Freewill is Back on the Menu

“There is now no safer occupation than talking bad science to philosophers, except talking bad philosophy to scientists.”

- Mary Midgley.

I don't find freewill a particularly interesting problem, but it does come up from time to time. Because it is essential to Buddhist ethics, I've ended up writing about it a few times despite my reluctance, mainly to try to counter what I see as a pernicious trend to Determinism amongst Buddhists influenced by Advaita Vedanta. My essays on the subject include: Do We Have Freewill?(6 Feb 2015), A Sutta on Freewill Experience and Free Will in Early Buddhism (4 Apr 2014). The problem has become a cause célèbre amongst scientists since the 1980s when Benjamin Libet (1916-2007) first published results of his experiments on the so-called "readiness potential". The correct interpretation of these experiments has always been hotly disputed, though Determinists seldom cite any dissenting voices when they reference this material (so readers might be unaware of the controversy). We have seen a number of physicists in recent years citing Libet in the media and in books for the general public as "proving" that there is no free will. But as Peter Clarke observes:

Despite the fame of the Libet experiment and its frequent acceptance in popular and semi-popular writings, it has been the subject of intense controversy. Indeed, most specialists in the philosophy of free will who have addressed the Libet claim have rejected it. (2013)

Philosophers and physicists seem to fall out in public quite often these days. See, for example, Goldhill (2016) for a typical complaint about facile arguments from prominent physicists on the subject of philosophy. Physicists seem to take a perverse delight in dismissing philosophy out of hand, but often show their deep ignorance in the process. Stephen Hawking infamously declared philosophy dead. Paraphrasing Goldhill, this is a very stupid thing for a very smart person to say. Which just goes to show that smart people do make mistakes and do say stupid things. We can't just abdicate the responsibility for evaluating what people say, even when they are experts. As Richard Feynman said, "science is the belief in the ignorance of experts". And if we are not in a position to judge, then we can always seek out those who are and get their opinion. Unfortunately, physicists are often seen as authorities and thus their views on philosophy are widely taken seriously, even when they are out of their depth and saying stupid things. 

In this essay, sparked by a blog by Deric's MindBlog, I will outline Libet's findings, explore some responses from other scholars, and look at the philosophical implications. We might not be able to put to rest the wailing of "there is no free will" by Determinists, but we can at least give them something to chew on for a while.

Libet's Experiments

Libet was investigating the phenomenon of readiness potential (RP). The RP is a slowish build up of electrical potential in the brain, measured at the scalp over the motor cortex by an electroencephalograph (EEG). It occurs a second or more before people make voluntary movements. As the name suggests, this build up of electric potential was assumed to be the brain "getting ready" to initiate a movement. Libet was interested in the timing of the RP and the decision to move.

Libet's classic experiments (Libet 1985, Libet et al. 1983) asked people to make a simple movement, usually flexing their hand or wrist. The subjects were instructed to move whenever they felt like it (within a 20 sec window). At the same time they observed the position of a spot moving in a circle on an oscilloscope screen and reported the position of the spot when they felt the "urge to move". What he found was that there was a delay of some 200 milliseconds (ms) between becoming consciously aware of an urge to move and the actual movement. However, the readiness potential began to build up 350-500 ms earlier.

Note, this is a very short-range phenomenon. The voltage measured on the scalp is in the order of a few micro-volts (10^-6 V). The amplitude drops off sharply. Another few centimetres from the scalp and the electrical activity would be undetectable (so no, this is not a mechanism for telepathy!). Indeed, one of the drawbacks of EEG for measuring brain activity is that it doesn't detect electrical activity below the cortex layer. The technique is also poor at localising the activity - multiple electrodes and sophisticated analysis of the activity can improve this, but EEG is still a pretty blunt instrument. The technique is famous for the early discovery that the activity in the cortex occurs in waves.

Libet controversially interpreted the initiation of the readiness potential as the "decision" to move, the point where the brain unconsciously began preparing to move. Becoming conscious of an "urge to move" came significantly later, and then, finally, the action itself was initiated, the whole process taking almost half a second. In this interpretation, the experience of willing our hand to move comes quite a long time after the brain has decided to move. In other words, the experience of willing our hand to move is a secondary feature in the process. Hence, freewill, interpreted as contra-causal freewill, is not what initiates a voluntary movement.

Contra-causal Freewill

I was alerted to idea of contra-causal freewill by reading Patricia Churchland's book Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain (2013) in which she argues against it. Contra-causal freewill is the idea that we have an abstract capacity called "will" that is like the executive branch of the abstract capacity of "reason". To be considered contra-causally free, this capacity to make decisions or initiate actions must be free from any influences other than itself. Specifically, emotions, motivations, desires, goals, and knowledge must be excluded as potential influences. If any of these influence our decision making then, in this view, our will is not free. Thus for Libet, if some unconscious part of the brain is making the decision to move and then placing the idea in our conscious minds, then even though our brain is still making a decision, it does not count as free will because it is not based on the abstract reasoning capacity.

Any long time readers of this blog will know that this definition of free will is suspect at best. There are two main problems with it. Firstly, the definition makes an egregious mistake in considering reason to be an abstract capacity. I follow Lakoff and Johnson in taking reason to be a function of an embodied mind. Reasoning specifically uses metaphors grounded in our experience of the world to enable abstraction. It is not that we have an abstract capacity for reason, but that we have an embodied capacity for abstraction. Research by Antonio and Hannah Damasio (amongst others) has shown that emotions are involved in all decision making. As I have explained it, emotions tell us how salient any fact is to our decision making process (see Facts and Feelings, 25 may 2012). There is simply no plausible way for contra-causal freewill to operate. Secondly, the definition involved legacy understandings of how reasoning works. I also follow Mercier and Sperber in seeing reasoning as an argumentative capacity. It is well known that individuals are generally very poor at reasoning tasks. Most of us do not to make rational decisions and when we try to, we almost inevitably fall into cognitive bias or logical fallacy. On individual tests of reasoning, we frequently score worse than random guessing. The long lists of cognitive biases and common logical fallacies that we are prone to bear stark witness to this. Reasoning is not activated until we are assessing someone else's argument or retrospectively justifying our own actions (see An Argumentative Theory of Reason, 10 May 2013). 

