Body Metaphors

Portrait of Vesalius from
De Humani Corporis Fabrica
– Source.

In a recent essay, Rumination, the Stress Response, and Meditation (22 Jan 2016), I mentioned the work of pioneering medical researcher Hans Selye (1907 – 1982). He was the first person to describe a generalised response to injury or disease which he termed stress. His name cropped up in the book I've been reading, Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind. That book had already sparked one other essay on the fundamentals of thought and metaphor: Image Schemas, Metaphor, and Thought (8 Jan 2016). So Johnson's ideas have provided me with rich pickings so far. This essay draws on the same few pages in The Body in the Mind as the rumination essay. Johnson argues that Selye's discovery was not merely an advance in medical science and treatment of disease, but introduced a change in the paradigm (my word) of how we think about the body. According to Johnson, Selye moved,

"... from one dominant metaphorical grasp of the situation, namely BODY AS MACHINE (and thus not organic or homoeostatic), to a novel understanding, that of the BODY AS HOMOEOSTATIC ORGANISM. (Johnson 1987: 127)

In this essay I want to take this idea of a change in the underlying metaphor of how we think of the body, place it in a different, broader context, and try to say what it means for how we understand the body, i.e. our own bodies. This essay assumes that the reader is familiar with the concepts of images schemas and with Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor. 

In this view metaphors are not the flowery ornamentation that a poet or orator uses to spice up their spiel. Metaphors are a fundamental aspect of thought that allow us to understand one domain in terms of another. As such metaphors are essential to abstract thought. The source domain is usually grounded in bodily experience. The metaphors that we use for a domain of knowledge place constraints on the inferences we can make in that domain. Metaphors structure our understanding. They are shaped by, but also actively shape, the way that we think about any given subject. Johnson's argument here is that Selye made a leap that opened up a whole new vista for thinking about the body and medicine precisely because the leap involved a new metaphor. His observations forced him to consider a different view of the body that could not be expressed in the existing BODY AS MACHINE metaphor.

I will begin by sketching out in broad brush-strokes how views of the body have changed, looking at some cultural phenomena that could only have emerged in their own era as an illustration of how metaphors structure our understanding. Finally I'll note that, despite paradigm shifts, old metaphors linger and shape our understanding long after the philosophers change their minds about something.

The Pre-Enlightenment Body.

Some initial thoughts about how we conceived of our bodies in pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment Europe can be found in two previous essays: Metaphors and Materialism. (26 Apr 2013), which also references the work of Lakoff and Johnson on metaphors; and Spiritual I: The Life's Breath.  (06 June 2014) which looks at how Vitalism has influenced our ideas of what life is.

Mind/body dualism is often ascribed to Descartes, but in my opinion it goes back to the dawn of human intelligence. Ancient theories of the body involved a pronounced dualistic outlook in which matter is cold, lifeless, dull, solid, heavy, and inflexible; and spirit is warm, vital, bright, translucent, light, and changeable. Value was very much identified with spirit, which survived the death of the body and granted the person immortality (either immediately or after some time) - this is one of the essential bases of religion (see The Complex Phenomenon of Religion 25 Sep 2015). While the body was a special kind of matter, i.e. meat (from an Old English word meaning "food") or flesh, it was still not valued. Indeed under Christianity, all value is based in the afterlife, in everlasting life in heaven, with God. The body in this view is merely a container for the soul. Interest in the body in the ancient world tended to focus on the location of the soul or spirit and with the circulation of breath or vital energy that enlivened the matter of the body. In Greek myth, Prometheus, infuses clay with fire to make living humans. In Christian myth breathes life into inert matter. In the story of Pinocchio the vivifying force is magic. Even vivified, the matter that makes up the body is base and unattractive, and this led to a harsh attitude to the body.

In the Christian and Muslim worlds, punishments routinely involved torture, mutilation, or drawn out deaths and sometimes still do. Extreme punishments like being hung, drawn, and quartered (i.e. hung till mostly dead, followed by being disembowelled, and then pulled apart by horses) were not only inflicted, but were a kind of public entertainment. There's a gruesome depiction of such an event at the beginning of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish for anyone with a strong stomach.

The ancient Greeks, like the ancient Indians, seem to have had no clear idea what any of the internal organs did. Indeed they came up with fanciful guesses at the functions of the internal organs. Their guesses were outrageously and often hilariously wrong, though of course it's wrong to laugh at them because they were doing their best (and because some people still believe in those guesses). For example, the heart was considered to be the seat of emotions or intelligence, though these functions have also been attributed to the liver. Until quite recently no society associated the brain with thought. And so on.

In addition the Greeks invented a theory that the disposition of the person was due to the circulation of four humours (Greek χυμός, chymos (literally, "juice" or "sap"): blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The humours could be characterised as wet or dry and as cool or warm. Blood for example was warm and wet. Black bile cool and wet. The revival of interest in Greece during the renaissance led to Arabs and Europeans taking up this humour theory again. Medical procedures like blood-letting were common when this was the paradigm. As in ancient China and India, Greek medical knowledge was not based on observation, but worked from a theory and tried to fit observations to it. It suffered hugely from confirmation bias. In fact a lot of the time medical practices based on this theory must have slowed healing and even hastened death.

