comment on the usage of such terms in Dzogchen and Mahamudra, but I think there may be a link through the idiosyncratic but highly influential LaṅkāvatāraSūtra. In this text the Tathāgatagarbha is equated with the alaya-vijñāna from the Yogacāra model of the human psyche. This Tathāgatagarbha is described by the text as prakṛti-prabhāsvara-viṣuddha [Suzuki p.77] which we can translate as "original, clear, and pure" (taking this to be a dvanda compound - i.e. a list linked by "and"). Prabhāsvara is a similar word to the Pāli pabhassara, but seems not to be the exact counterpart - the underlying metaphor in the former is of a sound (svara) or voice which is clear, while the latter is using a light metaphor. Still there is a possible link here with later ideas of the Tathāgatagarbha as a pure and luminous mind. It is interesting to note that the Laṅkā itself is aware of how much like an ātmavāda (or theory of immanent godhood) this sounds, and is quick to defend itself.

The Laṅkā claims that the Tathāgatagarbha doctrine is taught in order to "eliminate anxiety on the part of the ignorant toward a theory of non-substantiality (nairātmya)" [Suzuki p. 78] - more precisely a theory of "non-immanent godhood". In fact the idea of the Tathāgatagarbha seems to me to be a way of addressing a vital question which we might phrase - "how do we unredeemed sinners get enlightened?" By the time the Tathāgatagarbha theory was invented the idea that one got enlightened on the basis of dependent arising seems to have been lost along with many other early Buddhist ideas. This left the Mahāyāna Buddhists with a very distinct problem and one of the ways they solved it was by adapting the ātman theory of the Vedanta - one can be enlightened because one already has a seed of the Buddha inside one (as it were), or, to put it another way, one is already enlightened but obscured by defilements. This sounds so similar to the Pāli verse above that you can see why the wrong correlation was made. In effect as in the Upaniṣads: you are that - tat tvam asi - except that "that" is not God or Brahman, but a Tathāgata - "one [already] in that state".

So what have we learned? Firstly we must be cautious of translated sentences taken out of context. Secondly there may not be a link between early Buddhist doctrine and later doctrines even when they use similar wording. Thirdly that the Mahāyāna threw the baby out with the bath water as far as early Buddhist doctrines are concerned, and left itself in a philosophical tangle - advocating what amounts to an ātmavāda, and finding itself immediately on the back foot defending the obvious flaws in such an approach. Fourthly and perhaps most importantly we have learned that despite the fact that the Tathāgatagarbha doctrine is flawed, it was and is enormously popular and influential, and the people who advocate are in many ways admirable people some of whom deeply embody the values of Buddhism despite being doctrinally challenged - which is to say that practice and realisation is far more important than winning arguments and saying the right thing in Buddhism! 

References

• Access to Insight:AN 1.31-40; 1.45-46; 1.47; 1.48; 1.49-52.
• Kamalasila Tathatā & Garbha : Wesak Talk UK National Order Weekend and West London Buddhist Centre, May 2004. (I think Kamalasila errs in this talk when he suggests that the Pāli canon usage of the word suñña equates to anything like the Mahāyāna usage of śūnya)
• Suzuki, D.T. (trans) 1966. The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra. London : Routledge.

See Also

In Action and Intention III (2011) I noticed something else about this passage:

Pāli citta is further confused with Sanskrit citra 'to shine'. So when the Buddha says Pabhassaramidaṃ, bhikkhave, cittaṃ (AN 1.51) what most people miss is the pun. Citta means both 'thought' and 'shine' and the phrase could equally be read - 'this thought is radiant', or 'this shiny-thing is radiant'. The context does incline towards reading 'mind', but the ambiguity and pun are obvious to a Pāli speaker.

29 Oct 2014. 

Sujato has done a much better job of essaying this passage on his blog: On the radiant mind.

"[The mind] is not that it is “naturally” radiant or defiled: it is naturally conditioned. When the conditions for darkness are there, it is dark, when the conditions for light are there, it is light. 

and

"This is one of the most common tendencies we find in Buddhist history: that well-known, frequently repeated passages with clear meaning are ignored, while obscure, marginal passages, probably suffering severe editorial loss, are taken up precisely because their obscurity allows one to read anything into them." 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A standard translation being:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Reference

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

image: Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, Alternate Film Guide