As Churchland has said, contra-causal freewill is not particularly interesting. Even if the experiment showed that we do not have contra-causal freewill, this would still not be interesting as the concept is a legacy of a bygone era that has no place in modern discussions about the mind or morality. Clearly, many scientists are poorly informed on developments in philosophy because they think philosophy is worthless. They cannot be relied on, in general, to be guides to the philosophy of freewill. This is an important caveat when considering this question. My suspicion is that the criticism cuts both ways. That as much as philosophers like to comment on science, they are often too poorly informed about it to be trustworthy guides to it. All too many philosophers in this field seem to be ontological dualists who do not believe that studying neurons can tell us how the mind works, for example. Sorting out whether or not any individual commentator on this issue makes sense is really quite difficult. No doubt I am also a poor guide to this issue. However, other scholars have been trying to reproduce Libet's experiments and assessing his interpretation of the results since it was published. And we can turn to them to get some balance.

Re-evaluating Libet.

As I say, the interpretation of Libet's experiments has been the subject of intense controversy since they were first published. It seems, from my outsider point-of-view, as though physicists have lined up to say that they prove that human beings are Deterministic and that there is no freewill. But even casually reading around this subject we see that philosophers have lined up to deny that Libet tells us anything about freewill.

For example, what exactly is a voluntary movement? Peter Clarke (2013), for example, cites the example of a tennis player serving a ball. The decision to serve may be voluntary and the movement of the arm might even be partially under conscious control, but the myriad movements that coordinate the whole body as it moves and balances to support the motion of serving are almost entirely unconscious. The motions that direct the ball to the precise location on the opposite player's court are mostly not under the direct control of the player. Tennis players have developed a kind of reflex that allows them to serve accurately at speeds that does not require conscious thought. Indeed, in many sports, we know that thinking too much about key muscle movements is counter-productive. So, is serving the ball a voluntary act? I get this playing the guitar. I train my fingers to find and pluck the notes I want so that I don't have to think about them and this enables me to sing at the same time. If I was consciously seeking out notes on the fretboard and dredging up lyrics and all the other components of articulation and delivery, I could not play the simplest tune, let alone something as complex as, say, the Beatles' tune Blackbird. The assumption that a decision to act cannot occur without being conscious of it is deeply problematic. In playing a tune like Blackbird, I initiate hundreds of actions with no consciousness of doing so because my attention is usually elsewhere. So this question is far from trivial and it ought to make us pause before considering what it means for an experimental subject to make a "voluntary movement". Even if Libet relies on a single movement, how do we know that this is representative, or that the experiment is able to isolate that movement from everything else that is going on in a conscious subject?

An important criticism of the Libet experiment is that it is very difficult to judge when one experiences the "urge to move". Clarke (2013) did the experiment himself and commented "When I try this, I find it very hard to judge the precise time when I decided to move my finger / wrist." Clarke describes studies on the reliability of the subjective timing of events which have shown it to be very imprecise. Additionally, the experiment involves an attention shift from the movement to the timing that "may have introduced temporal mismatches between the felt experience of will and the perceived position of the clock hand." Attempts to eliminate this mismatch have shown that the RP occurred before the "urge to move" only in about two thirds of subjects. To try to improve accuracy, the experiment was performed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and this also showed that "the activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex was correlated with the decision [to move] with 60% prediction accuracy, up to 10 sec before the conscious decision." These findings seem to say that there cannot be a causal relationship between the RP and the "urge to move", else it would occur every time. In which case Libet appears to have misinterpreted what the RP is.

Clarke (2013) lists a number of other published criticisms of the Libet experiments. Firstly, Libet takes the RP to represent a decision to move; i.e., he believes that there is a causal connection between the beginning of the RP and the action, if and when it comes. However, it appears that there is no neural connection between the areas that build up potential in the RP (the sensory motor-cortex) and the parts of the brain associated with decision making (in the parietal lobe). Thus, in addition to there being a disconnect in practice, there is no obvious mechanism for the RP to cause the urge to move, either.

Secondly, if the RP was the cause of the movement, then we would expect a strong correlation between the timing of the onset of RP and the timing of the urge to move. But this correlation does not occur. Experiments to test this seem to rule out the RP as cause of the urge to move, though not of the movement itself. So, at the very least, the mechanism proposed by Libet has a missing link. And that link might play an active role in the process (i.e., might be directly causal).

Alfred Mele offers a third criticism of the Libet experimental set up, noted by Clarke (2013). In Libet's experiments, the data was only stored when a movement is initiated. Libet collected no data on what happened if the subject decided not to move. This vitiates his finding because it's entirely possible to prepare to move, which would presumably initiate an RP, and then not experience the urge to move. If an RP can exist and not give rise to an urge to move, then RP may not related to the urge to move at all. This possibility ought to have been excluded, but was not. A variation on the experiment by Trevena and Miller did collect data on cases where the decision was made not to move. The RP was the same whether they moved or not. And this suggests that RP does exist without giving rise to the urge to move, or an action, which undermines Libet's conclusion that RP represents a decision to move. 

