What's in a name?

If a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, what would Shakespeare have made of roses with no smell at all? If the smell is the thing, then why not just call Turkish Delight "Rose". Does "rosey cheeks" refer to the way someone smells? The relationship of words to things is one of the most fascinating philosophical problems. Most people take up one of two extreme positions on this subject: firstly that names are natural to their object, and secondly that names are entirely conventional, the latter being the most common way of thinking about it at present. Plato explored both sides of the debate in his Cratylus dialogue but typically did not commit to either view. What follows is an attempt at a Buddhist perspective on the problem, heavily informed by the writing of George Lakoff.*

There is a fundamental error which has persisted almost throughout the history of thinking about this problem. The assumption has always been that there is a one to one relationship between a word and the thing it names, and that the 'things' are unitary. So dog is one 'thing' and rose is another 'thing', and the ideal language, a dream of scholars both biblical and secular, would have only one word for each thing. The things are assumed to be unitary for the purposes of naming, even though we know them to be a collection of attributes. All of this multiplicity of reference and meaning seems untidy somehow.

If, the argument goes, there was a natural relationship between words and things, then everyone would use the same word for a thing. Therefore because different languages use different names for things, there is no natural relationship - words are arbitrary. This is the current paradigm for thinking about the relationship between words and things. The hypothesis is made only slightly more sophisticated by an acknowledgement that our choice of words is not entirely free, but constrained by 'socially agreed rules' such as the phonetic pallet of a language. However this holds only if we first make the assumption that the thing being named is unitary and that it is viewed identically by everyone everywhere. Simple observation should be enough to tell us that things are not unitary they are complex, nor are people always agreed on what they perceive. And yet on this assumption rests most of contemporary linguistics!

Within any category of object there is a great deal of variation. A great-dane is a dog, as is a poodle or a corgi. But these creatures are really quite different in some ways as well. George Lakoff tells us that they fit the category dog because of their shared features, but that some will seem more typically like a dog to us, and some less. He refers to these typical category members as protoypes. This is crucial. When I say 'dog' I may have a different beast in mind than when you say 'dog', especially if we come from different cultures. Often we are quite atuned to such subtle differences. We have quite a few words in English: dog, canine, mutt, cur, hound, mongrel, spaniel, tyke, bitch, pup, pooch, 'man's best friend', plus as many as 200 breeds. And we probably know when each word fits. Sometimes I might even, if only ironically, dispute that the animal in question is a member of the category: "call that a dog?". Think about how we use dog in metaphors as refering to a subordinate position, or loyalty, or persistence, or a keen sense of smell. As well there are many ways to see a dog: as a working dog, a hunting dog, a lap dog, a guard dog, a circus dog, a food item, etc. We may change the word we use for the dog depending on whether the dog has shit on our carpet or not! "Dog" is not a simple unitary concept- it is, as we Buddhists say, compounded and has a subjective component. But because we have a tendency to focus unconsciously on prototypes, we come to believe that a dog is a dog is a dog.

If we have different images of the archetypal dog, and if perhaps we interact differently with dogs, and we actually do have a number of words to suit the occasion, then it makes perfect sense that someone from a another culture uses a different word to the one I use. This needn't lead to the conclusion that words are arbitrary, only to the conclusion that the relationship between words and things is complex, because we and things are complex.

What I'm arguing for is a more nuanced view of words, things, and the relationships between them - for a middle way. A Buddhist theory of naming, on the grounds of observation, must refuse to see things as either determined or random, these are extremes. Equally it would not see the complex as simple. It would refute the notion of "dogness" - an essence possessed by all dogs upon which the name hangs. Such an essence cannot be found. I've mainly address the question from the point of view of debunking the 'arbitrary' argument. Sometime I'd like to look at the other side of the equation - the 'naturalness argument.

Would it really have mattered if Juliet was a Montague? Well probably not, but it might have mattered if she had been a dog! Is this stuff important? Well I believe that the way we use words tells us a lot about the working of the mind, and to a Buddhist there is no more important subject!