Now textbooks will tell you that these theories have been replaced by more modern theories. But a good deal of the language, imagery and particularly metaphors associated with humours survive in English. Many people still talk as though their emotions are located their heart. Our heart's still fill with joy" or are "heavy with sorrow" for example. We still use images of the heart to symbolise love and affection. Words for dispositions like phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholic are still in current use to some extent (mostly in literature these days). We still describe a peevish person as "bilious"; something that is exasperating as "galling".

From this archaic worldview we also a number of surviving superstitions. One of the most common is that being cold and wet gives rise to illness, causing one to "catch a chill". This is based on the idea that cool and wet in the environment affect the humours causing an abundance of black bile (cool, wet). The idea is given credence by numerous popular culture references - actors in films and television often get soaked and before a few minutes have passed they are already sneezing with sinusitis. Despite the completely wrong-headed rationale and the complete lack of evidence of efficacy, medieval medical practices from India (āyur-veda, "life-knowledge") and China (acupuncture) remain extremely popular New Age treatments for disease. They are especially popular for diseases in which the medical profession is not proficient in diagnosing and treating, which includes many of the stress related illnesses.

So the fact that metaphors in the medical profession did change, with a consequent change in how disease was viewed and treated, does not mean that the metaphors necessarily died out. Sometimes they are like zombies and keep crashing about the intellectual landscape eating brains. Another of my essays on Vitalism, for example, referred to it as the philosophy that would not die.

The Enlightenment Body is a Machine.

With the Enlightenment, some people in Europe started paying attention to the world around them and discarding theories which were based on the ancient guesses of the Greeks (and others). Some of the early successes came in the field of astronomy. Observation gave rise to a new worldview: heliocentric rather than earth-centric. And the motions of the heavenly bodies were discovered to be described by relatively simple mathematical formulas. At the same time engineering was achieving new heights: stronger, lighter materials, allowed the instantiation of designs that would previously have been impossible. The invention of the steam engine in particular not only changed the industrial landscape, but captured the public imagination. The "engine" became a new source domain to make metaphors with. Out of this emerged the new metaphor: BODY AS MACHINE. It was accompanied by the metaphor: UNIVERSE AS MACHINE, but that's another story.

A machine is a contrivance made up of mechanisms that uses an external power source to do work. The BODY AS MACHINE metaphor gave rise to new theories of medicine in which internal organs did particular jobs. For example the heart is a pump; it pumps blood through pipes. This view of the body gave rise to the lesion theory of disease. In this view disease is localised and specific. A disease indicates that one of the mechanisms has gone wrong (but it still has little or no basis in biochemistry). Specific injuries lead to specific symptoms, so diagnosis is about identifying the most significant symptom and ignoring other symptoms. Medicine is the art of identifying and excising damaged parts. Surgery takes off under this view, especially with the discovery of anaesthetics.

In this case it is quite clear that the metaphor is not just a product of the worldview. We don't take up a worldview and then spin metaphors to suit it. The metaphor is the worldview. The metaphor structures our understanding, limits the kind of inferences we can draw, and defines the kind of actions we take in response to knowledge. The BODY AS MACHINE metaphor is an essence aspect of a mechanistic worldview.

One of the phenomena that emerged from this metaphor was Frankenstein's monster: a being made from bits and pieces of dead bodies and (re)vitalised, at least in the movies, by electricity. In fact Mary Shelly based her story on the Prometheus myth, but seen through the lens of the BODY AS MACHINE metaphor. Frankenstein's monster, assembled not from clay, but from body parts scavenged from various corpses, is only possible if the body is a machine, the parts and mechanisms and the external energy source is electricity. The identification of electricity with the vital spirit was a parallel development. Vitalism was undermined by the mechanistic worldview, but those to whom the idea of Vitalism appeals are extremely adept at adapting to circumstances and finding new gaps into which the spirit can fit. 

However, once again, just because philosophers and medical professionals have moved on, does not mean that the public has followed them. Both stories, Pinocchio and Frankenstein, are popular favourites constantly reprinted and rehashed (For example the story I, Robot, a 1951 book by Isaac Asimov and 2004 film starring Will Smith). The popular imagination still seems to see the body in dualistic terms. The idea of turning dead matter into a living being is one that continues to fascinate people, so that even quite crude stories that deal with the issue are fairly popular. Artificial intelligence continues to fascinate the public and researchers alike, because it seems to be the next iteration of the myth.

Hans Selye started out with the BODY AS MACHINE paradigm. He was researching the effects of sex-hormones. He would grind up ovaries and placenta and inject extracts into rats and observe what effect this had on the organs of the rat. What he found was a pattern of physiological changes that was the same whatever he injected the rats with. This ran deeply counter to the lesion theory of disease in which specific diseases caused specific symptoms. His aim was to identify the specific effects of specific sex hormones, but if every sex hormone caused the same symptoms this was incomprehensible in the existing paradigm. At first he thought that he must be failing to isolate the responsible compound. He tried using extracts of other endocrine glands and was dismayed to find exactly the same cluster of symptoms. Eventually he twigged that there was a general, non-specific reaction to the injury caused by the injection of foreign matter into the body: inflammation in particular. He changed his research topic to investigate this generalised response.