A fourth weakness was pointed out by Hermann, et al. They set the experiment up as a decision to press one of two buttons in response to a stimulus. They also found the RP appearing before the urge to move occurred, but the RP occurred even before the stimulus appeared and thus is unlikely to have been related to a decision about which button to press. Again, the evidence points away from a coupling of RP and the urge to move. In fact, Schurger, et al (2012) showed the decision to move occurs very late in the course of the RP, not at the initiation of it.

Libet himself argued that his interpretation showed that, although freewill in the sense of consciously initiating actions was ruled out, we still had the option of inhibiting actions between the initiation of the RP (what he called the decision to move) and the urge to move. Some people called this "free-won't". This might be an interesting thread to follow up, except that considering the various critiques of Libet's experiment and interpretation, it seems that treating the initiation of the RP as the decision point makes no sense.

The real nail in the coffin, however, was published in Feb 2016 (just a couple of weeks ago as I write this). Libet was focussed on spontaneous voluntary movements (SVM) and it turns out that these are rather different in their underlying dynamic than movements initiated in response to a stimulus. Citing from Deric Brown's blog:

"A new generation of experiments is now suggesting that brain activity preceding spontaneous voluntary movements (SVMs) 'may reflect the ebb and flow of background neuronal noise, rather than the outcome of a specific neural event corresponding to a ‘decision’ to initiate movement... [Several studies] have converged in showing that bounded-integration processes, which involve the accumulation of noisy evidence until a decision threshold is reached, offer a coherent and plausible explanation for the apparent pre-movement build-up of neuronal activity.'" (Shurger et al. 2016)

So what looks like a build up of "readiness potential" is, in fact, happening because of anticipating having to make a decision at some point (and in the experiment the subject is explicitly primed to do so). The actual decision is reached when background neural activity reaches a peak:

"In particular, when actions are initiated spontaneously, rather than in response to a sensory cue, the process of integration to bound is dominated by ongoing stochastic fluctuations in neural activity that influence the precise moment at which the decision threshold is reached. ... This, in turn, gives the natural but erroneous impression of a goal-directed brain process corresponding to the ‘cerebral initiation of a spontaneous voluntary act’"

In other words, if we look again at the graph of "readiness potential" the decision to move comes at the peak of neuronal activity not at the onset of the RP. The RP is an accumulation of more or less random neuronal activity. This would explain some of the contradictory results mentioned above.

But, crucially, what this suggests to me is that the urge to move precedes the decision to move. The urge to move may, in fact, be an important factor in the decision to move. So it seems that Libet's interpretation of his experiment was flawed in these various ways and that freewill is back on the menu.

Conclusions

I discovered this information because I happen to read a number of neuroscience blogs and Twitter feeds and one of them happened to mention this new article by Shurger et al. (2016) which drew me into the subject anew. But there was always debate. Over what freewill means. Over what the readiness potential represents. Over the causal relationship between the readiness potential and the urge to move; or between the RP and the actual movement. Over Libet's experimental methods.

This experiment is so often presented with a one-sided interpretation, with no mention of the mass of contradictory evidence that make Libet's interpretation look doubtful. There is no mention of the intense debate that has ensued. Any reader could be forgiven for thinking that it was an open and shut case or that Libet had definitively shown that freewill could not exist. But this was never the case. The interpretation of the experiment could never be considered unequivocal proof of anything. The weakness of Libet's experimental design and the many contra-indications for Libet's interpretation of the readiness potential as a decision or even as causal, ought to have been given more prominence in the discussion of freewill.

Most scientists are aware of the problem with "proving" an hypothesis anyway. As Karl Popper observed, an hypothesis can really only be disproved or a conjecture refuted. A scientific theory may make more or less accurate predictions. For example, the Higgs Boson has not in fact been proved to exist. However, the theory (The Standard Model of Particle Physics) did predict a particle would be found in a certain energy range and such a particle was found in the Large Hadron Collider. So the theory survives another test, and we now try to test other predictions that it makes. The theory could fail at any point, and many scientists hope that it does, because that would make their work far more interesting and open up the field to new discoveries. The failure of the Standard Model would initiate a golden age of inquiry into the nature of the universe. Scientists are frankly bored by the idea that everything has been discovered. Which is the opposite of how they are sometimes portrayed and the opposite of religious approaches to knowledge. 

When so-called scientists give a biased presentation of an issue, citing only the evidence for their interpretation and avoiding even mentioning that there is considerable evidence against it, then that is a kind of fraud. Scientists committing such fraud ought to be censured by their peers. False statements ought to be retracted. And I think in this area of freewill many scientists are guilty of this kind of fraud. And many laypeople have repeated the fraudulent claims and perpetuated a falsehood.

In this the public have been extremely badly served by lazy journalists who have simply failed to report the experimental evidence. Whether this also amounts to fraud depends on your point of view. I see the primary function of journalism as being entertainment. Entertainers are always allowed some "poetic licence" to deceive us about facts if the version of events they present is more entertaining than reality. Hollywood films almost always distort history because the real story is often boring. Science journalists are a mixed bag and you never know which kind of story you are reading, but these days I just assume, with very few exceptions, that if a journalist is writing they are seeking to entertain rather than inform.

There will be those who cite this case as showing that the scientific method is broken. That in overturning a previous interpretation of the data science has proved that it cannot be trusted. To my mind, it says completely the opposite. This is science in action. This is the scientific process at work. The overturning of previous interpretations is part and parcel of embracing science. What we think we knew today is quite likely to be overturned tomorrow. For the religieux seeking certain knowledge and believing that they have found it, this seems anathema. That knowledge could be transient and contingent makes it seem untrustworthy. Religion is predicated on the idea of absolute knowledge, from which comes certainty, and relaxation, as all mysteries are resolved in the long run. But that is an impossible fantasy. In the real world, things are messy. Knowledge is never absolute. There is always the possibility of being wrong.