* My thoughts on this are influenced in particular by:
George Lakoff (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Uni of Chicago Press
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Uni of Chicago Press

The Yellow Rite

Yellow is the colour of the sun, of gold, and of fields of grain in the autumn just prior to harvest. Hence it is associated with richness, abundance, and fecundity. The sun is probably the most important thing in India and features in the mythologies of all the various sub-cultures. It is also a potent symbol. For the last five years I've lived in Cambridge England. When you are 52 degrees north of the equator the sun is never directly overhead. But in India the sun is high in the sky even in winter. The sun is the key to everything. Just enough and the plants grow and ripen, but too much and plants, animals and people start to die. The sun has many names in India - Sūrya, Vairocana, Prabhakara, Āditya, Mitra, Savitri, etc. Gold is a precious substance where ever it is found. Gold does not tarnish. It is both ductile and malleable and can be made into any shape, or beaten so thin that light passes through it, picking up a greenish tinge on the way. The Aryan people were golden skinned, and Buddhists insisted that the Buddha was the colour of gold.

So it should come as no surprise that the Yellow, or Golden Rite is the Rite of Abundance and Increase. This rite can be used to gain wealth, to be materially rich, but spiritually speaking the greatest wealth is not material, it is knowledge and vision of how things really are. However there is often a middle ground in the use of this rite. In the Tara Tantra it says by this rite, one will be endowed with necessary goods, long life, beautiful appearance, and strength. In the form of the Tara mantra addressed to White Tara one requests that Tara grant you long life, merit and wisdom. But why these qualities? It is said that these things - long life, beauty, strength, merit, wisdom etc. - all help the Bodhisattva to spread the message of the Buddha and to sustain them in their repeated sojourns in saṃsara. One requests the material things that will best support one's spiritual progress in other words!

I'll talk about two applications of the Yellow Rite: gratitude and generosity. With my usual disclaimer about my rather idiosyncratic approach to this kind of magic.

Gratitude is a very positive mental state. By cultivating a sense of gratitude for what we already have we do begin to experience a sense of abundance. Often our dissatisfaction with what we have, whether it be a sexual partner, a car, or whatever, is because we have ceased to pay attention to the fact that we have it. Because the grass is always greener on the other side, we stop looking at the grass on this side. Gratitude brings us back into relationship with our immediate surroundings, our personal possessions and helps up to appreciate how lucky we are. In other words gratitude helps us reconnect with the fundamental interconnectedness of the cosmos. This is the essence of tantric magic according to Ariel Glucklich who studied modern day tantric magi in Varanasi.*

Even if things could always be better, anyone well-off enough to read these words on the internet probably has plenty to be grateful for. Gratitude is a way of creating awareness of abundance, the abundance that we already have, and which can help to counteract the feeling that we don't have enough, or even that we aren't good enough. From a state of abundance, we are always ready to give, which leads us onto generosity.

Generosity is giving from a sense of abundance, and it creates abundance for others. I've written quite a bit about generosity in my take on the six perfections for instance, or in the story of my generous friend Kapil. I see one of the primary aspects of generosity as making us aware of other people. But the Yellow Rite it is also a way to create a sense of abundance in everyone around us. If we all gave until we "swooned with joy" then what abundance there would be! Generosity is also about letting go of attachments, and this again creates a sense of abundance in us.

You can see that I am not advocating the Yellow Rite as a way of getting what you want, although this aspect of the rite is present in the texts. The Buddha was quite clear that amassing a fortune, acquiring lovers and families, storing up food, or gold, or favours, etc would not provide any lasting satisfaction. At the very least we are all going to die. A mountain of gold will not change this fact. A dozen beautiful lovers will not prevent us getting old. And most of us will get sick at some point despite having a hundred DVD's in our collection. Actually it is possible to be happy and have very few possessions. Remember back in the 1980's when Ronald Reagan was pursuing the arms race with Soviet Russia and it was announced that there were enough nuclear weapons on both sides to destroy all life on the planet 100 times over? I remember thinking how insane that situation was. I remember thinking what's the point? Sometimes having more of something is completely pointless.

In my blog post about the yellow Buddha Ratnasambhava I pointed out that he represents both our highest ideals - the jewel of Awakening - and our most fundamental value - generosity. The Yellow Rite is concerned with activating the latter in pursuit of the former.


* Ariel Glucklich (1997) The End of Magic. Oxford University Press Inc, USA.