In permitting himself to think of a non-specific, non-localised response to injury as such, Selye broke out of the strictures entailed in the BODY AS MACHINE metaphor. For the body to have a non-localised response to a specific injury it could not be a machine, it must be something else. Today we would call this something else a "system" or an "organism".

The Body as Organism.

Although Selye's discovery of the generalised stress response was made in early 20th Century, it was not until his older contemporary, Walter B Cannon (1871 – 1945), published his book The Wisdom of the Body (1932) that the change was cemented. It was Cannon who introduced the idea of homoeostasis, i.e. systems which is feedback to maintain an equilibrium. In this new view it was realised that the body was made up of a number of interacting systems that had evolved to keep the internal milieu of the body within certain limits. For example the body can operate optimally only in a fairly narrow range of temperatures, i.e. ca. 37 ± 0.5 °C. We have processes to warm the body up and processes to cool the body down. Both operate at the same time and work together to keep the body at an optimum temperature whatever the ambient temperature around us is. This idea of homoeostasis is what made sense of Selye's discoveries. He was interacting with homoeostatic processes in his rat victims. The injuries he caused initiated general responses such as inflammation. The image schema underlying homoeostasis is one of balancing opposing forces, as discussed in Johnson (1987: 80ff). And this image schema allowed us to use the metaphor BODY AS HOMOEOSTATIC ORGANISM.

In this view, life is a system of feedback mechanisms that respond to an energy gradient. Most life now uses the energy gradient caused by sunlight falling on the surface of the earth. However, a recent theory plausibly suggests that life got started around deep sea thermal vents where hydrogen gas and methane bubble up through fractured rocks into cold sea water creating an energy gradient that enables hydrogen to react with carbon-dioxide dissolved in the water to produce organic compounds. (For more on this theory see this article or this video)

Identifying the body as an organism, involving a number of interacting homoeostatic processes, enabled the medical profession to recognise diseases through a clusters of symptoms instead of focussing on one defining symptom. The far reaches of this are the syndromes – regular clusters of symptoms that are recognised, but for which there is no known cause or treatment (other than relief of symptoms).

One phenomenon that emerged out of this new metaphor was James Lovelock's idea of Gaia, i.e. the biosphere of the earth as a coherent collection of homoeostatic processes that changed the conditions on the surface of the earth so that it was more conducive to life, and hold it in that state through feedback processes. Chemical and biological processes, for example, keep the temperatures stable and in the sweet zone for the chemistry that is the substrate for life (i.e. carbon compounds suspended in liquid water). Biological processes also keep the level of oxygen steady at a much higher level than inorganic chemical processes alone could achieve. When this oxygen first started appearing as a waste product of certain types of metabolism, it was toxic to most life. Fortunately certain types of bacteria evolved that could metabolise corrosive oxygen; and even more fortunately some of these organisms when on to form a permanent symbiotic relationship with other organisms giving rise to complex cells with mitochondria.

Another area of modern life dominated by the metaphor of the homoeostatic organism is economics. Mainstream economists model the economy in which processes like supply and demand tend produce equilibriums in, for example, prices. Disruptions to that equilibrium are termed "shocks" another term adopted by Cannon. Heterodox economists argue that the economy ought not to be modelled on an organism, but instead be treated as a complex inorganic system, such as climate, using the mathematics developed for predicting the weather and other complex phenomena. However, as Lovelock has showed, on earth climate is not simply a complex inorganic process, it is a homoeostatic process in which living things play an important role in keeping the atmosphere in a state that is conducive to life. So perhaps equilibrium theory is not so bad after all.

Conclusions.

I've tried to show how metaphors for understanding our own bodies have changed over time. No doubt this broad brush-stroke picture is over simplified and a lot more could be said about the body. The idea was to show that the metaphor theory is applicable to the body and provides us with some insight into how we understand ourselves. An important point to try to emphasise is that this theory is not one of metaphor as ornamentation, but of metaphor as fundamental to how we structure our worlds based on experience. 

"Understanding is not simply a matter of belief. It emerges out of embodiment – of perceptual mechanisms, patterns of discrimination, motor programs and various bodily skills. And it is equally a matter of our embeddedness within culture, language, institutions, and historical traditions." (Johnson 1987: 137)

The metaphor  BODY AS HOMOEOSTATIC ORGANISM doesn't simply open up new ways of thinking about the body, it requires new ways of thinking and at the same time places new limits on how we understand the body. It changes the way we interpret experience and the inferences we draw from what we know from experience. The metaphor structures our understanding. 

The key point in all of this is that the BODY AS MACHINE metaphor was not merely an isolated belief; rather it was a massive experiential structuring that involved values, interests, goals, practices, and theorising. (Johnson 1987: 130)

So this change is non-trivial. It constitutes a revolution, the consequences of which are still being played out in the daily lives of people around the world. The embodied cognition theory of metaphor helps us understand firstly, that this is a revolution, and secondly the importance and dynamics of intellectual revolutions.