Religieux seem very uneasy with the idea that they might be wrong. Buddhists, in particular, seem to find this concept deeply troubling. Scientists, by contrast, embrace uncertainty and the principle that all knowledge may be overturned by a better explanation. Science progresses by testing ideas to destruction. This attitude of contingency with respect to knowledge of the world is, in fact, far more in keeping with Buddhist ideology. Most Buddhists appear to believe that the world can be understood in absolute terms, that the Buddha was omniscient in this sense, and that the Dharma is an expression of this absolute knowledge, i.e., that it represents absolute truth. They further believe that we can come to this absolute knowledge through introspection and believe that we cannot come to knowledge through examining the world. I have been told by a colleague, for example, that "no amount of study of the brain will ever tell us anything about the mind". Which is just Cartesian Dualism, as far as I can see, and thus a thesis that has already been soundly refuted.

However, despite having cast considerable doubt on the Libet interpretation, this is not the end of the story. There are other arguments against free will that are much more difficult to tackle than Libet's and his Determinist fans, for example, the argument by Sabine Hossenfelder on the Backreaction blog. I don't necessarily agree that arguments from fundamental laws eliminate the possibility of unexpected emergent properties that are indistinguishable from free will, but she still makes a strong argument for anyone who acknowledges the laws of physics. And so the arguments will go on. But as religieux we do need to be wary of pursuing a conjecture only because it supports our doctrine. Freewill is interesting because without it Buddhist ethics would be meaningless. If we seek only to bolster our view, rather than to seek the truth, then the possibility of being wrong is excluded and we are unlikely to accept that we have been wrong when the evidence becomes unequivocal. I see this happening in the area of the afterlife, for example. Intelligent people must always hold to the possibility of being wrong. But intelligent people are also the most reluctant to reconsider their considered views. Intelligent religious people are the worst. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Alexander, P., et al. (2016) Readiness potentials driven by non-motoric processes. Consciousness and Cognition, 39: 38–47. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2015.11.011

Churchland, P. S. (2013) Touching A Nerve: The Self as Brain. W. W. Norton & Co.

Clarke, P. G. H. (2013). The Libet Experiment and its Implications for Conscious Will. Faraday Paper No. 17. Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. http://www.bethinking.org/download/faraday-paper-17-clarke-en

Fried, I., Mukamel, R. & Kreiman, G. ‘Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition’, Neuron (2011) 69: 548-562.

Goldhill, O. (2016). Why are so many smart people such idiots about philosophy? Quartz. March 05, http://qz.com/627989/why-are-so-many-smart-people-such-idiots-about-philosophy/

Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary
action. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8: 529-566.

Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W. & Pearl, D. (1983). Time of unconscious intention to
act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (Readiness-Potential), Brain, 106: 623-42.

Schurger, A., Sitt, J.D. & Dehaene, S. (2012) An accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-iniated movement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.1210467109

Schurger, A. et al. (2016) Neural Antecedents of Spontaneous Voluntary Movement: A New Perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20 (2), 77 - 79.

Additional reading

Fischborn, Marcelo (2016) Libet-style experiments, neuroscience, and libertarian free will. Philosophical Psychology. 1(9) doi: 10.1080/09515089.2016.1141399

"The general result is that neuroscience and psychology could in principle undermine libertarian free will, but that Libet-style experiments have not done that so far."

Thich Nhat Hanh's Changes to The Heart Sutra.

I've written close to thirty essays on the Heart Sutra since I read Jan Nattier's 1992 article and attempted to précis it. In rediscovering this text that I've known for more than twenty years, through studying the manuscripts and Chinese canonical versions, I have very seldom been tempted to write about modern English translations or commentaries. The translations are mostly awful and the commentaries all about what the exegete wants the sutra to say, not about the sutra itself. This essay is, however, about a modern translation that is also to some extent a commentary.

In 2014, the popular Zen priest, Thích Nhất Hạnh (TNH), produced a new translation of the Heart Sutra. You can see it alongside the previous, more standard translation, here. Whenever someone like him does something like this, the result is usually greeted with a wave of sycophantic over-praising (the same happens in my own Buddhist movement). TNH's own website refers to the translation as "profound and beautiful". This is really not true. Only a disciple of the man, suffering from lack of perspective, would say this. To an outsider, the new translation looks turgid and peculiar. In some ways this is no surprise, because the Heart Sutra is tightly packed Buddhist jargon that doesn't translate easily. See also David Chapman's content analysis of the Heart Sutra.

A lot of new translations are motivated by vanity or a desire to establish one's credentials as a "Zen master". They add nothing to our knowledge of the text, and make no contribution to the field of literature, either. They are usually the worst kind of Buddhist Hybrid English. For example, many translators, TNH included, try to imply that the Heart Sutra is in verse by laying it out like a poem. The Heart Sutra is not in verse. It's not a poem. The Heart Sutra is prose. In fact, there is only one Prajñāpāramitā text in verse and that is the bridesmaid of the genre, Ratnaguṇasaṃcayagāthā (not even translated into Chinese until the 10^th century).

In this case, the translation is motivated by something more serious. THN's office tells us that:

"The reason [TNH] must retranslate the Heart Sutra is because the patriarch who originally recorded the Heart Sutra was not sufficiently skilful enough with his use of language. For this reason, it has caused much misunderstanding for almost 2,000 years."

