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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A standard translation being:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Reference

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

image: Sir Laurence Olivier as Hamlet, Alternate Film Guide

Anatta in Context

In comments to some other posts I discussed the context of the idea of anatta (Sanskrit anātman) and I thought it might be useful to give it more prominence. Anatta is usually translated as no-self, or as non-self. Misleadingly it is often rendered as egolessness - I'll get to why this is a problem shortly.

Anatta is the third of the tilakkhaṇā or three marks. In the Dhammapada 279 it says that sabbe dhammā anatta - All dhammas are non-self. The order of presentation of the lakkhanas is significant. In fact it is helpful to work through them backwards. We might ask for instance why are all dhammas anatta? They are anatta because of the second lakkhana - dukkha. Dhp 278 says in fact that sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha - all compounds are suffering.

Backtracking a little we need to look at what atta or ātman is. Ātman, using Sanskrit because it fits the context, is a concept introduced by the philosophers associated with the Upaniṣads. It was introduced not that long before the Buddha and was a distinct move away from the Vedic religion which had revolved around sacrifices to gods, and bonds between this world and the cosmos known as bandhu. It was also associated with a new idea about reincarnation - Joanna Jurevich has shown that reincarnation in a nascent form is, contrary to popular opinion, present in the Ṛgveda. However the Upaniṣads made reincarnation dependent on the actions of the person, on their carrying out of their religious duties and ceremonies. Ātman here was the immanent aspect of godhood - brahman. Not to be confused with the masculine personification of godhead Brahmā. Brahman was an abstract absolute transcendental principle. However the Upaniṣads equate ātman and brahman. The latter idea became highly influential in the popular form of Hinduism known as Avaita-Vedanta. The immmanent and transcendent aspects of godhead were not two. Brahman was said to have only three attributes (trilakṣaṇa) : satcitānanda - being, consciousness, and bliss. Ātman seems to have been the most influential religious idea in India at the time the Buddha was born. One's attitude to ātman - to the nature of selfhood as immanent godhood - was what defined many religious discussions, just as the existence and influence of the Christian God define religious discourse in the present.

Returning to the Buddhist anatta idea we can see that where there is an experience of dukkha - suffering, misery, diappointment, grief, etc, then that is not blissful. What is not blissful is not, ipso facto, ātman. Now the Buddha says that all compounded experiences are disappointing. The Buddha seems to have considered all experiences associated with the senses or the mind, which he considered as being synonymous with all unenlightened experience, as being disappointing (dukkha). Hence his constant refrain that the senses and the cognitive apparatus are anatta - not the ātman.

Note also that the Buddha taught that cittā - consciousness - arises in dependence on contact between a sense organ and a sense object. Because of this we must consider all sense experience as compounded or complex. More crucially cittā ceases when the contact ceases. Now if consciousness (cit) is a dependent product of contact, then brahman in it's cit aspect is conditioned! This is a major blow against the Upaniṣadic philosophy that doesn't get much attention these days because Buddhists are largely ignorant of that philosophy and fail to see the relevance of it.

We need to briefly mention that the reason that the Buddha said sabbe saṅkhārā dukkha, was because he had already observed in Dhp 277 that sabbe saṅkhārā anicca. Compounds are compounded of dhammas - and these are the objects of mano, the mind, and therefore saṅkhārā is more or less synonymous with cittā when used in this sense. Because we fail to properly see dhammas as ephemeral and fleeting (see also Language and Discrimination) we find all of our experiences disappointing. (The argument for unpleasent dhammas is more complex, but it also amounts to disappointment).

So in forward order: experiences are fleeting; because we don't get this at a fundamental level we find experiences disappointing; and because experience is not blissful it cannot be ātman. So nothing related to the body, senses, or mind - the apparatus of experience - can be the ātman. This is the proper context for the idea, and is the only context where it really makes sense.

Now for a variety of reasons, most of which relate to later Buddhist failure to take interest in the context the Buddha was operating it, the doctrine became decontextualized. Buddhists began to make new explanations for what the Buddha meant by anatta. One of the most prominent became that the Buddha taught that we have no self. There is apparently, and here I rely on Sue Hamilton, no explicit denial of self per se in the Pali Canon. What the Buddha denies is that any aspect of our experience is ātman in the sense of immanent godhood. The Buddha is trying to reframe the religious discourse away from ātman and towards a consideration of the existential experiential situation - he repeatedly refused to answer metaphysical questions and responded that he taught "suffering, the cause, the end and the way to end suffering".

A popular version of this corruption is that the Buddha taught something called "egolessness". Now this is problematic in several ways. The term ego is introduced by Freud's English translators - he called the psychic function in question "ich". Using Latin led to a reification of the term in popular usage - it moves from being an abstract function, to being a concrete part of the person. One can now speak of "having an ego", for instance, as though ego is a "thing". One can have too much ego, or perhaps too little. This is a dismal error that flies in the face of Buddhist approaches too being as process as well as what is intended in psychological jargon.

Buddhists take this one step further by making the ego wholeheartedly bad, and proposing that all people should be egoless. A person with no ego would be incapable of communication or learning, or any kind of interaction. Egolessness would be disastrous for the individual. I've expounded this at length in the past. Ātman as the immanent godhood is nothing at all to do with the ordinary sense of self. The Buddha even at one point suggests that a sense of self is essential for the development of empathy! I've suggested that the English word "selfless" is much more in keeping with the Buddhist concept - it means not, someone with no self, but someone who is altruistic! A final irony is that Buddhists who promote egolessness are often the same ones who are proponents of the doctrine of tathāgatagarbha (literally "the matrix of one who is like that") - or Buddha nature. Now some of the tathāgatagarbha literature equates the tathāgatagarbha with ātman (see for instance Williams, p.98-9). So while treating anatta as egolessness, they promote the idea of an intrinsic immanent Buddhahood which is like the ātman. So we're basically back to Vedantic eternalism at this point, the very kind of idea which anatta was designed to critique.

The idea of anatta is often elevated to being "the doctrine of anatta". I don't think it was ever intended as a stand alone doctrine. It seems more likely that it required not only a Buddhist context, but the Vedantic context against which it was being offered as a polemic, in order to make sense. So on the whole it does not make sense in the present. Anatta was part, and only a part, of a Buddhist demolition Vedantic arguments which are not relevant in the modern west, though it may still be relevant in India. What we need at present is a Buddhist critique of the Christian idea of creation, and the scientific idea of evolution. Both tend to draw attention away from the existential situation and from the problems associated with the apparatus of experience - and therefore neither are likely to be helpful in the Buddhist Enlightenment project. Perhaps a subject for a future rave...


Bibliography

• Hamilton, Sue. 2000. Early Buddhism : a new approach. The I of the beholder. Richmond, Surrey : Curzon.
• Williams, P. 1989. Mahāyāna Buddhism : the doctrinal foundations. 1st ed. London : Routledge.