Some metaphors don't work, because any given image schema does not map onto all possible target domains. This places constraints on how metaphors apply and the kinds of inferences that we can draw. We don't think of the body as a path for example. We do think of the body as a container. The path image schema doesn't map onto the body easily. Within the body we do have nerve pathways, and blood vessels can sometimes function as a pathway also. Abstractly we have metabolic pathways. But the body itself does fit the schema. Therefore abstractions such as "arriving at a conclusion" don't work with the body. Journey metaphors don't really work for the body. They can work for a person. A person may be on a journey of discovery for example. But the body isn't. However, within these limits there is a great deal of freedom. Once the mapping is established, for example IDEAS ARE OBJECTS, then any operation applicable to objects may be applied to ideas. So discovering a new metaphor opens up a whole new dimension for thinking about any subject. 

One of the entailments of the metaphor BODY AS HOMOEOSTATIC ORGANISM is the idea that processes have a purpose. The state of equilibrium becomes the purpose of the organism. The notion of purpose has a huge influence on how we understand our world. Things have purposes. Living things also have a purpose. Many people believe that animals purpose is to be food for people. From an evolutionary perspective organisms occupy niches in ecosystems, which are homoeostatic systems encompassing an area and all the living things in it. Each species, by following its purpose, contributes in some way to the ecosystem. Most humans are happier if they think they are contributing to some higher purpose. One of the successes of religion is that it provides a purpose which unifies and guides the activities of large groups of people. This idea is explored by Ara Norenzayan in his book Big Gods (2013).

States of equilibrium are common images in Buddhism. Nirvāṇa is sometimes characterised as a state of equanimity in which the forces of attraction and repulsion that we experience in relation to sense objects are nullified, leaving the individual in a balanced state (upekṣā) that is impervious to external shocks. If one is not susceptible to the forces of attraction and repulsion then one has attained stability.

This kind of analysis of how we use metaphors opens up important new ways of understanding ourselves and how we understand ourselves. Metaphors are not arbitrary, but they are changeable. If we think of argument as war, to take an example from Lakoff & Johnson (2003), then our approach to discussion may well be very different than if we think of it as a dance.

Recently the metaphor THE BRAIN IS A COMPUTER has become quite popular. It is not the only metaphor, but we tend to understand ourselves in terms of the most sophisticated technology to hand. No doubt in the stone age, people characterised themselves as flint cores that are shaped by the napping of experience until they are fully formed and sharp edged in their prime. But this also means that with age they become less sharp and eventually have to be discarded. In the 1970s Elton John declared himself to be a "rocket man". Nowadays the computer seems like a promising schema. Although to my mind nature makes a better model for computing than the other way around! Quantum mechanics has provided some notable metaphors, but casual users almost always misunderstand what the metaphors represent - for example the "observer" in the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment is not a person, but any physical interaction with another particle (See Buddhism and the Observer Effect in Quantum Mechanics).

This meta-knowledge about the influence of metaphors on how we think may enable us to choose what metaphors we use to describe our lives and our actions. There are as yet very few explorations of the metaphors used in Buddhist texts, and none that I know of that look at how Buddhism is presented in modern terms. As much as I could wish for a really thoroughgoing, excoriating critique of Romanticism in modern Buddhism, I think it might be even more interesting to set out the principle metaphors what we use and what that entails for us. Once we understand that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding, then we might be able to adapt how we talk about Buddhism to make our discussions more apposite.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Cannon, W. B. (1932). The Wisdom of the Body. New York, Norton.

Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981].

Norenzayan, A. (2013). Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Princeton University Press.

Against Merciful Lies

I recently responded to a blog post by Amod Lele (On the Very Idea of Buddhist Ethics) and the point I made was taken up by Elisa Freschi on her blog (Buddhist morality and merciful lies). My original point was that there is a disconnect between karma and anātman, which is not a new theme for me (If there is no self, who is responsible for what actions?). 

I was struck by this phrase "merciful lies", which is Elisa's rendition of the Sanskrit term kauśalyopāya, usually translated as "skilful means", as it applies to telling the truth. The idea of a lie told for your own good is not found in Pāḷi Nikāya (or to my knowledge in the Āgamas either). The Buddha of the Nikāyas does not deceive anyone, for any reason. In Mahāyānsim, this idea of a well-meaning deception "for your own good" is strongly associated with the Saddharmapuṇḍarikā Sūtra or Lotus Sutra (lit. The Lotus of the Good Dharma). In this sūtra we find the parable of the burning house. The world is described as a house that is on fire. We, the unenlightened, are portrayed as children playing with our toys inside the burning house and we are reluctant to leave the house because we are too busy with our toys. The Buddha is portrayed as a father who calls to his children, and when they refuse to respond, he lies to them about having marvellous new toys for them outside. The children run outside expecting toys, but the father gathers them up and puts them in his cart and drives off rescuing them from death. 

I find this repugnant for all kinds of reasons. But on Elisa's blog my argument was lost in the noise, so I'd like to restate it and expand on it here. To my mind there are three main arguments against merciful lies. Firstly the scenario itself is stupid and offensive; secondly there's no need to construct a religion which lies to us, either on historical or moral grounds; and thirdly we all need to take responsibility for our actions and merciful lies by authority figures undermines this imperative.

The Scenario is Stupid. 