Of course, the Heart Sutra is nowhere near 2000 years old, it is perhaps 1300 years old. Obviously, TNH is either unfamiliar with, or rejects, Jan Nattier's Chinese origins thesis, which by contrast I take to be established beyond reasonable doubt. The single most important piece of modern scholarship on the Heart Sutra has yet to penetrate Plum Village. The idea that a "patriarch" recorded it badly is certainly novel and we could dwell on this idea of a perfect sutra, imperfectly recorded, but I want to move on to the main point. The problem according to TNH is that there is a contradiction in the Heart Sutra. I independently identified this contradiction only recently and given the Buddhist establishment's reaction to any suggestion of imperfection in their scriptures I was both surprised and intrigued to find TNH fessing up, albeit via a spokesperson. So what is the problem?

"...the mistake doesn't rest in the formula, 'form is emptiness'; rather, it resides in the unskillfulness of the line, 'Therefore in emptiness there is no form.' "

The trouble is that the two statements are contradictory in a way that cannot be swept under the carpet as some kind of paradoxical crypto-wisdom. If one is saying that "emptiness is form" in one breath and in the next saying "in emptiness there is no form", then that is not paradoxical, it is simply contradictory. As TNH says: "This line of the sutra can lead to many damaging misunderstandings."

So all credit to TNH. He's found a(nother) mistake in the Heart Sutra and gone public about it. Buddhists are typically strongly averse to admitting such things. We really ought to pause and allow this to sink in before considering what TNH did in response to this discovery.

While it is radical of TNH to admit finding a mistake in a Buddhist text, his response is an anticlimax. He characterises the problem as an imperfect recording of the text by some ancient "patriarch" and, in response, changes the wording of the text so that the problem simply disappears. TNH appears to believe he has insight into the intended meaning and the ability to correct the wording to convey this.

Now, TNH likes to cite the Sanskrit text, because he still believes that this is the original, most authentic version of the text. As I say, he appears to reject the Chinese origins thesis. But, as I will show, he is, in fact, translating from Chinese and only citing Sanskrit in order to add gravitas to his words. (Compare Nattier's comments on which Mahāyāna texts have become popular in the WEIRD world). It seems a bit disingenuous, but appears to be standard procedure in the world of Zen translations.

Like other commentators, TNH sees the line: rūpam śūnyatā śūnyataiva rūpam as the heart of the Heart Sutra. He translates this as (I preserve his formatting)

Listen Sariputra, this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.

There are two things to say about this. Firstly TNH has inverted the order of these pairs of statements from the Chinese text of T251 (the best known version of the Chinese text, attributed to Xuanzang). Judging by other features of his translation, TNH is apparently translating from the Chinese, but here he has used the order found in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. The order in T251 reflects the order in the source text T233, Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, which, in turn, reflects the word order in the Sanskrit version of that text in surviving manuscripts. So, in fact, T251 is the more authentic version of this passage and the Sanskrit Heart Sutra is the odd one out. It is not necessarily more authentic to adopt the reading from the Sanskrit, especially when one is translating from Chinese.

The second thing to say is that translating rūpa as "body" in the context of the five skandhas is peculiar. It is normally taken to mean "form" as a representative of the kinds of objects with which the sense faculties can collide to produce experience. The Heart Sutra itself spells this out when it places form alongside sounds, smells, tastes, tangibles and mental objects (dharmas). And "form" is what was originally used by TNH. It's not clear why he now translates this as "body". Sue Hamilton does suggest that rūpa refers to the "locus of experience", but this is a bit more complex than just "body". TNH seems to depart from the mainstream in this choice for reasons that are far from clear. 

This formula "form is emptiness, emptiness only form" is, for most people including TNH, the central idea in the Heart Sutra. And TNH's project is to rehabilitate the sutra so that this part of it stands. And thus, he changes the wording of the conflicting part of the sutra, from:

Therefore, in emptiness there is neither form, nor feeling, nor perceptions, nor mental formations, nor consciousness. (Plum Village Chanting Book, 2000)

to: 

That is why in Emptiness,

Body, Feelings, Perceptions,

Mental Formations and Consciousness

are not separate self entities.

What the Sanskrit text says is Tasmāc chāriputra śūnyatāyām na rūpam... i.e., "Therefore, Śāriputra, in emptiness there is no form, etc" or "with respect to emptiness there is no form". The Sanskrit word for "emptiness" (śūnyatā) is in the locative singular case (śūnyatāyām) and can be read either as "in emptiness" or "with respect to emptiness". In either case, it is saying that there is no relationship between form and emptiness, whereas the earlier line states that the two are identical. A flat contradiction. TNH gets around this by changing the text so that it now says that the skandhas are not separate entities. This is by no means bad doctrine, from a Mahāyānist point of view, but it is also not what the text says. So TNH's "translation" is something that he has made up to solve an apparent problem (a post hoc rationalisation).

I find it fascinating that TNH feels he is able to change the text to resolve this conflict. It is, by far, the most interesting detail across the whole modern fascination with this text that I know of, and perhaps the only one worth writing about. Apparently, when sutras don't make sense, we can simply change them! Most commentators fail to even notice the contradiction, so they are not interesting at all. However, having stepped into the light, TNH fails to live up to his promise because he immediately sweeps the problem under the carpet. But at least he has acknowledged that there was a problem.

My own approach to this problem has been blogged about and at some point I hope to get it published in a journal. (See Form is Emptiness. Parts I, II, and III). I employed a method developed by Jan Nattier and Nobuyoshi Yamabe, which was to track the quotation back into the source texts of the Heart Sutra, i.e., the Prajñāpāramitā texts. And in doing so I discovered that someone in ancient times had tampered with the text of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhastikā or 25,000 text. In the Aṣṭasāhasrikā or 8000 text, the line is:

na hi anyā sā māyā anyat tad rūpam | rūpam eva māyā | māyaiva rūpam | 

Illusion is not one thing and form another. Form is only illusion. Illusion is only form. 

