Buddhism and Western Philosophy : the Fundamental Mismatch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Reading

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

The World and What Exists

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

The Flower Sutta begins like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Reading

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

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


image: World map from ancientworldmaps.blogspot.com