The parable of the burning house is just that, a parable. It's a hyperbolic rhetorical device meant to make a broader point through a simple analogy: we are like stupid children; the Buddha is like our wise Daddy. And on this basis many people might urge me to tolerance and understanding. They tend to do this when I complain about myths and legends. After all, the parable is widely admired and repeated, and even praised by the founder of my Order. My response is this: Has anyone actually thought about the intent of this so-called parable? Why, for example, would anyone embrace a parable that casts them as a idiot child, with not even enough sense to get out of a burning building? Who hears this parable and nods in ascent, "Yes, I'm so very stupid, that I need a father figure to look after me"? Well, who, apart from Christians, Muslims, and conservatives. One wonders at the appeal of this scenario in a post-Christian, anti-patriarchal Feminist and Freudian influenced, convert Buddhism milieu. And yet this is one of the most popular stories in a wildly popular text. Whole international sects are dedicated to this one text. This means that thousands of people tacitly accept that we're all really, really stupid and wise Daddy-in-the-Sky (aka Lord Buddha) needs to deceive us to save us from our stupid selves. If we even are selves, but don't get me started on that.

Or is it that we hear the parable, look around us at other people and ascent to their incredible death-defying stupidity? How stupid do we think other people are? I can imagine a priest taking this kind of view, especially the Buddhist sort because laypeople treat them with such exaggerated, sycophantic respect. If you're a bhikkhu, I suppose, laypeople probably do look pretty stupid as they bow at your feet. It's certainly an advantage to a priest for their flock to think him wise and themselves as stupid. But experience suggests this is unlikely to be the case. The priest is as likely to be an alcoholic or child abuser as he is to be wise. Most of them are just ordinary. How many disastrous scandals involving naive people giving up their power and individuality to sociopathic priests do we need before we start questioning this "Father knows best" attitude that they promote? The supposedly stupid lay person is often much wiser than we might otherwise give them credit for. Most of us converts got interested in Buddhism because of a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the mainstream, which is the beginning of wisdom. For many, meeting Buddhism is also the end of wisdom, because they drop one set of superstitions only to take up another set. 

I am among the first to rail against society and write apocalyptic social commentary. I see many problems in society. I see many stupid things going on. Many people making stupid decisions. I sometimes despair at how badly run our world is. But I am fundamentally optimistic about humanity. I don't particularly like most people, but I don't generally think of them as stupid. Most people are ignorant, even the educated, but this is not the same thing as being stupid. An ignorant person can learn, a stupid person has no hope. Most of us are doing our best, but we don't have all the information or the skill set we need (and we're too busy working hard to acquire either). Politicians generally speaking are a special kind of stupid, but they are a minority and we're talking about humanity in general. Even the people making stupid decisions are often doing so from the best of intentions, believing that they are doing the best thing. Truly stupid people are pretty rare. 

Many of us are figuring out how to be happy. Quite a few are studying happiness with a view to being more systematic about achieving it, which is precisely what we need to do. See for example this TED Talk by Robert Waldinger, who tells us that happiness is all about having positive relationships and not at all about working hard. In an increasingly atomised society, this call to pay attention to your relationships looks almost radical. Spend face-time, not Facebook-time, with your loved ones, you'll live longer and be happier. There are plenty of other sensible things said these days on the subject of happiness. Of course some (but not all) of the Buddhists selling happiness are also happy, but, not everyone involved in this project is a Buddhist or responds positively to the religious myths of Buddhism. Secular mindfulness looks more useful and relevant to most people than most of the stuff I learned as a novice Buddhist. I kind of hope it takes over our initial offering of somewhat random meditation instruction and a weirdly eclectic potted history of Buddhism. Better that people do something helpful than learn a bunch of stuff they can't make sense of.

Of course mere temporal happiness is not the end of the story. There are even a handful of people I know who are exploring the higher reaches of liberation. It seems unlikely to me that I, or 99% of the Buddhists I know, will ever join that group. And this is where David Chapman's critique of renunciation-centred Buddhism gets interesting. The argument goes that if few of us are ever going to be able to practice renunciation to the kind of intensity required to make a difference, why continue to use it as the basis of our religious lives? Is there any point in renunciation becoming an end in itself (which it does throughout the Theravāda world)? My concern is that the pendulum might swing the other way. We live a society with deep problems related to obsessive consumption of resources. Problems of addiction, obesity, and heart disease. Problems of making the environment much less able to support life. A society where my local paper thinks it's both amazing and great (rather than obscene and disgusting) that a restaurant serves a 10,000 kcal meal (albeit for two people) - 10,000 calories would go a long way in a refugee camp about now, and goodness knows we have too many of those at the moment. A lot of people are hedonists already, either by temperament or as a kind of neurosis, and I think that renunciation might help put the breaks on this trend, whereas a turn towards experience might accelerate it. Admittedly this might sound as though I also think people are stupid. On the contrary I think our decisions are driven by many factors outside our control and that few people are equipped with the understanding of their situation or right tools to change. And this is my key point, tell people the merciful truth about their situation and it better equips them to save themselves. Tell them a lie and let them think that someone else will rescue them. Except that there is no Daddy-in-the-Sky coming to rescue us. Relying on a fantasy is worse than useless. 

In any case I see no need to demonise humanity and portray them as very stupid children that won't leave a burning building because they are playing with their toys. That's a very unpleasant viewpoint to take and it makes me wonder who benefits from it. And the answer seems to be "priests". Those with a vested interest in keeping us passive, stupid, and dependent. Those to whom some of us prostrate ourselves. In which case, the first step towards liberation is to liberate oneself from this position of bondage. I would not ape that awful Mahāyānist saying "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him". I would not say "Kill the priests", but we should at least start ignoring them or making fun of them. 