This is a reference to an old Buddhist simile, that form is like an illusion. The simile becomes a metaphor: form is illusion. And the metaphor is reified to "form is an illusion". The problem is that the editor who substituted śūnyatā for māyā made a grammatical blunder. The form of this statement in the Heart Sutra simply doesn't make sense: it's bad grammar and it has broken a perfectly good metaphor. There are other examples of poor editing in the Heart Sutra that I detail in Part III of my essay Form is Emptiness. So, my argument is that, if there is a problem in the Heart Sutra, it is with this part. The fact is that that statement "form is emptiness, emptiness only form" is nonsense. This does not take away that fact that the statement has symbolised something important for Buddhists for many centuries. Many Buddhists felt, and still feel, that what they were trying to do was inconceivable (literally beyond the conception of the unawakened mind). And as Mahāyānism became more and more theistic, mystical, and magical, it served Mahāyānists to embrace paradox as an expression of this inconceivable goal. And the formula, being paradoxical, gave scope to exegetes of all schools who could claim to understand and interpret this phrase for the rest of us. Though, of course, ultimately, we have to have insight to understand it. I no longer see this line of reasoning as useful or meaningful.

Contra TNH, I take the second phrase with śūnyatāyām to be a reference to śūnyatāvihāra or śūnyatāsamādhi, i.e., a (meditative) state of emptiness, described in the Pāḷi Suttas (MN 121, 122) as one in which no experiences arise. The skandhas are the processes by which experience arises. In the state of emptiness these processes seem to be suspended. In emptiness, therefore, there is literally no rūpa, no vedanā, no saṃjñā, no saṃskāra, and no vijñāna. There's no paradox here. It is a simple description of a meditative state. And note that if rūpa meant "body", then the traditional interpretation would suggest that the body disappears in śūnyatāvihāra. Of course, from the point of view of the meditator their body does disappear. But this is not an objective fact. The meditator in emptiness has no way of stepping outside the experience to be objective, because "outside" and "inside" cease to have any meaning in samādhi.

So, my solution to the problem is very different to that proposed by TNH. I take "form is emptiness" to be nonsense created by a zealot who mindlessly mangled a perfectly good simile that can be found intact in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā. And I take "in emptiness there is no form" to be descriptive of what goes on in the (meditative) state of emptiness. This is unconventional, since most commentators find little connection between the Pāḷi word suññatā, which usually means something like "absence", as in the absence of experience, while the Sanskrit word śūnyatā is a quality ascribed to dharmas, e.g., sarvadharmāḥ śūnyatālakṣaṇā, "all dharmas are characterised by emptiness", though it can also refer to the absence of essence or svabhāva. I suspect that allegiances will play a major role in deciding what facts are most salient to this issue, and that this will determine which solution sounds more plausible. 

Since I'm looking at this translation, I want to make a few more comments on it. I will focus particularly on the first paragraph. This is the part of the text I know best and is the subject of my published article on the Heart Sutra (Attwood 2015). The problems evident in this brief section will illustrate my wider point about the value of this translation as doctrine and as literature. This is what TNH came up with for a translation.

Avalokiteshvara

while practicing deeply with

the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore,

suddenly discovered that

all of the five Skandhas are equally empty,

and with this realisation

he overcame all Ill-being.

There is much that is awful about this. Like the other recent Zen inspired "translations" the method seems to be to spell out in phrases what is meant by words and pad out the text, thus making it rather turgid. It turns the text into a kind of commentary. The layout hints at free verse (short lines without rhyme or meter), however, as I say, the Heart sutra is not a poem. It's a short extract from a longer work in prose.

The Heart Sutra is simply impenetrable to someone who is not versed in the context. Even some aficionados do little more than wallow in their confusion with regard to this text. No translation that is faithful to the source text is going to be easily comprehensible. The sutra is mostly jargon. Padding it out with expository phrases that are themselves jargon, is not going to improve the situation and makes for rather turgid prose (or pseudo-verse, or whatever).

I said that this translation is primarily from the Chinese. How do I know? Because no Sanskrit witness to the Heart Sutra in manuscript or inscription, nor any Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā text, has an equivalent of the phrase 度一切苦厄 "overcame all suffering". It breaks down as: 度 "overcome" (sometimes used to translate pāramitā); 一切 "all", 苦厄 duḥkhatā or states of suffering. The inclusion of this phrase tells us that TNH was looking at the Chinese text. The other hint of this can be seen later in his translation in the phrase, the "most illuminating mantra". Which is an interpretation of 大明咒. The Sanskrit has vidyāmantra, which cannot be interpreted in the same way. I have blogged on how the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā parallels of this phrase all have vidyā translated (by Kumārajīva) as 明咒 (See Roots of the Heart Sutra 15 Aug 2014). Later, when Buddhists had taken up the use of mantras, it seemed more natural to take the two characters as two words "shining mantra". This is further evidence in support of the Chinese origins thesis - the discrepancy is difficult to explain any other way.

The phrase "the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore", with its strange use of capitalisation, is TNH's translation of the Chinese 般若波羅蜜多 or Sanskrit prajñāpāramitā. There is much for which we can castigate Conze, but in this case, "perfection of wisdom" is adequate and has the advantage of being widely used and understood. Prajñā doesn't mean "insight". In most English speaking Buddhist circles, "insight" is used to translate vipaśyanā. Prajñā is then the product of insight. Choosing an idiosyncratic translation when there is a widely used and accepted translation is usually a bad choice for a translator, because it places a burden on the reader. A weird phrase like "the Insight that Brings Us to the Other Shore" only makes a text worse, because now the reader has to parse this strange phrase and pause to consider what it might mean. Likely as not, we end up translating it back into something familiar. As I've said, this is not a text that one can make accessible to non-specialists using long expository phrases in place of jargon terms. One is condemned to spend years learning to understand the jargon or remaining ignorant. In the latter case, one most likely resorts to the magical thinking that characterised the original milieu of the Heart Sutra and is often the modern response to a confusing text.

The first part of the text in Chinese reads: 觀自在菩薩 行 深 般若波羅蜜多時 It we break down we see: 觀自在 Avalokiteśvara 菩薩 bodhisatva 行 practice 深 deep 般若波羅蜜多 prajñāpāramitā. The particle 時 on the end suggest that this is an ongoing action and we usually translate it as "while" or "when". TNH reads 深 as an adverb of 行 "practicing deeply" [with American spelling] whereas most translators understand 深 as an adjective of prajñāpāramitā. That is, it is the prajñāpāramitā that is deep (gambhīra), rather than the practice. Typically, in Middle-Chinese we would expect an adverb to be placed immediately before a verb that it modified (so say my grammar books). In this case, the character 深 comes immediately after 行. So reading it as an adverb is doubtful. The Sanskrit is: gambhīrāṃ prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ caramāṇo. Here gambhīra is clearly an adjective, but it does seem to apply to carya 'practice', i.e., the deep practice of perfection of wisdom. In fact, it appears to be an adjective in the Chinese, as well, though an adjective of 般若波羅蜜多 or prajñāpāramitā. As a point of English grammar, an adverb also usually precedes the verb it modifies, so "practising deeply" ought to be "deeply practising", but this is subordinate to the observation that here "deep" is unlikely to be an adverb.

THN has interpolated that Avalokiteśvara is not "practising the deep prajñāpāramitā", but he is "practising deeply with prajñāpāramitā". So he's arguing that prajñāpāramitā, itself, is not a practice, but a substantive, and that Avalokiteśvara has it. The Sanskrit contradicts this with prajñāpāramitācaryāṃ, 'the practice of perfection of wisdom'. TNHs translation appears to be incorrect. According to TNH, Avalokiteśvara, a Bodhisattva, is "practising  with   prajñā-pāramitā". Weirdly, THN then inserts another adverb "suddenly" that has no counterpart in any version of the text in Chinese or Sanskrit. Avalokiteśvara "suddenly discovered that that all of the five Skandhas are equally empty". But Avalokiteśvara is a fully formed bodhisatva, "with prajñāpāramitā", and is thus quite conversant with the emptiness of the skandhas. It's not something that a bodhisatva like Avalokiteśvara can "suddenly discover", because part of being a bodhisatva with prajñāpāramitā is that he already knows it. So this would seem to be quite a serious error in understanding what is going on. Either Avalokiteśvara is a bodhisatva, or he "suddenly discovered that that all of the five Skandhas are equally empty", but not both. Nor does either the Chinese or the Sanskrit allow for the verb to be "discover". The former has 照見 which I will discuss in the next paragraph, while the latter has paśyati sma "he saw".

This adverb "suddenly" appears from nowhere. The Chinese text has the phrase 照見, which is quite unusual. Allow me to quote my own discussion it from my JOCBS article (Attwood 2015: 119):

"照見 zhàojiàn, a difficult term corresponding probably to vyavalokayati sma, but incorporating paśyati sma, i.e., both looking and seeing. 照 can also have a sense of “reflecting”, or “illuminating”, or perhaps “comparing”; while 見 just means “to see”; and on its own would usually correspond directly to paśyati. The two characters can be read like a verbal compound “illuminate and see”, or 照 can be adverbial, giving meanings of the type “clearly see, distinguish”.  In Yu (2000) several experts in Chinese literature with varying knowledge of Buddhology approach the Hṛdaya as literature and are split on how to interpret this phrase. Stephen F. Teiser (Yu 2000: 113) translates 照見 as “illuminating vision” (照 as an adverb), while Stephen H West (116) opts for “Shining upon and making manifest” (照見 as a verbal compound). Michael A, Fuller does not translate, but expresses the ambiguity: “I encounter a metaphor when it would have been simpler not to have one: why zhao [i.e. 照]? What is the lore here? Does the wisdom emit light? That is, is such wisdom an active use of the mind that engages the phenomena of the world, or is it simply receptive?"

So in this case the position of 照 immediately before 見 does allow it to be read as an adverb. The problem is that 照 doesn't mean "suddenly" and 見 doesn't mean "discover". So again, TNH has not simply translated the text, he has changed it.

Next TNH translates 五蘊皆空 as "all of the five Skandhas are equally empty". Again this is problematic. 皆 is, in fact, an adverb meaning "all, the whole, each, every" and the phrase means "the five skandhas are all empty" or less likely "all the five skandhas are empty". So we most likely do read the character 皆 as an adverb, but it's not the adverb he was looking for. It's quite meaningless to add the "equally" to the phrase "all the five skandhas are empty". Emptiness is not a question of degrees. If something is empty, then it is empty. The slightest presence means it is not empty. 

Lastly, TNH translates 度一切苦厄 as "he overcame all Ill-being". I was surprised to find that "Ill-being" is a word at all. It is an Americanism (it's in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, but not in the Oxford). I suppose we cannot complain about Americanisms when the bulk of a man's followers are American. But to me this is an ugly expression. Aesthetics are in the eye of the beholder, but most of the rest of this paragraph is so badly translated that it is at least worth pointing out that an obscure term like "ill-being" is just as bad as a Buddhist jargon word for the reader. It still makes them stop to comprehend the word.