Buddhism Without Lies

In my explorations of Mahāyānism last year (esp. The Ambivalent Religion 20 Nov 2015) I proposed an alternative history of Mahāyānism. Indeed I argued that Mahāyānism, in its mature form, was effectively a different religion from what went before. The resemblances to Nikāya based Buddhism are merely superficial. The Mahāyānists employed different rhetoric, dogma, and religious exercises towards a different goal. One of the dynamics of the development of Buddhism after the advent of Mahāyānism was an increasingly magical worldview. 

In early Buddhism, (at least) some people are capable of liberating themselves and the Buddha is just a guide. The first Arahants achieve just what the Buddha did, he is pre-eminent because he did it first and alone. Later a gulf opens up between the Arahants and the Buddha. The example of this I have published about (Attwood 2014) involves a story about King Ajātasatthu. In the Pāḷi Samaññaphala Sutta, the Buddha is portrayed as being unable to help the parricidal king, Ajātasatthu. He just says to the monks, "The king is done for". However, in later Mahāyānist versions of the story the king is saved from the consequences of his actions by merely meeting the Buddha and talking with him. The Buddha becomes more and more godlike as time goes on, but equally, ordinary people seem to become more and more hapless. The standard Mahāyānist rhetoric is that it takes three incalculable aeons of practice to perfect the perfections and become a Buddha. So where ever you happen to be now, Buddhahood is an infinite number of lifetimes in the future. In other words utterly unattainable.

Many people still believe that the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya or "Heart Sutra" was created as a kind of epiphany of wisdom, a summary of the doctrine that could serve the guide the percipient reader to saṃbodhi. In fact the truth is a lot more prosaic than that. In all likelihood lines from existing texts were taken out of context, written on paper and worn as an amulet to ward of ill fortune and malevolent spirits, which is what the Prajñāpāramitā tradition promised after all: "write this down and you'll be protected from misfortune". Because people of that time and place probably did not believe that anyone could actually achieve saṃbodhi and thus protection from evil or demons was a much more pressing issue for them. 

Early Buddhists already had a weak Vitalism (āyu/jīvata) and a somewhat negative attitude to the body that comes with it (cf Metaphors and Materialism 26 Apr 2013). But this hatred for mere flesh reaches its apotheosis in the awful book by Śāntideva, Bodhicāryāvatāra, in which he writes about the body as something supremely distasteful:

59. If you have no passion for what is foul, why do you embrace another, born in a field of filth, seeded by filth, nourished by filth? 

60. Is it that you do not like a dirty worm because it's only tiny? It must be that you desire a body likewise born in filth, because it is formed from such a large amount. 

61. Not only are you disgusted at your own foulness, you glutton for crap, you yearn for other vats of filth!

(pages 92-93 of Crosby and Skilton)

And so on. Śāntideva is a hate-filled maniac, with delusions of grandeur. But he's very popular in Mahāyānist circles because he seems to epitomise something of the twisted logic and fanaticism of Mahāyānism. There's a broad pattern of denigrating human beings and their bodies, and of deifying the Buddha or his replacement and elevating his body, which becomes a dharmakāya. 

Another manifestation of this hatred of human beings in Mahāyānist thought is the idea that we can do nothing whatever to save ourselves. All we can do is throw themselves on the mercy of the Buddha Amitābha and rely on vows of his that are recorded in the Sukhāvativyūha Sūtra. Recall that Gautama was sidelined because his parinirvāṇa meant that he could no longer participate in life on earth. Amitābha lives in another universe, but is able to interfere in ours, for our own good. It became necessary to invent other universes because Gautama cut himself off from our universe and the rules say we can't have another Buddha until the Dharma has completely died out there. The lack of a messiah-buddha proved so inconvenient that they had to invent one and situate him in another universe. Amitābha, unlike Gautama, is a model Buddha, who has not abandoned his universe and continues to care for souls in his world, and will even care for those souls in our world who ask his help. From my point of view a really compassionate omnipotent, omnipresent being would not need us to ask, or wait till death, they would tell us what we need to know right now and we could get on with liberating ourselves. But the point here is that we, poor stupid human beings, cannot help ourselves any more. The individual human being is incapable of liberating themselves without the presence of a god-messiah-buddha. And yet Buddhists and even Mahāyānists, insist that there is no god in Buddhism. Clearly there is a god, he's just in disguise, though it's not much of a disguise. 

So this idea of merciful lies emerges in a milieu of increasingly magical thinking, with godlike Buddhas floating around in paradises in other universes (but still able to save earthbound misfit humans); and with stupid people who have no hope of liberation from their own efforts or at all, but who are still plagued by misfortunes (disease, demons, criminals, tyrants, old age, death, or just plain bad luck).

The unfair characterisation of humanity as stupid, weak, and more or less beyond help short of a divine intervention is overly pessimistic. But this view was not always current in Buddhism. One can construct a Buddhism without merciful lies. We know this because we have records of it. While the Buddha is portrayed as expressing doubts about whether anyone would understand his breakthrough (Ariyapariyesana Sutta), he is never portrayed holding back from offering to help them, although he does call recalcitrant people stupid (moghapurisa). These stories are expressions of the values of the suttakāras. The idea of the merciful lie is absent from Nikāya and Āgama texts. Indeed the opposite is the case: the Buddha tells merciful truths. There are a few people who cannot take in these truths, the bereft man in the Piyajātikā Sutta for example, but on the whole the merciful truths that the Buddha tells set people free or at least on the path to freedom.

So why would a Buddha lie when the truth is what sets people free? How could a Buddha lie? Part of the answer seems to be that the distance between the Buddha and ordinary people has become an almost unbridgeable gulf. In the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha is a godlike, omniscient, omnipotent doer of miracles who occupies a transcendent realm beyond our comprehension. Human beings on the other hand are just sacks of shit, infinitely far from Buddhahood, and incredibly stupid. It is this distortion of the respective statuses of the participants in Buddhist myths and legends that opens the gap for merciful lies where no lie should exist. Thus, lies come into the religion in which pretty much everyone, from the meanest peasant to the highest priest, across the divisions rent by time and the changing needs of society, vows not to lie (musāvādā veramaṇī-sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi). 

Another divisive innovation was the Two Truths Doctrine, in which one of the truths is in fact a lie (or at least untrue). I've written about this at some length so need not repeat the argument here (Not Two Truths: 5 Aug 2011). But the idea of relative truths (saṃvṛti-satya), which are not in fact true helps to ground the merciful lie in Buddhist doctrine. If one can rationalise the lie as a saṃvṛti-satya in the service of a paramartha-satya or ultimate truth, then anything is justified. So Buddhists are able to weasel out of the ancient precept which requires us always to tell the truth. It allows some Buddhists to mislead people and claim that it is a skilful means. The result has been quite disastrous for Buddhism, as gurus who are alcoholics, sexual abusers, or who have other moral failings have sometimes passed this off as kauśalyopāya. Once lying is part of the system, then no end of abuse is justifiable.

No one is served by a merciful lie. We are not children. We don't need Daddy to rescue us. Buddhism was originally constructed without such lies. The changes that allowed for these lies were for the worst in any case. Grown-ups need to be told the truth and given the appropriate tools to save themselves. There is no Big Daddy-in-the-sky waiting up there to rescue us. Most convert Buddhists rejected this fantasy well before becoming Buddhists, though an alarming number don't seem to notice that the Buddha has become their Big Step-Daddy-in-the-Sky. 

Taking Responsibility

Many Buddhists seem to lap up this characterisation of humanity as fundamental stupid and unable to manage itself. I hate it. I think we demonise humanity, including ourselves, at considerable risk to our well-being. I've recently written about the problems of Buddhists with self-esteem issues and mental health problems (Rumination and the Stress Response 22 Jan 2016). I did not mention the pernicious consequences of convincing converts that they are idiot children whose lives have to be managed for them, and who can expect authority figures to routinely lie to them for their own good. And they are too stupid to know what is good for them or to make appropriate decisions. Which all seems catastrophically disastrous to me. 

The thought of this teaching being common and commonly accepted makes me angry. The Buddhism that I first learned was all about taking responsibility for one's actions. The idea that one would abdicate responsibility to a guru was anathema. And seeing this put into practice was part of what attracted me to the Triratna Movement. Some have argued that our founder, Sangharakshita, has been weak in this department and to be sure it is by no means universal in the Triratna Order, but over many years I have seen enough of my colleagues in the Order exemplify this quality of taking responsibility that I'm content to find my home amongst them. Taking responsibility for one's actions, indeed for one's mental states, is not mere rhetoric. It is a necessary step for growing up. 

If someone is taught from the outset that they are too stupid and helpless to take responsibility, then what hope does that person have of making positive changes in their life? We can agree that they ought to consult friends and mentors, seek and listen to their advice on matter of importance, but in the long run we have to live our lives as we see fit. We and no one else has to weight up the pros and cons and make decisions. We have to make our own decisions and face the consequences. Of course, where those decisions affect other people, or where we have existing obligations, we need to take these into account (that is part of taking responsibility). We are never totally free to act, but whenever we do act, we ought to do so after due consideration. 

The abdication of responsibility to authority figures is almost always disastrous. We have seen this time and again in many spheres of religious and political life for example. Those we invest with power are almost inevitably corrupted by it.  This is why democracy which limits the amount of time the powerful can spend in positions of power is essential. Our leaders wear out after a few years and must be replaced. Their need for expediency often sees them telling us what they see as merciful lies.

For example, Western Governments assured us that they did not spy on citizens or abuse the surveillance powers they granted themselves. And yet whistle-blower Edward Snowden showed that this was a bald lie. They were and are spying on us, reading our emails and texts, gathering information on who we talk to. We did not agree to this, we did not vote for it. Most of us don't want these powerful government agencies spying on us. We know that once they have power they cannot be trusted to use it wisely and we cannot vote the commanders of Homeland Security or GCHQ out after a few years. 

Or we can look at the global banking and finance industry. Successive governments abdicated responsibility for the economy to banks, removing regulations and oversight and as a result banks became corrupt and even criminal. They engineered an economic collapse of catastrophic proportions. While banks qua corporations went broke or were nationalised to stop this happening (i.e. were bailed out by tax payers), the individual bankers in charge of this disaster walked away incredibly wealthy, or in fact did not walk away and are still in charge of banks. In the USA only one banker went to jail. In the UK none did. And yet they destroyed trillions of pounds of wealth, including pensions and retirement investments. Thousands of families lost everything, including their homes. 