So many problems in such a short passage. Almost every phrase is mangled in some way. What TNH has done here is not so much a translation as it is a paraphrase of the text. As someone familiar with the text in Sanskrit and Chinese my opinion is that he has not done anything to clarify the text and, in many cases, he has made it less clear, either through an incorrect translation, an unhelpful interpolation, or just poor English grammar. Where TNH may have succeeded is in clarifying what TNH thinks the text means. Which is fair enough, it's just that he's wrong about what the text says.

I could go on to critique the rest of the translation, but I think the point is made and I don't want to labour the point. There's nothing profound or beautiful about this translation. It's awful on many levels.  

Conclusions

While having little literary merit and despite positively obscuring the underlying text, Thich Nhat Hanh's new translation is none-the-less interesting for the boldness with which the man changes the text in response to perceived problems. And this in a world where most new translations are vanity projects which paraphrase without adding anything. Some of TNH's changes are trivial, such as padding out the text with extra adverbs, or turning a word into a long expository phrase so it conveys the views of the expositor, but in dealing with the problem of the two conflicting statements TNH has attempted to make a more substantial contribution. Not only this, but he has had to weigh up the merits of the conflicting statements and choose between them. Since the Heart Sutra is a product of generations of just such interference with written texts, it is interesting to see this process continuing in the present.

Commentators have always interpreted the Heart Sutra with a massive dollop of confirmation bias. To each (and, more or less, every) translator the Heart Sutra represents a kind of epitome of their existing worldview, be it Yogācārin, Mādhyamika, Tāthāgatagarbhikā or Tantric. The importance of the Heart Sutra in this enterprise is that it is a canonical text that therefore authenticates and legitimises the view of the exegete, whatever the view happens to be. All Buddhists do this, but in the case of most modern exegetes they are reluctant to edit the text itself to conform to this view. We know that the text has been edited in the past. I've given links to examples of this. But consider that not only is each Sanskrit manuscript uniquely different from all the others (though sometimes this is only because of superficial scribal errors), but the three versions of the short text Heart Sutra in the Chinese Tripiṭaka are also different from each other in non-trivial ways (see also Variations in the Heart Sutra in Chinese).

TNH's new translation is also interesting because it illustrates the procedure that a Buddhist might take upon discovering a mistake in their texts. The problem identified by TNH is a genuine one. It is not a matter of exegesis or interpretation, there is a flat and unambiguous contradiction in the Heart Sutra that has long gone unnoticed, but which TNH has noticed. I also noticed it, but he beat me to it by a couple of years, so all credit to him. My approach to this mistake is to highlight the problem and foreground it. I want the tension generated to create a change in perspective on texts in Buddhism and this requires holding the tension rather than seeking a resolution.

As it happens, the problem in the Heart Sutra seems to be the result of an historic shift in emphasis in Mahāyānism that was inexpertly interpolated into existing texts some time in the early centuries of the Common Era (at least by 179 CE, when Lokakṣema translated Pañcaviṃśati). Thus, the conflict is also important as a signpost to changing Buddhist values and attitudes. Again, it is only by acknowledging the mistake and allowing it to stand that insights into the history of ideas in Buddhism come into focus.

TNH acknowledges the problem and then "fixes" it by creating a translation that does not contain the problem. He doesn't just translate the text as a neutral observer, but actively changes the text to ensure a reading consistent with his views on Buddhism. He does not completely obscure the history of the text, because in a separate document he acknowledges the problem. But in simply changing the text he removes the tension that might motivate a shift in perspective. He is preserving the status quo. But then this is what we expect of establishment figures, even those who are eccentric translators.

Another legitimating practice TNH uses, which we see quite often in Western Zen commentators on the Heart Sutra, is the invocation of Sanskrit to authenticate a translation from the Chinese. This can only happen in ignorance or rejection of Jan Nattier's Chinese origins thesis. It is supported by the general ignorance of Sanskrit amongst modern Buddhists. Sanskrit is an admittedly difficult language to learn, but the lack of knowledge of it means that commentators can make statements about the Sanskrit text that most of their audience will never question, nor have the skills to investigate. In my experience, commentators like Red Pine and Kaz Tanahashi who say they are translating from Sanskrit are pretty poor Sanskritists and heavily reliant on unnamed third parties (probably writing in Japanese) and the Chinese text. TNH's tries to imply that he was using the Sanskrit text, but clearly he was translating the Chinese text from T251.

Just as I would foreground any textual problems, I would like to highlight these practices for dealing with them. It is, I think, a distinctive feature of Mahāyānism that, despite the canonisation of texts, they are still open to being changed. It's quite evident from the Chinese Tripiṭaka that this went on a good deal in India. On the other hand, I know of no similar example from the field of Pāḷi studies. So this is a fascinating insight into the world of Buddhist textual production and transmission. Active editing, fixing perceived problems, is practised, right up to the present. Though, of course, TNH has not edited a text in a canonical language; the source text remains the same, but the process of translating the text provides an opportunity to make corrections that monolingual transmission does not.

In the final analysis, the new translation by TNH is not very good, either at representing the canonical text, or as literature. The new "translation" is, in fact, a palimpsest, a new text written over the top of the old. Not an interpretation, so much as a new composition which reflects the teachings of the author, rather than the teachings of ancient patriarchs.

The Heart Sutra is a bunch of lines taken out of context, mangled by scribes and editors, and elevated far beyond original competency as magical amulet to protect from demons and misfortune. The content of it continues to baffle, but the bafflement itself symbolises something essential for many Buddhists: their bafflement with the world, with Buddhism, and with how Buddhism makes sense of the world (or doesn't). 

~~oOo~~

Attwood, Jayarava. (2015). Heart Murmurs: Some Problems with Conze’s Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 8, 28-48. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/104

Yu, Pauline, et al. [eds] (2000) Ways With Words: Writing about reading Texts from Early China. University of California Press.