Or we could cite the numerous religious cults led by charismatic individuals who lead their followers to a sticky end. And we've seen what happens when Buddhist gurus are followed by naive individuals looking for the next Messiah. A mess, all right. 

Conclusion

There have been many deleterious developments in Buddhist thought over the centuries. The Realism of the Abhidharma, the Two Truths Doctrine, the ontological speculation, the abandonment of making a personal effort, and so on. But none is so egregious as this idea of the merciful lie. It is not merciful to lie to adults. It is deceptive and malignant.

A real problem we have in Buddhism is a deep religious conservatism which enables us to argue about how to interpret our doctrines, but never to fundamentally question them. So it looks like we have a healthy debate, but in reality everyone still assents to the tradition. Or we did until recently. At this moment in time a significant number of Buddhists are asking some hard questions. Or they are intuitively rejecting the usual sources of authority (texts, priests, tradition). We are discovering that we can still think for ourselves and that, for example, science is also authoritative. Or we are turning to people who seem to have genuinely made breakthroughs and can talk about awakening from experience rather than relying on second-hand authorities. We live in a time when awakening once again seems to be possible.

There's little or no scholarship behind this movement. It's quite hard to get such critical ideas as denying the validity of karma as a theory published. And it would be bad for an academic's career to do such a thing. A few renegades like Greg Schopen have attempted to stir the pot a little, but the bastions of Buddhism are heavily defended. The business of Buddhist academia is predicated on embracing Buddhism on its own terms. Indeed a lot of research into Buddhism is funded by Buddhist foundations like Numata and Khyentse, which in any other field would amount to conflict of interest. No one whose livelihood comes from a Buddhist organisation is going to conclude that Buddhism has got it all wrong.

Additionally we have more and more bhikkhus and lamas joining universities and doing research. They cannot be expected to provide our fledging move away from traditional Buddhism with any intellectual support either. "Monastics" are committed to supporting the status quo, in which they themselves are major beneficiaries. Their lifestyle demands so much from them, that they are even less likely than the Buddhism embracing academic to support the deconstruction of tradition. What they produce is almost inevitably in the form of apologetics for religious propositions. Defences of the very ideas that people like me want them to question. In all likelihood no help will come from that direction either. Nor can we expect much help from Western philosophers who continue to "discover" Buddhism and all too often act like they are the first people to understand it. In the end they are really only interested in reinterpreting Buddhism using categories that derive from ancient Greek thought and this is of little or no help to us. The Greeks and their successors were and are asking the wrong questions about experience.

Where we are getting some help is from neuroscience and from the psychology of mindfulness. Some argue that the work in these fields lacks rigour, but the scientific process will get there eventually. Refutation is at the heart of the enterprise, unlike in religion where it is all about making reality fit the theory. 

Presuming that we are in the presence of someone who knows the truth, I argue that the truth is always preferable to the convenient lie. The truth is what liberates us. Lies only sow doubt as to what is true. The idea of the merciful lie was a terrible mistake. That it survived and is traditional doesn't matter. It is still a mistake. Give us the truth and the skills to act on that truth.

~~oOo~~

A couple of people have suggested that the story of Nanda (Ud 3.2, Nanda Sutta) represents an early Buddhist merciful truth. In this story Nanda is thinking of giving up the religious life (brahmacarya) because of a pretty girl. The Buddha takes Nanda to the deva realm known "The Thirty Three" (tāvatiṃsa) - one of the lower devalokas. There they see a number of female divinities called accharā (better known by their Sanskrit name, apsarā) who are described as dove-footed (kakuṭa-pāda). Nanda agrees that compared to the apsarās his girlfriend is ugly. The Buddha then says:

abhirama, nanda, abhirama, nanda! ahaṃ te pāṭibhogo pañcannaṃ accharāsatānaṃ paṭilābhāya kakuṭapādānan ti.

Enjoy, Nanda, enjoy! I am your sponsor (pāṭibhoga) for obtaining 500 dove-footed apsarās.

With this motivation, Nanda returns to the religious life. After some grumbling from the bhikkhus who think this motivation is beneath them, Nanda becomes enlightened and then releases the Buddha from his promise.

At no point does the Buddha appear to lie to Nanda in this story. The story stipulates that apsaras exist and there is no suggestion that the Buddha was unable or unwilling to fulfil his promise to sponsor or guarantee Nanda his heavenly reward.

~JR~

Another possible exception is the story of Kisagotamī. This is not found in the suttas, but is found instead in the Apadāna and in the Pāḷi commentaries. I don't know the dates of the Apadāna, though it is canonical. According to Oskar von Hinüber's, Handbook of Pali Literature, it was one of the last additions to the canon. The commentaries of course date from about the 5th century, though are generally believed to be based on earlier, non-extant, texts because they say they are. 

~JR~

Also... This week Nature reported on an update to the Milgram Experiment. Abbott, Alison. (2016) Modern Milgram experiment sheds light on power of authority. Nature. 18 February 2016.

"People obeying commands feel less responsibility for their actions."